Archive of Our Own

It’s only a few weeks after the Flux that she finds him. Time’s warnings are still ringing in her head, her very own cloister bell tolling – but she doesn’t find him massing forces against her. She doesn’t find him sat on a throne, casting his eyes over wanton destruction wrought by his own hands with glee –

“– look upon my works, Doctor, and despair!”

She finds him bleeding on a table.

The planet itself is Karjeka, bang-splat in the backend of the Fiderous Quadrant – or rather, what’s left of it in this particular century. After the upheaval of the military dictatorship that ruled over several local systems, the whole quadrant had fallen into anarchy. Interplanetary gangs had sprung up in the power vacuum, and over the decades had led to the development of one of the most comprehensive black-market networks on this side of the galaxy.

If the Doctor had someone tailing after her – Yaz, Dan; Graham or Ryan, even – then she would have made it quite clear to them before opening the TARDIS doors that this was not the sort of place she’d usually come to.

Correction: it’s not the sort of place she’d usually come to with friends.

Alone?

That’s a whole other story – and one that won’t get told, at that.

And what about with an enemy?

The voice in her head sounds uncannily like the Master. But it’s not telepathy – she knows it isn’t. First off, if it were, she’d feel his presence in her mind, like a relentless student flicking through old books in Gallifreyan libraries. Second, he’s not awake. Unconscious might be a better word for it. Or maybe ‘half-dead’.

She swallows, pushing any and all unwanted thoughts under the floorboards of her brains and tucking the device she’d been clutching in her hand like a lifeline back into her pocket. She hadn’t expected to find him here – hadn’t expected to find him at all. But, actually, in retrospect, she should have anticipated something like this. She’d been following an emergency recall beacon. A Gallifreyan one, specifically used to recall a lost TARDIS. She hasn’t seen one used since the Time War, and – well –

Mostly what she’d expected was someone had found the tech and was messing around with it, having no clue what they were doing, or what they were holding. That was the most likely explanation – especially on a planet like Karjeka. She’s willing to bet she could find other scraps of Time Lord tech, if she deigned to look for it. And, probably, she should do that. Letting that sort of thing get out into the wider universe – into the hands of anyone who could use it –

That’s why she’d tracked it. The activated beacon, which had lit up like a lighthouse on her ship’s sensors.

Or at least, that’s what she’s trying to tell herself.

Because it’s definitely, definitely not because she’d had this ridiculous, stupid notion that maybe, just maybe, there’d be another Time Lord at the end of it. That maybe someone had survived the Master’s massacre, that maybe someone had gotten away that maybe –

That maybe there’s someone left out there.

Someone to be a comfort? Or someone to blame?

She doesn’t really know.

The irony is that there had been another Time Lord who’d activated the signal. It just happens to be the last one she wanted to see.

The scene before her is far from pretty. A grim, dimly lit back room in a side-alley in the rough part of the biggest city, which is on a planet that’s considered the rough part of the whole quadrant, which is the rough part of the whole galaxy. The room itself seems to have been converted into something approaching a makeshift surgery, although with the grime on the walls it’s got to be far from hygienic. The counters on the side are piled over with stuff – bloodied equipment, gutted electronics, vials full of bubbling experiments – and fastened to the walls are shelves upon shelves of specimen jars. A quick glance tells her all she needs to know – they’re full of body parts, from a whole spread of different races. Bile, fury, and a sickening sort of not-memory rises in the back of her throat, and she forces herself to look back at the table. To look at the Master, restraints wrapped around his wrists and ankles, no coat, no waistcoat, shirt unbuttoned and dark with his own blood as it weeps from the surgical wounds scattered over his body.

She’s still frozen, stuck just inside the doorway where she’s been since she first entered the room and saw him there.

It’s hard to look at him.

It would be hard for anyone. Literally anyone with any sense of compassion or morality would see a scene like this and react with immediate horror. The nausea rising from the depths of her gut, biting at the back of her throat, is a normal reaction. It is.

