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The knife glints in the peek between shadows—sharp, wicked, honed to a point and chipped towards the hilt. It cuts a smile deep through flesh with a curling whip of the blade and flicks down, drips onto the carpet, soaks new blemishes into vile fibres.
Stagnant air and the ghosts of too many bodies, too many scents, nameless and timeless and overwhelming. (That’s the point, he thinks: make him feel small and rip away the facade, anonymous in the bare bulb lights and shabby wallpaper.) He’s never been here before and he’ll never come back; he can’t predict the future but he can predict himself. He’ll never come back.
He whines, bites it down and forces himself to hold steady on his knees, keeps still with the knife in his sights and the memory of cold steel on his throat.
“You’ll like this,” the Master says—a command, an insistence, never a reassurance. Red-slick fingers adjust around the handle of the blade, carve another gash, loosen as skin splits and pulls away from the laceration.
Flinches are nods and shivers are ‘yes’ and ‘no’ doesn’t have a place here; he’s willing, he pleaded, he followed the rules and the traps laid out with a careful toeing through lines of waning self-preservation—he opens his mouth when the Master traces his lips with the flat of the knife, snags the proffered morsels from its smooth finish without complaint.
“It’s life, my love,” the Master says, coaxing his jaw shut with a shiver of pressure on his chin. “Do you remember what that means yet? Have you counted your scars, do you know where they came from?”
The seeds burst with a drawn out chew and they’re bright, tart, coat down the back of his throat and stain him from the inside—the outside, thickly pigmented juice peeling out of the corners of his mouth and marking his skin.
There’s no trick, no ulterior motive, no everlasting bond forged in pearls of crimson. There’s a pomegranate, and a knife, and an infection of salt creeping onto his lips from the sorry droop of his eyes. It’s life, buried in the crush of arils between his teeth and a trail of stories that aren’t their own, and it’s loss, sweet like rot and he hates himself; he knows that look in the Master’s eyes. They ripple with waves of amber, with a disarmingly golden gleam.
He’s no innocent stolen away and haggled over for his autonomy, nor is he a god smirking upon beauty and claiming his proclivities as love. He's a mess on the floor and the Master put him there so he’ll stay, stay, until whims change and the last of the fruit has been consumed.
Time beats around them; he feels it in his nicked breaths and the heat of the Master’s body edging closer until his head tips back to hoard that gaze, until he’s pinned down by a stare with his soft belly vulnerable. A kick to the gut and he’d succumb, a thrash of the blade and he’d be freed from this farce.
“Do you deserve it?” the Master asks with the unnerving accuracy of true perception: ‘do you deserve the pain?’ and ‘do you deserve to die?’ and no, no he doesn’t; he doesn’t deserve anything he wants. A clicked tongue and a palm around the back of his head—cradling, not coercing—but tick-tick-tick-tick and he slumps forward against rough wool.
“Do you deserve it?” repeats, not unkindly, running rampant with desolate promises and haunted by the looming ruins of memory. “You chased me, Doctor, but you’re not ready to be caught.”
To name a thing, to name oneself, to shout oaths to the heavens and turn heel when they fall, crumble, burn—not only his pledges, but eternity itself. The universe awaits his footfalls with fear and a vague acceptance that his emptiness can only expand as a red giant, that his destiny is wrapped around the whole of creation and wrenches tighter with every smothering second. He fights a sob at the title he chose. The man who heals, a septic ulcer on the pulse of life.
His stubble catches on the wispy fibres over the Master’s thigh, his tears wick away and darken the deep black of the cloth. ‘What do I deserve?’ he wants to ask, needs to know, because he’s trying, but his best is a curse and his worst is a blight. He opens his mouth in question and the only wisdom he receives is a ruby droplet on his tongue. Fewer seeds with every pass, now. His stomach is filled but he’s never felt so starved.
“Do you recognise your voice anymore?” the Master asks, rumbles his fragile bearing with a crouch down and a trail of nectar smeared over his cheek. “You used to beg so well for me, you used to know your place.”
If he dipped into the nebula of his dysfunction, seared his palms over each and every star named after his pain, the heat would draw him to a sun at the centre of his orbit. He doesn’t know who he is—the sun is the Doctor, and it scalds him while it razes the cosmos.
The fingers on his cheeks are a known, as is the knife at the hinge of his jaw, so he leans into both points of pressure and steals comfort doled out with conditions (obedience and a release to humiliation, a leash-like grip on his throat—home, that’s home to him, the only certainty left in his life that never fails to be ripped away).
“When will you learn?” the Master chides, and it burns.
