Chapter Text
The Doctor didn’t mean to find the fob-watch.
She hadn’t, honestly, but when you heard the faint sound of drums coming from your partner's dresser drawer, you tend to get a bit curious.
Her fingers delicately ran over the Gallifreyan script etched on the outside of the watch. Everything grows old under the power of time, and everything is forgotten through the lapse of time. An Aristotle quote, one of the most brilliant minds humanity had ever produced (who also made quite a delicious beef and barley soup).
She held it to her ear, the sounds of drums echoing, the mechanical ticking and buried underneath it all was laughter. His laughter. His laughter and Missys, Saxons, all of them together; manic and dangerous and completely insane and laughing, laughing, laughing.
Laughing at her.
“You alright, Love?”
The Doctor jumped as two hands found their way in her waist. She turned, hiding her hand behind her back as her eyes searched over O’s face.
His face. The newest one, at any rate.
He looked concerned. Concerned and kind and beautiful. “Is everything okay?”
The Doctor wanted to laugh. What on earth could she say to that? ‘Oh I’m fine. I just only found out my boyfriend of the past year is actually my oldest friend slash oldest enemy slash ex slash I can’t even describe our relationship, only he doesn’t know any of that.’
“Talk to me, Love, what’s going on.” O was trying to comfort her. His big brown eyes were soft and warm, trusting and so, so, kind.
“I’m fine.” She wanted to roll her eyes. Yeah, good job, Doctor, he’ll really believe that when you’re on the verge of tears.
He opened his mouth and shut it again. O was shy. Shy and brilliant and almost as socially awkward as she was. He wouldn’t push her to talk when it was clear she didn’t want to.
The Doctor sniffed and looked down at the carpet, reaching out and taking hold of one of his hands. He was warm. Human warm, a balming 98.6 degrees, with one single heart. She knows that there’s only one heart, she had heard it the hundreds of times she had rested her head on his chest, she had felt it when he laid on top of her and she could feel it beating under her fingertips as she ran her hands over him chest.
Maybe… maybe it wasn’t his? Yes, that was a possibility. Maybe he had happened to find the watch somewhere, maybe he had picked it up someplace not knowing what it was. They had gone on so many adventures, and O had always been so excited whenever they went to some new planet, so enthused, so full of glee and joy and life. A dorky little smile on his face coupled with bright wide eyes as he asked a thousand questions, wanting to know everything about these other worlds and alien lives.
It was very possible that he had picked up a souvenir not knowing it contained the essence of one of the most dangerous people in the universe.
She tried her best to keep her tone free of accusation. To sound curious, not judgemental, as she pulled the watch from behind her back. “Where did you get this?”
Say Abydos or Ogros or Morok or somewhere, anywhere. Please. Please let me be wrong. Please be you. “I- I was looking for something in your drawers and I found this,” she explained hastily. She knew he wouldn’t ask more questions. Of course he wouldn't, O was very trusting, especially of the Doctor. “It’s a very nice watch.”
“It is, isn't it?” He smiled as he took it, and the Doctor held her breath. “My grandfather was a soldier during the partition. This was the watch he carried with him during all the fighting. You see that scratch there?” O pointed to a long curved circular scratch on the brown metal. “Someone’s knife grazed him, and the watch saved his life. He gave it to my dad on his wedding day, and my dad passed it on to me when I graduated uni.”
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation. A watch being handed down from father to son and son again, a tried and true story. Quite lovely, actually, passing on a family heirloom during big life moments like getting married, or getting a PhD from Cambridge.
Only it wasn’t true. Because the Doctor knew for a fact that ‘scratch’ as he had called it wasn’t caused by a knife scraping against it, but was just a natural part of their language, letting the reader know a vowel needed to be hard rather than soft.
The Doctor tried, she tried , to smile as he flipped the watch around in his hand before setting it back on top of the dresser but it was too hard. She wondered if he could hear the laughter or the drumming and choose to ignore it, or if his own warped persona refused to let him.
O took her by the waist and pulled her in close. Her eyes found his and she wanted to melt into those eyes. He always looked so kind, so sweet, so everything she had ever wanted the Master to look like. What she thought Missy might look like one day.
“You sure you’re alright?” O asked her.
“Of course,” she lied.
Just like he had.
Although it wasn't really a lie, the Doctor was loath to admit. Even under the worst forms of torture he would insist that he was O; the MI6 analyst who hailed from Stockport whose now dead parents had immigrated from Punjab, and whose Hindu grandfather had fought during the partition (and apparently been saved by a watch). He would recall his childhood holed up in his bedroom reading science fiction stories and trying to pretend it hadn’t hurt when he wasn’t invited to a classmate's birthday party that had never took place, spending his teenage years excelling at his studies he never took, getting over rejections from girls at uni he had never met, crying at funerals for parents who had never lived.
