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Gallifrey smoulders in ruins, and the Master drags another body across the floor. It’ll need cleaning. Dust and fire is sexy. Maggots and flies are not. Never do an important monologue near flies - you will swallow one, and it’ll ruin your flow. Master Rule number twenty-eight.
There is a grinding of a TARDIS materialising with a flight-brake on.
The Master drops Ex-Chancellor Jodixon whose head hits the ground with a thunk. No, not already! There are still Outsider stragglers in the Drylands, the fatal radiation is still travelling like a wave around the planet, he’s not done the mopping up and presentation is everything!
The Master runs outside, trying to formulate a plan to reverse the landing using what’s still in the pockets of his tattered black coat: A broken laser screwdriver, a key to what could charitably be called a living space if you could actually find any space in it, and a girl’s tooth that he kept as a souvenir because what does a Cyberman need molars for anyway.
He wastes half a second trying to chase those memories and they disappear like dreams before he can catch them. All that remains is a desperate desire to decide his own future, the ghost of a cyber-plan, and the feeling that he’s his own worst enemy. Old news. If he knows one thing about himself - it’s that.
The other three-and-a-half seconds give him this: Use the tesseractic crystal from the laser screwdriver to take his thought patterns, translate them into a energy transfer that beams to the tooth, causing the enamel to strip out the hyperion particle, then take what refracts from that using the key, bounce it back to the crystal, and then all he has to do is think really hard in the ship’s direction and the Doctor will-
He’s already standing outside the TARDIS.
Except he’s a she. Short, shorter than him - and doesn’t that feel good - with hair barely reaching her shoulders. He takes in everything about her appearance, from her eyes, to her cheekbones, to the dimensions of her nose, and he scores it into his hearts. He refuses to forget the Doctor’s faces.
She eyes him with a look of mingled curiosity and revulsion, and he can see the pieces slotting into place for her immediately.
“Oh. It’s you.” She says.
The Master claps his hands together at the feeling, but it fades quickly. He wishes there was a way to make it last longer. Probably a bit more dread and less resignation would be good.
But then the feeling goes away entirely, as an echoing shockwave causes the air to change direction towards him.
...And also, he looks behind her.
“Wasn’t expecting the beard. Don’t like it much. Or the black - bit of purple does you wonders.” She says, looking around with perfectly feigned casualness.
“And I wasn’t expecting a human.” He snarls, snorting the stench out of his nostrils. Then he stops and sniffs again. “Are you dead?”
“Not caught up on that?” The Not-Doctor says, ambling away from the Diner-shaped TARDIS. “I always assumed the raven was secretly your doing somehow - very wicked witch’s familiar, narratively appropriate I thought.”
“Wicked witch?” He says stupidly, immediately despising himself.
“So, what do you need to know... I have a TARDIS, I answer distress signals - from some members of this planet at least - and nowadays people know me as the Doctor, or in the Time Lords’ case, the Other One. Oh, and I’m immortal. That about sum it up?”
The Master laughs until his throat hurts. Until his knees give way. Until his lungs burn from the toxins in the air, and ‘the Other One’ has long since wandered off.
He doesn’t know what he’s done, or what he’s going to do at least, but he loves it. And who are you if you can’t laugh at the jokes you make yourself.
'The Doctor’ is by a row of doors when he finds her, whispering sweet nothings to them until they open up and let her inside them, where she fiddles about and then leaves them, and they disappear.
Except these are TARDISes. Not humans. And the process is much faster.
“Not concerned about all the dead bodies? That’s not very ‘Doctor’ of you...” The Master wheedles, feeling as high as if he’d eaten a pound of crystallised ginger - the hard stuff.
“Isn’t it?” The Joke replies. Ooh, that’s fair. “Wasn’t a Time Lord’s distress signal. It was his,” she waves a hand to where a door once was down the corridor but is now just flat wall, “And everyone else is just being too polite to raise their own.”
The Master looks down the row of TARDISes and back again. He’s never been sure about them. The Doctor might treat his like a lover, but he’s never had a problem treating them like the mechanised horses they are, like any other Time Lord. Better in fact - sometimes he might repair his instead of sending it to be scrapped immediately. But the thought of them pressing their own buttons is ridiculous. As if they could know what he’s planning.