The blade falls to the floor, hushes its crash against the carpet. Those known fingers spread over the arch of his cheekbones, the cut of his jaw, the rise of his nose. They reel him in, and he faces the void of the very deepest sea without a lifeline. He pulls away.
He pulls away but he’s followed, pursued, and it’s not the slide of the Master’s thighs around his kneel that scares him, or the brand of ownership passing through skin. He didn’t earn this and he’s terrified of being given, even as he’s taken from.
“Would you let me teach you?” sounds like a boulder tipping over the rim of a well, pulls him down with the sentiment. “You’re so lost, dear heart, will you ever let me find you?”
He can’t say ‘no,’ it doesn’t have a place here, and if he tore through his cowardice and spoke it into existence then his guilt would be stolen by the Master’s lips, lapped from his mouth and rendered meaningless by the simple matters of ‘yes,’ of wanting and needing. The Master's waist is warm under his hands, soft, deceptively welcoming. He wants to lay him down and blanket his body, prone, pleased, wants to feed him the traces of pomegranate still stuck under his tongue. He needs to feel the race of the Master’s hearts through the velvet veneer of skin, needs to trace the jump of duelling pulses in his throat.
“You could be perfect,” the Master pants, and it aches more than any strike between them (he could be perfect but he isn’t, he won’t be, he doesn’t deserve this gift and he never will). “You could be perfect,” and the buried rejection slides into his bloodstream through the open wound of his being—he’s never had this, he has it now, he feels it slip away with every second.
He sinks back at a shove, kicks his legs out from underneath the Master’s straddle, grasps the lapels of his coat and tugs. And tugs. And tugs, but the Master halts the momentum with a hand slapped over his shoulder, seizes the moment with an affectation of regret.
“Will you be good for me?” the Master asks, and all he can do is try (never enough, never enough). “Will you pretend, just for one minute, that you never left yourself behind?”
It breaks through the haze, breaks through the shame, exposes the last flickering flame of self from his molten core. A knock to the Master’s braced arm, a rolling grapple and the air tightens with the revelry of who’s on top, whose wrists are slammed to the floor and held firm, who felt the goad of power and shrugged into its unhemmed costume.
The Master’s smile is a snick of a sneer, tossed out in crowed delight and wiped away by a downward lunge and the clack of teeth. Desperation grows, passes back and forth in saliva and the lingering nip of fruit—he’s desperate to take, to take and take and take; he thinks he’s found his bitter end.
“There you are,” the Master groans. “You’re perfect, just like this.”
He’d take the air out of the Master’s lungs, inhale the ash of their history, spit it out upon the floor. He’d take the blood from the Master’s veins, bite punctures around his throat, swallow the ecstasy of life. He’d take the teeth out of the Master’s jaws, file him down to a docile creature, lick the smooth hollows of his gums—he’d be triumphant.
The Master would let him take anything he wanted, if he ever meant it.
Slowly now, not stopping, never stopping but the clarity of awareness recedes, the fog of power disperses. He can’t mean anything if he himself is nothing—every action driven by the engine of his unmoored identity is the warning tremble of a quake, and they’ll all fall down into the crater of his despair, chewed by the maw of his potential.
Fingertips are sharp against his temples, goad him back enough to wallow in pitying rosin eyes. “Did you leave me again?” the Master sighs on a trail of disappointment shared and mourned.
The kiss is soft against his forehead, softer against his lips. “You were perfect,” tastes of heartsbreak and he’s never had this before, he’s never had it, but he did for a blip in this liminal spread of possibility. “You were perfect,” tastes of promise and failure and he’s never had this before, he’s never had this…
He’s never had it.
The knife glints in the peek between shadows—sharp, wicked, honed to a point and chipped towards the hilt. It lays motionless on the floor, soaks out a stain in the wretched carpet. He doesn't know where it came from. He doesn’t know where he is.
His cheeks are hot and abraded, sticky and damp. He feels ashamed but he’ll never know why, abandoned but he’s the one who always leaves. He’s never been here before and he’ll never come back; he can’t predict the future but he can predict himself. He’ll never come back.
He picks himself off of the ground, winces as his stomach turns over like the tide. Sickly sweet ambrosia stings his tongue, pinches his throat; his wrist stains pink when he scrubs it over his mouth. (He’ll keep the shirt. He won’t wash it—it smells distantly of days gone by and the weakest parts of him hope it smells of days to come.)
Any journey taken to summit this destination is lost in the fuzzy smog of his mind; the opening number to this curtain call looted by the tear-stained sieve of his memory. He has no audience, no troupe, no script turning page in his mind. No point in an encore, no point in another show when he can’t recall the lines of the last one. He pockets the blade, thumbs over the peril of its dagger tip.
He never comes back.