What’s not normal is the way her mind is instinctively reaching back – trying to pull forward memories that aren’t there anymore, and instead just finding the scarred, scabbed over remains of what was left behind when Tecteun cut a whole lifetime out of her mind. And then the rest of her – there’s a chill across her skin; a bone-deep, aching fear that she can’t quite supress, a shiver that just won’t quit. Because the body remembers. Even hers – even one that’s been burnt and remade so many times that she can’t even count them all anymore. Even though her memories are gone, her cells know. Her atoms know.

She’d been the one lying on a table, once. Long ago. Bleeding out. Unconscious. Half-dead. Dead.

She swallows again. Wills herself to step forward, to step back, to do something.

If she stays here too long, morning will creep in through the early hours, and the people who did this will return. She can’t imagine this will end well for either of them if they discover her here.

She should leave him.

She should. It would be the right thing to do – after everything he’s done, with all the lives he’s taken, all the planets he’s burned to the ground. And then everything he’s done to her, personally, with all the intimacy of a knife sliding between her ribs. Whatever he’s got himself into here – whatever he’s done to get himself in this situation – he probably deserves it. Without a doubt.

And yet, when she moves, she’s striding forwards. Leg hitting the metal edges of the table, hands immediately ghosting over the wounds on his chest, hovering over rugged stitching. Did they take anything out of him? She flicks her eyes around the room, looking for any evidence, gaze sweeping over jars on shelves – dammit. She looks away. Bile rises in her throat again – she swallows it down. It’s – well. It’s hard to tell. But she needs to know. Time Lord biology has always been a well-guarded secret – and for good reason –

 “– it took her years,”
the Master whispers as she
watches the images
unfold in front of her.
“Several of the
child’s regenerations –”

A guttural noise chokes her throat, and she has to screw her eyes shut, shaking her head. Nope nope nope. Not now. Nope. She’s fine. She is. She doesn’t even remember it. She doesn’t remember any of it, other than those splinters she saw in the Matrix that felt like they were happening to someone else.

It’s fine.

She forces her eyes open again, and this time keeps her gaze fixed on the Master. Tentatively, she reaches up to brush her fingers against his face. His skin is clammy – but she can immediately tell that he’s still alive. She moves her hand further up, pressing her fingertips against his temple as her other hand comes up in mirrored opposition on the other side. His unconscious mind swirls within her reach, vague ripples of surface thoughts. The rest is locked down like a guarded fortress, even when he’s like this. Never vulnerable – like sleeping with one eye open.

She shakes her head, and then closes her eyes, before sending the Master the mental equivalent of a fierce shove in the direction of his mind.

Contact.

Instantly, his eyes snap open and he gasps, lurching upright and straining against the restraints before she shoves him back down against the table. His eyes are wild, restless, his gaze slipping off her face multiple times, like he’s trying to keep his focus on her, but doesn’t quite have the strength. Despite that, a wavering grin twists at the corner of his lips.

Contact, he breathes in the back of her head, like he’s pressed against her shoulder and whispering into her ear. He lets out a shaky, painful breath. “Hello, love.”

“What did they do to you?” she hisses, cutting right to it – she has such a lack of interest in pleasantries that there’s a danger of it forming some kind of singularity. Her hand is still on his shoulder, holding him down as she practically leans over him, trying to hold his gaze.

“Is – is that concern, Doctor?” the Master manages, sneering, eyes manic and wandering out over the cluttered counter on his left. She grabs his chin, forcing him to look at her, and a laugh stumbles from his lips like a drunkard. “No – not quite –”

“Did they take anything?” she hisses, because that’s what’s important here. Not the sickening fear that’s still churning in her stomach. The fear that, as his body shivers under her hand – as she feels his grip on lucidity slipping in and out of his grasp – is steady twisting into something hotter. Something furious. Something dangerous.

They shouldn’t have done this. They shouldn’t have let her see this. And she hates it, she hates it with every fibre of her being – because it would have been awful enough with anyone being strapped on this table. Anyone. A stranger, even. But with him –

“Well, I don’t know,” the Master hisses back. “Seeing as I was – unconscious.”

This time, it’s her turn for a humourless laugh to escape from her lips – because she knows the truth. She can feel it through the conduit of their skin; in the deep, cold dread in her bones of long-forgotten horror.

“No. You weren’t.”

