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I should be dead.
The TARDIS floor is cold and sticky under their cheek. They lift their head, and hair pulls from their scalp, trapped in the dark red stains.
Brought me in. Left me here. I want to be dead. They recoil from the final thought on sore hands, broken nails crusted with their own blood. Wars named for devouring time should be cleaner. It all seems so high, far and beyond their own senses, but it’s still fought with bodies. Not theirs. They don’t fight for a world that won’t exist and so doesn’t, except as an unintended prison.
The Time War does not care. It chews them up anyway. It tears them all between its teeth and starts again on the same flesh untouched when it’s finished.
They are breathing, and they are naked, and they are cold, and he did not take the watch.
He knows what it is. He takes it in his hand sometimes, stops them dead when the chain around their neck pulls tight and thumbs the watch. He has never taken it from them.
They suppose, if he’d thought he’d left a corpse at the foot of the engine, he would have.
What a waste, otherwise.
They take it between their hands. It’s warm and beating like a second heart beside their own. They curl around it like it could heat the rest of their shivering body.
There is a feeling like rain on the back of their neck. They flinch. It goes away, reluctantly.
She’s trying to help as best she can. She is flying with jagged shoots through time — where all her focus should be on avoiding the rising peaks of years-lived-twice and years-that-weren’t — and she still reaches out to comfort them. Even wants no mind inside theirs but their own, but the unavoidable psychic landscape of their shelter means they’re never really alone. She’s clumsy compared to the Doctor’s TARDIS, unused to a human inhabitant, born and broken for war. And she retreats further when Even makes the comparison, as though she’s hurt by it.
Even presses the watch against their cheek. The metal is a poor substitute for what they want. They get their blood on it.
They stiffen at the approaching footsteps, but they know the quick pace. They listen to his brief pauses around the console, circling to make sure they aren’t off-track. He doesn’t tell them to do anything, doesn’t name an instrument or an adjustment. He knows they’re awake. He steps around them to view their trajectory, and Even doesn’t turn their head up, taking in the folds of the short robes he’s wearing and the mud on his boots.
(They have a matching set. Or had. He liked them to compliment him when they were seen, and given how the translation circuit left them stranded with only their rudimentary understanding of his language, they didn’t argue with having an easy way for people to see them and know they were together. (Besides, they understood more every week, if weeks were how they were measuring their life. It was funny what people would reveal to someone they thought couldn’t hear them.))
He stops moving, very briefly, and then starts again in place, a never-ending stream of small gestures like he can’t contain them. He is most like the Doctor when he does that, and Even doesn’t think about any other way that he could be.
“You’re alive,” he says, as if it’s a surprise and not something he must have known. Even raises their eyes to his hands. They’re clean. They hate him for taking the time to. “You can thank me now,” he continues after a beat of silence.
“What have you done to me?” they ask. Their knuckles are going white around the watch.
“I saved your life. And didn’t you look? I left you a souvenir.” They raise their eyes further, to his chest, and then drop them completely. If nothing else, at least with him they always have an excuse not to look him in the eye. “A reminder,” he says, hushed into a threat. They don’t look, but they do drop one hand down their front, splayed open as it drags over their skin until it finds the raised skin of a scar already older than the wound that made it. The wonders of advanced technology. They trace the line of it over their side as he speaks, “that you can’t die.”
“What have you done to me,” they repeat.
“You ruined your own liver. Don’t blame me,” the Master says. “Or the shrapnel did. Does it hurt?” There’s little care there, only curiosity. “You know, I’m not much of a-“
“No,” they cut him off as his lips begin to curl for his little joke. They hope to disappoint him. The answer mostly seems to bore him instead, which makes their stomach turn and their hair raise on the back of their neck.
They liked those feelings once. They rarely understood the meaning, only the sway and shift of their body. They can connect those sensations to fear now, and their world is less beautiful for it.
The Master stands in front of them. They return their gaze to his boots. It’s not all mud, they realize. There’s worse in the grooves of his heels.
“Where is it?” they ask.
“It wasn’t wasted,” he answers, and he smiles again. There are teeth in it.
Their fingers relax slightly around the watch. They tighten them again, but the moment their focus falls away from defying their relief, it doesn’t stick.
They don’t flinch when he drops down beside them. The hollow in the console where they’ve fit themselves is clearly made for two. When he settles, he does it with a magnanimous toss of his robes. Even takes them and warms themself beneath the cloth, tilting into his body heat without guilt. Time Lords have too much of it, burning and burning inside. It’s selfish to keep it all.
They do not tentatively press into him like they once did the Doctor, unsure of where the boundaries lay. Even tosses a leg over his own. They turn until their face is in his neck. Their hands sneak down against his stomach. The Master sighs and leans back. His arm wraps around them, hand under his robe, fingers pressed into their hip. They drum. The rhythm is far from comforting, but familiar, now, fitting like it infested their skin and made it home. Even lets go of the watch. It falls until the chain catches it and keeps it safe against them. They find the Master’s pulses against their cheek.
They could do a good thing for the universe here.
His fingers don’t stutter. Even’s hands grow firm against his stomach. They open their mouth against his neck and rest their teeth there.
They’ve seen him do it. They’ve seen the mess it makes.
Easier for someone with his inheritance. They have duller fangs. But he armed them himself. They dig that poisonous tooth into his skin as well as the others.
It would probably kill them both.
Or kill them, and leave him to regenerate, if he can. As good as living — to force him to remake himself in their violence.
The Master raises his hand. His fingers wind in their hair. It’s all grown dark now, like his own. He presses them against his neck, and their breaths fan back across their own face, hot and dry like desert wind.
They release his throat. “What have you done to me, Master,” they say a third time.
“It won’t last forever.” He’s honest now. He strokes their hair, nails against their scalp, so clean. They have spread their blood across his skin anyway, rubbing it in from their bloodstained cheeks until his skin and undershirt are mottled with ugly dark reds. “Maintenance. You’ll know when. It’s hard to miss your liver failing.” He strokes through their hair again. “I can fix it if you ask me nicely, Even.”
That is the bargain for their continued life. It’s more fair than they’d expected of him.
They should bite down. They should. He will be the death of them either way.
He can feel that. Without reaction, they know he has to. He is reading them with every touch, and he’s better at this game than the Doctor ever feigned when he gave them their short-lived lessons in psychic defense. The Master thinks it all flies over their head, and it’s funny, how much people will reveal when they think someone can’t hear them.
Even exhales slowly. He’s keeping them.
“Was it good?” they ask. He is tap-tapping again, on their skull this time. It seems to ring through their head.
“Tender,” he answers.
The TARDIS shudders around them. They wonder what she says to him that they can never hear, but they decide it’s worth not knowing if they also don’t have to know what he says back.
They should be dead. They feel whole. They aren’t sure how much of them is left. They cannot leave.
They brace their teeth against his throat again. For now, at least, neither can he.