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There was something special, something unique about the Doctor; of course there was. The Master had known that since they were children. He’d known it for sure when he’d looked into the Matrix, and he’d resented her for it then. Enough to destroy their entire planet for it, and lure her into what he’d hoped would be a trap designed to torture her.
He hadn’t known just how special she was at the time, but then again neither had she. Neither of them had known the depths of the difference lurking within her, until she’d overloaded the Matrix with just the power of her mind and something had...snapped.
The next time the Master saw her after that, the Doctor was flickering. Her usual self one second, and then when he looked away, something else. Same height, same silhouette, but surrounded by a dark, writhing mass, mouth full of wickedly sharp teeth whenever she talked. It was terrifying, it was unexpected, it was- beautiful.
He couldn’t fight that.
A week later, he was on board her TARDIS, de-Cyberium-ised, and absolutely in awe of her. Whatever being suddenly aware of her past had done to her, it was a matter of scientific curiosity, it required extensive and careful documentation- and the Master just had to try and touch the tentacles. Or were they wings? Maybe they were both? It was very difficult to tell.
They’d manage to ascertain a few things over the course of the week, which were as follows:
- To the direct gaze, the Doctor looked like a perfectly normal Time Lord. It was only when the Master looked at her out of the corner of his eye that he could see the strange, flickering shapes behind her.
- The teeth were real. The teeth were real, and they were very, very sharp.
- The dark wings/tentacles/formless masses behind her couldn’t be touched by either of them, but they somehow seemed to make it a little awkward to go through small doors, or lie on her back.
- Humans were very amusingly disconcerted by the Doctor’s new quirks. The Master found this hilarious; she did not.
And really, that was about the extent of the list. The corporeality of everything (except the teeth) was unclear, but the Doctor had taken to not wearing her coat around the TARDIS, and turning sideways to walk through doors.
Some part of the Master wanted to be jealous, wanted to use this as definitive proof that she was better than him, that she always would be.
The rest of him was far too busy being fascinated by watching her try to negotiate a mass of invisible, semi-intangible limbs into a rainbow-striped t-shirt to even care about that.
The t-shirt flopped to the floor, joining a large pile of others, and the Doctor groaned in frustration.
“It’s definitely not working,” she grumbled. “I’ve tried just about every fabric in the universe. Nothing goes over them.”
“You’re wearing a t-shirt right now,” the Master pointed out. He was not entirely sure what the Doctor was trying to accomplish with this particular experiment; her ramble to him had been long, and vague, and he had zoned out to stare at her phantom limbs several times.
“Yeah, on my...this-dimension body. But it’s all itchy. I need a shirt that goes over all the things. Does that make sense?”
“Nope,” the Master said, putting extra emphasis on the ‘p’ sound. “None of this makes any sense to me. I just know that I like it.”
“Course you like it, you don’t have to deal with it.”
“I have to deal with you.” The flickering mass around the Doctor flared outwards for a second at that, something deep inside of it squirming frantically before suddenly calming down again.
“Don’t be rude,” the Doctor said. “Else I’ll bite you again. Since I can do that now.”
“What a cruel universe, where I’m not even allowed to be rude to my best enemy.” The Master let out a long, overdramatic sigh, and the Doctor just folded her arms and looked unimpressed.
“You’re not being very helpful. C’mon, you’re clever. Help me solve my t-shirt problem.”
“You could always just...mm, not wear one,” he suggested with a grin. “Certainly wouldn’t get any complaints from me.”
“No,” the Doctor said firmly. “Not going there.”
“Boo. So boring. Hmm.” The Master stood up, walking closer to the Doctor. Studying the pile of t-shirts on the floor, then turning back to look at her. Or, slightly to the left of her, so that he could see the wings. Tentacles? Somethings. They looked nice up close, semi-visible surface swirling with faint colours like an oil spill. “Well. They’re not in this dimension. Not fully. So it follows that you’d need to find a way to put your shirt into their dimension, and then it would go over the...things. Either that, or you bring them into this dimension, like the teeth.”
“I don’t want them in this dimension, I’d scare my fam,” the Doctor said miserably. The Master hadn’t known it was possible for someone to say the word ‘fam’ and sound sad, but recently the Doctor had been full of surprises. “And if I could somehow get a t-shirt into another dimension, it would be invisible in this one. And I’m not doing that,” she added hastily. The Master closed his mouth, biting back another flirtatious (or possibly just lewd) comment.
