Archive of Our Own

The sixth moon of the planet Raylone is not much to look at. It’s hot, sandy, barren, did he mention hot? It’s stifling, the heat, like every breath he takes is burning a hole into his lungs – okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. The air is breathable. Technically. That’s the only thing the moon really has going for it – a flimsy excuse for an atmosphere, but it’ll do in a pinch. It simply means it ranks one point higher than the other eight moons, which don’t. Nine barren moons around one barren planet, and no one could be bothered to name any of them. There are much more interesting moons and planets in the rest of the solar system, and much more interesting solar systems in the rest of the quadrant, and as for the galaxy itself –

Boring. Boring boring boring, there’s nothing here –

Or, rather. There isn’t supposed to be.

He leaps off the large boulder he’d been standing on and lands in the sand with a thud, whooping at the sky, before a laugh bursts from his lips. Oh, this is going to be a good day. He has to admit, even though this moon is woefully disappointing on the sight-seeing front (– or on the destruction of sights to be seen front, which, he’ll be honest, he’s far more interested in –) there is something somewhat exhilarating about being on celestial body with no one else. Knowing that he’s probably the only living creature breathing in this stagnant, burning air – knowing that he’s the only one who’s stood in this sand for, well, centuries? Millenia? He doesn’t know, it’s not like he read the Wikipedia page before he parked the TARDIS on this boiling lump of rock – and even if he had, he rather supposes it would be a very short and very boring article.

And that being alone – the only one – reminds him, in the most wonderfully horrific way, of Gallifrey.

Standing in the ruins of his own making, choking on smoke and knowing that there wasn’t another single thing left alive on the whole burning husk of a world, screaming at the ghosts of the people who had destroyed him, who had made him –

He pinches that thought between his fingers, silencing it.

The point is – the point is that no one comes to the sixth moon of Raylone.

Not by choice.

Except for him, apparently – although, he’ll admit, he’s not here for the sand, or the rocks, or the heat, or the stunning vista of…more sand, rocks and heat.

“I’m here,” he says to himself, to the large dark blot marring the endless desert that he’s walking towards with a grin on his face, “for you, gorgeous.”

Aforementioned dark blot doesn’t reply. He’ll admit, if it had, he’d have been a bit surprised, but it would have livened things up a bit.

Based on the readings his TARDIS had provided him, it looks like some kind of Judoon craft – but that can’t be right, because there is no way a Judoon would come all the way out here to a moon that doesn’t even have a name. Well, maybe they would. He supposes he can’t judge. A Judoon soldier would probably be highly surprised to find a TARDIS parked on Raylone’s sixth moon, after all, and yet here he is. But, unlike him, the Judoon are both predictable and inflexible, and there’s only one reason a Judoon craft would be here – because they’ve got a contract, which means they’re looking for a fugitive or doing a space drugs raid or committing war crimes or something very police-y and very dull. Because there is literally no other reason why the Judoon would stomp around this place. It’s far too hot.

Of course – and he has to smile – there is an alternative, obvious explanation.

There are no Judoon actually here. He knows that. His scans showed it.

This craft? Is stolen. It’s got to be.

And, also, very very crashed, going by the rather impressive plume of smoke wafting up from it. Now he’s getting closer to it, the smell is getting stronger, more pungent. He takes in a deep breath of it, and sighs happily. Burning – and in the good way, not the desert sun beating down on him kind of way. He can practically put the narrative together of what’s happened here already. Some stupid idiot who thinks they know what they’re about manages to steal a Judoon craft, only of course that sets a whole bunch of other Judoon after them – they panic, set a hyperspace course for anywhere and nowhere, only they end up burning out the engines by accident, and it sends them crashing into a backwater moon orbiting a backwater planet in a backwater solar system of a backwater quadrant of a backwater galaxy, probably in a backwater universe, since the only interesting people apparently seem to be coming from other universes these days –

He stops abruptly, twisting, smacking his hand against his temple a couple of times in quick succession, forcing that thought out of his head.

“Shut up,” he snarls at himself. “I’m having a good day.”

Sure you are, his brain replies helpfully, sounding unhelpfully like the Doctor. It’s almost impressive – you haven’t even killed anyone yet! And you’re going to help someone in a crashed spaceship. Very generous of you –

“I am not,” he spits, mood immediately souring, because he really, really isn’t. He’s not here for whoever is stuck in that ship – someone who is probably dead, and if they’re not, that’s a very fixable problem. Ha! There, see? Plotting cold-blooded murder already. Back on track.

How’s that, he sneers at his brain as he starts walking again – which doesn’t deign him with a response. That’s fine. He prefers that, actually.

No, he’s not here to help – and he has to laugh, because really, that’s hilarious. He’s here for the salvage, to see what parts he can get from the wreck. Because whilst the Judoon are laughably incompetent, it’s actually remarkably difficult to get hold of one of their ships, thanks to all their regimented regulations and strict guard duties. Which means any of their tech would fetch him a pretty penny in certain circles – which he doesn’t necessarily need, but the idea of Judoon tech circling around several galaxies worth of black markets is appealing to him, mostly because it would leave the Judoon High Command immensely disgruntled.

Really, he should shake the hand of whoever it is in that burning cockpit – before he snaps their neck, of course – because what they’ve done, crash landing aside, is quite impressive.

Maybe he will, maybe he won’t – maybe he’ll just zap them with the TCE. Hard to know – he’s feeling quite erratic today. He might have changed his mind entirely by the time he reaches them. But that’s fine – he’s in a good mood. Today is a good day.

It doesn’t take much longer for him to reach the crash site, but he still feels like he’s got half the desert in his shoes by the time he’s got there. No matter. He jumps up onto the wreckage, humming to himself as he goes, avoiding the bit that’s still smoking and clambering over to the other end of the ship. It’s not a large craft, but he knew that already from the scans he made before he started his little trek. Probably only fits one person – two, at a pinch, but he bets it’s only one. His lone thief, with excellent robbery skills and terrible driving skills. Ha – sounds like someone he’s definitely not been thinking about at all lately.  

His face twists into a scowl at the thought – but no. No – good day. So, he just waits until he gets to the access hatch, gives it a few good kicks, and then once it’s cracked open under the pressure (he knows the feeling), he yanks it open the rest of the way and drops down in the inside of the ship below, not bothering with the ladder. More fun, this way.

He lands perfectly, of course, not even stumbling – but then, unfortunately, immediately coughs at the smoke and dust hanging in the air, which somewhat ruins his entrance. But, no one’s watching. Yet. He squints through the dimness, emergency lighting barely doing anything other than giving the corridor a sort of vaguely ominous vibe, painted all red in the glow. And no one can say that he’s not able to read a room – if they’re going for ominous, the very least he can do is adhere to the dress code.

He moves silently through the shadows and the smoke – with a purposeful, dangerous stride that he knows will cut a very intimidating silhouette for whoever he’s going to find at the cockpit. He’s very glad he left that hatch open, letting the desert sunlight spill in from behind him. Got to have good lighting for the performance, doesn’t he? It’s all about the attention to detail – the drama of it, the presentation. If you don’t get the whole show right, how can you expect people to keep their attention fixed on you? It’s about the whole experience. The Doctor understands that, as much as she would adamantly deny it. She’s always relished standing in the spotlight –

No. NO. He is not thinking about the Doctor. Not today! Not when he’s having a good time.

Seems a bit like you’re thinking about her though, his brain decides to chip in, still sounding like her.

“Did I ask you?” the Master replies, nonchalant and dangerous all at the same time – and maybe it’s strange to be threatening his own brain, but if he doesn’t, who will? Besides, he’s not exactly racking up a lot in regards to self-preservation this time around. That’s not quite true. He doesn’t want to die yet – he’s saved himself already, plenty of times. Getting off Gallifrey in that TARDIS before the Death Particle was activated; getting the Cyberium out of his brain, and oh, that had been an interesting experience, not unlike pulling barbed wire out of his brain via his nostril –

He knows the reason, of course. He’s not scared of death – he craves it, almost. But he craves a very, very specific death.

The death of him, and her. Together. By their own hands, blazing as one, because if they didn’t start together, then the least she can give him, the very least that the universe owes him is that they end together, burning –

You didn’t ask me, his brain replies, cutting him off and sounding irritatingly smug. But when has that ever stopped me?

