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This is arguably not the most brilliant plan the Doctor’s ever come up with.
In fact, it’s perhaps technically not even really a plan at all.
There had certainly been very little thought involved when she’d decided to input the coordinates to O’s former address, against the TARDIS’s wishes, or when she’d shifted the temporal array to take her back to about a year before he’d swanned off to the outback and set off to ruin her life in earnest.
There had perhaps been even less thought involved when she’d bounded up to his door and grinned her way through an inane excuse involving a worrying Artron storm over London that might affect anyone who’d ever met a time traveller and so could she come in and keep an eye on him until it was all over to make sure he was all right?
And, most likely, there had been precisely no thought of any kind involved when she’d ended up pressing him up against his kitchen wall and snogging him senseless.
She tugs at his hair, pulling him closer, and he sighs into her mouth, the sensation of it echoing through her like a flash.
No thought of any kind, certainly, but stars does not thinking feel spectacular, sometimes.
And, well, no, it’s not that she doesn’t have a plan. She’s the Doctor. She always has a plan.
The fact is, part of her has been curious, despite herself, of how he’d managed this whole O thing. She’s maybe not always particularly observant and the Master’s always been good at disguises, but she and O had been friends for years. Sure, she’d only ever met him the once, but to sustain the illusion on that scale, for so long…
Something twists between her hearts, a hollow type of grief, the loss of someone who’d never really existed.
Thankfully, the person who’d never really existed chooses this precise moment to start trailing a line of scattered, searing kisses down the side of her neck, dragging a shaky sigh from her throat and efficiently reducing the feeling to ash.
It takes a moment to regain her focus, and even then, it’s somewhat hazy. But, yes, this is exactly her point, actually. This? Is a lie. A lie he’s managed to maintain over years, and that has no business being as convincing as it is.
And so, that means that this evening is not the thoughtless, reckless, somewhat self-destructive impulse her TARDIS disapproved of so strongly. No, it’s in fact a very elaborate experimental design that seeks to elucidate two key questions.
One; figure out whether the charade holds water when he’s forced to interact with her in person, with some direct contact, and not just over text.
Two; if so, figure out how the hell he’s pulling it off, so she can make sure it never happens again.
There may possibly be a third, less critical question, which maybe isn’t so much a question as a general objective, and maybe isn’t so much an objective as a slightly petty kind of revenge. But that’s hardly the point.
So, yes. Two-fold plan, carefully thought out, perfectly executed. Scientific, really. She just… hasn’t been aware of it until now. Go, subconscious; really on top of things, just like always.
His teeth graze over her collarbone, and her breath hitches. Alright, so maybe this is taking direct contact a little literally, but that just means she’s thorough. Exploring her research questions under every angle. Every option. Leaving no detail uninspected, no conjecture untested—
He bites, gentle, but the sting of it is like being struck with lightning, shattering her train of thought. Her self-control, too, goes out the window and she nearly falls into him, clinging to his shoulders for support. She feels him smile against her skin, and he presses a soft kiss into the same spot, almost apologetic.
Right. Yes. Scientific… something. Investigation. Or was it inquiry? Definitely one of the two.
The point she’s trying to make is that she’s been working this out. And, much to her annoyance, the answer to question number one seems to be a very definite yes.
He’d answered his door in character, down to the hair, tucked up in that little swoop that always makes her fingers itch with the urge to bring it down over his eyes. He hadn’t let through any panic, just a perfectly acceptable kind of delighted surprise. He hadn’t even blinked at her absolute bullshit excuse, even though the sheer concept of an “Artron storm” would have made anyone who’d ever even touched a vortex manipulator roll their eyes hard enough to strain a muscle. His flat had been tidy, but lived in enough to pass her as-thorough-as-she-could-make-it inspection.
He'd even cooked dinner for the two of them, in a move so domestically human it had taken all her willpower not to gape at him when he’d offered. Turned out, he was bafflingly good in the kitchen, to the point where she’d had to wonder how many of his O years he’d spent living as an actual human; only to dismiss that question, when the somehow both obvious and impossible answer of all of them presented itself immediately.
And through all of this, not once had he come close to breaking character. She’d spent the entire evening under the warm, gentle pressure of O’s gaze, his quiet laugh at her most outlandish stories, his softly awed look every time he glanced at her, like he couldn’t quite believe she was here at all.
So. As any good scientist would, she’d introduced… something of a stress test. Decided to push the experimental conditions to their limits.
And hence. The snogging.
So, really, it’s all very scientific. Perfectly justified. Rational, even. The logical next step, in a well thought-through scientific method.
And, as it happens, experimental results are perfectly, infuriatingly consistent.
