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Snippets of conversation from the couplings room crackle into the lab.
“Ever since I ran away from you…”
The pounding beat of the drums is nothing compared to the strike of the Doctor's words. They pierce Yana right in the chest and rip through his heart, wrenching it in two.
His heart has ached in the past for himself, for Chantho, for the people he thought before today he could not save, but he has never felt sympathy quite like this. He feels sorry for the captain, yes, but this degree of empathy–because the pain must be empathy–for a man he’s known for a mere few hours?
Jealousy, he would understand. He’s already felt it, spiking within him earlier when Martha clasped the Doctor’s hand in front of his face. They’d beamed at each other and all Yana could think of was the way the Doctor’s hand had felt, clasped in his just minutes before.
That was Yana’s hand to hold. He’d taken it and held on tight, pulled the Doctor through the halls to his lab. The Doctor had smiled then too, laughed, even. Because of Yana. Because of what they could do, together. Two men of science against an impossible problem. There had never been a hand that fit so perfectly in his, that made the old Professor feel, for the first time, that he was not alone.
Jealousy over whatever this relationship is would make sense. The tears that threaten to fall, stinging at the corners of his eyes do not.
Then the feeling turns. Something new pours out from the shredded edges of his heart, sour and burnt and oozing. It feels like… like rage, hate, a bitterness, grown and fermented over centuries of resentment.
Centuries? He’s only…
Only…
The something new grows so rapidly he has no way to prepare for the wave that suddenly bursts forth and crashes over him. It fills him from his chest, covering every inch of his insides with its sickly slime and bringing with it one single revelation: He hates the Doctor.
He hates the Doctor. He hates him, he hates him, he hates– always running, always leaving, always…
Yana blinks, tries to hold the tears back, but the words have him now. The drums are no match for them, in fact, they seem to grow in strength, beating out a war cry as the voices cut at him, over and over.
Time Lord…TARDIS…Daleks…extermination…time vortex…Time War…regeneration...
A single tear runs down his cheek. He’s frozen to the spot as his mind races away from him, towards…
Martha asks him about the grubby broken pocket watch and runs off and nothing makes sense anymore, nothing but…
If only the Doctor were here, now.
The hate is gone. There was no reason for it, how could it have stayed? The Doctor has been nothing but kind and generous to Yana. He had placed a cool hand on his back and knelt before him. He’d asked about the drums. He’d looked up at him with soft eyes and a wistful smile and it had been all Yana could do to pull himself away and back to their work.
But there was the hand, again and again as they circled each other in the lab. A quick tap, a light brush, those few brief moments when the doctor had grabbed him firmly by the waist and handled Yana physically into a better position. Everywhere he looked, the Doctor was there with that hand, leaning on it, adjusting his glasses with it, tapping away at screens or fiddling with components with it, his long agile fingers wrapped tightly around his screwdriver.
He longs to feel those fingers wrapped tightly around his own once more, but all he has right now are the watch and the voices and–
The hand in the jar. He needs to find it, he needs to see it. It will ground him, it will remind him of the Doctor, of this strange, intoxicating man and his alien ideas. The feeling of his hands, the way they moved, wrapping in wires and trailing across his body. He needs the hand.
He finds the hand.
The hand is what does it.
He looks at the hand as his own voices echo in his ears and he knows what he must do.
He opens the watch and he is the Master. The voices are gone. The drums remain.
...
Once he’s dealt with the Doctor and Chantho, he returns to the hand, kneels beside it, reaches his own hand out toward it and caresses its case. He smiles.
There are so many things a Time Lord like him can do with a hand like this.
The Master lifts the hand and wraps it tightly in his arms. He brings it up to his face, presses his cheek to the glass, inhales deeply. The casing is cool against his skin.
He carries the hand to the TARDIS and places it gently beside the console. It seems to like that, judging by the way it wiggles, jostled about by the bubbles in its preservation fluid.
The Master takes a long look back at the Doctor's hand as he steps out of the TARDIS to finish his work. He feels alight with a fire he has not known for 70 years.
He has plans for the hand. Oh the many terrible things they’ll do together.
Hands, at least, cannot run away.