He’s not quite sure if his brain is talking about itself or the Doctor, which is very confusing and also really not very helpful right now. He shakes his head sharply, and then moves forward, fists clenching at his sides. Focus focus focus – got to give a good show, got to stick the landing, and he can’t do that if his thoughts are running off down roads he does not want to be wandering down –

He gets to the cockpit, full of blinking warning lights and a lot of cables hanging down and out of the walls in ways that they’re probably not supposed to. Panels torn open – probably in order to gain control of the ship after stealing it. Sounds about right. As for the pilot themself, he can’t see them – but the back of the chair in front of him is tall and could easily be hiding someone behind it. Maybe someone unconscious, dead – or maybe someone trying to hide –

He hopes they didn’t hear him muttering to himself. That would sort of ruin the whole intimidating and suave thing he’s going for. Then again, it does give him a sort of crazed dangerous space pirate vibe – which he’ll take. As long as people are watching. As long as he has their attention.

But then, says his head, and oh, he’s really wishing it would shut up, there’s only actually one person whose attention you want, isn’t there?

He ignores it, focusing his entire attention on the scene before him – so, crashed ship, half-gutted, but still looks in mostly good condition. Nothing that he won’t be able to fix, anyway. And then it’s just a matter of salvaging the best parts – once he’s dealt with his friend, the pilot, of course. It looks like it’s in good enough condition to run a diagnostic, which is nice, because he would actually like to know that the engine isn’t a few moments away from exploding before he goes and puts his head in it. He takes all this in whilst another part of his brain is working on the very important task of coming up with some good one-liners that he could use with the TCE. He’s still so mad about missing his opportunity with the Lone Cyberman – all because he’s been on such a hair trigger lately. His fingers twitch at his side and he moves to come around the pilot’s chair, ready to pull out the device at a moment’s notice – ready to react the moment he sees whoever is sitting there, and they must be unconscious or dead because they still haven’t moved –

He twists his body fast to come in front of the chair, TCE in his hand and pointed straight ahead –

At an empty seat.

“Oh,” he says, lowering his arm, free hand coming his hip. He screws up his face. “Well, that was disappointing.”

And also concerning. Because there certainly wasn’t anyone outside, and the pilot’s got to be somewhere. Unless –

He turns to look at the console, restless eyes darting across the controls. No recent teleport. He sticks out his tongue, tasting the air – no vortex manipulator travel either. That always twists the local temporal plane like nothing else, and so if anyone had –

Before he can finish the thought, someone’s grabbing him from behind and shoving him up against the wall. A shocked breath escaped his mouth with a sharp oof, and oh, he’s about to laugh, because now things are getting more interesting – but then he manages to twist himself around before his attacker gets any ideas like stabbing him in the back and –

His body smacks against the harsh metal of the hull interior, but that’s not what causes all the air to leave his lungs.

Pinning him against the wall with one hand, the other holding a knife to his throat as blood pours down one side of her face, is none other than the Doctor.

“You’ve got two seconds to give me a very good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” she hisses, vicious.

He can think a lot in two seconds.

The first thing he thinks is how she’s always looked so stunning like this – snarling and covered in blood – but oh, with this face, when she rages, it’s like staring into the face of a supernova –   

The second thing he thinks is that this is probably at least a little bit justified, considering where they left off.

The third thing he thinks is that, actually, no, however angry the Doctor is about what happened, he, by right, is justified to be fathoms angrier than her. Because, oh, what had she said again? Remind me, dear Doctor – it’s not like the words I am so much more than you have been etched into his brain or anything like that –

The fourth thing he thinks is the flicker of a memory – fingers resting on piano keys in a dark windowless room, within a glass box, laid bare for all the universe to see, but of course the universe is only one person, really –

The fifth thing he thinks is that he really should be thinking of something to say.

The sixth – no, no it’s sort of joint first because he’s been thinking it since she shoved him against the wall, is that this isn’t right, this isn’t right, because her eyes are fierce and dark and beautiful but he doesn’t find a single ounce of the Doctor he knows in them, not one drop, and he knows that as much as he would relish the Doctor getting into a physical fight with him at any point, he always has to work his way up to that. She’s far, far too attached to that rigid morality of hers that she binds herself to, locking the storm under her skin behind a cage of rules that keeps her in check, keeps her safe for the humans she likes to drag along behind her because they can’t take the real thing, the wildness that she hides behind her eyes that only he has ever been able to look back into and grin rather than flinch –

The Doctor he knows isn’t home.

So this –

This is –

The last thing he notices is the chain hanging around her neck – and the hauntingly familiar curve of a fobwatch hanging off of it.

He’d held a fobwatch in his hand, once – Rassilon, it had been lifetimes ago, now. During the War. Finally, something he was more afraid of than himself – something he could run from, and run he did, locking himself away behind the eyes of a stranger who didn’t know who he really was, who would never know, who would be washed up onto a beach with nothing but the truth he couldn’t perceive clenched in his hand, and is this how the Doctor always feels, hm? Always running, always hiding who they really are, crafting everything they are into a persona that is suitable for anyone other than him, but –

But he remembers the Matrix too – fathoms deep, drowning in the depths of memories that weren’t his own, hardly able to breathe under the pressure of eons beyond eons of data above his head. But oh, what he’d discovered in those frozen depths. Flashes of green. Ireland – only it isn’t, of course, he can taste the artificial tang of a perception filter. A man strapped into a chair, equipment strapped around his head in a twisted crown. A clock on the side, waiting. Watching, as switches were flipped and the man screamed.

He’d suspected, then. But now – now –

“The Division,” he says, like a prayer. “The Division got you.”

The Doctor, despite the fire in her eyes, flinches.

“How do you know that name?” she hisses.

A smile quirks at the Master’s lips. “Maybe keep me alive long enough, love, and you’ll find out.”

He’s not sure what he expects her to do – probably slit his throat. But he doesn’t expect her to stare at him like he’s a paradox, sharp and wrong and impossible.

She doesn’t know him at all. He’d figured that out pretty quickly, but the reality of it now twists like a knife between his hearts. Whatever they’ve done to her, they’ve taken all of it – gouged it out of her brain and left it to bleed on the cutting room floor. And oh, it just drives it all home, doesn’t it? The fact that she’s so much more than him, that she is so ancient, that she had a whole life before him and so what does that make him, hm? Just another pet for her to drag around, just another thing to keep her occupied before she gets bored and moves onto the next – he’s nothing to her, nothing –

It also makes him really, really want to obliterate whoever did this to her in the most excruciating way possible, and the intensity of it is so fierce he can hardly breathe through it.

Not because they hurt her, of course. No no no – because they made her forget him in the process.

It’s definitely got nothing to do with the fear darting wildly at the edges of her rage, the blood pouring down the side of her face, or the fobwatch hanging around her neck like a deadweight.

The Doctor’s momentary confusion and fear is quickly pulled back, shoved down behind a cold, calculating mask that has her pressing the knife harder against his throat.

“I think you’ll find,” she says, “that if you don’t answer my questions, you’ll regret it.”

He can’t quite help the huff of a laugh that escapes his mouth, even as the movement sends the sharp edge of the blade scraping painfully against his skin – because oh, if she could just see herself right now. “Really? Demanding I answer your questions, and if I don’t, you’ll…what? Oh, stop me answering any questions ever again?”

A dangerous smile quirks at the corner of her lips. “If I have to.”

He opens his mouth to reply – not even sure what he’s planning to say – but before a word can leave his mouth, the Doctor flinches suddenly, twisting in on herself as a strangled sound wrenches it way out of her throat, pained. The Master doesn’t waste any time being sympathetic – he immediately takes advantage, grabbing the wrist holding the knife and knocking the weapon out of her grip. It clatters against the floor as he shoves her back against the opposite wall of the cramped cockpit, holding her firmly in place with his arm braced across her chest.

But she doesn’t even fight him – instead, she’s blinking, panting heavily like she’s trying to breathe through a lot of pain, and there’s something about the way the blood pouring from her head glistens in the red of the emergency lighting that makes something twist sharply in his gut.

“Ggh,” she says intelligently, clearly trying to lift her head, and clearly struggling. He helps her along the way by taking hold of her chin with his hand and forcing her head up to look meet his eyes.