He manages to hold her gaze, his eyes as escapable as a decaying orbit. He must know what she’s thinking – what she’s not-remembering. He stares at her for a long moment, dark, before his eyes flick to the counter on the left again. She glances over, following his line of sight, then looking back at him. He stares back at her, wordless, but there’s a morbid sort of humour glinting in his gaze. She frowns, and then pushes herself away, moving over and taking a closer look. It doesn’t take her long to find what she’s looking for – hidden behind a stack of surgical equipment and several bloodied sets of hand-written notes, is a grubby no-longer-white sheet covering over something. She pulls it off, to reveal three large jars, all containing –

Again, she swallows back the instinctive rush of nausea as she picks up the first jar, and forces her voice into something closer to incredulity than horror when she says: “They took your ectospleen?”

The Master waves a hand, movement restricted by the restraints. “Apparently, they’re in –” he grimaces, trying and failing to keep the pain from his voice – “high demand.”

She picks up the second jar, and screws up her face. “And one of your kidneys?”

He lets out a strangled huff of a laugh. “Oh, that’s nice. They didn’t – take both.”

The meaning of that hits her instantly.

They didn’t want him dead. Didn’t just – harvest everything they could. But why? Why would they –

She glances down at the third jar, and her grip on the other two immediately tightens. Ice forms like fractals over her ribcage in dread.

Because there’s no organ in the third jar. No biological material at all, in fact.

Instead, there’s the churning, undulating, liquid-mercury form of the Cyberium.

Immediately, the narrative of what’s happened here falls into place with a harrowing click.

He must know what she’s seen. Their minds are still connected, and she can feel his thoughts swirl with dark amusement in response to her growing understanding.

“I got…desperate,” he says, as though the admission has been pulled out through his teeth against his will.

“Desperate?” she repeats, incredulous. “This is long past desperate. Going to the black market on Karjeka? To get out the very thing you let into yourself on purpose?”

“They’re the sort of people who – don’t ask questions,” he grumbles, tugging against his restraints.

“Yeah,” she says, glancing back at the jars – because surely getting his ectospleen taken out of him and ending up like this hadn’t been his plan. No, she’ll bet that he had an arrangement – something like if they got the Cyberium out, they could keep the thing. So long as it was out of him, he didn’t care if it got loose on some world where it could cause untold damage to the human civilisation if it managed to get itself a host – or worse, jacked into some kind of electronic communication system.  But, clearly, it hadn’t worked out like that. And so – “I’ll bet they’re also the kind of people who decide that someone with a binary vascular system is just as interesting a specimen as a cybernetic AI. Or did they just think they might as well take a kidney whilst they were at it?”

She knows it’s got to be the former – they kept him alive. They must be interested in what he is, even if they didn’t realise his species from the two hearts. He was hosting the Cyberium. But the Master just rolls his eyes in response.

“Yes yes yes,” he growls, before wincing as he shifts. “Now are you going to let me out, love?”

At that, the anger that had been briefly forgotten immediately flares, and she thunders back over to the table, hand on his chest, leaning right over him. Gallifrey is burning in the back of her mind, smoke in her nose and ash in her throat and the inside of her ribcage is a raging inferno. Her sympathetic horror is all but forgotten against the bristling heat of it.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just leave you here.”

If she’s hurting him, it doesn’t show on his face. His eyes are alight, a smile distorting his features as he gazes up at her in irreverent reverence.

“You’d miss me, love.”

She chokes on a furious laugh. “Sorry. Not good enough.”

She pushes herself away, so caught up in her own anger that, for once, she fully intends to let him face the consequences of his own actions. But whilst he’s still restrained, the Master’s mind is still free to move – and still very much connected to her own. And so, he digs in, psychically taking hold of her consciousness whilst pushing forward the intense sense memory of his hands wrapped around her neck – not strangling, but a threat.

It does the trick. She stops in her tracks.

“You’re not going to leave me,” he hisses, voice dripping with hypnotism. But she’s too old to fall for that sort of basic trick.

“I said,” she murmurs back, “to give me a good reason.”