O kisses exactly as he ought to.
He’s steady; reassuringly solid without ever leaning into oppressive. He lets her drive him back, lets her lead with no hesitation, in a way that makes her head spin a little. He’s everywhere, yet never crowds her.
And so, yes, fine. Insufferably, he can stay in character no matter the circumstances. Fine.
But that only leads her to question two: how.
As it happens, she’s had an idea about that from the start.
Some of it’s obvious, like the sheer effort he’s put into set design and background work. This flat, O’s clothes, O’s file and all the associated trail he’s created… it’s all perfect, with just enough inconsistencies to feel real.
More delicate is the frankly astonishing psychic shield he has up. It hides his right heart—even with her palm pressed right up against his chest, she can’t feel a thing—and his psychic signature. It blocks up to the smallest trace of touch telepathy, but also projects a perfect imitation of a low-level human telepathic response. It’s a work of art, really, for all that it’s been created with the express purpose of ruining her life.
But. It’s not just those things. In fact, none of them are the real key to this charade.
Like all excellent lies, O’s got just that bit of truth to him.
The sweet, soft-spoken analyst with an interest in the extra-terrestrial isn’t just a shell or a plain, single-layer mask. There’s a definite measure of reality in him; the smallest glimpse of the wearer, muddling with his disguise. Unavoidable, with something that lasts this long, but he’d used it, turned those slip ups into something that made O just that little bit more interesting, just that little bit more real.
It was perceivable over text: a sharper sense of humour than she’d have expected from him, an intuitive grasp of her silences, of when she’d need distraction or space… The smallest of slips, that had kept her attention across regenerations the way only the Master really could.
And it comes out now, too. It’s not easy, distinguishing which bits of this are him and which are O, but she has a few guesses. The hesitation is O, she knows, the way he stops himself and holds back, like he doesn’t want to scare her.
But the way he keeps pulling her closer, like he can never have her quite close enough? That? That is all him.
He says her name, a breathless whisper as his lips brush over the shell of her ear, and the sheer awe of it is O, too, has to be. It doesn’t make it any less intoxicating. If anything, the sting of fury and hurt only makes the sensations sweeter in contrast. Loathing-laced shivers course through her, and she grasps his jaw, brings his mouth back to hers to hide the snarl threatening at her lips.
Of course he’d aim for her ego. Of course it would work. It always does.
In retaliation, she murmurs his name, O’s name, presses it against his lips with a small, happy smile. To her intense annoyance, he doesn’t so much as twitch, not betraying anything of the irritation he has to be feeling.
And of course, touch telepathy is no help. His psychic shield blocks most of his reactions, leaving her blind in a way she hates. It’s like having to squint at a work of art through a thick, smudged glass case; she only gets the faintest of ideas, the general lines with none of the gorgeous, addictive detailing. Out of purely reflexive frustration, she finds herself digging against it, a push of her own mind against its blank, anonymous surface and—
His hand grips her throat, sudden steel, unyielding.
She freezes, and blinks her eyes open. They’re still inches apart; she can feel his breath over her face. Outwardly, nothing has changed, but… His eyes have shifted. Sweet, kind, adorable O has vanished; she’s staring at the Master, who’s scanning her with a completely unreadable look.
“When are you from?”
Well. Fuck.
He still looks like O, and it’s captivating. Even though she knows this really isn’t the time, she finds herself mesmerised: the way all those details—the clothes, and the hair, even the damned kitchen—suddenly look so fake and thin and obvious. It’s all washed out, like an forgotten, abandoned movie set, or an ill-fitting disguise. It’s all the confirmation she needs regarding his methods, really; it’s not all smoke and mirrors. There’s real magic in it too, magic only he’s ever had the secret to.
His grip on her throat tightens near imperceptibly and she inhales sharply against something that is not fear.
“How much do you know?” His voice is still dangerously neutral, giving nothing away.
“Enough.” There’s nothing she can say, not as a part of his personal future. Already their timeline is tensing like a bowstring, the loop she’s putting in it creating unnatural strain.
He senses it too. “Risking the web of time?” A slow, sardonic smile cuts at his mouth. “My, Doctor. You could have just texted—oh, but wait.” He winces, faux-apology making her clench her fists in the fabric of his shirt.
She shouldn’t let him get to her that easily, but her reply is much too sharp all the same. “What, going to tell on me, are you? Oh wait.” She narrows her eyes at him. “No one to tattle to. It’s just us, now.”
It’s a shot in the dark, but she expects it to land. She’s been wracking her brains for the why of everything he’s done, and the only conclusion she has reached is that it has to be something like this, involving the two of them, against everyone else. It must be. It always is, really. When it’s really important, then it is.
