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The Master clawed, raging, to the surface.
The nexus parted as his head breached the surface, and despite knowing the unnecessity of it all, he couldn’t help but instinctively gasp for breath. In the split-second before his eyes opened, the virtual reality around him reshaped itself, and what he finally saw appeared to be an impersonal, empty hotel suite.
He took several deep breaths, assessing the eggshell walls, the homey neutral-coloured kitchenette, the ecru-sheeted king-sized bed, and the panoramic view through the glass windows that seemed to show a vast megalopolis far below but – he knew – really showed nothing but a mirage generated by the most advanced data Matrix in the universe.
With nothing better to do, he grabbed the ewer on the nearby dinette table and flung it into the far wall with a furious scream. The ewer shattered quite satisfactorily, the water inside staining the wallpaper and carpet to a muddy brown. Then, a second ticked by, the shards of the ewer vanished, and the stain and puddle evaporated into nothing. The Master looked down at the ewer, restored on the table beside him once more, and debated throwing it again just for fun. However, there was a sort of despairing emptiness to destroying things that both didn’t really exist and also didn’t have the good manners to stay destroyed.
The Master concluded, quite quickly, that he hated death.
The revelation didn’t occupy him long, as it wasn’t particularly surprising; he hated most things. He closed his eyes and entertained himself for a few scant minutes by mentally rearranging the suite to his liking: metal-industrial fixtures, sharp whites to replace the insipid neutrals, black and red accents on the bedspread and artwork. When he opened his eyes again, the changes had become reality in his mindscape, and the room looked properly cold and uninviting, just a bit dangerous.
A quadruple drumbeat passed.
Two.
He realised that he’d been dead for exactly four minutes and twenty-three seconds now, and already he was bored out of his skull.
The Matrix made a rather pathetic attempt to supply him with occupations: several computer interfaces, books, and half-completed mechanical projects appeared half-heartedly around the room. The temporal-inversion detonator was even remotely promising, but for the fact that none of this was real, so the damned thing wouldn’t ever be able to blow anything up. The Master sneered, and the ‘suggested’ projects all vanished rather sheepishly.
That, at least, was somewhat satisfying. As far as the Master knew, the Matrix wasn’t properly sentient, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make its continued existence living hell. He posited a while on whether computer subroutines could feel pain, made a series of telepathic requests designed to unnecessarily drain system resources, and eventually ended up with what he thought was the very slightest bit of frustration after the Matrix had been forced to restructure the laws of physics in the universe to his specifications for the thousandth or so time. At least that was something, but it was still far too much work for scant payoff.
The Master needed something meatier to cut into.
He let the Matrix flip the environment back to the physics of the real, physical universe (there might have been a relieved sigh from the servers) and threw open the door to his suite, slamming the door against the wall in the process. Outside, his second incarnation paused, blinked impassively at him, and walked on by carrying an experiment in what looked like event-horizon compression. Ah well, she’d always been impressively unflappable, and he bore her no particular ill-will. In fact, her extensive research into black holes and dark energy had saved him a good number of times over the eons. No, the him he really wanted to scream at was…
The atrium he’d opened into was surrounded by a series of doors, each one numbered. His had a shiny gold ‘18’ on it. How quaint. He debated destroying and reconstructing the lobby in his image too, but unfortunately he had less control outside his room, where he had all his past and future minds to vie with. Some of him were particularly stubborn and fussy. No matter; he’d already had his fill of interior designing.
Instead, he turned to the left and burst into room 19 unannounced. Annoyingly, his Nineteenth incarnation wasn’t there. Her room was borderline cuddly. Frills on the pillows, patterns on the walls, an actual tea cozy. Even the iron maiden had little rosettes etched into its metal: such tasteless perversion of a perfectly respectable torture device!
He turned the entire room into a foetid swamp, set a few lethal traps (after all, his Nineteenth self had been rather sexy, and a little homicidal flirting never hurt anyone…aside, of course, from all those billions of insignificant bystanders he had killed with his persistent, unrequited homicidal flirting over the centuries), and stalked back out into the atrium.
It was empty this time. He wondered briefly what the rest of him were doing.
Deprived of his first choice of torment, he stormed into the room of his next-closest candidate. Seventeen started to his feet abruptly, as did – the Master was disgusted to note – what smelled suspiciously like one of the Doctors, who had been sitting in the armchair next to Seventeen’s.
“Doctor!” the Master hissed, eyes narrowed.
The Doctor, infuriatingly, grinned at him. This was a Doctor the Master had never met, a pointy-faced git with big ears and a receding hairline even worse than the Masters’. He still had the nerve to be taller than the Master, like the bastard did it deliberately even when their time-streams weren’t crossing. He smelled older than the War Doctor, younger than the Master’s Doctor.
“Pleased to meet you,” the Doctor was still grinning, obnoxiously. “I’m—”
The Master, of course, had known objectively that the mind world of the Matrix behaved differently, even for skilled telepaths such as himself. Solid reality was non-existent here, which amplified emotions exponentially. He’d never fully grasped how that would affect him, though, until this moment when every last frustration he’d felt for this one particular Time Lord coalesced into a pinpoint of rage with infinite density, sucking whatever sanity – or insanity, for that matter – he’d ever possessed into its event horizon.