“Doctor,” he hisses, unable to help himself even though he knows this isn’t really the Doctor anymore. Through the conduit of their skin, he immediately feels a blazing kaleidoscope of emotion – fear, panic, desperation, determination and most of all just pain pain pain –

It’s bright and scorching, and any other Time Lord would flinch away in an instant. But the fire raging inside the Master’s chest has been burning him from the inside out ever since he hacked into the Matrix, and so it barely even registers. If anything, it’s almost a comfort – to know that someone else has an inferno caught in their ribcage that’s destroying everything it touches.

At the sound of her name, she blinks again – but then something changes in her gaze. Through the place where his fingers grip the side of her face, he gets a sense of something struggling within her – something screaming through the cacophony, desperate to be heard. The pain is still there, like a rod of heated iron driven right through the centre of her-mind/his-mind/the places where their minds meet, but through it all, crawling out from underneath, he feels the bloom of vibrant fury and aching relief –

Before he gets chance to even figure out what that could mean, she speaks.

“…Master,” she breathes – and then, like a puppet whose strings have been cut, she collapses against him bonelessly, out like a light. He just about manages to catch her, back hitting the pilot chair and only just preventing him from taking them both down to the floor.

For a long moment, he just stands there holding her, trying to untangle the pain still bristling in her unconscious mind from the twisting mess of emotions in his own.

Then, a sigh escapes his lips, and he adjusts his grip on her, trying to figure out what he’s supposed to do with her now. He did not come prepared to drag the Doctor across the desert.

Maybe that’s on him.

For a moment, he almost curses the universe – he was supposed to be having a good day, wasn’t he?

Oh, but then a smile cracks across his lips, unbidden.

Because, well – maybe this is the best day he’s had in a very long time.

By the time she wakes up, he’s managed to carry her all the way back to his TARDIS, dump her on the floor in the console room, and send the TARDIS off into deep space, somewhere that no one will bother them and far away from ridiculously hot unnamed moons. He supposes that he shouldn’t be surprised that she comes to the moment all the difficult part is done, now that she doesn’t have to help him lug her deadweight across a bloody desert –

And, of course, she wakes up with the subtly of an army of screaming Daleks.

She scrambles upright, shoving herself onto her feet and then immediately listing dangerously to the side, narrowly avoiding crashing right back down to the floor again by the good fortune that she manages to catch herself on a nearby wooden beam. Of course, the beam is not wooden, but the TARDIS seems to have decided that an Australian shack is a suitable disguise for every occasion for reasons that escape the Master – but he’s got other priorities more urgent than coaxing a dodgy chameleon circuit into behaving. Namely –

The Doctor is still clinging to the beam for dear life, staring right ahead of her with dead eyes and breathing like she can’t get enough air into her lungs. The Master remains beside the console, watching her out of the corner of his eye, but absolutely not giving her the satisfaction of him appearing concerned about her. It’s needless, anyway – he’s already catalogued her injuries from when he carried her in here, and he knows she’ll be fine, physically. It all seems to be injuries from the crash itself – nothing that’s going to cause any serious complications. Judging by the head wound, she might be concussed, but that’s a little tricky to say when she’s clearly having…other issues with her head at the same time.

“Master,” she says between gasps, and he catches her looking at him. He resists the temptation to return the gesture and keeps his eyes fixed on the console beneath his hands, emotions wrestling with themselves under his skin like a starving pack of wolves turning on each other.

“Yes, love?” he says, like he doesn’t care at all – because oh, she’s just like him in the end, isn’t she? He’s nothing to her, she didn’t even remember him – but she loves to be in the spotlight, she loves to have his attention, and before, back in that damn Vault, he’d be pressed up against the glass, hanging on her every breath but now? Ha. He’s playing hard to get, and she deserves this, she deserves everything she gets, she deserves it, she does – “Decided to remember me, this time?”

He’d hoped that it would infuriate her – send her blazing with fury again, have her lunging for him and grabbing him by the lapels of his coat and making him look at her. But instead, a pained sound pulls itself out from between her teeth, and he can’t help but glance over at her. She’s pressing one hand against her head, like maybe it’s the only thing stopping her skull from splitting open and pouring out onto the floorboards. Her skin is pale against the starkness of the blood. From what he’d felt back in that Judoon ship, she’s got to have one hell of a headache.

He’s already halfway across the room to her when he even realises what he’s doing, and a bright flare of irritation at himself flashes through him, even as everything else gets overshadowed by the fierce flash of possessive protectiveness that rushes through him, a fire catching in a dry forest. No one else gets to hurt her. That’s his job.

And he hates it – he hates that even though she’ll barely even look in his direction, he’s always following in her comet trails. How he will look for her face in every crowd, at every moment, whereas he could walk right up to her and she wouldn’t recognise him. How he had always waited for her, and she had never been able to stay, always too scared, too much of a coward. How he had razed an entire planet because of what they did to her, and she wouldn’t even give him the relief of ending it, of letting them end together –

He’s right in front of her now, grabbing her by the shoulders, and the way she sinks forward into his touch tells him exactly how bad this is. Even through the buffer of her coat, he can feel the intensity of the pain radiating off of her.

“What is it?” he snaps – because it would be so much easier if she just told him. “What did you go and do to yourself?”

“Ggh,” she grunts, blinking, not looking at him. “Division –”

“Yes, obviously,” he snaps. “What did they do?”

“Nothing,” the Doctor hisses in return, shaking her head – and then immediately screwing up her face, clearly regretting it. “They – they only came after.”

“After what?”

“After I –” One of her hands comes to grasp at something hanging from her neck – only to come up empty. And then finally, finally, she looks up at him, eyes shining with pain and panic, and oh, that’s satisfying. He lets go of her shoulder with one hand and pulls the fobwatch out of his pocket, winding the chain around his fingers and dangling it in front of her, a lure.

“Looking for this?” he asks, eyebrows raised expectantly, fervently anticipating her burst of fury. But, disappointingly, she just sighs, sagging back against the beam of the TARDIS behind her.

“Open it,” she dares him, voice heavy with exhaustion, looking at him with half-lidded eyes. He can’t help the way he falters – and a humourless laugh huffs out of her throat as her voice turns more dangerous. “Open it.”  

He stares at her for a long moment – and then presses the release. The lid falls open with a click – and reveals nothing more than a grey, lifeless clockface. For several seconds, all he can do it stare at it.

The Doctor doesn’t say anything – there’s no need.

“This held your memories,” he says.

She reaches out, fingers curling around it, and pulls it out of his grasp. He lets her take it.

“You opened it.” He stares at her again, taking in her face – the clamminess of her skin, the stark rust-orange of the blood, the strangeness of her eyes, and is that all just from the crash, or is he seeing the true depths of her? The countable infinity of everything that she is that just keeps going down and down and down – “You got them back. You remember.”

The words come out like a snarl, twisting like a betrayal in his mouth. Because it was bad enough before, just her saying she was more than him – but now? Now, she knows, and it stokes the blistering anger in his gut.

But she just huffs a quiet, humourless laugh, looking away from him, leaning her head back against the beam behind her as if she can barely hold it up without support. “I wouldn’t – ngh – I wouldn’t quite say that.”

“Then what would you say?” he snarls, leaning closer, pulling at her chin again to make her look at him. She doesn’t reply, just watching him with a curious expression, clearly deciding to leave him to figure it all out. His mind races, going over the implications of everything she’s just said, following the threads until he hits upon the tangled knot of the truth at the centre and oh – oh – a grin quirks at his lips, the realisation coming together –

Because she’s in pain, and he can feel that this isn’t physical, this isn’t because of the crash – no, this is psychic, this is her very mind ridden with shards and sliced through with jagged fragments of shrapnel. Back in that cockpit, she’d not recognised him at all – and yet now she does. Does this mean the memories of who she was before are blocked off – splintered, separate from the rest of her mind?

“The memories aren’t integrated – oh, love,” he sneers, hand reaching out to brush his fingers against the side of her face, and she glares at him with such stunning fury. “You’ve really gone and made a mess of yourself, haven’t you?”

“It’s – agh!” She breaks off with a cry, recoiling away from him, and he has the flinch back at the sharp spike of pain that ricochets back at him through the places where their skin is touching. For a moment, she looks like she’s about to collapse again, and he instinctively reaches out to grab her, firmly pulling down his psychic shutters before he takes her under her arms, hands fisting into the fabric of her coat. But the moment he touches her, she’s shoving him back with surprising strength, hard enough to send him crashing down to the floor. Pain bursts all along his side as he hits the wooden boards, and before he can even start to scramble back into a vaguely defensible position, she’s thrown herself on top of him, pinning him down and staring at him with furious eyes that barely hide the utter terror that’s flickering behind the mask.