She hears him scoff, even as another shudder of pain ripples through him, transmitting directly into her through the close apposition of their minds. “You mean you need – some sort of justification? So you can keep your – your conscience clean?”

“Still not hearing a reason,” she hisses back. She turns enough to glance back at him, meeting his eyes through the glint of scalpels and the smear of blood. As she watches, he lets his head fall back against the table.

“Well,” he says, sounding like he’s commenting on the weather – albeit through gritted teeth. “If you want a sensible reason, you – you and I both know that we don’t –” He has to clear his throat. “We don’t exactly want knowledge about Time Lord biology being passed around the intergalactic black market.”

Even though she’d been thinking the exact same thing, she still manages a sneer. “Not a Time Lord, so not really my problem.”

And – yep, shouldn’t have said that, because immediately that sense of horrified, unremembered nausea manages to climb up the back of her throat again. This was her, once. A specimen on the table to be tied down, cut open, dissected –

“You seemed pretty convinced that – it was your problem a minute ago,” the Master hisses, knocking her out of her thoughts. And it had been intentional, she realises. Even though he’s always been a much better telepath than her, they still spent most of their childhood in each other’s heads. Which means she can feel things seeping through that no one else would be able to detect – concern? Dread. Fear – panic, really, tugging fiercely at the tight lease of his fraying control.

“Yeah, well,” she says, swallowing, her pulses pounding in her throat. She feels strangely distant, she realises – like she’s listening to everything through a ringing in her ears. The aftermath of an explosion. Only there’s nothing – no debris, no memories left to pick apart, to come to terms with. Just scars left by shrapnel that is long gone. “I changed my mind. It’s not like there’s anyone else left to worry about it. You made sure of that.”

The Master hums consideringly, still staring at the ceiling. He tries to hide a pained shiver, but she feels it rush through their minds, as subtle as a pebble dropped in a still pond. The ripples reach those deepest parts of her – the places where a long-forgotten child lies bleeding to death a hundred times over at the hand of their adoptive mother.

“Go on, then,” he says, shifting his head so he can look at her. His lips are curled into a snarl, eyes alight in defiant challenge. “Leave me. Go on. Turn your back on me, knowing that when they –” he grunts, a pained grimace – “when they come back, they’re going to do this again. They’re going to keep doing it until –” A broken laugh. “Until I’m dead.”

But he’s wrong. She knows he’s wrong, right down in the depths of her, the truth carved into her very cells. They won’t stop when he’s dead. Because when he has no blood left to bleed, his body will weep with gold, and then they’ll start it all over again. And again. And again –

He stares at her, gaze burning.

“Do it, Doctor. Leave me to my fate.” He swallows. “There’s no one here – no one to watch. Just you.” His smile twists. “And me.”

And she thinks of Tecteun. She thinks of her standing there before her, so callously leaving a universe behind, poisoning it, just because it’s become too inconvenient for her. Just because she couldn’t control things the way she wanted. The things that she’d said, on that ship in the void between universes – telling the Doctor that they were the same. Befriending people, taking them with her, promising them the journey of a lifetime – and then running away, leaving them behind when it’s too hard. When she gets scared –

And the Master – hadn’t he just been the first person she abandoned?

He deserves this, an angry, twisted part of her hisses. After everything he’s done – to rescue him would be to spit in the face of everyone who has died by his hand. Everyone that you’ve failed to save because of him –

“– I do what I do, because it's right!”
he cries, pleads against the
darkening blue of an artificial sky
“Because it's decent!
And above all, it's kind.
It's just that.
Just kind.”

She closes her eyes.

“Become death,”
the Master goads,
eyes shining
and desperate,
almost like he’s pleading.
“Become me. Come on –”

She hears him laugh – a soft, incredulous huff of air.

“No,” he murmurs. “Of course, you won’t.”

Without a word, she opens her eyes and turns fully, pulling her sonic out of her pocket. She points it in his direction, and as a familiar whine splits the air, the restraints holding him down open with a harsh snap of release. The Master immediately pushes himself up on his elbows, expression twisting with a pained grimace – but the Doctor doesn’t move to help him. She just slips her sonic back in her pocket.