“Niney,” the Master snarled, materialising a cudgel from thin air, “shut up!” He smacked the Ninth Doctor across the forehead with every last fibre of that uncontrollable rage behind him.
The Doctor went down, although apparently there wasn’t any blood in this Rassilon-forsaken place, which was so grossly unfair that the Master suddenly saw red that wasn’t even there. He descended on the Doctor in a fit of berserker rage, while his own Seventeenth incarnation just stood on the sidelines, passive and useless. Rather like he’d been in life, actually (although, to be fair, not wholly his fault).
This Doctor was as slippery as ever and refused to be bludgeoned to re-death. After the initial surprise blow, the Master only got in a handful of solid hits (and received at least three good ones in return) before his Seventeenth self finally yanked him back, kicking and biting, into the far corner.
“Let me go, you impotent cretin!” the Master demanded. Had it been anyone but himself, he might’ve made the effort to keep control, but it was pointless to try to hide your feelings from yourself, and even more pointless given the emotional amplification within the Matrix. However, the intervention did alleviate his anger somewhat, transforming the exponential back into the logarithmic. A neat telepathic trick, that.
As the Master calmed, he processed that dear old Seventeen actually looked far from as impotent as he’d been when he’d regenerated into the Master. The Matrix had brought him back in his prime, as he should have been, had he not spent a whole lifetime trapped in Yana’s revolting pile of rotting monkey flesh.
“Just arrived?” the Seventeenth Master asked him, infuriatingly patiently in the circumstances.
“Words,” the Master managed tersely, “if I may.” He directed the last, snidely, to the Ninth Doctor, who was fussing over his leather jacket but otherwise looking entirely nonplussed about the Master having just attempted to claw his eyes out of their sockets.
The Seventeenth Master cast the Doctor a look that was almost apologetic. “A personal matter I need to discuss with myself,” he actually requested. Not ordered: requested. What, were all of him going soft now?
“No worries,” the Doctor was grinning that devilish toothy grin again.
Apparently, this Doctor was even more desperate for Masterly attention – of any sort whatsoever – than the Master’s own Doctor had been: more foolish hope post-Time War, no doubt. It made the Master want to kick all this Doctor’s teeth down his throat, maybe get something painfully lodged in his respiratory bypass, if such a thing still existed in the Matrix.
“You know where to find me,” the Ninth Doctor entendre’d, seemingly oblivious to the Master’s once-again-rising irritation.
“After all,” the Seventeenth Master agreed, “we have all of eternity.”
“We do, at that,” the Doctor agreed happily and, blissfully, left.
The Seventeenth Master’s grip slackened then, and the Master spun out of his arms and advanced upon him angrily. “You have got to be kidding me!” he spat in disbelief. “You’re sweet on him? Him!”
The Seventeenth Master eyed him warily, with just enough sly cunning to placate the Master somewhat. Seventeen sidestepped over to the end table and picked up the decanter and a spare glass. Seventeen’s glass was still on the table, but the wily bastard had vanished the Doctor’s glass, removing the provoking evidence.
“Brandy?” Seventeen offered.
“Actually, I’d prefer berry-blue Kool-Aid,” the Master huffed.
Seventeen shrugged and poured the golden brandy from the decanter into the glass. As the liquid left the spout, it suddenly became a radioactive-blue colour. Seventeen handed the Master his neon-filled glass, before picking up his own glass of brandy and taking a careful sip. “Care to sit?” he gestured to the vacated armchair before reclining in his own.
The Master paused, feeling petulant. He didn’t particularly want the drink; he’d just instinctively ordered the most outrageous thing he could think of. He sat anyway and took a sip. The drink, as expected, bore no resemblance to any known edible substance in the universe. He set his glass back down on the end table. “Just what do you think you’re doing with—?” he began again.
The Seventeenth Master waved him off. “The Doctor has his uses,” he said reasonably enough. “And I never got the chance to play with him properly while I was alive. You can at least grant me that much.”
The Master grudgingly agreed. Seventeen really had gotten an unfair shake, after all.
“And,” Seventeen went on, “it is, after all, a very long eternity. You’ll see what I mean.”
The Master didn’t like the sound of that, both for its personal and temporal implications. “How does time work here?” He tasted the air, but given that he wasn’t an actual physical Time Lord in an actual physical universe with real time, his perceptions were strangely warped. It tasted like the relevant and fixed time of his death, but also every other time and place in all of existence.
“Time is linear, circular, and omnipresent all at once. We’ve met before, seen each other’s futures, and we will both remember it and not. Every moment is an experience of every other moment, yet distinct, causal, and cyclical. Past, present, and future are one.”
The Master shrugged. “Seems simple enough.”
“Rassilon likes to think he’s much cleverer than he actually is,” Seventeen agreed, sounding equally unimpressed.
A happy thought occurred to the Master. “That means that, for all of eternity, I’m constantly punching that Doctor in the face.”