“Who are you?” she hisses, hand coming around his neck – not choking, but gripping tight enough to make it clear that she could, at any moment. “Where have you taken me?”

Something warm and wet hits his cheek, and it’s only when the sharp scent of blood hits him that he realises that her nose has started to bleed. A laugh escapes his lips, and he leans up as far as he can when she’s holding him down like this, ignoring the way that her hand tightens around his neck, staring right into her eyes without an ounce of fear.

“I’m your living nightmare,” he hisses, the grin on his lips widened with a breathless baring of teeth. “I’m the one who haunts your every waking moment – the one that dances with you across the universe. Don’t you recognise your best enemy, love?”

She stares at him, a frown creasing her brow. “…Swarm?”

His good humour evaporates immediately. “What?”

The confusion and dread from her expression vanishes, traded for a smug sort of nonchalance. “No, then.” She smirks, thumb threateningly rubbing his neck. “Tell me, don’t people normally recognise the people who haunt their every waking moment?”

“Who,” he snarls, fury and devastation thrumming through every inch of him, “is Swarm?”

“No one you need to worry about,” she replies, smooth – but strained. She’s still in pain, then – just more invested in masking it than she was before. Her grip tightens. “Now – I know this is a TARDIS. You’ve clearly come to take me back.” Even tighter – starting to bruise, and it’s actually getting harder to breathe, his respiratory bypass is going to kick in any moment and she just stares down at him, eyes dark and dead. “I’m not going back.”

He chokes. “I’m – I’m not – I’m helping you escape –”

The hand immediately slackens in shock. “What?”

He doesn’t waste a moment – he jerks his head up fast, forehead colliding with hers in a sharp burst of pain, bone cracking against bone, before he shoves her off him. She rolls off to the side, and he immediately pushes himself up, tensed and ready to go on the offensive, ignoring the way the front of his skull is screaming at the fact it just got used as a blunt force weapon. But the Doctor seems to have taken the hit harder than him – she’s trying to push herself up onto her elbows, but she can barely manage it, blinking heavily, clearly dazed. He doesn’t move, watching her like a hawk, and after a moment she turns her head slowly to look at him, as if only just registering his presence. She stares for a moment, even as her arms give up and crumple beneath her, sending her back down to the floor. The blood is still dripping from her nose in a steady stream – but she doesn’t even seem to notice. She just blinks at him, a hand coming up to press against her face.

“K–” she starts, but then breaks off with a pained noise. “Koschei?”

The sound of his childhood name catches him entirely off guard, making something twist sharply in his chest, like a jagged knife through the bars of his ribcage. And suddenly he forgets the anger, the desolation, the rage and pain in both of his hearts. In that moment, he’s a boy again, panting from wrestling with his best friend in endless red fields rather than wrestling with someone who doesn’t know him on the floor of his TARDIS.

He tries to speak – to say her name back – but the word catches in his throat. Someone has punctured his lung, and he can’t breathe.

He hasn’t heard her say that name in a very, very long time.

Since the start. The start for him, if not for her.

As he sits staring at her, unable to speak, to do anything, she opens her mouth, as if to say something else. But then she blinks heavily, once, twice – and then sags against the floor, completely gone from the world, arms splayed out against the wooden floor and blood running down her face.

For a long moment, all he can do is sit there.

Then, he shoves himself up, hauls her off the floor and drags her out of the console room without a word.

The Doctor’s TARDIS, the Master thinks with a fair amount of begrudgery, has a habit of moving the rooms around as and when it pleases. Most of the time, the Master considers it abhorrent – the Doctor has really let that ship go, letting it develop from a semi-sentient to a fully sentient state, enough that the ship both refuses to do as it’s told, and actively sabotages what its pilot wants to do more often than not. However, it is a loyal thing, and in a situation like this, would do something incredibly helpful such as shift all the rooms around so that the medical bay is just around the corner, the first door out of the console room. As it happens, his current TARDIS isn’t quite that intuitive. It has the good sense to significantly reduce the distance, but it still requires several minutes of considerable lugging around the Doctor to actually see the open doorway at the end of the corridor that looks like it leads to something promising.

By that point, the Doctor has started to come around again, and is making a vague and mostly useless attempt to help, which mainly consists of trying and failing to get her feet underneath her. But she’s leaning on him heavily, and frequently tenses, making quiet noises as though she’s being beset by waves of pain that just keep coming. And he feels it too – they’re close, too close, and there are moments when her face presses into the crook of his neck, and he’s suddenly overcome by a rush of sensation and pain, hitting him like cold ocean waves against the rocks of his mind. But he grimaces against it, pushing through, keeping himself grounded in reality – in the task he has to complete. And he knows he can do it. He has, after all, had to deal with much worse than this before.

He has, specifically, dealt with worse in this body – this body has seen plenty, actually, between those seventy-seven years of living through some of the worst bouts of human history, being stranded in the Kasaavin’s dimension with the very creatures that he’d tried to double-cross, and then, of course, having the Cyberium rage through his veins. Oh, but that had been glorious, in its own way. Compared the blazing inferno of his own essence, the Cyberium was an icy poison, freezing mercury pouring through his veins, seeping into his skin, his muscles, his organs – breaking him down from within, but he hadn’t cared. He hadn’t thought he’d live that long. Had hoped he wouldn’t – had hoped that, finally, he could break her down enough to get her to accept the truth that really, when it came down to it, the two of them were the same. They were death and destruction, and nothing else.

But then, before that too – when he’d been new in this face, with these hands, with these eyes, not sure on who he was or what he was in the aftermath of his two previous selves committing a very literal case of murder-suicide. And the Doctor had been gone – abandoned him, he’d later realised. Believed so readily that he was entirely beyond saving and had left him on that colony ship to burn in the destruction of his own making. Of course, he should have expected it – when has the Doctor ever stayed, especially for him? But right then, he’d been desperate to find the Doctor once more, Missy still whispering in his ear, urging him on. And those whispers had seen him returning to Gallifrey – returning home, if you could really call it that. To him, home was not found in those alleyways, in those looming towers under a glass dome, or even out in those red fields calling up at that marmalade sky. No, home was in the person who’d been with him there – the person who had run through those alleyways whilst they hid from Borusa, who had laced their fingers through his hand in those perpetual fields. Who had shouted down those constellations right beside him.

Besides the point – the point is that no one had known where the Doctor was, or had the inclination to find out, and he’d been quite firmly told by pretty much every Time Lord that he had tried to speak to that no one wanted to find the Doctor. In fact, they didn’t really want to talk to him either, and seemed to have preferred it when he hadn’t been around. For the life of him, he can’t even begin to imagine why…

But he’d been left to his own devices whilst simultaneously being barred from every system he could possibly get his hands on, including the Matrix…which, of course, he’d immediately taken as a challenge. There are backways into that rather literal ghost drive – the Doctor had found one, after all, whilst they’d been youngsters at the Academy together. But the Master hadn’t quite felt like dealing with Cloister Wraiths, and had gone with a slightly less dangerous option instead – a secluded nook that barely anyone knew existed, with handily exposed telepathic circuits that if he tinkered with just so, he would have unlimited access to the Matrix without anyone even knowing he was in there.

And so he’d done just that – hacked his way in through the initial line of defences, working through them with the ease of an extremely competent telepath, before he’d gotten into the real meat and bones of the thing, and begun his search. And the deeper he’d dived – the further into the murky depths of all of Time Lord history that he’d gone…the more he’d forgotten the initial reason he’d gone into there in the first place. The Matrix is a tricky thing – extremely easy to get lost, even easier to lose yourself, to forget who you are or forget the fact that you don’t belong there, and oh, the Matrix is always so hungry for more –

He can’t quite remember what had happened now – everything that had come after had superseded it. But he’d caught a flash of…something. Green. Memory – or a vision. Something that didn’t fit. Flickers of Ireland, buried so deep that it didn’t make sense. Why would Earth be in the Matrix, this far down? Whatever he’d seen, it had caught his attention, and he’d taken hold of the images, pinching them between his fingers, trying to tease them apart because this had the bitter taste of something artificial, and there was something not right –

But then the Matrix had spat him out with a psychic blast so intense that it had sent him to his knees, clutching his head and trying not to scream, just in case someone heard him.