“You better be able to walk,” she says, as he tries to sit up completely, swinging his legs over the side of the table. He’s leaning forwards, bloodied shirt still unbuttoned, arms shaking as he holds himself upright. It doesn’t bode well for either of them. “Because I’m not dragging you out of here. This is your fault.”

He laughs again. “Please, love. I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you like that.”

The moment he says it, he pushes himself off the table – only for his knees to immediately buckle. Irritatingly, despite herself, the Doctor can’t prevent the way she steps forward, arms outstretched. He manages to catch himself on the table before she can reach him, and flashes her a grin like he knows exactly what’s annoyed her, even as his arms continue to shake under the pressure.

“You can leave,” he hisses, somehow more amused than anything. In the back of her mind, she feels the words in his mind that he doesn’t quite have the strength to spit out – something about appeasing her morality, her conscience, by giving him the opportunity to escape whilst knowing that he doesn’t have the strength to actually manage it. Something about leaving him here, knowing he wouldn’t make it out, but being able to say that she did what she could –

With a flare of frustration to cover up some other emotion that she can’t name, she closes the distance between them and wraps her arm around him, pulling him upright. The moment their skin touches, the sense of his mind against hers sharpens, and she feels him fail to hide a flicker of surprise.

“Thought you weren’t dragging me out,” he manages to hiss, already slinging his arm over her shoulder, shifting against her.

“Shut up,” she snaps back, glancing around the room. She needs to do a thorough check, make sure there’s nothing left here that shouldn’t be. Even though part of her doesn’t care – even though another part of her isn’t sure it even matters anymore. But the rest of her –

She thinks of that fobwatch. Memories, cut out of her with a psychic scalpel and placed in a jar on a shelf. A trophy – and Tecteun just stood there, talking about how a good scientist never throws away their work. The nausea in her throat swells again, and she feels it bleed over into the Master – feels him shudder in response.

??? he sends back at her, the wordless question half interrogative concern, half possessive curiosity. There’s a distinct sense of what did I just see? swimming in the space between their minds. She doesn’t answer him. She just drags him away from the table, across the slick grime of blood and dirt on the tiled floor. Whatever’s in here – she’ll come back later. Once she’s got him out of the way.

Once he’s safe.

“My coat,” he hisses once they’re through the doorframe and in the corridor.

“No,” she replies, short. “We’re leaving it.”

“I need it back –”

“Should’ve thought about that before you let yourself be operated on by black market surgeons,” she snaps, even as she feels an acute wave of sympathy. The memory of her prison cell flickers behind her eyes – her coat gone, and it shouldn’t have been such a big deal, it shouldn’t have mattered but after everything that had happened it had become a kind of safety blanket, and without it she’d started to lose that sense of who she was, who’d she’d become –

The Master stumbles suddenly, blindsided by the intensity of the memory, and it unbalances them enough that it nearly sends both of them to the floor. But the Doctor manages to keep herself up, and pulls down hard the shutters of her mind, severing the connection between them with a ferocity it probably doesn’t deserve. It doesn’t stop their touch telepathy – the smeared, bleed of emotions from one to the other via the conduit of their skin. But it does mean that the open line between them is shut. She doesn’t want him peaking into her memories, and this place seems to be bringing up a lot of them.

She adjusts her grip on him, stabilising them both, before dragging him onwards.

“You’ve been busy, love,” he murmurs.

“Yeah, well,” she mutters back, trying not to think of how many times she marked tallies on those walls – how many times she’d wished that the Master would have shown up on the other side of the electrified mesh of the exercise yard, just so she’d know she wasn’t so alone. “Unlike you, I actually have other things to do when you’re not around.”  

Although, the moment the words leave her mouth, she knows it’s not exactly fair to say that – because there’s a slight offset in their temporal alignment. It had been hidden, before, underneath everything else she was getting from his side – but now that she’s severed their connection, it’s becoming more apparent. It’s mostly because of her time spent in prison, she reckons, but she’s got decades on him. Maybe they’re equal, now – after his seventy-seven years stuck on Earth, and all his years pretending to be O in MI6…maybe she’s finally caught up with him. That is, if she ignores all those lives that were taken from her before she can even remember which means she was way ahead of him from the very start.