Seventeen’s lips twitched. “I hope that offers you some small consolation.”
It did, somewhat. “I punched Rassilon in the face once, too. While I was alive, I mean. With a solid blast of artron energy. The bastard regenerated on the spot. You wouldn’t believe how much he deserved it. Fond memories.”
Seventeen laughed, delightfully maniacally, and held up his glass. The Master picked up his own again, and clinked them together. He took another sip of blue chemicals and found it wasn’t half bad. He always had had a calming effect on himself: probably something refreshing about not having to share his company with a complete imbecile.
“So,” the Master said at long last, feeling much more like himself again, “what do we do for fun around here?”
Seventeen’s eyes veritably twinkled with mischief. “The War Doctor, in all his sentimental ‘wisdom’, requested of the High Council that our databanks in the Matrix be kept immediately adjacent. Gravestones side by side, I believe is the quaint human custom he borrowed.”
“Wait,” the Master laughed, “so he actually asked for us to torment him for all of eternity?” He wouldn’t have believed it, but it was the Doctor, so of course the masochistic idiot had gone and done just that.
Seventeen leaned in conspiratorially. “He’s practically gagging for it,” he agreed.
The Master got a warm, fuzzy feeling inside at that, rather like the feeling he got every time he exploded a puppy. Physical attacks might be lamentably impermanent here, but mental anguish? Oh, he could just inflict that upon the Doctor forever and ever and…
“Wait,” he realised. “The War Doctor, you said? But that Doctor just now wasn’t—”
“Through the War Doctor, we have access to all of them,” Seventeen agreed. “Sometimes they cross over into our mind, sometimes we cross over into theirs. You can have your pick of the lot.”
The Master was suddenly completely rock hard. “So my Doctor, the Tenth? Constantly screaming out his vulnerability to the whole universe? All tortured and teary-eyed? Tell me!”
“Here, complete with that sexy arse and gorgeous hair and those big brown eyes,” Seventeen agreed. “He’s been asking after you, you know. Going on about how brilliant and wicked and dastardly you were, and how he misses you ever so much.”
Okay, the Master took it all back. He didn’t hate this place, after all. This place was heaven. “Where do I find him?” he practically growled with hunger.
***
The War Master looked much less frazzled than the last time the Master had seen him in the mirror. The War Doctor too, for that matter.
The two of them were sprawled out on the floor of the War Master’s room, lying on their stomachs side by side, and appeared to be finishing off that temporal-inversion detonator that the Master himself had rejected earlier.
The sickeningly domestic scene was only mitigated by the fact that the War Doctor seemed to have somehow wired an inter-dimensional gravity pulse into the trigger – clever, lethal creature that he was. The Master pondered for a long, beautiful moment whether the detonation of such a device would simultaneously destroy every single universe and alternate reality that could ever possibly have existed. He practically purred at the thought.
The War Master squirmed on his belly just enough that the Master could tell that he was aroused by the thought of all that wanton bloodshed, as well. It was so nice to meet people with whom he shared common interests, even if they were only himself.
Then the War Doctor looked up and gave the Master an unimpressed look-over and a dismissive snort, completely ruining the Master’s wonderful moment. “Don’t tell me,” the War Doctor groused, elbowing the War Master, “that’s you.”
The War Master looked up as well, grimaced, and gave the Master an apologetic shrug. “What’s wrong with me?” he demanded. “I think I look very handsome in that incarnation, thank you very much.”
The Master preened inwardly, because he privately thought so too.
The War Doctor scoffed and returned to figuring out the mysteries of wiping out the entire multiverse.
With any other regeneration, the Master probably would’ve been shivving him in the back right about now, but the War Doctor had always been notoriously unstable. Even the War Master had been wary around the War Doctor as the Time War slowly unravelled what little sanity he’d ever pretended to have. This War Master didn’t seem to be walking on eggshells around the War Doctor the way the Master had remembered doing back then, but still it was better to be safe than sorry. After all, the Master had just found a reason to ‘live’ in this time-forsaken afterlife, and he wouldn’t put it past the War Doctor to erase him even from death, if properly provoked.
The War Master rose languidly to his feet, spine undulating suggestively through the motion. The War Doctor’s eyes darted in his direction for a split-second, before returning fixedly to the device components he was dissecting. Both the Master and the War Master caught that side glance, however.
The Master cocked an eyebrow, mildly impressed.
The War Master smirked with just the hint of tooth at the corner of his mouth, like an ambush predator whose prey was a mere inch out of range. “Well,” he addressed the Master, “about time you showed yourself.”
The Master scowled at him; he’d forgotten what a testy bastard he’d been in this incarnation. “I had important matters to attend to.” Like pointlessly harassing the Matrix environmental circuits for what probably amounted to centuries. Although at least the War Master didn’t know that. Although, knowing himself, the Master probably did that every incarnation as soon as he entered the Matrix, so the War Master probably did know. The way the War Master rolled his eyes indicated as much.
