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The Master had never particularly liked humans. What was there to like? Bunch of smelly, squabbling, primitive little creatures. Oh, he wasn’t some sort of Gallifreyan chauvinist or anything, he didn’t exactly care for (most of) his own people, either. Although recently his species’ average intelligence had improved quite suddenly. One could even say explosively. Ha.
Despite his general distaste for Earth and its inhabitants, he had to admit that prolonged exposure was causing him to build up a tolerance. And humans did have a few redeeming qualities. Fun music. Some decent food, some interesting clothing styles. One or two creative methods for killing people, though nothing that hadn’t already been invented a billion times over elsewhere in the universe, throughout the unimaginably broad scope of space and time. Sentient beings were all the same when you got down to it, really.
Given the incredible tediousness and pointlessness of nearly everybody else he’d ever met, it was a surprise that he hadn’t gone the hermit route long before now. But then again, after the better part of a century essentially stuck in one room, with salvation from his crushing boredom only coming when the Doctor deigned to allow it, he’d have thought his next regeneration would be just desperate for company. Even if he was hiding out among such lesser beings, needs must, surely? A little colour, a little stimulation. Some people to chat with, problems to solve, minds to manipulate and break. An elaborate scheme, with a false identity to match, and the promise of a satisfying payoff to tide him over. Classic, right? Such fun! But a good five years playing the docile human MI6 agent, and he’d been almost ready to open an artery with his own teeth just for a change of pace. Yet another tedious prison, this one of his own making, and getting texts from the Doctor was the humiliating high point of his existence.
His MI6 coworkers had always thought he was weird (part of the cover story, of course. The Doctor couldn’t resist a misfit). But they’d surely noticed O getting more and more snappish and eccentric as the Master’s mask began to show cracks. They’d become uncomfortable around him. The Master wasn’t oblivious, he’d been an ostracised schoolchild once, and it turned out the average office job had quite a lot in common with the playground. You know O in analytics? He’s always been a bit of an odd duck, but he seems like he’s… struggling, lately. … I know, he kinda creeps me out. I feel bad for him. How long d’you think until he goes properly mental? That wasn’t too far off what he wanted them to think. Nobody had really been surprised when he’d abruptly quit his job to move to a paranoid little shack on the opposite side of the planet, in the sand-blasted middle of nowhere.
The benefits of living in the middle of nowhere: nobody around to bother him. By rights he should have hated it. He thrived on chaos, he’d had more than enough peace and quiet on his last regeneration. But he’d also learnt that peace and quiet was precisely what he needed, so he could plan for the real chaos. So he sat on his verandah, gazed out at the shimmering heat haze of the horizon, and thought. Nothing but the sound of the breeze rustling through the mallee scrub, the chirp of crickets and the buzz of flies, nothing to distract him from the fevered, seething swirl of his plans, the memory of a planet burning, the phantom sound of drumbeats. Beaten into the soft meat of his brain like a bruise.
There was life out here, and plenty of it, but you wouldn’t know to look at it sometimes. On a hot, still afternoon, he could walk out into a salt pan and sit quietly and pretend he was the only living thing left on the planet. The dirt in this place reminded him of Gallifrey, the iron-rich orange brown of it, and the deeper reds of the sand dunes further west. The eucalypt trees with their grey-green leaves that in the right light almost looked silver. The slight tang of radiation he could taste when the breeze blew the wrong way, decaying isotopes counting down their half-lives tick tick tick tick like a clock. The Doctor’s precious humans had tested bombs out in the desert, decades ago, the Master vaguely recalled. Even though there were other humans already living there. Left the place such a mess. The things people did, when they knew they could get away with it.
The drawbacks of living in the middle of nowhere: superior Gallifreyan biology still hadn’t overcome the need to eat food (they should’ve thought of that while they were making improvements, pity the oh so special Timeless Child hadn’t been able to provide a simple solution) and he had to drive nearly two hours into the nearest town to pick up groceries.
All right, most of the time he just took the TARDIS. But people in town knew him, unfortunately. He’d had to buy the plot of land his TARDIS was parked on, and it was lucky that humans’ electronic banking systems were so easy to fool. His nearest neighbour was a good twenty kilometres away, the next one even further again. But these humans were nosy. They kept track of who lived where, who bought property nearby, who came into town. They remembered his face, and eventually his name.