But he doesn’t snap, doesn’t bare his teeth at her. Instead his grip grows laxer, which a small, horrible part of her is inordinately disappointed about.
“So you don’t know,” he whispers, apparently to himself.
“Don’t know what?” There’s something about his tone that sends unease pooling in her gut.
“Everything. Anything.” His gaze is nothing short of absent, but before she can really start to worry, it sharpens back into something intent as he scans her face. “So. Why are you here?”
Silence is the best defence in general, and it also happens to be her only option at present. She can’t say anything without doing irreparable damage to time, and it’s just as well seeing as she finds her mind completely blanking.
“Hm?” he pushes, and his grip shifts. He runs his thumb along the line of her jaw, delicate, sending involuntary shivers through her. “Come on, I know you’ve got some sort of ridiculous plan.”
Ha! she thinks, half delirious, as his thumb slides down, presses, hard, into her pulse point. She really doesn’t.
“Trying to shift the timeline? Nudge history into something more to your liking?” he murmurs, leaning forward, closer, not close enough.
Huh, that’s quite a good idea, actually. Risky, but maybe she could have managed a few changes. Probably she should have thought of that. She stays silent.
His grip relaxes, drops lower, until he can trace the line of her collarbone with a gentle, insistent fingertip. The skin to skin contact feels like he’s trailing an open flame, even with his psychic shield still firmly in place. He follows its edge, with a constant pressure, like it’s something precious, priceless. Like it’s something he’d like nothing more than to shatter.
She’s barely breathing, her breaths coming short and ragged as she stays immobile, almost hypnotised. It’s all of it; the slow, deliberate movements, the tantalising proximity, the steady, persuasive cadence of his words. She feels vaguely untethered, not quite real. Maybe that’s why the words slip out, without her noticing
“I just wanted,” she breathes, her voice getting stuck as he reaches the hollow between her collarbones, as he presses down gently. “I just wanted to see my friend.”
Time freezes. She can feel it, the weight of it pressing into her, like shifting atmospheric pressure, until—
His hand flies back to her throat, with an inexorable, delicious pressure tightening his grip, restricting airflow. He’s shaking with barely restrained power, eyes blazing as they stare into hers and it’s intoxicating.
But not as intoxicating as how perfectly casual he sounds when he repeats, “Your friend?”
The threat is so acute she can almost taste it. It comes from him as much as it does from the stretched-taut line of their shared history.
She leans into it, the sheer danger of his stance and his voice and his grip. “Yeah,” she breathes, eyes wide. “My friend. He’s…” And finally the spell breaks, and she finds herself having to look away to continue. “He’s brilliant. So fast, so clever. Always there for me.” She allows herself to crack a small smile. “Even when I don’t expect him. I haven’t seen him in—”
The tension of the timeline reaches a new high, echoing like a whine in her ears, but she forges on.
“—in a long time.” The timeline rocks, shudders, twists, but holds. He lets out a slow, controlled breath, and she knows he feels it, too, both the risk and the thrill of it. Time isn’t meant to be played with like this, and there’s a charge building in the air around them, making the back of her neck prickle.
“I missed him,” she murmurs, and she can taste metal at the back of her throat.
She pushes closer to him, and he lets her, until they’re down to inches of air that is heating up with the sheer voltage differential she’s building with nothing but words. Temporal energy ratchets up into spirals, bleeding from the inexorable, increasing proximity of two sections of a timeline that should never, ever touch.
Closer, and he adjusts his grip, lets her inch forward, without letting go.
The scent of ozone, sharp and dangerous, fills her nose. The energy crackles, warning sparks from the temporal storm—a real one, this time—that she’s creating.
She draws a breath, and the temporal winds fall to nothing, a stillness more threatening than any warning shots.
“I just wanted my friend back.”
The timeline crashes into itself with a sound like the shattering of glass.
When she surges forward and crosses the last inches to kiss him, their history tangles with them, the brilliant, heat-choked flash of the collision blinding in its intensity.
It’s wrong, in the most visceral sense of the term. A temporal abomination, the collision of past and future in a way that goes against every instinct she has. It grates at her time sense, screaming to be corrected as it chafes and twists and snags, electric sparks of pain coursing under her skin, flaring at the points of contact.
He kisses her back, pulling her closer, hellfire blazing when he brings a hand to the back of her neck, temporal eddies swirling like stinging static, and it’s wrong, it’s wrong, but stars, that’s what makes it right, for them.
She should stop this.