What was that, he’d asked himself – and that’s when the obsession had started.

He’d gone back into the Matrix over and over again, each time diving down into the depths digging up those memories again, prying at them, chipping away at them, teasing them open until they revealed their secrets, their truth. Whatever they were, someone had worked very hard to stop people from finding them – buried down so deep, but also…protected. Defended, by psychic triggers that activated if he wasn’t careful, shoving him right back out of the Matrix with a shrieking burst of pain that only got worse the more he pushed. But he kept pushing. He kept going, again and again and again until finally, finally, he broke through.

He found the truth.

The Timeless Child.

And everything he thought he knew had fallen apart around him.

And also, it turned out, his mind too – because Tecteun really had been very, very meticulous. It was only when it was too late – when he was already deep into the files, watching through every scrap that he could decrypt, that he could salvage – that he realised what she’d done. These files weren’t just hard to get into – they were barbed on the inside, trapped from within. Impossible to get out of without causing himself some serious damage – but oh, right then he’d hardly been able to care. His fury had been blazing, the kind of anger that could ravage entire planets – and would, in the end, do exactly that – and so he’d raged, tearing through the Matrix and ripping his way out with the force of his own will, barely even noticing the way it was tearing his mind to shreds, destroying him as much as he was destroying it because Tecteun’s secrets stay secrets, but the Master cannot be silenced he will NEVER BE KEPT AGAINST HIS WILL –

He doesn’t know how long it had taken him to break out into reality – doesn’t know how long he’d laid there on the floor afterwards, his mind splintered into jagged shards, every thought cutting against the gaping wounds of his consciousness. Days, it might have been. Days of agony, barely able to move, to breathe – but the things he’d discovered inside the Matrix had stayed with him, like burning scars etched into the back of his eyes, and oh, the anger. He’d barely been able to contain it. Even as he lay there, paralysed with pain, he’d been consumed by it, raging, itching itching itching to get up and make everyone on this wretched planet burn, because none of them deserved to live, not a single one of them, their entire species was an abomination built of the torture of –

Of the Doctor.

Of his Doctor.

And it was that anger that had saved him – that had given him the ability, after days of staring at the ceiling, to twitch his fingers. To get up. To stand. To ravage. And it has defined his every waking moment since then – and probably will until the end of time.

So yeah. He knows pain.

He knows psychic pain.

And he knows how to think through it – to get up, to keep moving even when his own thoughts are like serrated blades. Which is how he manages it – dragging her down that corridor that feels like it could go on forever, even when he can feel the sharp, twisting aftershocks of whatever has happened to her mind, even as she’s barely able to stand beside him.

It’s only when they finally step foot into the med bay that things go sideways.

The only warning he gets is the sudden, blinding surge of panic emanating from the Doctor, and then she’s shoving him against the doorframe hard enough that the back of his head cracks against it. He doesn’t have time to process what’s going on – the Doctor has a hand around his neck again, and her eyes are wide with desperate, pleading panic.

“I’m not going back,” she hisses between rasping breaths, sounding more scared than fierce. “I – I told them. I’m done, they said I was done –”

“Doctor,” he hisses past the grip she has on his throat – but she’s not listening. He’s not sure she’s even here with him.

“I should have known,” she whispers, fervent, looking away, blinking against a headache so agonising that it’s making his eyes water from overflow of pain through the fingers wrapped around his neck, even with his psychic shutters firmly locked. “I should have –” she screws her eyes shut, opening them against, breathing sharply in rapid, terrified breathes – “They said one last mission, one last push and I was stupid enough to believe they wouldn’t do it again – that they wouldn’t take it all from me –”

“Doctor,” he hisses again, sharper, reaching up a hand to wrap around the pale skin of her wrist, tentatively sending out a sense of him into her mind. Something familiar – something she can trust. But within an instant, he feels her grabs the thread of it in her mind, twisting it around her fingers and pulling it hard, and to his horror he feels a crack form in his mental defences – feels her slip in through it, and then her hand is moving from his neck to his temple, gripping onto him and riffling through his surface thoughts, and the headache is so bad that he feels his nose prickle, feels the blood start to weep down over his lips in solidarity with the trail that still gushes down her own face.

“The moon,” she whispers, reverent and entirely delirious. “It – it did have a name.”

He chokes – he can’t speak, his mouth thick with the taste of iron.

“It had a name,” she insists, staring at him like it’s the most important thing in the universe. “And there were people there – on the sixth moon of Raylone. They – they called it Sune. And they lived there, they were alive, they breathed, and then –”

Another spike of pain runs through both of them, and they gasp in tandem.

“…Doctor,” the Master tries again, struggling. “Doctor, let go –”

“But then the Division came,” she breathes, horrified. “They came and they – they cut up the timeline and twisted it all and broke it until it’s guts all poured out and became dust, became nothing and they didn’t know what they were doing back then, they –” she chokes, blood dripping off her chin – “It was new to them. Their time sense. They didn't understand – they didn’t – they didn’t know how to prune the timelines yet. They didn’t know and so they – they made it so they’d never existed. The people of Sune – they – they’d never even been there. And so, there’d been no one there to name it – no one there to remember. The name – the name was lost. No one – no one knew.”

He just stares at her, trying desperately to prise her fingers off his face, but she just keeps clinging on as she stares, eyes full of dead, endless space.

“I don’t know my own name anymore,” she breathes.

“Doctor,” he says, urgent, trying to cut through the pain, the noise. “Doctor, I need to get you into the medbay.”

But she shakes her head sharply, frantic.

“No,” she hisses. “No – no you don’t – you don’t understand.”

“Doctor –”

“You don’t know, do you?” she asks – and she laughs, breathless.

“Know what?” he growls, frustrated and hurt and so scared for her and for him that it aches in his teeth.

“What it’s like,” she says, far, far too calm, “to be vivisected.”

He swallows, nausea rising in his throat.

“She didn’t know, y’see,” she says, still too calm, even though he can feel the pain rolling off her. More blood, dripping off their chins in tandem, and she leans forward, forehead pressing against his own. “Where it came from. The gold. But it didn’t take her long to realise that once I – once the child was dead, the gold would come and take everything away and she – she thought – she thought there had to be some kind of organ, or something holding the energy, something she could sample, or, or something she – she could replicate but –” And she laughs again, and a deep, deep anger is welling up inside him, consuming him, reaching him through the pain just like it had before. Her mind is grating against her mind, sharp shrapnel edges like twisting blades. “But she couldn’t look at the body after it was dead – because it would be burning. So she had to – she had to – when I was awake –”

“Doctor,” he tries again, again, and he will keep trying until she hears him, until she lets go. The damage in her mind is brutal, and he still doesn’t quite understand what’s happened to her – but an educated guess flits at the edges of his consciousness, and it only makes that twisting fury coil tighter in his gut.

“I can’t go back there,” she pleads – and he’s not sure if she means the Division or the beds in the medbay, but he decides, horrifically angry, that it doesn’t matter. His hand comes up to her shoulder, angling her away from the door, and he pushes at thought at his TARDIS intently. The ship responds immediately, obedient, and the door to the medbay slides shut with a firm, decisive click. Instantly, as if her strings have been cut, the Doctor sags against him, finally finally releasing her hand from the side of his face. She’s probably dripping blood onto his shirt – but he can’t find it in him to care. He needs to fix her. He needs to – he’s going to. But – but –

But he could exploit this, couldn’t he? That’s what he should want. She’s so vulnerable, barely able to keep hold of the thread, and she’s so dependent on him for help, and oh, how he could make her regret that. He could fix up her mind, smoothing over the jagged edges and plucking out the psychic shrapnel, but then he could leave something behind. Something to haunt her – something to teach her to do something as foolish as trust someone, just like he had with O –

But.

He thinks of these memories, torn from her – and then given back just to shatter in her hands, sharp. He thinks of Tecteun, cutting her open and examining her insides whilst she was still alive, still awake. He thinks of Tecteun, sharping the insides of those files in the Matrix, probably not for someone like him – probably because she’d thought that the Doctor would come looking. Probably knowing that she’d stop at nothing to get through – only to find that getting out would tear her mind apart.

That educated guess flits at the back of his mind again.

The Doctor had opened the watch.