But then admittedly, he has rehearsed his speeches a lot during the corpse collection.
What if they can plan as well...
The Master slides his glance over to the woman, and before he’s even consciously formulated his attack, she’s knocked him down with a blow to the knees, wrapped an arm around his neck, and is pressing something sharp into his back.
Feelings burst inside him, though pain isn’t one of them, as she doesn’t break the skin. A rush of familiarity, like he’s fighting himself, or kin he’d somehow forgotten. And a corresponding flare of arousal makes his hearts pound like drums and remind him of his wrongness.
“I’m not ‘the Doctor’ when it comes to you. I will always be Clara with a pointy stick, and no qualms about putting another pretty head on those shoulders. Now I’m just here to do my job because they asked for help, and then the people out there are next on my list. There’s no love lost between me and the Time Lords but do not get in my way, because the Doctor’s version of good is not absolute, and I will definitely do the universe a favour by killing you.”
“Oh, I think you’d find you’d be here quite a while, Shepherd’s Girl.” The Master says softly, remembering bedtime stories that weren’t. But he tilts his head in something that in a lesser person would be submission, though in him is simply common-sense self-preservation.
She releases him, and as she walks round to continue her rescue mission, she tucks something metal into her pocket. Not a knife. Just a TARDIS key.
He can appreciate a fellow liar.
“Leave two.” The Master shouts to her. “If you don’t want more innocent people to die.”
“Do you count as innocent?” She asks.
“I’ve never been innocent in my life.” He replies, as a furious storm closes in on the empty spaces of his memory.
It takes her ten minutes and thirteen seconds to coax all the TARDISes but two out. They’re not the only ones on the planet. But if they’re the only ones who could figure out how to send distress signals, then in this dimension it’s survival of the smartest, baby.
“What’s in the box?” She asks, as she attempts to make some of the computers check for life-signs. It’s pointless - these ones only work for the inside of the Citadel, and he’s already scanned multiple times, just to make absolutely certain every last high-council-and-adjacent Time Lord was dead.
“Oh, in here? A glue gun. Some headdresses, just a few accessories I’m going to need later, if this all goes to plan, which it will because it’s mine.”
“Still mad then?”
“Oh, I am the mad man, the new King of Kings, the best, the brightest, Mr Clever himself, I am the Master, and don’t you forget it.”
It would’ve been much more impressive if he wasn’t sat cross-legged on the sticky floor, drawing stencils with a compass, a protractor, and a hastily scrawled translation of ‘Ozymandius’. But it seems to have the same effect, because Clara steps back and looks him up and down, from his hair to his trouser cuffs.
“Is this something to do with the Doctor?”
“Doctor who?” He says pointedly to infuriate her. But she just nods slowly.
“Yeah...that’s what I’m wondering...” She looks at him, and then around the room. “I’m early, aren’t I...Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I thought you were late, Claraaa.” He draws the word out, determined to get a rise, but she still doesn’t bite.
“Forget I said that name. No, actually don’t. PC World, Shoreditch High Street, 29th of March 2013. Not now, it’ll probably be obvious when.”
“Better be soon, I don’t have all the time in the universe.” The Master says, grinning widely and clenching his teeth til they hurt.
She puts on some ridiculous sunglasses, pulls a pen out of her pocket, and starts writing co-ordinates on her arm. He’s seen data-specs before. Stupid things.
“You don’t really want to scan for life-signs out there. Promise.”
The Not-Doctor-But-Close-Enough ignores him.
“Do you at least know the difference between a Time Lord and an Outlander?”
She doesn’t respond, but keeps writing a list to her elbow.
“Because I think you’ll want to. Do you want to hear me practice my speech?”
She loves the Doctor. He knows the symptoms.
You love the Doctor, venerate the Doctor, worship the Doctor. And then you become the Doctor. It’s sick, a disease, and it can only be cleansed by death.
“Once upon a time... No. Once upon several times...”
There is a set of co-ordinates that she puts a tick next to on her arm. A handful of people huddled in a barn in the Drylands. The rest she crosses out. A failed test. A mass of red pen.
The Master cuts out his stencils.
And she leaves without a word.