However, she’s a little too dizzy to even really string coherent thought together; especially when he kisses her like he’s drowning, or maybe like he’d like nothing better than to drown; especially when he starts losing his grip on his own shield, and it starts to unravel under her hands; especially when he flips them around, crowding her into the wall, until he’s all she can see, hear, feel. His right heart is still shielded, but the left one beats fast and hard enough that it’s almost the same thing.
Stars she’s missed him; like caesium misses water, like hydrogen misses a flame.
A small, near delirious part of her can’t help but think back to her ridiculous excuse for coming here—as if this hadn’t been what she’d been after all along. Ridiculous or not, she has her answers, now.
Kissing him is nothing like kissing O, yes, but she had some of it right. Some of it carries over; the urge to press closer, closer, closer, as if to make up for the distance his own psychic shield forces between their minds, for example. It’s still here, in the way his hands tangle in her hair, and pull at her waist, in how he’s pressing into her like he just can’t quite get close enough, in the way he’s pulling her in with something that borders on desperation.
The sharper bits, too, of course, that came from him as well; there’s as much teeth as lips involved, and the sting of pain finds itself perfectly at home amongst the aftershocks of time twisted over itself, the sheer sensory overload of his being here.
She got one of them wrong, though.
The awe she’d attributed to O, the shaky, awestruck fragility, like he’d not been quite certain of her being really real…
That’s still here, too.
It’s buried, under a blaze of fury, beneath the way he sinks his teeth into the same spot O had earlier, but, oh, with none of the gentle restraint, but it’s there, and that realisation is such a shock it breaks through her haze.
It’s there. Seeping from the cracks in his shield, a sense of unreality, of pure disbelief, of awe that borders on reverence.
For a delirious second, she thinks it would take very little to have him on his knees.
She doesn’t understand it.
He pulls back.
Not far; she doesn’t let him. She holds him there, one hand at the nape of his neck, the other clenched in the material of his shirt, over his hidden right heart, keeping his forehead to hers, nose brushing alongside hers.
She keeps her eyes closed. Breathes. Something shifts; the time winds quiet down, the fury simmers to something quieter.
He brushes a kiss to her mouth, then another. Soft, gentle, but it’s not O, either. It’s something else.
It’s something that tears at the inside of her chest, and she waits until the sting in her eyes subsides to blink them open.
When she does, it’s to find his open wide, staring at her with unreadable swirls in their depths.
She doesn’t speak. She can’t.
“So,” he breathes, and they’re so close she can feel his chest rising with each inhale. “What now?”
Ah. well.
“That’s up to you,” she says, because it’s true. She’s from his future; anything she says could break time further, until the damage is irreparable. They’re already tottering on the edge of real destruction, and anything could push them over.
There’s a flash in his eyes at that; the glimmer of satisfaction at a power over her he hadn’t realised he had. He’s always liked it—obviously, for someone who chose a name like that—but there’s something, she thinks, about when she just hands it to him, without a fight. Something that makes it special.
He rubs his thumb in small, gentle circles at her hip, just under her shirt, and she almost loses track. But she has a card to play, and she can’t afford to skip her turn. Not with the kind of games they play.
“Only—” she starts, letting the word trail off into a deliberately unconcerned quiet.
He stops, eyes flaring because oh, he knows that tone, she’s sure, and she can’t completely suppress the smile tugging at her lips, nor the smug sense of quiet victory that’s warming her chest.
“Only what?” he snarls, and she lets the smile through; a small thing. Tiny.
The flare of anger she gets in response, through his shield and in his spasming hands, is nothing short of spectacular.
“Well,” she says, so reasonable, in the face of his barely controlled rage, knowing it only adds to the fire, “you can do what you want.” She shrugs. “You could kill me right now, if you wanted.”
And the look on his face at that particular suggestion…
“But…” She lets the pause hang in the air, until he’s so tense he’s shaking, a bowstring about to snap. “You don’t know when I’m from. You don’t know what I know, what I’ve seen.” She lifts a hand, traces a finger along his jaw, as delicate as he’d been, earlier. “What you do know, is I don’t know it all yet. You know that whatever your full plan is? It’s not over. Not yet. It’s not complete.”
She pauses, lets her hand drop, and tilts her head, smiling at him oh so sweetly. “And anything you do right now could jeopardise that.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “It could break the entire timeline apart.”
He’s shaking with barely restrained fury, but his expression is completely blank.
The smugness in her chest settles, turns into something with a bit of a sadder edge. “You can let me go,” she whispers, “or you can break time. Like I said. Your choice.”
She’s got him.