“Yes, yes,” the War Master said impatiently. “You want the integration circuits into the Doctors’ mind, no doubt?” He cast an eye back at the War Doctor, who was now doing positively obscene things to the quantum-flux payload. “At least I hope you do; your counterpart is absolutely unbearable with his big, mopey eyes, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
The War Doctor snorted again at that, like he couldn’t agree more. “Not that he gets much better when *̴͉͑̐̚ͅ*̸̧̡͈̖͖͙̠̦͎̳͂͂̾̎̔͌͑͒͛̄*̷̡̧͖̲̦̙̍͑͊͛̋͝*̸̢̛̮̭̹͚̳̪̹̃̈́̎̿̊̌͂̆̈́͠*̸̡̩̫̩͙̣̙͊͆*̴̠̙̘̣̟̗̠̏͒́̈̋ͅ*̶̖̳̪͕̇̊̆͆͝*̸͚̫̞̩̖̿̉̇͗̈́͋͠*̸̣̦͖̭͚̞͙̗̤̗̥̈́*̸͍͍̣͈̤͎̊̅̉̽.”
The War Doctor had said something that happened in the Master’s relative future. The Master experienced the odd sensation of knowing what the War Doctor had said and not, both at the same time. Yet another irritation he could blame on Rassilon and the stupid temporal schema he’d set for the Matrix.
The War Master rolled his eyes, eloquently.
“I’ve noticed, believe me.” The Master had responded to the War Master, since his statement on the Tenth Doctor’s stupid eyes was the last one that technically existed fully in the Master’s current time-line. The War Doctor’s response had now separated jauntily into an independent temporal loop that the Master only perceived when he focused his time-sense directly on it. Seriously, Rassilon was such an arsehole. “Let me at him, and I’ll kick his skinny behind.”
Two of the words in that sentence also flickered back and forth between two quantum realities, joining the messy temporal knot that was forming. Maybe the Master should find a way to punch Rassilon in the face in the Matrix, too; it certainly couldn’t make things any more annoying.
“Do we all grow increasingly uncouth as we get older?” the War Doctor asked wearily, his eyes still fixed entirely on the mechanism before him.
The Master felt the rage bubbling up again inside him at that. However, the War Master held up a warning finger for the Master to let it slide, and the War Master’s anxious glance in the War Doctor’s direction pacified the Master slightly. More so, when the War Master explained, “An altercation at this venture would be an unwelcome set-back.”
The Master sighed, appreciating the streak of impatience that had run through all his incarnations. He could hardly blame himself for being himself. He could blame the Doctor for being so stubborn and mercurial, but he’d much prefer to blame his own personal thorn-in-the-side for that; let the War Master deal with his War Doctor.
The Master inclined his head in repressed frustration, and the equally repressed-frustrated War Master led him to a door at the back of his suite. Had this been an actual hotel suite, the door rightfully should’ve opened into the linen storage, but instead there was a brief corridor ending in a broken electrical panel and what looked like an access hatch, just wide enough to get through if an average-sized Time Lord shimmied through sideways.
“Not the most dignified of integration points,” the War Master conceded with a sigh, “but the Doctor opened it before we even knew it was there. I nearly vaporised him when he slipped into my room that first night.”
The Master wetted his lips. He would have done the same, of course: bored out of his mind, absentmindedly punishing the Matrix no doubt, perhaps sprawled across the very comfortable bed, and suddenly the Doctor there, undoubtedly so chuffed at his latest little miracle—
The Master let the fantasy – Memory? Collective consciousness? – trail off there and instead examined the access hatch. The panel had been broken through on the other side, and there was a Phryldine spanner jammed in the Matrix substructure, holding the portal open. It was an incompetent, haphazard, jury-rigged mess, and the Master would’ve known who’d forced open the pathway between their consciousnesses just by looking at it.
“Someone should probably try to stabilise this better,” the Master said wearily.
“We’ve brought it up,” the War Master crossed his arms. “Repeatedly. He keeps promising to get to it…”
“…And then dashing off whenever something shiny catches his eye,” the Master finished.
The War Master exchanged a long-suffering look with him. “We’d try to fix it ourselves…”
“…But it’s so precarious, we might accidentally close it without his active assistance.”
“Just so.”
“Even in the afterlife, he’s stringing us along,” the Master concluded angrily.
“Not necessarily,” the War Master said.
The Master gave him an incredulous look.
“You’re still new here. You’ll see.”
He would’ve been annoyed at himself for being so cryptic, but he had a feeling that he was actually explaining everything to himself perfectly clearly, yet the explanations kept getting swept away by Rassilon’s infernal time-warps.
“I’ll see,” he agreed.
In parting, he gave the War Master a quick, affectionate peck on the lips. He had always liked to be appreciative of his incarnations that had gone to incredible lengths for their collective survival, after all, and escaping the Time War, destruction of Gallifrey, and Time Lock was an exceptionally impressive trifecta. The thought made him wonder, a bit sheepishly, what the others must’ve thought of him, killing his future self as he had. So far his reception had been surprisingly warm, which when he considered it, didn’t match his expectations of himself. Ah well.
The interface between the Masters’ and the Doctors’ subroutines couldn’t quite decide whether it wanted to appear as a maintenance tunnel, the time vortex, or a very long queue to a carnival ride. So typical of the Doctor. The Master squeezed his way through, and finally made his way through an equally rickety contraption holding the door open on the Doctor’s side.