But why? Why had he locked his memories away again? What scheme had he cooked up now? What could he possibly be planning that required locking away his memories and having her fall for him over their year of traveling together? Or had that been just an unfortunate side effect? Something neither one had intended, something he hadn’t meant to happen and had just gotten incredibly lucky?
There were too many questions. Too many questions and answers that would only come with a flick of a metal hinge. She glanced back at the fob-watch.
You could hide it , a voice rang in her mind, desperate, frantic. And she could. It would be a way to end the Master once and for all. She could chuck the fob-watch into the furthest reaches of the universe, O would age like a normal human, never knowing any better, loving her all the while, and on the day of his death the Master would be gone for good, her greatest enemy vanquished. The Doctor would be victorious, the winner of their little game that had lasted thousands of years and cost countless lives.
Her stomach twisted at the thought. A painful feeling so strong, so deep that it took her breath away. The thought of a universe without the Master was too much to bear. But what about O? She couldn’t imagine an existence ithout the Master but she wanted to spend a lifetime with O.
Was she being selfish? To want to be with the best version of him and hide away the worst parts? Or at least a version he had conjured up out of Time Lord technology. She and O had been friends for so long, years even, trading texts and photos and videos and then finally inviting him to travel with her and the fam.
Then during one adventure when O had offered to stay behind to manually control a spaceship so that it stayed on a collision course with an asteroid rather than a well populated planet so that the ships surviving crew, the Doctor and the fam could escape, she knew she had fallen for him.
“I’ve always wanted to fly a spaceship,” he had said in what he thought was his last conversation with her. His eyes were wet with tears but he was smiling. “Looks like I’ll finally get my chance…”
O had been willing to die so everyone could live, so that the Doctor could live. It was only her being able to materialize the TARDIS around him a half second before impact that had saved him. Everyone had screamed and cheered and cried for joy and celebrated and in that moment the Doctor had kissed him, and he had kissed her back.
That had been a year ago. A year ago last month and tonight she found out it was all fake. She had fallen in love with a man who didn’t exist, who had never existed, who could never exist.
But what if he could? a voice inside asked. All she had to do was hide the fob-watch, and then she and O could be happy together. How many lives would she save if the Master didn’t exist? How much heartbreak would she save herself? Sure she would be stealing his memories, stealing a part of him, the good and bad and horrendous, but surely the benefits would outweigh the harm? For her and the rest of the universe.
The Doctor turned her gaze up to O. He was taller than her, only by an inch or so, but even still she couldn’t help the smile when she thought about how he would react if- when- if he realized he finally got it over on her when it came to height. His fingers were gentle, always gentle, always caring, always a sweet caress, as they came up and danced along the back of her neck.
“I love you, Doctor,” he said, almost a prayer. It wasn’t the first time he said it, but it was the first time it made her eyes water.
The Doctor gave him a teary smile as she hugged him, burying her head in his shoulder. How much of those words were his genuine feelings and how much was the fob-watch telling him this is what O would do in this situation?
“I love you too.”
All of you, every part of you.
His arms wrapped themselves around her, to comfort, not to suffocate. “I’m here when you need to talk, Doctor,” he promised, and she knew he would be.
Because O never lied. O never made a promise he couldn’t keep. O would never think about hurting her.
She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand, enjoying the closeness before she pulled away. She took his face in her hands and leaned in for a kiss. Soft sweet lips danced against hers. His dark scruff gave a pleasant scratch against her skin.
O pulled back first, his hands lightly curling around her waist as he pulled her in close. “Do you want to go back to bed?” he asked.
An invitation for whatever she needed from him right then, be it to just hold her as they laid together in her bed, sex, or staying up late playing Tetris in the TARDIS arcade trying to beat the other persons score. Because O would never slam her facedown on the ground and take what he wanted as the Doctor fought and pretended she didn’t want the same.
She doubted a thought like that had ever crossed O’s mind.
“Could we just… can you just be with me?” she asked, and he said of course. Because that was the only thing O wanted. Not the destruction of Earth, not to cause mass chaos, he wasn’t obsessed to the point of insanity with every form she had been. He just wanted to be with the Doctor because he loved her.
Pure and simple human love.
The Doctor promised she would be join him in bed soon and he left her with a quick kiss before he headed back to the bed that had been hers and was now theirs. She gnawed at her lip as she looked at the fob-watch. A beat of hesitation and then she quickly scooped it up in her hand.
Nothing wrong with safekeeping.