Work Text:
There’s barely any ground left to stand on.
The water has been rising for years, long years—years of the sun’s gilded expansion burning brighter than ever and swallowing any hope for night. Its rays shine down on the seas, on the oceans chewing up islands and spitting back frothy taunts against scant shorelines. Continents crumble into crags and shed billions of years of layers in the blink of an eye—in two blinks, the world will burn.
The Doctor keeps his eyes closed, avoiding the temptation to watch the planet fall into the steep trap of time. He can still feel it: the wobble of its rotations and the drag of its orbit closer and closer to the end. He doesn’t even know the planet’s name. He didn’t think to check.
The grass around him is red—red and crispy and dry. It’s something to do with artron, he thinks. A chemical reaction tainting the once sapphire turf and marking it with his pollution. Every brush, every barely there touch against the blades swirls them through with crimson, overtakes their cellular structure and tinges them with the stain of his life. He sits in the centre of his own careless destruction, the heart of the storm. The grass looks tarnished. It looks bloodied.
It looks like home.
The fingers woven through his hair switch from soothing swipes to painful pulls, back and forth, back and forth. There’s no telling when the pressure will change, no warning flex of muscle or first hint of nails. It’s fitting, really. They’ve never had a rhythm between them. Just the fight, then the fallout. They already fought—they fought to the last, this time. The fallout seeps higher with the tide, with every passing second.
Tears patter down onto the Doctor’s shoulder, and there’s no rhythm to that, either. He burrows his aching head deeper into rich wool and relaxes into the warmth of a tentative embrace.
He knows how they got here. He knows the part he played, the role he took on and acted out to the best of his ability. He knows.
The score surrounding their bodies casts out wider with each flagging breath, every pulse of artron. The grass takes on the hue of crackling flames, near glowing under the light of the red giant menacing the sky. It’s the closest to a pyre that he’ll get; the closest he deserves.
The Doctor shudders through the waves of energy scalding his veins, his hands spasming against the threat of renewal. He didn’t expect this to hurt so much. He didn’t expect the pain to settle the wild beast in his chest, the selfish thing he’s starved with his cowardice and fed with his acceptance.
“How much longer?” the Master asks, tearing through the stifling blanket of silence they wrapped themselves in hours before. His voice is hoarse from shouting, thick with swallowed down sorrow. More than anything, he sounds defeated. The Doctor can relate.
“Not long.”
Running, always, always running. Leaping over brooks bubbling to life under his feet, dodging rubble crashing down the cliffs. Always, always running.
“How can you tell?” the Master murmurs, mumbles, passes off as casual interest and belies with a hitched sob. His freehand cups the base of the Doctor’s head, holding him closer to the crook of his neck with a fragile care that teeters on the knife’s edge of his regard.
Running, running faster than ever before. Always running, never stopping, he can’t stop, he can’t stop. Pursued, chased across the stars. Just like he said. Just like he dreamed.
The Doctor pushes into the Master’s ministrations, humming at a pleasant tug of hair and hissing at a sharp scratch against his scalp.
“I don’t know,” the Doctor admits, but neither of them can hide from the uneven flutter of his chest against the Master’s, the icy surface of his skin that should be well warmed by the sun, the flight of his filly hearts.
Running, tripping, there’s barely any ground left to stand on. Pulses thump-thump-thump-thumping, mirroring the only other beat of its kind left in the universe. The beat that’s getting closer, the beat he can feel as tangibly as the crackle of static in the air. The beat that’s as much a funeral dirge as it is a lullaby.
“You’re not supposed to give up,” the Master says, echoing his endless screams that began when the Doctor didn’t even try to pick himself off the ground, that grew when he didn’t react to the harsh kick landing deep in his gut or the jeers spat in his face. The screams that petered off to nothing when he let the Master haul him onto his lap without complaint and sought comfort in the arms that damned him.
The Doctor presses a kiss to the hollow of his throat, the skin tear-stained and tacky with sweat. It’s the only apology he can bear to make. “I know.”
There’s barely any ground left to stand on. He can’t run anymore. The planet is dying. He sees his doom in the Master’s eyes, in the whirl of the schism that rings his corneas purple and blows his pupils wide.
“You’re not supposed to—”
“I know,” the Doctor says, kindly, quietly, cutting off the Master’s vulnerability before it can sink back into his throat and fuel his anger. They’ve already done this today—once, twice, arguments blending together until the Doctor’s teeth started chattering, until the Master’s words lost their edge. The Doctor’s body still aches from the brutality of their final battle, but the feeling is obscured behind the numb prickle of his nerves.
They’ve had their violence, tasted the sharpness of its blood. He needs peace for this. He needs to let himself believe the Master’s tears, his soft sniffles, mean he loves him. He doesn’t need it to be true.
Begging, now, pleading and hoping and promising pipe dreams like pipe bombs he detonated before the lies left his mouth, before they reached the Master’s ears.
“You’re always fine in the end, always fine,” the Master insists, his hands clenching tight while the Doctor’s slowly loosen around fistfuls of his shirt. “You must be, because you always keep going, you always keep moving.”
“I’m tired, Master. I’m so tired.” Gallifreyan sounds wrong when it comes from his own lips, it always has. But the harsh consonants and silky vowels slip and slide against his loosening tongue, muffle against the Master’s throat. He’s so tired, and he’s slowing down. Not much longer. He knows.
Bleeding, bleeding and choking and looking up. Seeing the sun—swollen, swelling, ready to burst—burning his eyes on his fate. He can’t run anymore. He won’t run anymore.
The Master’s tears flow freely, soak down his jaw and curl across the Doctor’s temple. “You wouldn’t have been able to keep going if you weren’t okay, right?” It’s been his refrain since the Doctor first fell and refused to rise, since the blade that’s always been lodged between their hearts was ripped from the abstract into reality and found itself in the Doctor’s chest. “You’re always okay, you always keep moving.”
Running, always, always running. He’s so tired, and there’s barely any ground left to stand on. He doesn’t have to run anymore. He won’t—he can’t. Stopping, just this once. For the first time. For the last time.
There’s artron in his lungs, on the wisps of his gasps. It’s hot against his teeth and even hotter lashing against the Master’s skin. The Doctor breathes in, tasting ash and dust and salt from the air around them. He fits his head under the Master’s chin, mustering up the very last of himself to press in impossibly closer. He breathes out, artron spewing from his lips and razing the last of the meadow in the blink of an eye—in two blinks, the world freezes. The artron dissipates. The grass fades back to blue.
“Why aren’t you moving?”