The War Doctor’s suite was empty, Spartan, and impersonal. The Master didn’t linger or try to think too much on what that meant.
The atrium outside looked more Doctorly. The Master took a calming breath at the absolute chaos the Doctors had made of their common space. The tile floor, which was in theory identical to the Master’s own pristine one, was covered in stains and pools of various mechanical oils and elbow grease. Stray bits and screws and cogs abounded, amidst advanced technology hobbled together with primitive parts and power supplies, stretched between long cables that vanished under the doors of most of the rooms. Most of the wires were frayed, sparking, or both. It was a wonder that the Doctors’ whole minds didn’t explode.
Three Doctors – the Second, Seventh, and Thirteenth – were all trying to prevent what looked like a dark-matter generator from blowing every single fuse in the place. The Thirteenth Doctor spared a moment to look up when the Master entered the atrium and gave him an appraising look. She was actually rather attractive. The Master debated doing something deliciously nasty to her, but then his own Sixth incarnation ran in with a fire extinguisher and doused a set of sparking wires that had just caught fire. The Doctors and Sixth Master were preoccupied with their little catastrophe at that point, and the Master had better things to do, anyway.
The Master’s mindscape had been neat and orderly: tidy atrium, numbered doors in logical sequence. Needless to say, the Doctor’s mind wasn’t like that at all. The Master passed, in turn, one door with what looked like an upside-down human letter ‘Q’ on it, a door with a picture of a tree, one marked with an interrobang (which looked suspiciously like a question mark mounting and exclamation point, to the Master’s eye), and one door that was painted to look like it was tie-dyed.
The Master was busy boggling how he was considered the ‘insane’ one, when the tie-dyed door suddenly opened and closed, and all of his anger suddenly narrowed with laser-like focus.
“You!” he snarled.
Missy looked up at him in surprise, looking thoroughly dishevelled, her lipstick smeared. Even so, it only took her a beat to recover herself. “You!” she snarled right back, stepping away from the closed tie-dyed door and into his personal space.
Oh, Dalek’s balls, she smelled like the Twelfth Doctor. The Master knew he’d been right about her questionable proclivities!
“Don’t you have any dignity, even in death?” the Master demanded.
Missy’s lip curled. “Me? Oh, that’s rich, coming from you.” Her accent grew increasingly more Scottish as she jabbed him in the chest with one talon-like nail. “Especially since you’re always *̶̟̫̳̀̉̕*̵̞͍̃͒̅̅̀̑̎͋͂͌*̷̛͚̳̙̺͂̄̓̀*̶̰̻͓͉̳̿*̸̨͖̮̹͂̕*̷̦̙̥͕̼͙̳̈̐͌ͅ*̷̦̥̍͗̇̑̄̓́͆̏͑̕*̸̝̦͉̙̐̐*̷̺̫͓̮̗͚̘̥̦͗͛̂̈́̂́̒͛͜͝*̷̫͎̙͚̪͎̠̪̇*̴̡̢̛̻̪̬̫̤̖͖̉͜ͅ*̷̢̻̲̩͇̲͙̰͂̿,” an impressive stream of invective was washed away in an eddy of non-linear time. “Not to mention: you killed me.”
“Well,” the Master retorted childishly, “you killed me first.”
“I killed you better,” Missy corrected.
The Master was about to object, when suddenly the Nineteenth Doctor came running down the hall, the Twenty-Sixth Master hot on his heels. Given how slight their Twenty-Sixth was, it was rather remarkable how she succeeded in tackling the Doctor to the tile floor, wresting some rather deadly-looking device away from him, and making off down the corridor with it. The Nineteenth Doctor shook himself off, and then tore off after her with a mischievous smile, a mirror of the scene they’d come in on.
“Oh, damn,” the Master sighed at the evidence of his obvious failure to kill his incarnations permanently.
“Nyah,” Missy deadpanned. “Nyah.” She stuck her tongue out at him.
Well, at least that explained why none of him was particularly upset with him. He really should’ve known there was a back-up plan, or ten. There always was. He glared at her, nostrils flaring, and she flared her nostrils right back at him, hands on her hips. And then, with a mutual ‘whoop’ of laughter, they were in each other’s arms, spinning around together and giggling like loons.
He really had missed herself.
They ended their twirl with a nose kiss, still sneering at each other in happy reunion.
“Try to maintain a little decorum, won’t you?” he sniped. “The rest of me doesn’t need to know about your bizarre fetish for old men.”
“I will the minute you stop humble-bragging about how you got the pretty one,” she said, sing-songing the ‘pretty’ with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.
“I don’t humble-brag. And he’s not pretty!”
“Darling,” Missy patted him condescendingly on the cheek, “you’re already mad, self-incestuous, and suicidal. Try not to add blind to the list, too.” She pulled away with a little pirouette which showed off her good side, which was her every side. “Enjoy…” she teased, winked once deliberately, and strolled off down the corridor back toward their own mind, primping her hair back into place as she went.
