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Lightning flickers across the sky -- jumping from point to point, cloud to cloud. It is the only interruption to the velvety cloak of darkness that coats this planet. This is not the sort of place the Doctor would choose to take her friends and companions -- not willingly, at any rate. It is the sort of place where people go to disappear. To mourn. To die.
The wind whips her coattails against her legs as she strides across the pitch black plains. Instinct lights her way. She always knows where the Master is. He is the aching thorn in her side, the nagging itch at the back of her mind, the longing tug in her heart.
Of course, that connection is wholly manufactured, an artificial link that has bound them since birth. It is written into their bodies, wired into their neurons, scribed deep into their skin. Gallifreyan society deemed them a matched pair before they were old enough to have a voice in the matter. They've fought against that label ever since, a desperate scramble of flashing grins, vicious words, and scrabbling limbs.
Yet they always find themselves inevitably pulled back into each other's orbit.
It is difficult to tell whether that is a reality that they created themselves or a reality that was created for them, written into their blood far too casually.
She does not have to walk far to find him.
The Master stands on the edge of a cliff. Lightning illuminates his silhouette in scattered flashes. His ankles are crossed. One hand rests jauntily on his hip as the other hovers in the vicinity of his space. He does not look at her as she draws even with his shoulder.
"Cheery place to meet." The Doctor delivers her sarcasm with a barbed tongue.
A small scoff catches in the back of the Master's throat. "I was not under the impression that you wanted to be seen with me, love."
If the pet name carries any affection whatsoever, it is buried deep beneath its caustic surface.
The Doctor wrinkles her nose. Another flash of lightning illuminates her eyes, clear and sad and weary. Oh, so weary. She does not challenge his claim, does not get in his face and go toe to toe with him in the way they so often do.
"What do you want?"
That must have been the question the Master was waiting for. There is a change in his bearing that she can practically ripples through the air as he stands beside her. It radiates pride and smugness, yet she swears she feels a beat of hesitation in it as well.
"I found a way to undo it."
The Doctor blinks once. Somewhere just outside of the fringes of awareness, thunder rolls across the barren landscape.
"Undo what?"
It's a pointless question, a wholly unnecessary clarification. There is only one thing that they never dare to mention by name, only one thing that looms like a specter over their lives, only one thing that would merit a trip out here, into the abandoned reaches of the universe.
"This."
In the space of a single moment, the Master's hand is in her hair, sweeping the short blonde strands aside to expose the delicate patch of skin that lurks behind her ear. He presses the pad of a finger to it, indicating the raised scar burned below it. The scar that matches his own. A shiver runs through her body at the contact. If the Master notices her reaction it passes without comment.
His touch falls away with the next florescent flash of light, his hands finding the pockets of his trousers as he says, "I found a way to sever the connection."
There is a flutter of beating hearts, a warm rush of blood to the head, a stirring of her newly leaden tongue as the Doctor says with no small amount of hesitation, "If you dragged me all the way here to kill me, I'll --"
She does not have a chance to finish the threat. The Master springs forward. Another spark splits the darkness, illuminating an almost feral grin. "Oh, it's so much better than that."
There is a shallow breath before he continues, words moving at an increasingly manic pace. "I was doing a bit digging in the old archives. Nothing too invasive, just a quick peek around to see if anyone left anything interesting lying about. I found a scrap of a document buried in the back of a book. Most of it was missing, but there was just enough information to set out on a chase."
He lingers on the last word for a moment, turning it over on his tongue as if relishing the memory.
"And I found a journal written in Old High Gallifreyan. Hadn't been opened in years."
An image of those pages -- aged and wrinkled -- slips into the Doctor's brain, as cunningly rendered as the mind from which it had originated. The neural network that had been drawn between them is, perhaps, the most invasive part of the bonding process. One never knows which thoughts might remain private and which might deign to sneak across boundaries. In their youth, it was a tool mostly used for mischief. Once they parted ways and chose to walk different paths, however, it became fodder for paranoia.
It is dangerous for any enemy to know what you're thinking, nonetheless your best enemy.
They have eavesdropped on each other's fantasies. Stolen precious memories. Trespassed in moments that did not belong to them. All in the name of artificial intimacy.
Yet, the Doctor cannot imagine a life without that connection. It has always been there. She does not know any other way of being. Though she is well acquainted with the feeling of loneliness, she has never been truly alone.
A wave of gooseflesh rises beneath her jacket, sweeping across her arms and down her back as the Master continues to weave his tale.
"In that journal, I found an interesting set of blueprints for a device. It's a little thing, really. Easy to overlook if you don't know what you're looking for."
A chill wind rises, wrapping them in an icy embrace that cuts through the many layers of fabric that clothe them.
The Master's arm brushes against hers as his hand tightens into a fist in his pocket. When it emerges again, he takes the Doctor's hand in his own, prying her fingers open as he presses a small cylinder of metal into her palm.
"It was difficult to build. Took me weeks to figure out, and I had a remarkable lack of willing test subjects."