He doesn’t know how she got it back – doesn’t know how she ended up opening it. But he doesn’t think that Tecteun would have wanted her to remember without her being entirely in control of the situation. He doesn’t think that Tecteun would have been above adding in a little gift for her adopted child, just in case she clicked those memories open without proper supervision. She doesn’t think that she would have just let her take those memories back, without placing some insurance that it would leave her broken and compromised – make it difficult for her to run.

But she had run, hadn’t she? She’d taken that Judoon ship, presumably, and she’d run. She’d got away.

She’d got back to him.

He’s not going to hurt her like that. Not when she’s like this.

He will not be Tecteun.

He refuses, with everything that he is.

Besides, he still wants that ending he craves – the two of them, together, staring each other down as equals whilst the universe blazes around them. And if she crumbles here – if he doesn’t put her back together – then what will he do then?

And so, he pulls her closer to him, the blood on his face smearing into the blonde of her hair as he presses his fingers against the side of her temple. He fights against the urge to flinch away as the pain from her mind sharpens once again, and instead gently plants an idea into the loam of her consciousness, coaxing it, letting it grow.

Sleep. Sleep.

Normally, the Doctor would resist such a thing on principle.

But this time, she doesn’t even try to fight it – she just sinks further against him under the weight of her own gravity, and he catches her before she can fall, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her tightly, face pressed against her scalp and swearing to the universe that he will not allow anything, anyone, other than himself, to ever touch her again.

It could be a long time before she wakes again.

This is good – he needs time. He needs time to clean and treat her wounds without her panicking – he needs time to wipe the blood off her face, even as he can’t help but think how good it looks on her. He needs time to wipe the blood off of his own face – and then time to scream at the ceiling, to break something, because he needs some kind of release after all of that. But, most importantly, he needs the time to treat her mind. That’s the priority – and so he addresses that first, once he’s carried her out of the corridor and into the first room with a bed that he can find. Thankfully, this time, the TARDIS leaves a nearby door ajar, and he finds a well-furnished room with a large bed adorned with various blankets, fit for a king. The light is low and warm – soft – and he can’t help the smile that quirks at his lips, and wonders if, maybe, his TARDIS is starting to learn.

He lays her down, gently tucking a lose hair behind her ear, and then sits down next to her and begins to work. The damage is as about as awful as it had felt – shattered fragments of memories, constantly shifting and cutting against the flesh of her mind, breaking through into other memories. It’s horrific – and looks exactly like how he imagined his own mind had looked when he’d managed to pull himself out of the Matrix that last time. He’s still got the psychic scars – and she will, too, on top of the ones that were already there. The Time War had left its mark – and much, much older wounds too. Ones that she’d never even known about.

Maybe it’s no wonder that she’s never been that good at telepathy, and connecting to other minds – other than his, of course. Her mind had been wiped and torn up and ravaged so many times, that it had probably learnt that telepathic contact could only mean pain and the worst kind of death. And so, it had been left gnarled, disfigured. Twisted with scar tissue – nerve endings cut off, lacking feeling. She’d never had his sensitivity for it all. Her attempts at telepathy had always felt something like a blunt force weapon.

It’s a good thing he does have his sensitivity and skill, because there’s no way he’d even be able to begin dealing with this mess otherwise. He manages to take out the worst of the shards, smooth over the gaping, weeping wounds. But he knows it’s not quite enough. It’s a shattered mirror – there are fragments that he can’t reach, far too small and far too sharp, and far, far too numerous.

It’s no surprise that she’d barely been able to stay present.

It only makes the fact she managed to steal a Judoon ship all the more impressive, and he can’t stop the smile that is fonder than he should ever allow it to be from creeping across his face.

He can’t get it all out – in fact, he’s starting to think the only way to do that would be to use the chameleon arch again in reverse. Put those fragments of memories back into the watch, at least to just be sure that it’s all out, so her mind can heal. Figure out a way to open it again without breaking her brain. There’s got to be a way – after all, Tecteun may have wanted her to have her memories back some day, under her control, which means there’s got to be some trick to it, something clever. And the Master is extremely good at clever.

But he won’t use the arch without her permission – others have already done that far too much. So, for now, he’s settling for dealing with the worst of it so that they can talk, at least.

He retreats from her mind, gradually returning to the real world. He looks at his hands, half-expecting them to be covered in cuts and gashes from all the shards he’s just removed. But, of course, there is nothing. No physical sign of all he’s just done – just like she will bear no scars on her skin from all the wounds inflicted on her. Not from this, and not from everything that was done to her as a child. It almost feels worse, that way. To have no proof that it even happened. To have nothing to show for the pain, to prove that they made it out alive, mostly intact. Mostly.

He clenches his fists, holding them tight enough that his nails leave crescents embedded in his skin for several long minutes after he finally releases them.

Then he forces himself to get up, moves into the adjacent bathroom, and washes the blood off of his face.

He returns a few minutes later with most of it wiped away, and turns his attention to the Doctor’s physical injuries. It almost feels pointless to tend to the wounds – a long enough nap would heal them, most likely – but there’s something cathartic about the process, and so he finds his hands getting to work anyway. It’s not like he’s got anything better to do, besides. And it’s whilst he’s in the middle of cleaning her head wound that he feels her start to wake, consciousness moving to the surface. He braces himself, not sure how she’ll react when she comes to – but she just blinks, looking at him in wary confusion. He moves his hand away from her face, settling himself back against the bed – the pain radiating off her is significantly less intense, thanks to his handiwork, but he still isn’t interested in feeling that headache, thanks very much.

For a long, long moment, she just looks at him, frowning. Like she can’t quite make sense of what she’s seeing.

Maybe she can’t.

“…what are you doing?” she asks, sounding nervous. His lip curls.

“So suspicious,” he says, smooth to hide the hurt that’s hissing at the edges. “I’ve been clearing up your mess, love.”

“…you didn’t have to put yourself out,” she says, and his lips twist into a sneer – but there’s a strange expression on her face that he can’t…quite decipher.

“No, I didn’t,” he says, the grin he knows she’s expecting to see tugging at his mouth – because this is a comfort for her as much as it is for him, isn’t it? The masks and the games, even though all he really, really wants is to tear it all down and to just see her. The one underneath all the pretence, all the walls. And he just wants her to see him. “But it’s not like I would just help you, is it? Not without some ulterior motive.” He leans closer to her, fixing his eyes with hers. “Can’t you feel it? Your mind? It’s different, isn’t it?” An unsettling smile. “You don’t know what I did. You can’t know, can you, love? Not from within.”

He did nothing. Of course, he did nothing. But if she’s so desperate to paint him as a villain –

“I know you’re planning something,” she hisses. “I – I’ve been warned.”

“I’m always planning something, love,” he returns – and that’s interesting, but he decides not to read too much into it. After all, the chances of him planning some nefarious scheme against the Doctor isn’t exactly ground-breaking. It’s part of the game, and, really, she should know this by now – but he always, always, manages to catch her off guard.

She’s still looking at him, like he doesn’t make sense. A paradox, twisting in the air – and for a moment, he can’t quite breathe, because to have her look at him like this, to have her fix her gaze on him and think of nothing else, to know that he is consuming her thoughts –

That’s all he’s ever wanted.

Her gaze flits to the cloth in his hand that he’d been using to clean her injury, and she narrows her eyes at him.

“Are you…” she frowns, looking even more bewildered, “treating my wounds?”

He rolls his eyes, and then reaches forward again, dabbing at the injury without even a veneer of gentleness, and she hisses at the sting. “Well, love, it’ll ruin my great plan if you get laid out with an infected wound of all things, so it’s in my best interests.”

“…or if I can’t keep track of a whole conversation,” she mutters as he moves away again, most of the blood gone, other than the stuff in her hair – but she can deal with that on her own, if she’s going to be like this. He reaches for the anti-infection anti-septic anti-everything cream that the TARDIS had provided him with in the small medkit, and unscrews the lid, placing a small blob of it on his finger. He reaches over, and catches her frown deepening.

“What did you – agh.” She screws up her face as he rubs the cream into the wound. “What did you do up here?” She taps her forehead. “It feels – less like I’m breaking open every time I try and think.”

He hums, as though intrigued. “I don’t know. What did you do to end up like that?”

And he’s pretty sure he knows – he knows enough to know who he needs to go and burn next. But she owes him this, and he wants to hear her say it. To stumble over the words. Wants to see if she’ll lie to him.

For a moment, she doesn’t speak – but he’s plenty occupied enough to wait. It’s only when he presses the first of the bandage stitches across the gash, pulling it together, that she begins.