The Master fervently hoped that she drowned in the swamp.
Three more false starts down various corridors, and he finally found a door with the number ‘10’ on it. He opened it with a dramatic bang. Inside, the Master and Doctor sprung apart in surprise.
The Master gaped.
His Thirteenth incarnation gaped back at him, trying to smooth his hair back into place, straightening and retightening his collar.
The Third Doctor similarly fussed with the stupid frills he’d always worn, his stupid face looking back and forth between them, his stupid hair in even more disarray than usual, and one of the Master’s leather gloves still draped strategically over his stupid lap.
The Master might, just maybe, have still had some lingering resentment over the Doctor’s Third self’s extreme and malicious cock-teasing.
Or maybe not such a cock-tease anymore. This was certainly new. If this had ever happened back when the Master’s Thirteenth incarnation had still been vainly courting the Third Doctor all across Earth, the Master most certainly would remember every last detail even now, and would probably still be star-writing across the universe, through carefully-placed controlled detonations of supernovas, ‘That damned pompous Doctor finally put out!’
“What?” the Master said, eloquently.
“What?” the Thirteenth Master retorted, procuring a lighter from his pocket and lighting up the end of his cigar. (Literally, not metaphorically.)
“My dear, must you really?” asked the Third Doctor. (Metaphorically, not literally.)
“Yes, dear Doctor, I’m afraid I must,” the Thirteenth Master took a deep puff, blowing out slowly. (Both literally and metaphorically.)
“How did you even—?” the Master asked in stunned awe. “Were you—?”
The Third Doctor actually blushed and rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. The Master thought that maybe he could die happy, just having witnessed that much.
The Thirteenth Master raised one eyebrow and casually reached over to retrieve his missing glove from the Doctor’s lap. The Doctor squirmed in his seat in response.
“—Canoodling!” the Master accused. It was such a ridiculous word, yet the only one he would even dare to apply to the absolutely incredible situation he’d walked in on.
“That’s one word for it,” the Thirteenth Master agreed. “Another would be: fu—”
The Third Doctor coughed, loudly. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, deliberately rudely, “but did you want something, old chap?”
The Master remembered why he was there, and grew angry once again. “Why are you in your Tenth self’s room, and where is he?” he demanded, pointing to the ‘10’ on the door.
“Oh no,” the Third Doctor corrected, now infuriatingly composed once more. “This is my room, of course. Ten is Thirteen minus Three, you see,” he gestured to the Thirteenth Master and then himself, then looked at the Master like he was an imbecile for not intuiting that.
“Of course,” the Master agreed tersely, because that made absolutely no sense at all and only a complete space-case like the Doctor would think of it. He slammed the door shut again before it occurred to him that he should probably ask what manner of nonsense marked the Tenth Doctor’s room, but there was no way he was opening that door again. Ever.
In something of a daze, he wandered the hallways aimlessly, absently trying to work out a way to light up the Matrix circuitry so that it spelled out, in binary for all eternity, ‘That damned pompous Doctor finally put out!’
He knew he’d always been insane, of course, but after what he’d witnessed, he was starting to wonder if he really had gone round the bend this time.
Then he passed a door that had a picture of a banana on it (because of course it did), and he snapped back to his mission with an abrupt halt.
At this point, he was confused, which made him angry, a bit discombobulated, which made him angry, horny, which made him angry, and still really quite angry. He prided himself on his emotional range. On the other hand, he had no proof that the Doctor hadn’t at some point regenerated into a tropical fruit, and some future incarnation of the Master wasn’t eating him for breakfast. (Neither literally nor metaphorically.)
He opened the banana-door very, very cautiously.
For a moment, his breath caught in his throat. Because there was his Doctor, sitting in the middle of the floor, his back mostly to the door, surrounded by a circle of books, papers, and notebooks scribbled in that horrible chaos of curlicues he claimed was handwriting. The Master couldn’t fully see his face, but he would know that lanky sprawl anywhere, that ridiculous (okay, fine, absolutely gorgeous) spiky hair, the subtle movement of his breaths and the heartsbeats in his chest.
A part of this Doctor clung painfully to the Master’s insides, a memory of their first meeting at the birth of this regeneration, how he’d imprinted upon this miraculous being and no other: his whimsy and rage, his radiant joy and that deep, black abyss buried at the core of him, of them both now. The Masters had always been intertwined hopelessly with the Doctors, but never before like this, where he could see nothing else in all the universe but hate and—
Oh.
“I think I’ve finally figured out the—” his Doctor began, clearly mistaking the Master for someone else. Then he looked up and froze.
The two of them stared at each other in absolute silence for a minute, the Master leaning awkwardly against the open doorway, and the Doctor half buried in whatever research had been occupying his time.
Then the Master took a fortifying breath, summoned up all his fury at this man who’d always ruined everything for him, and—
Before he could lash out, the Doctor barrelled into him, slamming him back against the doorframe.
The Master hissed at the force of the assault, but couldn’t get out his absolutely scathing insult before the Doctor’s lips smashed down onto his own, biting, gnawing, sucking like he was trying to crawl his way down the Master’s throat.