The town itself wasn’t much to speak of. You could take a leisurely stroll from one end to the other in under half an hour, and in a car, you could practically blink and miss the entire thing. A bank of short streets full of dingy little houses, some brick, some in pale weatherboard cladding. All with the same red-baked dirt yard shaded by stringy-barked eucalypt trees. Many of the houses had cars parked in the driveway and solar panels installed on the roof, but it was obvious just as many were unoccupied. The town was big enough to support a primary school, and a hotel or two for the sporadic tourist trade. Why anyone would want to come for a visit was quite beyond the Master’s understanding, which made it no different from any other destination on the planet, really. But at least he was here for a reason. So he parked his TARDIS outside the town’s tiny grocery store, and made his way inside.
The woman working at the grocery store— the Master didn’t care to learn her name, but O would, and her name tag said “Shaz”, so that was what he called her— always gave him a friendly wave. Always clucked over his purchases when he checked out, asked him if he was sure he bought enough, was that going to last him until next time he came into town? It was plenty. He’d been adequately fueling his own body for centuries, he wanted to snap at her, just to see the look on her face. Try telling him something he didn’t know about his nutritional needs. He could teach her species’ best so-called scientists things about cellular metabolism that would blow their tiny minds. Then afterwards maybe he actually would blow their literal heads open, with covertly placed micro-explosives. They probably wouldn’t appreciate the pun, but he would, and that was what mattered.
No reason to be keeping up his cover identity, in this tiny pustule of a town. Not like the Doctor was about to show up and start asking around for corroborating evidence. He could be as much of a bastard as he wanted, and there would be no consequences. He could pick up a tin of beans off the checkout conveyor belt, grip it tight and raise it high and cave Shaz’s skull in. He could pull out his TCE and kill every person in this grocery store, and it would simply be one more tragic unsolved mystery in a universe where bad things happened all the time for absolutely no reason at all. He wouldn’t leave any witnesses. Nobody who mattered would ever know (there was only one person in the entire worthless universe who ever actually mattered).
Granted, it would cause a bit of excitement. The town was near a primitive human airbase, and everything there was in some way owned by or affiliated with whichever military group was in control of the nation’s airforce. And while it would be funny watching them scurry around like ants on a hill trying to figure out who went on a murdering spree in a grocery store in their supposed territory, he’d enough self-restraint to recognise the momentary thrill wouldn’t be worth the inconvenience.
So he didn’t do any of that. He ducked his head and smiled the smile that made brainless humans melt, and waved off Shaz’s concern. Thought of it as practice.
As Shaz scanned the barcode on the tin of beans that could’ve killed her, against all odds she thought of something useful to say.
“By the way, Omar,” she said. That had been the real O’s name, before the Master had stolen his job and his life and gotten stuck with the admittedly amusing code name. “There was someone in here asking around about you earlier, said he was your brother?”
That put the Master on alert. He didn’t have a brother, and even if he ever had, he certainly wouldn’t anymore.
“What did he say his name was?” the Master asked.
“Harry,” Shaz said. “Looked just like you but with a beard.”
“Ah,” said the Master, extemporising. “My evil twin, so to speak. Y’know, when we were teenagers we flipped a coin to see who would get to experiment with facial hair and who would have to keep clean shaven, so people could tell us apart. You’d think moving to a different continent would make it a moot point, but he still holds me to it.”
“No kidding?” said Shaz, like the gullible single-celled organism she was. “I always thought having an identical twin would be so fun.”
“Less than you would think,” said the Master, who’d had his fair share of run-ins with doppelgängers and shape shifting mimics and alternate versions of himself, and wasn’t looking forward to finding out which of the above this Harry was going to turn out to be. “Guess I’d better track him down. Did he say where he was going?”
“The park,” said Shaz, meaning the feeble patch of sun-scorched grass a couple of streets away.
“Typical that he couldn’t just give me a call,” the Master said, rolling his eyes. “Siblings, eh? Always have to make things difficult.”
“Nice of him to come all the way out here to see you, though,” said Shaz.
We’ll see, the Master thought.