There’s no choice at all, and they both know it. And so, even though letting her walk away is akin to giving her the last word in a way he’d rather die than let happen…
They can both feel how high strung their timeline has gotten, how the merest wrong word could snap essential threads free… and he won’t risk it. He can’t. Not without at least screwing himself, his future self, over, and probably worse. Not without making this whole charade useless. Not without obliterating his entire plan before he can finish it—because if there’s one thing she knows, it’s that the Kasaavin were only the beginning.
Not without igniting their shared timeline into a blaze that would be glorious, but lethal to their history. And that, after all, is the one thing he’s never been willing to risk.
She’s won. Just like she knew she would.
It was the ace up her sleeve; her insurance. She always needs one, if she’s going to play at their games. Maybe that’s what’s tugging at her hearts, right now, with something that is not the victory it should be; the fact that it’s always going to come down to this, to failsafes and trump cards, for them to get anything at all. Even something as simple as a pleasant evening together has to come with the threat of total temporal annihilation. She knows it, and he knows it, and they’re used to it, because it’s always been this way, but…
But sometimes, she thinks as she watches him close his eyes, looking so tired even as his hand tightens at her hip, sometimes she can’t help but wish they could do simple. Just here and there. And she thinks, deep down, he must, too.
She can’t help a small, inelegant nudge against his thoughts, wanting to glimpse whatever is drawing at his features. She wants to know if the rage still lurks below, like it should. But he deflects her attempts, gentle, but unyielding, with what seems to be no effort at all.
Only, it turns out it doesn’t really matter anyway: he opens his eyes, and she can see it all, right there, plain as day, in his eyes.
There’s no anger; it’s all grief, pure and raw and completely disproportionate for the situation. Reflexively, she reaches for his mind again, wanting to understand, wanting to comfort, but only gets a helpless sense of running out of time before she is, again, shut out.
She tries to make her voice as gentle as possible in response, knowing it won’t be enough.
“You have to let me go,” she whispers.
It’s the cruellest thing she could say to him, and she knows it. But it’s the truth.
For one hearts-stopping moment, as he stares at her, a storm of pure agony blazes in his gaze. She finds herself wondering if he’s about to shatter time entirely. He seems to be considering it.
She thinks she would let him.
Instead, something changes. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink, but some of the tension seeps away. His hold on her relaxes, becomes something she could break with the merest of intentions, if she so chose. He leans back, barely, but the motion gives her space, keeping him comfortingly close, rather than boxing her in.
Most impressive of all: under his now fantastically messy hair, his eyes shift. They soften, into the gentle gaze of the analyst she’d befriended lifetimes ago.
It’s mesmerising to watch. With every minute, almost imperceptible change, he starts to fit back into his surroundings, like a perfect optical illusion. Even with the changes she caused—the untucked shirt, the messy hair, the marks she left on him—the integration is seamless.
She’s a little dazed by the transition, but still with it enough to be confused about why he’s bothering. “What are you—”
“I don’t have to let you go,” he says, and his voice is still hovering right on the edge of being himself, blurring the line; too soft for the Master, too raw for O. A small afterimage of a smile tugs at a corner of his mouth, too fleeting for her to attribute it to either of them. “Not yet.”
And she thinks she knows where he’s going with this, except it can’t be, because why would he—
He raises a hand, gently running his thumb along her cheek. When he speaks again, his voice has softened almost completely into O’s cadence. “We can’t have this,” he mutters, “but they can.”
Her hearts catch in her chest. He is.
He’s right. The two of them, as themselves, can’t stay, can’t have something as simple as one evening together. Time would shatter.
But the people they’re supposed to be, at the point in time where she’s pretending to be from…
If they both play along, both pretend not to know—who he is, for her, and when she’s from, for him—then the timeline will hold. It has so far, all evening. It’d only started to come apart when she’d slipped up.
If neither of them gives the game away, if they both let themselves lie to each other—and to themselves—then, and only then… they can have this.
By even offering this, he’s showing his hand more than she ever thought he would. If she were to accept, she’d be revealing herself right back; the two of them betraying just how much they miss that simplicity. Not forever. Not even for long. But just for tonight.
He’s watching her, she realises. There’s a hint of his intensity under O’s undemanding gaze. Once he sees he has her attention, he takes a step back.
“Doctor,” he says, and it’s O, entirely, completely, not a trace of himself anywhere, “would you like to stay?”
There are so many reasons why this isn’t a good idea, even if temporal annihilation no longer is one of them.
“Yeah.” The word escapes her, maybe a bit too shaky for the person she’s pretending to be, but she’s never been as good an actor as he is. She smiles at him. “Yeah, O. I really would.”
His answering smile is genuine and bashful and perfectly in character. He holds out his hand.
She takes it.