The Master froze in shock for one moment, perfectly immobilised. The Doctor’s hands were clasped on either side of his face, fingers scratching through his hair into his scalp. The Doctor had taken advantage of his height to force the Master away from the door back against the far wall, his thighs splayed on either side of the Master’s hips, pinning him in place. His mouth was ruthless, devouring any attempt at objection, his tongue invading every corner of the Master’s mouth roughly. Also, the Doctor was very, very hard, and not shy in the slightest about it, where their bodies pressed together. For a moment, there was nothing to do but be stunned; this wasn’t how the Master had anticipated this encounter going.
The banana door swung very slowly closed, which absolutely wasn’t symbolic of anything whatsoever.
Then, with a snarl, the Master grabbed the Doctor by his skinny arse and spun them around viciously. The Doctor let out an “oof!” as he was smacked back into the wall, his head falling away from the Master’s at the impact. The Master took advantage of this distraction to force the Doctor upward, until he was suspended entirely between the wall and the Master, his scrawny legs clenching around the Master’s waist in a desperate attempt to keep from tumbling to the floor.
“Now—!” the Master spat and shoved his tongue down the Doctor’s throat this time, as roughly as he could.
The Doctor moaned and whimpered in response, clutching at the Master’s hair, his back, his arse, seemingly anywhere he could reach and also seemingly with a disturbing number of limbs. The Master knew those limbs were long, but surely there were only four of them? Not that it really mattered, not when he finally had his Doctor gasping for his kisses, squirming to grind his cock against the Master’s stomach, clenching those sweet, skinny cheeks of his around the Master’s—
“You came for me,” the Doctor gasped, pulling back long enough to stare in awe at the Master with those idiotic, besotted eyes, and then did exactly what he’d just accused the Master of doing, with a strangled groan.
The Master couldn’t deny that was something deeply, primordially satisfying about having his archenemy orgasm in his clutches. He slowed the rutting of his hips to watch how the Doctor’s eyes went glazed and then rolled back, before his eyelashes fluttered shut; how his pretty red mouth slackened into an astonished “O”; how his thighs trembled weakly around the Master’s hips as he spent himself right into those too-tight pinstripe trousers, like a horny adolescent.
The Master drank it all in and then, when the Doctor was still too fragile and pleasure-shocked to protest, leaned in to catch the Doctor’s lower lip between his teeth and twisted. The Doctor’s chest hitched, and another shaky wave of pleasure cascaded through his body.
“Mmm,” the Master breathed against the hot, sweaty skin of the Doctor’s neck, abrading both their faces on each other’s stubble. “Where,” he demanded sharply, “is the bed?”
In any kind of normal room, he wouldn’t have had to ask, of course. But this was his moronic Doctor’s room, and it looked like a hurricane of electronics had passed through. The ‘Oncoming Storm’ indeed…
“Uhnnnnnn…” the Doctor said unhelpfully.
“Now,” the Master snapped. “Some of us still need to get off.” He ground his rather uncomfortably hard cock up between the Doctor’s arse-cheeks.
“Uhnnnnn…” the Doctor repeated. Then, “Wellllll…” which wasn’t much better.
The Master was about to slap him un-silly when suddenly the wall vanished, and the two of them went flailing backwards to fall, very painfully, onto a newly-imagined bed. The Master winced as every single bony angle the Doctor had simultaneously jabbed into all his weakest, most vulnerable spots.
“Ouch!” He managed to prop himself up on one elbow and glared down at the Doctor.
The Doctor at least had the courtesy to look sheepish. “Yeah…” he agreed. “Probably not one of my better ideas, that.”
“No, it was absolutely brilliant,” the Master insisted. “Right up there with not annihilating the Daleks from the get-go…”
“There were mitigating—”
“…And genociding and then ungenociding our entire species…”
“There are some advantages to—”
“…And flirting with stupid Earth girls when you could have been flirting with me, instead!” The last came out far too angrily, and was accompanied by a savage kiss that left them both panting in the aftermath.
“In my defence,” the Doctor insisted cheekily, “I did flirt with you quite a lot, too.” He waggled his fingers in front of the Master’s face and then lowered them to the Master’s wrist before slowly walking them up his bare forearm, to where his bicep curled holding him above the Doctor, sliding down the line of the Master’s collarbone, and finally ending up at the centre of the Master’s chest, toying with the curled hairs there.
Up until a few seconds ago, the Master would have sworn that he was wearing clothes. And, come to think of it, the Doctor had been, too. Okay, so maybe there were some advantages to the Matrix…
“Frankly,” the Doctor demanded irrationally, “I’m the one feeling not flirted properly with, at the moment. Are you just going to taunt me indefinitely? And what’s this I hear about you taunting my Twelfth incarnation? And all while wearing a sexy goatee I never got to see! I thought we were exclusive.”
“You are,” the Master insisted, finding himself spontaneously sprouting a goatee at the mere thought that this Doctor might find it sexy, “insufferable.” And he thrusted home hard.
“Ah!” the Doctor gasped, throwing his head back and squeezing his eyes shut tight at the sudden depth of the Master’s penetration.