“I met Tecteun,” she says – and he falters, hearts lurching, and he stares down at her.

“You what?”

“Don’t get too excited,” she says, her eyes flicking up to meet his, exhausted and knowing. “She’s dead.”

He stares at her, almost awed. “You –?”

“No.” She looks away. “No. Not me. But – I got my memories back. That fobwatch.” Her face twists. “She just had them sitting there on a shelf.”

He’s still reeling from the fact she met Tecteun, but the pure, icy rage in her voice sends a shiver rippling across his skin.

“And so you took it,” he completes, picking up the next little strip of bandage. “Opened it.”

“Not right away,” she corrects, shifting. “I didn’t – I didn’t want them, for a little while. Figured I knew who I was without them, but…”

“You got curious,” he finishes as he presses down the strip – because he knows her. “Couldn’t stop thinking about them. Got obsessed.”

“Yes,” she breathes. “And I just – I got it again.” Huffs a laugh. “Had to really, really talk the TARDIS into giving it back to me, but she did. And…”

She swallows.

“Tecteun laid a trap,” he says, picking up another, and her eyes flick to look at him.

“Yeah…” she says, unsettled. “It has to be opened with her biosignature, or it corrupts the memories. Apparently.” She looks away from him again as he reaches forwards once more. “That’s what they said, anyway.”

“Who?”

She falters – looks away from him. “The Division.”

He pauses, considering this, as he presses the bandage over the wound. One more should do it. “They came for you.”

“They’re still out there,” she explains. “You know how it is – once you start time-travelling, you never die. You’re always there, in someone’s past or someone’s future. Timelines get tangled. And the Division is always listening.” She swallows. “It was part of Tecteun’s…failsafe. Corrupt the memories, break my mind so I can’t get away – and then alert the nearest branch of the Division so I could be brought back in and…re-assimilated.”

His fingers still in the medkit, that anger blistering so hot within him that it burns the insides of his lungs, and for a moment he can’t speak.

The Doctor doesn’t notice – she just keeps talking. “They came and got me – don’t really remember specifics, it’s all too sharp. I just knew that I had to get away from them. Things got a bit clearer when they’d got me to their – it must have been their base. Another lab, or something. Maybe they had a way of stabilising it.” She huffs a laugh. “I got away as soon as I could – stole that Judoon ship. But then it got worse again.” She winces, as if maybe she’s still cutting herself on the shards in her mind. “Couldn’t remember if I was running away from them now or back then – for the first time. Couldn’t remember if I was still one of their agents or not. Made it – made it pretty hard to pilot, if ‘m honest.”

He reaches over again, pressing the last bandage against the wound – and as he does it, her eyes flick away, terror chasing the edges.

“They’re always going to be coming after me,” she says, barely more than a scrape of syllables against the air. Anger bursts once again in his chest, a fierce crackle of embers, and his hand comes to her chin, turning her head to look at him. His eyes take in the fear in her expression, the dried blood that cakes the skin under her nose, and the burning in his chest only grows hotter.

“They’re never going to take you again,” he swears, like an oath. “Never.”

“You can’t stop them all,” she says, gaze meeting his, and his lips curl.

“Can’t I, love?” he whispers, eyes wide and fervent, drinking her in – her face, her fear, the blood. A quiet, dangerous laugh escapes his lips. “Do you really think I couldn’t?”

She keeps staring back at him – and anyone else would find her unreadable, but oh, he knows her. Even though there is so much of her that’s unknown, he can cling to that, at least. He knows her, and she knows him – and he can see, flicking in the ripple and flare of her irises, that she knows he could do it. That he would do it, for her – without even a hesitation.

That he’ll probably do it anyway, whatever she says.

She doesn’t speak – and so he reaches back, picking the cloth back up again. It’s still damp enough, and so he carefully wipes at the blood from her nose, shifting the hand at her chin to cup her cheek, supporting her head, keeping her still. The action is gentler than he’s been with her this whole time, and her eyes slip shut, leaning into his touch. Through her skin, he can feel the twisting churn of her emotions – that fear, that anger that tastes so familiar at the back of his throat, acrid and sharp; but then also a warm bloom of relief just underneath, along with something that, perhaps, could be contentedness.

It’s so foreign to him, and yet so familiar all at once, and all he can think of is back when they were boys, both bleeding together, laughing together, lying next to each other in those red fields. Holding each other. He can still remember, with a sharp vividness, how he’d traced his hand along the line of his friend’s back – his fingers mapping the contours of his spine. He pushes the memory in the Doctor’s general direction, and he feels her react to it – realises that she’d been remembering the same thing with a wistful, aching fondness.

That was so, so long ago now.

The beginning for him – but not for her.

Something sour twists in his gut, and he suddenly remembers something she’d said before, when she’d been pinning him to the floorboards of the console room and demanding who he was.

“Who’s Swarm?” he asks.

Immediately, he feels a flicker of intense irritation, accompanied by a healthy amount of discomfort rushing over from her side of things. Her expression twists.

“Apparently someone I used to fight when I worked with the Division,” she says, sounding none too happy about it. “Don’t remember him. Didn’t like him much, either. Bit creepy.” A shudder ripples through the conduit of their skin, and he feels it rush through him.

“Where is he?” he asks, voice low.

“Also dead,” she replies with a wince. “Sorry.”

She really does know him – and, oh, that’s satisfying, isn’t it? Because maybe this Swarm knew her before, has known her longer – but the Doctor? She doesn’t remember him. He’s nothing but dust in the wind, whoever he is – just someone who truly means nothing to her. Meaningless. Just another villain who thinks they can try to be her equal.

But the Master, on the other hand – she knows him. He’s her shadow, the spectre that haunts her. And is he the oldest person she can remember? Certainly, he’s the oldest person she knows who is left alive. The last. A thrill of satisfaction rushes through him at that, and he can’t help the laugh that slips from his lips.

“Make it up to me next time, love,” he murmurs. “And tell me when the next person shows up claiming to be your best enemy – and I’ll show them precisely how wrong they are.”

Her face twists – oh, that morality of hers again – and her eyes flick away. But the hint of a humourless smile teases at the corner of her mouth.

“…’ll keep it in mind,” she says, quiet – and it strikes him how tired she looks.

There are only a few other scrapes and bruises left on her face, and none of them need attention, and so he packs the kit away and gets off the bed, returning it to the nook in the adjacent bathroom where the TARDIS had left it for him to find. He half expects it will be gone if he returns here, vanished away back where it actually belongs. If they were in the Doctor’s TARDIS, it certainly would be.

When he comes back to the bedroom, the Doctor has laid herself down, head pressed against the pillows, eyes shut in a way that would look almost peaceful, if it wasn’t for the vaguely pained furrow of her brow. He sits himself on the bed beside her, his mind flicking through memories of red fields under orange skies – and, before he can think any better of it, he settles down on his side next to her. Her eyes flicker open, and she meets his gaze, curious and bewildered – and remembering too, just like him, he likes to think.

“…what happens now?” she asks.

“How’s your head?” he returns, not sure if he wants to answer her question. Not sure if either of them do, really. This is the kindest they’ve been to each other with these faces, and it’s a tentative truce – one that could fold at any moment, knowing them.

Or maybe, it would if the Doctor wasn’t so tired – her eyes slip closed once again, and a sigh escapes her lips. “Relatively? …pretty good. Objectively? Really awful.” He watches her swallow, throat bobbing. “Whatever you did or didn’t do, you didn’t fix it completely.”

“Couldn’t get it all out,” he admits. “I’m not sure anyone could. It was painstaking.”

Still, no thank you – but he’s learnt by now that she doesn’t know how to say such a thing, especially to him. Instead, her brow just crinkles with a frown, eyes opening slightly again.

“Need to figure out a way to get the rest out,” she mutters – and then her eyes flick up to look at him. “…any bright ideas?”

Of course, he does. “The chameleon arch.”

She visibly pales. “No.”

“It would work,” he hisses, insistent. “It would remove all the pieces that hurt and leave everything else untouched.”

But her eyes are screwed shut again, and she’s biting her lip. “No. I won’t.”

“Doctor.”

“I can’t.”

He stares at her, frustration and fury at her and the person who did this to her twisting inside him, barbed wire around his lungs.