But it means that he’s probably behind on a few major temporal events – like the Flux, for a start. Which, for once, he’d had absolutely no part in. She’s certain of it. After all, he wouldn’t have let himself go uncredited for his destructive work if he had been involved.

“How long has it been for you?” she asks, dragging him around a corner. At the other end of the hallway, she sees their way out – a door that she’d left slightly ajar which leads out into the moon-slicked alleyway.

A pained, amused huff escape the Master’s throat. “Since Gallifrey?”

“When else?” she shoots back, glancing back over her shoulder. The light of the corridor is low, and flickers dimly, but there’s no one coming after them.

She turns back, tugging the Master along. He gives a pained grunt.

“I – not sure,” he manages. He lets out a couple of shallow breaths, starting to struggle.

“Well, make a guess,” she insists, trying to shove any feelings of pity or sympathy or concern right back into the depths from which they came.

“Which – which calendar,” he growls, “would you like me to use?”

“Any,” she snaps back, ignoring the way her own muscles are aching with effort. The door is getting closer, but the distance is starting to feel akin to climbing the mountains that had framed the sky back in those red fields they’d run through as children. “Any calendar you like.”

The Master scoffs. “Why are you so – interested?”

“Why are you avoiding the question?” But then it hits her. “You really don’t know.”

He doesn’t reply, and the truth of what she’s just said sends her thoughts spiralling in a thousand different directions.

“You don’t know – how? Wait –” Her mouth clamps shut as her mind races ahead. It hits her in moments. “The Cyberium.”

The Master lets out a dry laugh which quickly twists into a cough. “Well done – caught up.”

“Shut up – what are you saying? That the Cyberium messed with your time sense? Or – no. No, it was – was it taking over your body? Your mind? And you don’t know how long you weren’t in control for? Or was it –”

His knees buckle again, and she cuts off, lurching to keep her grip on him, barely able to stop them both collapsing to the floor. She ends up falling against the wall and pulling him against her, wrapping her arms around his back in a way that would look like an embrace to any passing observer. Luckily for her, there’s no-one around to make such a blatant mistake.

The Master leans heavily against her, his face pressed against her collarbone. He’s shaking again, even more than before, and his skin is clammy and slick with sweat and weeping blood.

“Maybe,” he hisses, “we can play twenty questions later.”

Her mouth twists into a snarl, but she doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.

“If you can’t make it to the TARDIS,” she informs him, “I’m dumping you in an alleyway.”

He laughs at that, coughing again. “Will you?” He swallows. “Will you really?”  

She bites back the growl that’s growing in her throat – because she hates it, she can’t stand it, but he’s right. She won’t. Because as much as she’s trying to avoid thinking about it, her mind is a traitorous thing. It’s still reaching for those amputated memories, still tracing those mental scars, the stitches that have never been pulled out and have long since festered. And she knows, deep in the very heart of her, in the chill within her bones, that no one ever came to rescue her like this. The child she doesn’t remember being had laid on that bed, dying under her mother’s hand over and over and over – and she knows that she screamed. She knows it in the way her throat aches to do it again – to cry and cry for help until it’s bleeding and raw and her voice is completely blown out. She knows that she needed help, and no one came. No one dragged the crying child out of the dark. No one cared –

Except, one night, after it was all over and she was a boy again. When it had all been cut out of her mind but her body still remembered; when she couldn’t stop crying and she didn’t know why. One night, in a barn, when another boy came to find her and slipped under the covers, because her tears had been as beautiful as diamonds to him.

He’d come for her. Night after night. And he’d pulled her through those red fields and into dawn.

She’d loved him. She always has – and maybe, always will. And she knows, as true as anything in the universe – as true as her name is the Doctor because she chose it; because her other names were given to her by others or ripped away from her by force – that even when she hates him more than anything else in the universe, she will still love him.

Sometimes, she thinks, when she hates him, she might love him more.

She doesn’t know if she can quite tell the difference anymore. Not after everything.

She shifts her grip on him – tightens it. Turns to look.

They’re just a few steps away from the door now.  