When the next bolt of lightning jumps from cloud to cloud, the Doctor looks down at the device. It is shockingly inconspicuous. At first glance, it passes for a normal auto injector, but when you peer down the barrel, you can see a dozen small blades, ready to strike, and something that buzzes faintly. An electromagnet, maybe, powered by a small motor.
It is so small a thing for the claims that accompany it.
"It's perfectly calibrated," the Master continues. He almost seems giddy. "One press of a button and it severs the nerves and deactivates the inorganic components." He raises a hand and clicks his fingers. "Just like that, you will finally be out of my head."
The final sentence is curt. Detached, even. The Master is never that distant. Usually, he dwells lovingly in every moment, spews theatrics from every pore of his body. The sudden change in mannerisms makes the Doctor suspicious.
"What's the catch?"
A shrug rolls across the Master's shoulders and through their minds. "Only one way to find out, isn't there? Who goes first, you or me?"
The Doctor falls silent. She rarely finds herself without question or comment. Her mind runs fast but her mouth runs faster. Her fingers itch with anticipation. She has dreamed of something like this, spent thousands of days across the long centuries slaving over ideas and concepts of her own, none of which made it past an opening salvo.
Yet here she stands with salvation in reach, and there is no thrill of victory, no sigh of relief. Indeed, it seems as if there is no substance left in her body at all -- just a void where her twin hearts should be.
She blames her hesitation on the lack of data. She cannot put her hope in something that has yet to be tested. She tried that for years, funneling hope and energy into sieves, where it ran out and disappeared into the hungry ground.
"How do you know it will work?"
"I don't."
His honesty drops to the dirt like the first stone thrown at an execution.
The Doctor's hand trembles slightly. "I don't want to go first."
"Fine then." The Master raises a hand, presses the cartilage of his ear forward with the point of his fingers. "Make it quick, would you? I have places to be."
The Doctor steps forward. Her shaking breaths break across the Master's exposed skin. She does not know this body as well as she knew those which came before it, but there is familiarity nonetheless. Even in the dark, she knows the curve of his neck. The lines of his jaw. The four beat flutter of his pulse just below the surface of the skin.
She braces her hand against his skull as she readies the injector, but she cannot bring herself to hit the button. Something stops her as surely as a switch being flicked. She swipes a tongue over her lips, tightens a muscle in her jaw, sets her mind towards accepting the precious opportunity that has been placed before her, but still, she continues to hesitate.
"If you're going to do it," the Master hisses. "Do it quick." The tambour of his voice betrays that he carries the same tension as the Doctor. The same doubts.
A drop of sweat rolls across the Doctor's brow and down her cheek, only to be washed away as the sky begins to open.
The rain is sharp and icy cold. It cuts straight through the Doctor's skin and buries itself in her heart. It takes a long moment before she realizes that there are tears falling, too, mixing and mingling with the rushing tide of the water.
They are not tears of grief. They are tears of fear. Despite the resentment, despite the storied history, despite the pain, she cannot let go of him. She cannot condemn herself to loneliness. She cannot let go of her oldest friend. The very thought is terrifying.
She shakes her head and steps back, lowering her hand. "I can't."
She expects the Master to argue. Expects him to wrestle the device out of her hand and bury it in first his own neck and then hers as they grapple in the fresh mud.
But he does not do that.
He doesn't even move.
When he finally speaks, his voice is so quiet that it barely reaches the Doctor's ears. "You've gotten soft in your old age, love."
Despite the sharpness of the accusation, the Doctor thinks that she can feel something else in them, too. A sigh of relief, maybe. A release of long held tension.
"There are worst things to be. I can give you a list. You're on it."
The Master's words curve with the set of his mouth as he says, "I hope I'm at the top."
The Doctor smiles that fond, sad, distant smile. "Always."
She reaches out a hand, trying to pass the device back to its owner, but the Master shoves his hands back in his pockets. "Keep it. You need it more than I do."
The Doctor runs the pads of her fingers over it one last time, feeling the screws and seams and welded faces.
Then she reels back her arm and hurls it into that deep, endless dark.
In the space of a second, the Master is upon her. Not to menace, not to gloat, not to kill, but to curl a knuckle beneath her chin, incline her face towards his as he blindly seeks out her lips.
The kiss is wild. Feral. Desperate. The coupling of two people with an encyclopedia's worth of history.
The Doctor loses herself in it, something that she can only do in a place like this -- where there is no one left to see, no one left to judge, just two begrudging soulmates sharing their scars in the velvet darkness of a foreign planet.
Then almost as quickly as the kiss began, it is over.
Her lips are cold.
Her hearts stop.
Without another word, the Master vanishes.
And the Doctor is left alone to reckon with the doubt that had preserved their link, the lever that she could not pull, the rivalry that she was never able to truly commit to.
When she finally returns to the TARDIS -- frozen to the bone and dripping wet -- she disappears to the cluttered quiet of the bedroom that she never sleeps in and tries to summon up tears that will not come.
The kiss burns too brightly in her mind.
Not for the first time, she wonders if the system that had paired them together might have had a point.