“Fine,” he says eventually – and he so tempted to argue with her, the urge to fix this burning through him, raging in his veins. But there’s no point. Not when she’s like this. And he does not want to do this to her against her will. Not this. “We won’t.”

For a moment, she remains very still, like she doesn’t quite believe him – and then, eventually, some of the tension in her shoulders seeps from her, and a breath trickles from her lips. The pained lines on her brow are still there, but the frown has faded, and when he reaches out a hand to brush his fingers against her cheek, he feels a bloom of exhaustion and relief where his skin touches hers. She doesn’t flinch away from him. If anything, it seems to make her relax another increment. Emboldened, he can’t quite find it in himself to resist the urge to shift closer to her – to let his arm drift from her face to wrap around her waist, hand tracing up the notches of her spine, just like he had all those lifetimes ago. She stiffens, and for a moment he wonders if she’s going to bolt – if she’s decided that she doesn’t trust him after all, what with everything she’s apparently been told, everything he’s done. But then she softens again, and curls closer to him, pressing her head against the fabric over his collarbone.

“…should go,” she murmurs into his waistcoat – but she makes no move to do such a thing. A bitterly fond smile cracks across his face, and he shifts his hand from her back to her head, fingers gently weaving through her hair – and she sinks into him further.

“And when do we do what we should do?” he replies, just as quiet, unable to help the thrill of contentedness that sweeps through him, even though it shouldn’t, even though he’s still so angry at her and the universe and everything. But he can’t quite bring himself to leave her here – to go back out into rest of his TARDIS, out into the rest of the universe and do what he was meant for. To raze civilisations to the ground. To break a million hearts to try and heal his own, only he can’t, it can’t be done –

But she’s here, with him. And for once, even though she says she should, she isn’t running. She isn’t flinching away from his touch. She isn’t standing above him and saying how much more than him she is, and she isn’t turning to let some human finish him off whilst she leaves him behind. No. She’s been broken, and in that she has fallen to her knees and down to his level – and now, she turns to him for comfort.

And he should hate her all the more for it – but he isn’t strong enough to refuse her.

The Doctor hums into his chest, noncommittal, and he feels her send a vague wave of petulance in his direction – but it just makes him smile.

“Go back to sleep, love,” he says into her hair – and then, at the flicker of irrational (but is it?) fear that flashes through her and into him, he holds her a little tighter. “Stay. The Division aren’t going to find you here.”

And if they do, he thinks, they’ll very quickly come to regret it.

He’s not sure if she picks up on the thought – he does nothing to shield it from her, and something seems to make her relax another increment. For a long time, neither of them say anything. And then, eventually, he feels the waves of her consciousness mellow out, oscillating into a pattern reminiscent of gentle dreaming. Her breathing deepens, the tension seeps out of her, and she shifts against him once, before settling, completely still. He can’t help but close his eyes, his mind carefully flitting over the edges of hers.

He hopes she doesn’t get nightmares. But in case she does, he’ll be here to uproot them before they can grow large enough to choke her as she finally, finally rests.

He must fall asleep – because the next thing he knows is that he’s waking up.

Immediately, before he’s even opened his eyes, he registers that the space on the bed beside him is empty.

The Doctor is gone.

He doesn’t waste a moment – instantly, he’s pushing himself up and off the bed, racing out of the room, hearts hammering in his throat. She can’t have been taken. No, no, she can’t have been, especially not with their minds brushing like they had been, bleeding over into each other, she can’t have been because he would have felt it, wouldn’t he? He would have felt it, he would have known, he wouldn’t have slept through it –

He bursts through into the console room, heading straight to the TARDIS doors. He throws them open, and finds that the ship is no longer parked in deep space. Instead, he’s greeted with the bustling interior of a large space station, people from all across the universe hurrying to and from like ants working tirelessly. Unaware of the deity that must have walked out into their midst.

For a long moment, he just stares, uncharacteristically still. He’s always moving, this time around – except for when he’d been shoved out of the Matrix one last time, left lying on the floor with a body that wouldn’t respond and a mind that wouldn’t stop screaming. And now, it feels just the same – some part of his soul torn, ripped open right down the centre, blood gushing out of the crevasse and filling up his lungs.

He should be leaping into action with a roar of blazing anger – should be racing out of these doors and pulling this station apart until he finds her, finds a single thread that could lead him to wherever she is now. Wherever she’s been taken –

But he knows, deep within him – he knows.

She hasn’t been taken.

She never gets taken from him.

He closes his eyes, a wretched sound catching in his throat, but he bites down on it before it can leave his lips. Unbidden, across the skin on the side of his temple, he feels the unremembered memory of a gentle pressure – the ghosts of her fingertips, pressing down.

With a twist of his heels, he slams the door shut and surges back over to the console with a storm raging within his chest, his coat flapping behind him in the forewinds. This TARDIS has got security systems, surveillance systems – he’s not stupid enough to not have that – and so it doesn’t take him long to call up footage of the room they’d slept in, the ship around him immediately responding to his mental request as he leans over the console, hands pressed against the edge and hearts thundering in his chest, waiting waiting waiting –

The screen flickers, and shows him exactly the moment he needs to see. The moment the Doctor wakes up again – the way he shifts to look at her, in memories that he no longer has. The way she doesn’t look at him for a long moment, before moving her hand – and, in an instant, she’s pressing it against the side of his face, catching him off-guard, her mind a blunt force weapon against his just like it always has been, and sending him back into sleep once again.

And then she lies there. She lies there, watching him, for a long, long time.

And then, without warning, she gets up from the bed – wavers for a moment, unsteady on her feet. Then, she looks down at his sleeping form, silent, before she turns and walks out of the door – and, presumably, flies the TARDIS to this space station and leaves him completely.

It’s only then, as the video shuts off, that he sees the flicker of something on the console near his hand. A note, jammed underneath the edge of the helmic regulator. A swirl of circular Gallifreyan that just reads –

Sorry.

He picks it up, and immediately feels a rush of the telepathic imprint that she couldn’t help but leave behind. A sharp flash of images –

– strapped to a chair
arms bound and a
warped crown of machinery
presses against her skull,
relentless,
hungry –

The Master grunts, face twisting, eyes screwing shut –

– there’s a flash of green
behind her eyes and
something has broken
into her mind and it’s
splintering the inside
of her skull it’s
gouging out
her memories
it’s breaking
her into so many
piece that they will
never
ever
be able to put
her back together
and they said she was done
they said she could leave
but she was so foolish
so naïve to believe them
and she should have known
it would end with her
strapped into this chair
and SHE IS SCREAMING –

He lets go of the note like he’s been burnt, emotions blistering through him too much TOO MUCH and he lashes out without even thinking about it, arm striking across the console and he knocks something off, something smacking against the ground with a clatter. It hardly matters – the sound of it is drowned out by the furious scream that rips itself from his throat.

She’s run from him.

Because she’s scared.

AGAIN.

The Division, Tecteun – everything they’ve done to her has taken her away from him AGAIN –

And all he wanted to do, for once, was to fix this.

He wants to burn something. He wants to tear the entire universe apart. He wants to find her, he wants to make her sorry, he wants to make her beg him for forgiveness –

He wants to lie beside her in fields of endless red grass under an orange sky.

But those fields are nothing but ash, and she –

Well.

The two of them…

He finds himself sinking to the floor, leaning his back against the base of the console and curling into himself, burying his head in his hands, fingers pulling at the strands of his hair until it hurts. And if tears prick at his eyes – if a sob wrenches itself from his throat – well, he doesn’t care. There’s no one here to hear him, now. No one to take advantage of his pathetic display of weakness – no one to brush a thumb against his cheek to wipe away the tears and ask if he’s alright.

There’s just the fire of his anger burning in his chest and the staccato of his heartbeats in his head.

In a minute, he’ll get up. He’ll untangle his fingers from his hair, clench them into fists and rage around the console like an inferno in a forest, moving and moving and never stopping, even as the rest of the world chokes on the smoke. He’ll go after her. He’ll find her, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do but oh, she’ll regret it –

But right now?

Right now, he stays beneath the console, trying desperately to forget how it had felt to lie next to her on that bed, holding her close and vowing to never let anything near her, all whilst she must have been deciding already what she was going to do when she woke up. Trying desperately to forget how it had felt to look up at familiar constellations embedded in a marmalade sky with her by his side. How her hand had felt in his – how he’d mapped the contours of her spine with a curious hand.

He fails. Every single time.