He didn’t bother to rush. If “Harry” had been hanging around town in the vague hope the Master would eventually show up, then he could wait a bit longer. The Master loaded his groceries into boxes, and carried them one by one out to his TARDIS. It had taken the shape of a four-wheel-drive motor vehicle, as it always did in town. The boot opened into the dimensionally engineered space of the console room, where he placed his boxes of groceries, but the front hull of the ship had extruded itself quite obligingly into the facsimile of a car’s cockpit. He could even drive it the short distance to the park— there was no actual engine under the hood, of course, but it wasn’t exactly complicated for his TARDIS to rotate its wheels and propel itself forward.
The Master pulled to a slightly haphazard stop across the street. His TARDIS was straddling one of the white lines that were supposed to delineate the spaces for each vehicle, but he wasn’t about to get back in and fix it. Not like vehicle spaces were in high demand.
The park itself was something of an open-air museum, a sad little exhibition of obsolete human missiles and aircraft, all quietly baking in the afternoon sun. The Master had to admire the cheerful menace of turning old weapons into display pieces, but why leave them out in the desert where hardly anybody could see them? Stick them in the middle of a major city if you wanted to really make a statement. This is what we’ll drop on you if you don’t behave! Yeah. They were all inert, though, any active components removed. That had been one of the things he’d immediately checked, first time he came to town and saw them. A shame, but it was hardly as if he couldn’t just make his own explosive devices, should it come to that.
Gutted rockets and missiles stood around the park like obelisks. Behind them, the metal shells of several aeroplanes from some prior human war. Underfoot, the grass— mostly dirt— was just as brown and patchy as it always was. If the Master had been in charge of urban planning, he’d just as soon not have bothered.
Casting his eyes around the park, the Master spotted himself, standing in the shadow of a red-tipped, point-nosed rocket. And it was himself, he was quite sure, not an impostor. Even from this distance, the potential paradox was making his teeth itch. It was exceedingly difficult to fake that effect, and he’d become quite familiar with it, shortly before his most recent regeneration.
Of course, even if it was just a future version of himself, that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a threat. He’d learnt that on his last regeneration, too.
The Master hopped out of his TARDIS, and sauntered over towards Harry (the Master had decided to just keep calling him Harry, even though he was sure the name had been chosen in reference to Harold Saxon, who was hardly top of the list of his favourite people lately). Harry, clearly sensing his presence, gave him a nod.
“Hello, handsome,” the Master called out. Couldn’t hurt to be friendly. “I like the beard.”
“Thanks,” said Harry. “You should consider growing one yourself. Not just yet, though. Maybe try a bit of stubble for a while.”
The Master’s time sense twanged, then settled. Clearly the statement had been somehow important, but not that important. Just as well. Facetious personal grooming advice would’ve been a really stupid thing to cause a paradox over.
“I’ll consider it,” he settled on, as a nice, neutral answer. He’d figured the clean-shaven look was his best bet for coming off as innocent and trustworthy— not to mention distancing himself from some of his previous incarnations— but maybe some stubble would make him seem more approachable. More human.
“If you’ll take some advice in return,” the Master added, “next time you’re planning on a quick jaunt to the outback, at least try and dress for the occasion.” His other self was wearing a rather fetching deep-blue-and-orange plaid waistcoat and matching trousers, having removed his jacket (there surely must have been a jacket at some point) and rolled up his shirtsleeves as his only concession to the weather. Even standing in the shade, there was sweat beading on his temples.
“Yes,” Harry’s lip curled ever so slightly as he glanced down at the Master’s shorts and hiking boots. “Can’t say I remember the clothing choices of this period of my life with any particular fondness.”
“So you are a future version of me, then?” the Master couldn’t help asking, even though he’d already guessed as much.
“We both know I probably shouldn’t answer that. Frankly, the less you know about the future timeline, the better.”
“So why are you here at all?” the Master folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t know what his future self thought he was playing at. It wasn’t like he could give himself any useful advice— their tangled timeline was fragile enough after the whole paradoxical double self-murder thing, a reckless move like looping back on himself to try and change his own future could absolutely shatter it. And if the presence of future-him fucked up the timeline in some irrevocable way before he got the chance to execute his plans, to see the look on the Doctor’s face, the Master would be furious. He’d make it so that his future self’s life was not worth living, if the idiot was careless enough to ruin things for them now.