The Master drove into the Doctor’s eager body once, twice, and on the third time struck the ring of pleasure nerves hidden vestigially within the male time-lord body. The Doctor’s eyes flew open in response, and the Master locked him into a hypnotic stare, trapping the Doctor’s mind with his gaze while he took the Doctor’s body at his leisure.
So tenuous and delicate, this Doctor’s psyche… Used, reused, and abused, and not nearly enough due to the Master’s own actions. He growled at the thought, that anything else in the universe dared to harm this Doctor, when his pain belonged to the Master and the Master alone.
The little hitches escaping the Doctor’s throat didn’t sound like pain, though. Nor did the undulation of his body into the Master’s thrusts, nor the rapidly re-hardening erection teasing the Master’s abdomen, nor even the unfettered delight curving at the corners of the Doctor’s lips.
“I hate you!” the Master snapped at him, and snapped his hips just as hard.
“You taste like berry-blue Kool-Aid,” the Doctor replied in a perfect, beautiful non-sequitur.
“I’m going to destroy you!” the Master insisted, something terrifyingly like a sob bursting forth on the last syllable.
“I love the taste of berry-blue Kool-Aid,” the Doctor said softly, his palm reaching up to cradle the Master’s cheek.
“St-Stop lying,” the Master’s voice hitched, his movements slowing against his own will. “Nobody loves the taste of berry-blue Kool-Aid…” The protest sounded weak even to his own ears.
The Doctor beamed up at him. “It’s always been my favourite,” he confessed in a sultry voice.
And that was it. The last straw. The Master’s plan foiled again. He’d come here to break this stupid Doctor, with his stupid hair and his stupid forgiveness and his stupid love, and now here the Master was breaking instead. He shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut tight, and a scream broke deep in his throat, pained and raw. No, no, no! He was furious with the Doctor, and he hated the Doctor, and he was going to make the Doctor suffer, and—
Oh no, the universe help him…
—He loved this Doctor so much!
His anger broke just like, appropriately enough, an oncoming storm, and suddenly there were no more lies to cling to, no more tricks or deceptions or elaborately violent plans.
The Master, still half against his will, did what he’d wanted all along: he made sweet, tender love to his Doctor.
It hurt. Like this, he could feel how beautiful the Doctor’s mind and soul really were, impossibly complicated and contradictory, delightful and terrible all at once, both vain and self-loathing, jejune and ancient. Brilliant, in a word. Fucking brilliant, in two.
The Master revelled in everything he was experiencing, and recoiled at everything he was becoming. Another contradiction. Oh, which made them so alike, made them opposites at the same time, yin and yang…
“Stop it…” the Master pleaded again softly, pathetically against the Doctor’s lips. “Stop turning me soppy. Stop making me lose control. Stop trying to destroy everything I care about.”
“I can’t,” the Doctor whispered raggedly back. “It’s all I’ve ever known how to do with you.”
Their bodies were still interlocked, but the Master was moving slowly in the Doctor now, firmly but gently, feeling every inch of the Doctor wrapping around him, consuming him, drowning him, until there was nothing left.
“It’s not fair,” the Master insisted.
“It’s never been fair,” the Doctor agreed.
“I’ve only ever loved you.”
“I’ve always loved everything,” the Doctor apologised.
The Master buried his face in the Doctor’s neck and tried not to let what he’d always known cut him too deeply.
“But,” the Doctor said, not unkindly, “my time is over now. My universe is no more. Which means that”—the Master pulled back to look him in the eye—“to me now”—their breaths brushed in the narrow space between their lips—“you are everything.”
The Master came with a strangled exhalation at that, releasing his pleasure deep into the Doctor’s body, unable to look away.
Everything was rather fuzzy and warm and Doctor-scented after that: a comfortable, downy haze of bed and blankets and bodies. Smooth, lickable skin and fascinating, wonderful hair that the Master could riffle through for eternity and a very, very sexy arse.
The Master realised that they were cuddling and had been for hours – Years? Millennia? – and even worse he wasn’t properly horrified by the concept. Sappy, stupid, lazy post-coital bliss should’ve been the Doctor’s thing, damn it!
“’s’not fair,” he complained for the umpteenth time into the sweet, freckled skin along the Doctor’s shoulder. He’d being trying to trace Gallifreyan sigils with his tongue through those freckles, like an elaborate game of connect-the-dots, for an eternity or two. Maybe three.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor mumbled. “I’m so sorry. It’s all I can give you.” He resumed laving the Master’s fingers with that obscenely dexterous tongue of his, like the Master’s hand had been dipped in marmalade. Actually, given the way the Matrix worked, that was entirely possible: the Master spared a coherent thought toward materialising marmalade on his fingertips. The Doctor hummed in increased pleasure in response, and his tongue returned to its work more diligently than before.
It was more than enough.
And, of course, it would never be enough.
***
It was only enough afterwards, when the Master finally got to humble-brag about how he’d shagged himself the pretty one, with the sexy arse.
All the rest of him rolled their eyes in unison. After all, they’d heard it all a million times before and since. Literally.