“Just shut up and save your strength,” she answers, not letting herself look him in the eyes. She doesn’t think she’d be able to survive that right now. “It’s not much further now.”

He just huffs in her ear. “Lead the way, love.”

They make the rest of the journey back to the TARDIS in silence, save the sound of their panting breaths. It is, for the most part, because by the time they step through the doors, the Master is barely hanging on to consciousness – and whilst the Doctor has never really needed another person in order to have a conversation, her swirling thoughts drag her into silence.

The moment they step through the doors, her ship whorps in disapproval, and the Doctor feels for all the world like a child who’s dragged a bleeding, feral animal off the street and is now begging to be allowed to keep it.

“Yes, I know,” she grumbles back at the ceiling, already pulling the Master inside. “Would you rather I left him bleeding in the street?”

There’s another whorp from the console, before she hears the creak of the doors swinging shut behind her. Probably, that’s as close to approval as she’s going to get. The sense of reproach is still overpowering, however, hanging in the air like a bad smell. She wrinkles her nose.

“I know,” she repeats. “Look, it’s fine. Yaz and Dan aren’t here, and he’s not staying long. Just –” She grunts, shifting the Master in her arms again. His head lolls – he’s not even responding to what’s going on, barely even holding his own weight. It’s only a matter of time before he’s completely gone from the world, and the screaming ache of her muscles is getting harder to ignore. “Could you just keep an eye on him if I leave him here for a moment? I’ve got – clean up to do.”  

There’s a high-pitched whine over to her right, and she glances over to see a door has etched itself into the walls. She moves towards it, dragging the Master along with her, and as soon as she’s close enough, it opens to reveal a familiar, soft white light.

“The Zero Room,” she murmurs, fighting back an instinctive wave of trepidation. She’d spent far too long stuck in one of those things during the Time War, fighting off a particularly bad temporal injury. But it’s perfect for what she needs right now – and she isn’t the one who’s injured, for once. Her gaze flits to the ceiling. “Thanks, old girl.”

The TARDIS wheezes in response as the Doctor cross the last stretch of the console room, and deposits the Master ungracefully on the white bed against the blemished spread of the wall. He’s a stark block of dirtied colour against the perfect cleanliness of the white, and she scrunches her face at the thought of how much blood and grime he’s going to get on the covers. And on that note – ugh. She glances down at her coat, her hands, finding them smeared with liquid rust. She sighs. Great. She’ll have to do laundry – which just really means she’ll leave things on the floor somewhere and the TARDIS will, somehow, sort it all out.

She hesitates for one moment, watching him. Half-expecting him to stir – to open his eyes and grin, strength fully returned because it had never really been gone, and tell her how this had all been a trick. A lure to get her to allow him into her own TARDIS – an opportunity for him to take the one thing that is more precious to her than anything else in the universe.

But he doesn’t.

He just lies there, vulnerable in a way that neither of them have been with each other this time around.

It feels – wrong. So wrong, in so many different ways. After everything that’s happened between them…

But it also feels right, in the way that a knife between her ribs and a laugh on her lips feels like home – and that’s worse. That’s worse than any of the rest of it.

She doesn’t know how long she hovers there, frozen in the doorway, a mirror image of how she’d been when she first found him in that surgery. But at the thought of it, bile rises in her throat again, bringing with it an acidic, burning anger. An anger that, for once, is not directed at him.

She turns, crossing the threshold back into the console room, hearing the door close itself behind her.

“Make sure he stays,” she instructs her ship, getting a whorp of affirmation in response. “I won’t be long.”

She returns to the TARDIS less than twenty minutes later, a purple coat under her arm, a jar of cybernetic mercury in her hand, and the stench of smoke on her heels.

The console room dims to a low, blue light as she crosses the room, and she can feel her ship’s condemnation like breath on the back of her neck.

“Tell me they were good people,” she says under her breath, icy in a way that burning black-market surgeries are not. “Tell me it would have been right or just to leave them be.”

The TARDIS doesn’t reply.