“Not gonna tell you just yet,” said Harry, smugly. It wasn’t a good look on him. That was hardly going to stop the Master from being smug in the future, of course— presumably it’d look better once he got around to doing it. More justified, anyway. “Let’s get out of this heat. Your TARDIS or mine, it doesn’t really make a difference.”
“Mine, then,” the Master said. He didn’t exactly love the idea of his future self having access to his TARDIS, but he liked the idea of meeting on someone else’s turf even less. The two of them made their way over to the badly parked vehicle, and the Master threw open the rear door and gestured for Harry to clamber up inside.
Up close, his future self looked a little worse for wear. In addition to the beard, his hair was slightly longer. It hung across his forehead, no longer carefully combed back. The skin around his eyes was bruise-dark, red-rimmed with exhaustion. Self-evidently, the Doctor hadn’t gotten around to killing him yet, and the strain of his continued existence was starting to show.
“So,” said Harry, once the door was shut behind them. “You’re in Australia, that means it’s, what, 2018? 2019? You’ll have met the Doctor’s next regeneration by now. I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know if I say you won’t be springing this plan on old Eyebrows, like we’d expected.”
“Don’t you know what year you’ve landed in?” the Master asked snidely. He’d always taken pains to be precise in his piloting, unlike some people.
Part of him wanted to press his future self for more details— had he found out when Eyebrows had regenerated, exactly? The Master remembered roughly what date they’d left Bristol for Missy’s last adventure, and Short Trousers— his Doctor— had texted O with a selfie of her new outfit a few months after it. The Doctor tended not to backtrack over their own timeline when picking up pets on Earth, so most likely Eyebrows hadn’t waited much longer after the colony ship before getting himself killed somehow. That had come as a surprise to the Master. He’d been banking on the assumption of betraying the same Doctor who’d betrayed him. But that was Missy’s Doctor, really, and it was kind of fitting to take this final turn around the dancefloor when they both had new faces. Created just for each other.
“Memory’s a bit foggy on the details,” replied Harry, which hadn’t been the point behind the Master’s objection, but yes, that was an issue, too. “Believe me, a lot’s happened between then and now. And your little self-imposed purgatory in the middle of nowhere hasn’t exactly been the most memorable part of my life so far.”
“As if it wasn’t your decision, too,” said the Master. How much time had passed, then, for the memory to be so faded? What the hell had happened in the interim? If events went even slightly according to his plan, then there was no way this version of him could be from more than a few years into the future, because there shouldn’t be much more of a future for him.
“I now have the wisdom of hindsight to realise what a stupid idea it was, to exile myself in this place,” Harry replied loftily. The Master scoffed. “No, really, ” Harry continued. “What, did you miss the Vault so much you thought you’d spend a few more years hanging about on Earth, playing the toothless little pet?”
“This is nothing like that,” the Master said, without even thinking about it, because clearly it wasn’t. He’d stayed put in the Vault for so long out of a genuine— albeit futile— desire to regain the Doctor’s friendship and good opinion. Whereas the aim of all his efforts here was precisely the opposite.
“Isn’t it?” Harry said. He began to pace, circling the interior of the TARDIS in a way that made the Master feel restless in turn. This regeneration was prone to unnecessary movement, fidgeting and grandiose gestures, explosive acts of violence. It took a sustained effort to keep a lid on it while he was being O, who was excitable but not manic. Maybe that was a side effect of all those years cooped up in the Vault.
“In the not too distant future,” Harry pontificated as he paced, “you are about to have the most infuriating… oh, seventy-odd years of your life. And as we both know, coming from me, that’s saying something.”
“Can’t be worse than the infuriating seventy-odd years I’ve just had,” the Master replied.
“Believe me, it can,” said Harry. “Which is why I think you’re stupid for voluntarily spending even more time on this insignificant little rock than you had to. If you wanted to hurt the Doctor, you should have just blown the whole planet to pieces.”
“I’d still have to ingratiate myself with her somehow, if I was going to do that,” the Master pointed out. “I want to see the look on her face. And I want it to be personal.”
“Yes, yes. You want her to like you— to like O— so it’ll hurt worse when she realises the person she cared for is not who she thought he was, and the friendship meant nothing. You’re very transparent, you know that?”
The Master shifted his weight from foot to foot, and tried to make his mind up whether it would be worth the risk to just pull out his TCE and shoot his future self. It would probably be fine, as long as the smug bastard didn’t manage to kill him in return this time, since their shared facial features clearly indicated that wasn’t supposed to happen. But that would be quite literally self-defeating.
