Chapter Text
Mist suffocates the cliffs of Oregon. It makes every breath a bit heavier, a bit harder to take. It sticks to her tongue and clings to the back of her throat like the dozens of promises that had been easy to make and even easier to break. It tastes of salt and the sea and the thousands of tears that the Doctor has been swallowing back since the TARDIS’ doors had swung shut behind three people who had not so much as bothered to glance back over their shoulders at her as they went. It threatens to steal her away and bury her and her broken hearts somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
Drowning would be a fitting punishment for her crimes. She lied to them, she betrayed them, and they watched her surrender to those cruel instincts that never seem to go away, no matter how quickly she tries to run. She deserves worse than life, worse than death, worse than a hundred fates as yet unconceived, and yet in her cowardice, all she can manage is to stride to the edge of the cliff and hurl her sonic screwdriver into the waves that crash against a beach that lies somewhere far below she stands, completely unseen. The forging of a new sonic is always a promise, a refusal to take up arms, and she had broken that promise. It feels right that she should rid herself of it, and yet, its absence does not lessen the weight of her guilt.
Instead, she crumples beneath it, and -- drawing her knees to her chest and staring out into the stark gray of the nothingness that lies before her -- she allows quaking sobs to once again consume her. Every passing second feels like an eternity, and she cries until she has nothing left to give, until she is nothing but a hollow shell of grief and guilt and loss.
The Doctor doesn't know how much time has passed before light seeps through her swollen lids. Four flashes from a distant lighthouse and then a quiet wash of darkness. She ignores it, brushes it aside as nothing. Whatever it might be, it doesn’t matter, just as she doesn’t matter.
Despite her disregard, it persists. Four flashes and then nothing. Four flashes and then nothing. Four flashes and then ...
Contact
.
Familiarity stirs in the bottomless chasm of her chest as a mind brushes against hers, but she shoves it away and shuts it out, the faintest echo of rage boiling somewhere deep within her blood. The Master is unwelcome in her life even at the best of moments, and he most certainly is not allowed to wallow in the lowest points of her trajectory. Koschei would have been allowed to linger, but the boy that Koschei had been devolved into chaos long ago, pushed by ambition and a council of people determined to bend him to their own wills until he broke beneath the pressure.
The flashing stops. His mind retreats, and she is once again left alone. She should run back to her TARDIS, close the doors and race off to somewhere where he might not be able to track her down, but she can’t seem to find the will to stand, nonetheless flee. Perhaps she deserves this. Perhaps she deserves a fresh bout of his hellfire. Perhaps she finally deserves to give him what he wants: her death at his hands.
It is impossible to know how much time passes. There are no ticking clocks, only her drying tears and the insatiable press of the mist and the quiet acceptance of any number of the dreadful, horrible fates that might befall her at his hands.
After a time, she feels the tiny hairs along her arms and on the back of her neck stand on end. The reflex carries with it a vague sense of both seeing and being seen, an echo of the collective memories that are injected into every cell of a Time Lord’s body. Carefully bred, meticulously engineered, painstakingly grown. Given the strict circumstances under which they were first created and then raised, it is a miracle that they both managed to go so wrong.
"Heard you went nuclear." Sadistic glee permeates his voice, creeping into the edges of his words and tugging them upwards. “Took out an entire planet, did we?”
The Doctor doesn’t so much as turn, doesn’t so much as lift her head, doesn’t so much as blink . There’s not much point in staring down her own humiliation. It will happen whether she likes it or not, and so far as she’s concerned, it is well-deserved. It would be more palatable if it took place at the hands of someone better, someone who was not intent upon sowing discord across the universe, but this is hardly the time for nuance. She committed an atrocity, and she sincerely believed, up until the very moment that she came face-to-face with the reality of that which she wrought, that she did so in the name of goodness . To her, that’s even worse. It has shifted her entire perception of morality -- her entire perception of her own self -- shattering thousands of years of memories into taunting fragments that all turn up flawed.