She deals with the Cyberium quickly. There’s a room full of shelves that frequently gets shifted right into the centre of her ship’s infinite halls, near-impossible to reach – and impossible to escape from. The TARDIS moves it to the door opposite the library, just past the bins, and she slips inside without a word. She finds a space a few shelves in, right next to the glowing box that still mutters a quiet, desperate recording. Emergency Time Lord messaging system. There’s still a symbol on the side – the coiled ouroboros of the Corsair. The Doctor swallows, shoving the jar into place and stubbornly ignoring it, thinking instead about how funny it is that something as advance as the Cyberium could be foiled by something as simple as a well-made jar. Ha! Yeah. She’s definitely not thinking about anything other than that. She's definitely not thinking about burning planets and dead friends and dead species that apparently are only hers because they built themselves out of her blood –

She turns – and comes to a stop in the doorway, pressing her head against the frame.

For a moment, her loneliness is so overwhelming that she thinks it might swallow her up completely. Solar systems into a blackhole. Planets, crushed by gravity into nothing, their own star turned against them.

Her eyes slip closed, and behind her eyes Gallifrey burns two times over.

Even before then, she’d been alone. No one else in the universe like her.

With one exception.

And she hates him. She does, with everything she is.

But she’s also so pitifully, painfully relieved that, out of all of them –

The very thought of it sends guilt twisting her stomach. But she doesn’t swallow the thought down.

Around her, the TARDIS hums, nudging her mind. A sigh slips from her lips.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, glancing down at the coat still held under her arm. “Might as well.”

She wanders back through long corridors, not even thinking about where she’s going. Her ship bends the hallways around her, guiding her directly where she needs to go. When the TARDIS places a door directly in front of her, she doesn’t hesitate to open it, already braced for the whiteness of the light that lies beyond it.

She steps through the threshold, and the door slides shut behind her. The Master is still exactly where she left him, completely gone from the world. For a moment, she just stands there, considering him. She hasn’t seen him sleep with this face. Hasn’t seen him like this at all. And she can’t help but think of that boy who found her in a barn – who’d slept beside her under burlap covers.

He burned Gallifrey, part of her hisses, a reminder. He annihilated them all.

She breathes in, and she can still smell the smoke from the fire she started only minutes ago.

He did it for you, another part of her whispers – the part of her, she thinks, that had screamed for someone to help her when she’d laid on that table and died a hundred times over.

She steps forward, silent. A ghost in bloodied blue against the white.

Without a word, she drapes his coat over his sleeping form, before crouching down so she’s level with his face. A brush of her fingers against his face tells her all she needs to know – he’s still alive, and looks like he’s slipped into a healing coma. She sighs. He’s not going to be bothering her for a while, in that case. Also means he’s not leaving immediately. But – fine. She’s sure that the moment he wakes up, he’ll be gone without saying goodbye. She’ll probably leave the door open for him. It’ll make it easier, for both of them.

But it means she can’t quite stop the way her hand reaches up to his hair, fingers tangling with the strands.

“I met her, you know,” she murmurs. “Tecteun.” She looks away, down at her other hand – at the ash and blood under her fingernails. “I’m sure you’ve been looking for her, too. Bet you knew that she wasn’t dead the whole time.”

She can’t help the laugh that escapes her lips, loud in the quietness.

“Anyway, don’t beat yourself up over not being able to find her,” she tells him, even though there’s no way he’s hearing her. He’s out – and that’s the only reason she’s even here, talking to him. “She wasn’t even in this universe. She was crossing the void. Trying to poison this universe on the way out whilst she was at it – and then tried to say it was my fault.”

It’s so strange, saying it out loud. She shakes her head.

“I haven’t told anyone this. I don’t even know why I’m telling you,” she murmurs, even though she knows full well it’s because the words have been clamouring inside her, waiting to pour out. This is just the first time she’s had an audience that won’t answer back.

“She’s dead.” The words are barely a scrape against the air. “Someone else killed her whilst I watched.”

She swallows. Thinks of memories and organs in jars. Of lying on a table, dying over and over.

Tecteun, disintegrating before her eyes at the hands of an enemy she didn’t even remember, and with her went any hope of answers, of justice, of closure –

The Master, stood before the burning vista of Gallifrey.

“It would have been better, I think,” she says, like a prayer, like a confession, “if you’d been the one to do it.”