He took a careful breath in and slowly exhaled it out. “So what I’m hearing is that after all this planning and setting things up just right, you fumbled the execution, as usual, and somehow ended up taking more than seven decades to pull off a plan that should’ve been foolproof. Is that right?”
“Wow, everyone’s a critic,” Harry said. “And good luck trying to avoid making the exact same mistakes I did.”
“Are you just here to act coy and mysterious about what a colossal failure you are, or was there a purpose for this visit?” the Master asked, but was spared the necessity of dragging the argument out any further by the sound of his phone going ding.
A few of O’s old coworkers and acquaintances still texted him on occasion, but every single one of those notifications was muted. There was only one contact whose messages were permitted to make a ding noise on the Master’s phone, and from the way his head snapped up to stare in the Master’s direction, his future self remembered exactly who it was.
“Well, go on,” Harry said, voice soft. “Answer it.”
The Master was already pulling the phone out of the zippered leg pocket of his hiking shorts. Unlocking it, to read the Whatsapp message that had just arrived.
THE DOCTOR🌈🌠: Just flipped over a rock on Macchia IV and you’ll never guess what I found underneath it!
The Master shook his head and went to slip his phone back into his pocket. All of a sudden, Harry crossed the circumference of the TARDIS console room, shoving his way into the Master’s personal space.
“Answer it,” he hissed, teeth bared in the Master’s face.
“Down, boy,” the Master rolled his eyes. He, of all people, certainly wasn’t going to be threatened by his own histrionics. “It’ll do her some good to be left on read for a bit.”
“Answer it. That’s an order, not a request.” Harry’s eyebrows were lowered into a stormy glare, his eyes impossibly wide and seeming to pulse with hypnotic suggestion. Of course it wasn’t going to work on the Master, not unless his future self had spent the intervening years getting substantially better at hypnotism than he already was. “In fact, give her a video call.”
“What, while I’m standing in my TARDIS console room with a future version of myself?” the Master laughed. “I don’t think so.” But it had been a while since he and the Doctor had spoken, so he hit the voice call button as a compromise. And since he felt like being generous to his guest, he even put it on loudspeaker.
The phone rang long enough that he was starting to suspect the Doctor wasn’t going to answer. Typical, she was probably busy, had more important things on her mind than talking to him, since she was so important— and of course, why shouldn’t she take her time, as far as she was concerned he was just one more human vying for a scrap of her attention— he hoped she didn’t come running when all her little companions called, he hoped this thing she had with O was different, somehow special, but clearly not that special— he bet if she knew who he really was, she’d drop whatever she was doing and pick up— or more likely she’d throw her phone into a black hole and never speak to him again, never even think of him again, just wash her hands and walk away like she had done on the colony ship—
The Master nearly flinched in surprise when she finally answered the call.
“Hiya, O!” came the usual insufferably cheerful greeting. “It’s good to hear from you!”
“Well,” said the Master, after a moment’s pause to settle himself back into the right persona, “it sounded like you had something pretty exciting to share about whatever you found under that rock.” More than likely it was some kind of weird bug.
“Oh, right!” the Doctor said. “Well, I turned over a promising looking rock and there was this bug—” gold star for me, the Master thought— “although, when I say bug— actually, this probably needs a bit more context than what I really have time to explain right now— so about two and a half centuries ago on this planet called Macchia, there was a civil war between these three different factions. Nuclear bombs getting lobbed around like cricket balls. And that was a whole situation in and of itself, but the ecological devastation had some really remarkable results on the local wildlife—”
The Master let it all wash over him. It had always been like that between them. The Master had his topics of interest, of course, but the Doctor was a ravenous omnivore when it came to the ingestion of information. Even as children, Theta liked to learn, and to talk, and Koschei was always his favourite audience. Standing across from the Master, Harry appeared to be listening intently. A smile was tugging at the corner of his mouth, small and lopsided enough that it almost appeared pained. Wistful? Was that the word for it?
“Listen, Doctor, this is fascinating,” the Master said, just for the petty enjoyment of cutting her off. “But I’m actually in the middle of a grocery run, I’ve only got time for a quick word right now.”