“Guess you’ll just have to suffer,” he said, shrugging. “Is it really that bad?”
“It’s annoying,” the Doctor said, wandering off and slumping down face-first onto a sofa. Why she had a sofa in what was ostensibly a science lab, the Master had no idea. Her TARDIS had no sense of interior design.
He studied her for a minute, both the tired form of the Time Lord he knew so well, and the hazy, twisting mass that hovered around her back whenever he looked away. The Master hated to admit it, but he felt bad for her. Neither of them had been expecting this to be the result of their meeting on Gallifrey. Quite frankly, the Master hadn’t entirely been expecting to leave it alive. But here he was, definitely alive, and so...maybe he could bear to do a little something more than flirt and make unhelpfully snarky comments.
“I’m sorry, Theta,” he said gently, walking over to where she lay down. The Master perched himself on the edge of the sofa, pushing aside one of her legs to make room. The Doctor just let out a faint ‘mmph’ at the sound of her name, and didn’t move.
He reached out, resting his hands on her back, and started to gently rub at the tight muscles. Where exactly the things came out of her skin, he wasn’t sure, but he could squint and take a rough guess. Presumably those would be the spots that were bothering her most.
For a minute, the Doctor said nothing. Then- “‘S nice. Helps. A bit.”
“Good.” This close to the Doctor, it was hard to see exactly where her...extra limbs?...were, even if he looked away. The Master tried not to stick his head through them, or anything like that, but it was definitely more guesswork than science.
He could feel her relaxing under his touch, and the Master spread a little further out, rubbing her shoulders, careful not to jab his fingers too hard into any particularly tense spots. Normally he’d love to see her flinch, but he was being nice today. Not...good, some part of him insisted. Just nice, because the Doctor needed him to be.
He didn’t much feel the need to talk, and apparently for once, neither did the Doctor. She looked half-asleep, one cheek pressed lazily against the sofa, her hair a messy halo around her face. The word ‘cute’ drifted unbidden to the forefront of the Master’s mind, and he hastily squashed it back down.
He’d worked his way about halfway down her back when...something happened. The air seemed to shift around him, like a sudden crackle of electricity, but colder. The Master blinked, and suddenly the Doctor’s extra limbs were physical.
Neither wings nor tentacles, but- perhaps somehow both? They pulsed and twisted almost like the Cyberium, but blacker than the deepest black hole, flecked with colour like a raven’s feather. The Master felt his head ringing as he stared at them, his pulse pounding in his ears as he reached out, barely even aware that he was doing so, and touched-
The Doctor jolted where she was lying down, head snapping around to face him, and in an instant the limbs were back to their usual mostly-invisible state. Her eyes were bleary, tired, and for just a fraction of a second the Master swore her irises had shifted to an inky black.
Then she blinked, and she looked perfectly normal again. “What- what? What did you do?”
Good question. What had he done? The Master wasn’t entirely sure. The last thirty seconds or so were suddenly very blurry in his head, like he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to and now his brain was doing its utmost to protect him from it.
“Your- things,” he said, making a vague hand gesture towards her back. “They were in this dimension, for a second. Or maybe I was in their dimension, I don’t know, but I- I think I touched them.” He frowned, rubbing one hand through his hair. His head still hurt.
“Oh, you’re brilliant! Don’t quite know what you did yet, but you’re brilliant!” The Doctor sat up, hands reaching out to squeeze his arms for a moment before she was jumping up, practically skipping over to the nearest bench to grab a pen and some paper. “Right. Now, tell me everything.”
The Master slumped back against the sofa, and started doing his best to recount every detail of the experience. He hadn’t seen the Doctor this ecstatic in the entire week since her new extradimensional traits had materialised. When he looked away, he could swear her extra limbs were standing up just a little taller on her back. And she had straightened back up to her full height, too, like they were no longer weighing her down. Whether this lasted or whether she’d slump again the moment their research hit another wall, the Master didn’t know. But it was undeniably good to see her happy in this moment.
This was quite possibly the strangest situation he’d ever found himself in. And yet, it felt just like their childhood; the two of them in a science lab, the Doctor bouncing around from idea to idea and him sitting back and providing the occasional nudge of common sense to push her in the right direction. Whatever she was, whatever this all meant, they could get to the bottom of it given enough time. And they could do it together.