A disapproving tsk slithers its way through the fog as The Master’s tongue clicks against the back of his teeth. “Come now, love. Hardly the first time.” It is an unwelcome reminder, and he knows it. He revels in ignoring boundaries, in pushing people just that little bit too far. The Doctor has always been a particularly fun target, lashing back out of him with unexpected ruthlessness and cruelty, and yet, here she sits -- broken, motionless, silent. How unlike her. The change is deeply unsettling; it prickles beneath the surface of his skin and ever so slightly rewrites the rules of this little game that they’ve been playing for centuries.
He crouches in front of her, and a faint shiver wracks her body as he slides a single knuckle beneath her chin, guiding it up so that he might look at her properly.
The Doctor summons up enough will to offer up a perilously quiet “
Don’t
,” but other than that, she doesn’t fight him. His very touch sets her skin crawling, yet she doesn’t even bother to shrug him away. There is some scant comfort to be found in feeling anything other than worthless, even if that something is as undesirable as repulsion.
Head tilting, the Master’s dark eyes regard her, flickering from puffy eyes to parted lips to the damp bangs plastered against her forehead. He hasn’t seen her look this worse for wear in a long time, and at the hands of a disaster that he did not engineer. How unfair it is that she survived his traps for so long, only to fall victim to a fate of her own making. “Can’t remember the last time you said this little. When we were children by a river, maybe. With someone else’s blood on your hands.”
There it is .
Burning, roiling, restless fury sweeps across her green eyes, chasing away the dead glaze that took up such stubborn residence within them. “I did that for you, as you well know.” Disgust curls her lips, and she raises a hand to brush away that condescending hand on her chin, but the Master catches her wrist in his other hand. His grip is firm, but far from the vice that she has come to expect of him.
A pause falls between them as stare meets stare, rage meets rage, and memory meets memory.
The Master’s tongue works against the point of a single tooth as his mind weighs actions and consequences, pitting love against murder, but the the Doctor speaks first. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Then or now
.
Amusement curls in between his words as the Master wryly replies, “You never do, do you?” And yet she gallavants across the universe, leaving a river of bodies in her wake. Some probably deserved it, but others … who knows how many people become collateral damage in her self-imposed struggle to save the universe, forcibly instilling order even in cases where it halts progress. The Doctor has never been one to carefully consider the consequences of her actions, or the depths of her own misdeeds. She considers herself to be above such things, even while she holds the people around her to ridiculous moral standards. It is one of the many things about her that he finds endlessly infuriating.
“
Stop
.” The word hisses like ice meeting a hot stove, fizzing, popping, dissolving into the charged air between them. She twists her arm, and the Master allows her to break away from him, watching intently as she struggles to her feet, staggering ever so slightly as exhaustion battles against her sense of balance. “I would never, ever, even
once
consider doing the things that you have done.”
The mist around them almost seems to absorb the laughter that ushers forth from the Master's chest, muffling, stifling, suffocating. "You don't think. You never did. You just act. You destroyed our home before I did. You shut away a war and forced them to turn on me . Did you think then?" He feigns consideration of the question, eyes appealing to the dull air above them before he settles on an airy, "I don't think you did."
She gathers her coat tightly around her as she edges backwards, moving towards the TARDIS that ought to still be around here somewhere. "You were long gone already."
"You can't run around the universe saving every precious human you stumble across and then leave your people to die, Doctor. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works." He’s still crouched where she had left him, gesturing at the empty air even as the moisture blurs the air between them. The mist is too thick. Unnaturally thick. It is almost as though sorrow and fear have taken over the world itself.
“What do you want me to do?” The question is an explosion, edged on either side by the frantic beating of her hearts. “I can’t undo it. Something that big, it’s a fixed point. I’ve already
tried
.” She continues to creep backward until first her palm and then her back press against the familiar wooden walls of her TARDIS. Despite the clammy chill of the air, it’s warm, alive, buzzing beneath her touch. With a quick snap of her fingers, she could be gone from him, gone from this. She could spend every moment of the rest of her life
running
, but she’s already tried that. It never really works. Her past and her darkness always manage to catch up with her before too long.
