Chapter Text
“Hello, Missy. I’m the Master. I’ve very worried about my future. Give us a kiss.”
For one second she was caught by total, abject, terror. In the next, she had a plan.
Her other self triumphantly gloated in the success of his little ploy; but she also saw the relief of a man caught in the wheels of own scheme, anticipating a possible out. How…adorable.
“Instead, why don’t we go have a cozy reunion with an old friend?” she suggested slyly. “It’s been so long. He’s simply dying to see you.”
“That sounds,” he paused. “Perfect.”
He held out his hand, she took it. She forgot what it meant; she nearly forgot her way forward. A single taste after years of denial and she was drunk on destruction, the undertow of evil emanating from his love of it, which was also hers. It inexorably drew her in, promising everything she had abjured. She reveled in it.
In the fight that followed, she did have the presence of mind to fling their hapless victim against a computer, but it was a near thing. And if her other self hadn’t arrogantly proclaimed he would rather DIE than beg for his life from the Doctor, it all might have gone differently. No one deserved to be knocked out with an umbrella more than he did right then.
“Stand with me. It’s all I ever wanted.”
“Me too,” She couldn’t even see him, her vision was so blurred with tears.
The Doctor offered his hand, she waved it away and all it represented. “But, no,” she smiled; an echo of her brilliant, Missy smile. “Sorry. Just, no.”
It was not that simple. She could never be the person he wanted her to be. But perhaps—
She made a decision. It might succeed, it might not. But she had a contingency. She took his hand firmly, resolutely, in hers. A promise, despite her words to the contrary. Also, in that last handclasp, she passed him her Confession Dial. “Thanks for trying,” She glanced up at him meaningfully, then away. She gave his hand a final squeeze to fold his fingers around the edges. She ducked and strode off; refusing to look back. She missed seeing his shock. His despair. Later, his willingness to consign himself to die, to reject his own regeneration. He teetered on the brink until the ghosts of friends who needed him, calling his name, gave him a reason to stay. The last “Doctor!”, the one that finally pulled him to his feet, was hers.
She stored it all in that small, flat, disc. How she ran to him for help because he always, always helps, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the reason. That she set him up with Clara, and gave him the Cybermen army to rewrite time, to use him as a fulcrum to wrench her own future from the terrible trajectory it held. Failing that, she had tried her best to prepare. She had tried to change herself.
She'd never known how. Or why. Or was even able to see anything but colorless shapes, images through a steamed glass door. A no-man’s-land of nothingness surrounded her latest regeneration and what preceded it, the ground she stood on was the conviction that the Doctor was completely mixed up in it. Only two events survived: One, a lady threw her against the wall and extoled her to always carry a dematerialization circuit. That was the clearer of the two. The second one…was more obscure.
She heard a voice, her voice, as it used to be. It cried: “This is where we’ve always been going. This, is our perfect ending. We shoot ourselves in the back!” Followed by mingled laughter…hers, and a horribly familiar other. Feminine. Then, the giddy high of having dispensed true death as her laughter continued unabated. Alone. The other had stopped.
She had killed herself, and she had to live with that.
Now, it was done.
The Confession Dial would only open when she was dead.