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The Doctor’s hands are big, lumbering, and clumsy. They are a poor impersonation of a physician’s form, are a sorry excuse for a man who purportedly fixes things... but here he is, anyway. Trying. Blunt fingertips and wide palms and thick knuckles, all wrapped around the singular task of applying one neon-bright bandaid after another.
The Doctor has just the tip of his tongue stuck between his crooked, pressed, concentrating lips, and the silence is suffocating.
(It hurts. Sure, of course it does, but—no more than being tried by the Daleks and incinerated at the Order’s behest. No more than the last several lives lived in desperate, furious abandonment. A raw finger with a peeled nail is hardly something to bat a lash at.
The Doctor’s clumsy and genuine attempts at softness are... another thing entirely.)
“Pity,” he drawls, “that human girl couldn’t come with you. Ah—but no, indeed, that wasn’t it. What was it, Doctor? Not couldn’t, was it? Wouldn’t?”
“Shh,” the Doctor whispers. “M’concentrating.”
Damnable preference-imprinting has got his mouth wrapped around an accent that’s ugly even by the standards of these clumsy, brutish human languages. How is it that softness sits so easily in these broad shoulders? It hasn’t escaped the Master’s notice that the Doctor is, for once, so much taller than he is—so how is it that clumsy, while sticking, doesn’t even begin to cover the half of it?
The Master grimaces.
“Means you’re stuck with me,” he hisses, with an air of desperation that repulses him to hear in his own—albeit stolen—voice.
“Master,” the Doctor murmurs. “Concentrating.”
He doesn’t even look the Master in the face, to say it.
Gods and Pythia, he’s writhing inside this robbed flesh. It isn’t fair, isn’t fair, isn’t fair!—he’s chased to no avail, burned through lives away from this fool, and burned through lives to get back, stood proud and blasted to dust, stepped into an unwilling skin and felt it shiver beneath him like the first tremors before the earth quakes and the foundations turn to grit, he’s turning to dust again, and blood and bones besides—and he can’t even get a reaction.
He nearly snaps something very nasty, indeed, but then the Doctor’s hands find their way around his thin, elegant, crumbling fingers, and the adhesive takes. "Ha!” the Doctor breathes, as he twists the Master’s hand subtly this way and that, and takes in his handiwork. His face is lit by the golden glow of the console, like fresh life and atron energy and wishful memories.
He smiles like the suns.
It isn’t fair.
“And I’m not stuck.”
“What?” the Master snaps, taken aback.
The Doctor looks at him. He’s slate-blue eyes and a strong jaw, and crooked lips and tousled hair, and how can someone so many right angles and bent edges be so...
“I’m not stuck,” the Doctor repeats. He’s... fresh. The patience is easy, and and simple, and nearly—cheerful, perhaps? “Why would I be stuck? Still got myself, got the TARDIS. Whole universe still out there to see. We can go anywhere. Why would I be stuck?”
“We,” the Master says. Soft. Dangerous, he’d hope.
(He hates it that it’s not.)
The Doctor quirks his mouth in the approximation of a shrug. “I’ve extended out the zedrino field. It’s not a zero room, but it should, uh, slow some of this down.”
He tweaks one of the Master’s fingers between two of his own. It does something soft and unspeakable to the Master’s innards and his damnably overworked single heart.
“Until we work out something else. Until you... leave.”
He says it with such weight, it could be mistaken for reluctance. Surely it can’t be reluctance. The Doctor, diffident fool as he can be sometimes, wouldn’t hesitate to let him burn. He’s done it before.
“And when should I plan to do that, hm?” he drawls. Ball in the other court, and all, uncover the threat. Surely, there’s a threat.
There is no threat in the Doctor’s eyes as he shakes his head, as he says, “When you do.”
“And when will that—”
“Master,” the Doctor says.
“—pray tell, be? Only ever so long, isn’t it, though? Only ever so long before your feet go cold—”
“Master—”
“—and the cowardice, oh, but it burns in you. How long, Doctor, until your cowardice overtakes your insatiable, damnable urge to fix what isn’t yours?”
“Master,” the Doctor whispers.
Somehow, it’s the whisper that does it.
The Master draws to a halt, fury hot between his teeth and something altogether heavier and darker clouding his head, and filling his stomach. He tries to spit another round of vitriol and comes up without the breath to do so. When... did he start to stare at the Doctor’s eyes, exactly? When did they get so blue, and so sad?
He comes up short, too, when the Doctor sighs, and leans forward. They never even found proper seating, the two of them, just the floor of the TARDIS and the wall at the Master’s back, a pillow propped behind him at some point between the lapses in consciousness... and now, the Doctor sliding forward to his belly. His arms reach and his head inclines. It’s moments, and then, the Doctor has his ear settled on the Master’s chest, his hair tickling his lower lip and his chin. His hands slide around the Master’s back.
It would... be better, if he froze. Instead he breathes in a terrible, tense breath, and lifts his chin as if to flee.
He doesn’t want to flee.
“When you figure out... your next steps,” the Doctor murmurs. “What you want to do, where you will go. When you... get tired of this. When you leave. Just—when you leave, Master. That’s all I mean.”
His voice is soft and his accent, ill-fitting, and clumsy. Even with the lift of the Master’s chin, he can feel the the echo Doctor’s hair, disheveled, where it brushed his borrowed skin. He wonders if the damnable fool can hear the pounding of this single, overworked, over-aching heart.
It’s... not fair.
“Master,” the Doctor says.
He has... always been an awful, greedy sort. Moreso, perhaps, now than ever. Nothing left to lose and everything to grab at—who in all the universe wouldn’t be? The Doctor lies well within his grasp. He could do... anything.
He lowers his chin, and lifts his hands. The Doctor fits (clumsily) in the crook of his neck. His hand settles on the awkward width of the Doctor’s strange barrel chest. His eyes lock on the far wall because anything more than that would be far too much to ask.
In a moment of loathsome, treacherous betrayal of the self, he whispers, “I missed you.”
The Doctor pauses. The Master can feel the pause. The silence, again, suffocates. (He could laugh, he could jab, he could ask and negate, or he could reciprocate and lie, he could break this fragile instant to pieces under his lugging form and his blunt edges, he could, he could, he could...)
Instead, the Doctor says, “I know.”
I know.
All the time, and deaths between, the bad blood and the shattered chances. Funny, how two damnable fools can go on carrying the same flickering torch.
The Master counts each pad of the Doctor’s fingers against his back like he’s counting the time. And only then, when he is sure the moment is real, does he finally close his eyes.
Finally, finally, the silence releases her clutching hold, and he breathes.