The Master’s movements are almost languid as he rises, half-seen through the fog. As he moves to adjust his cufflinks, he almost seems at home here, like some ghost that’s been left behind, trapped in a single moment of endlessly repeating time. However, he’s not here to haunt the cliffs. He’s here to haunt her . He’s the ghost of the home and the past and the faces that she’s left behind. He is who she’s been, who she is, and who she could be if she stopped desperately clinging to the moniker of hero .
He closes the space between them in a third of the time that it took her to create it, bracing his hands on either side of her head. The ship responds to his touch -- sparks of unseen electricity arcing between his fingertips -- but it does not push him away. They know each other well, the Master and this TARDIS, just as intimately as they both know the Time Lord that’s pressed between them.
The pair is close. Too close. Their breaths mix and mingle in the scant space between them, shared warmth washing over the charged skin of their bodies. The Master’s eyes shift and flicker, unable to find a single place to settle, whereas the Doctor’s gaze remains fixed, attempting to project a calm that she does not feel.
“What’re you going to do? Kill me?” The question is almost taunting as it spins from the Doctor’s lips, half-wishing that her best enemy would finally gather the nerve to finally carry out the deed. It’s selfish of her -- cowardly, even -- but she’d do almost anything to rid herself of the guilt and grief that’s devouring her from the inside out. “You already destroyed our home. Might as well finish the job.”
For a moment, the Master considers it -- fingers twitching almost involuntarily as he thinks of the weight of the knife in his pocket -- but he stands firm. She has spent centuries fighting to bring out the best in him, why shouldn’t he be allowed a little
dalliance
in order to bring out the worst in her?
A feral smile slips across his face as he finally indulges her with an answer. “Unlock those doors, and maybe you’ll find out.” Eyebrows raise as he drags his eyes away from her just long enough to indicate the blue wall behind her, before she once again has his full attention. “Come on, Doctor, I know that little thing you do.” He leans back ever so slightly, his fingers hovering a hair's breadth away from her ear, and snaps.
The Doctor blinks at the suddenness of the noise, but she does not flinch. Her hands remain unmoved, pressed into the wood of the box as tightly as possible. The beating of her hearts grows louder, drowning out the distant rhythm of waves against the shore and the hiss of each and every one of the Master’s breaths as they slip across her own lips. The Master leans in tighter, leg pressing against leg and chest pressing against chest, and she can feel the unforgiving press of a blade through their coats. He brought a weapon to this fight. She can’t say that she’s surprised. She is, however, shocked that he hasn’t yet drawn it.
Tension reigns between them for a long, pointed, calculated moment before he presses his lips to hers. It is far from the first time that they’ve done this, but it is the first time in these bodies. There’s something about it that threatens to sweep the Master away -- the power, the warmth, the sense of being
found
-- but he does not allow him to lose sight of his goal. One hand finds the side of her face as the other slips into the pocket of her coat, wrapping around the cool metal of her key.
For the briefest of moments, the Doctor almost finds the kiss to be a distraction -- a welcome comfort in an endless sea of misery -- but that warmth disappears all too quickly. They are not the people that they once were. Not friends, not allies, probably not even the last two Time Lords left standing. She’s lost that, just as she’s lost her home and her fam and her hope. She flounders at the thought, struggling for freedom and breath and sanity against the endless press of
him
, and without casting foresight towards the consequences, her hands wrap around the hilt of his knife and turn it inward, driving the blade too hard and too fast into his side.
The Master staggers backward, eyes widening in surprise. His hand presses against his side, fingers and stolen key coming away coated in his blood. His eyes gaze up at her, full of desperate, pleading panic, and she can’t bring herself to meet them.
“I’m so sorry, I --”
The Doctor doesn’t finish the thought before adrenaline offers up the will she had been lacking, pushing around the corner, bringing her fingers up in a decisive snap, and slamming the TARDIS doors behind her.
Surely she can keep running as long as she has to.
She can still fight to do better, fight to balance the scales as best as she can and leave this all behind her.
She can find a new group of friends to carry around the universe.
She can --
She reaches into a pocket that feels strangely empty, and just as the sinking sense of realization hits her, the doors swing open, letting in the mist and the sorrow and the ghost that she intended to leave behind.