“Sorry, sorry!” the Doctor immediately apologised. “You know me, I go on if you give me half a chance. I’ll try and make a long story short, shall I?”
“Oh, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” the Master immediately apologised back. “I’ll call you later and you can tell me all about it, how’s that? I’ve got a programming conundrum that I’ve been meaning to pick your brains about, as well.”
Hopefully the Master’s time-travelling nuisance would be gone by then, so the Master could focus on running conversational circles around the Doctor, and have her attention all to himself. Maybe over a video call. Harry shot the Master a truly poisonous look, as if he knew exactly why the Master had ended the Doctor’s rambling. And he probably did, too.
“It’s a date!” the Doctor said enthusiastically. She really had no idea, did she? No wonder all her pets ended up infatuated with her. If the Master really had been O, a strange and lonely human with stars in his eyes, his hearts would have given such a pathetic pitter-patter at that.
“Chat later, Doctor,” the Master said, allowing himself to sound fond. O adored the Doctor, it would definitely show in his voice. He hung up and slipped the phone back into his pocket.
“Couldn’t you have kept her going a little longer?” Harry said. The naked hunger in his voice was quite frankly sickening.
“Why are you so desperate to talk to her?” the Master asked. “I realise the two of you probably aren’t on the friendliest of terms, if you’ve already revealed your true identity to her, but surely you could call her up to taunt her every now and again?”
A horrible thought occurred to him then. There was certainly one reason he could think of, why his future self might not be able to talk to the Doctor, might look so very unravelled at the sound of her voice.
“What have you done,” he asked Harry, voice tight and urgent.
“You can’t expect me to go giving away all my secrets, can you?” Harry grinned, but the Master was able to see the strain behind it. He saw glimmers of it every time he looked in the mirror.
“Tell me she’s still alive,” the Master snarled. “You colossal fuckwit, if you’ve somehow managed to kill the Doctor and survived, I’ll kill us both right now.”
“Wow, now who needs to calm down?” Harry rolled his eyes. “She’s fine. Obviously. We both know she’ll always be fine. It’s just been a while since I’ve heard from her, that’s all. She’s gone and landed herself in some Judoon prison.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” the Master said, wincing at the pressure of the impending paradox.
“You asked. I’m thinking if she’s still there after seventy years, I’ll come break her out. No sooner than that.”
“Sounds fair,” the Master nodded. He’d have done the same. The straining threads of the timeline relaxed ever so slightly at the confirmation that this was a foregone conclusion, something the Master would’ve inevitably decided to do even without his future self around to suggest it.
“Anyway, as well as having a certain poetic justice, it gives me time to put some backup plans into motion. You know how we hung onto all those corpses of the High Council? Well, I figured out a way to cyber-convert them. Not that they’re particularly important to my plan, mind you, they’re just window dressing, plus I thought it would be funny. Them and the Daleks—”
“Ssst!” The Master hissed angrily. “Nope! Zip it!” He mimed the relevant gesture in front of his mouth, just in case his other self hadn’t gotten the message yet.
“You don’t wanna hear about my Cyber Master Dalek Plan? Yeah, I know, I’m still workshopping the title,” Harry said.
“Of course I don’t, you dribbling lunatic!” Oh look, he was back to being enraged. “Because then I’ll know something I couldn’t possibly have known without telling myself, and that’ll cause a paradox, and then spacetime will crumple around us like a wet cardboard box and write us out of existence. As you very well know. Has somebody come along and scooped your brain out of your skull with a spoon?”
“Funny thing about that, actually.”
The Master felt the timeline buckle. His stomach roiled with nausea and a sense of impending doom.
“You see,” Harry continued blithely, “after I offered myself up as a host for the Cy—”
The Master did the only thing he could, which was to reach for the nearest loose object on the TARDIS console— a coffee mug with a humorous slogan— and throw it with speed and precision at his future self’s face. Harry, mercifully, finally stopped talking, as the mug hit him directly on the nose.
The resulting crunch and yelp of pain was quite gratifying. Harry glared at him, hand clutched over his face.
“What was that for?” he whined.
“Did I break your nose?” the Master asked. It might set crooked then, which he thought would make him look quite rakish. Offset this regeneration’s pouty mouth and big cute eyes just a bit.
“No. Now, what prompted that particular random violent outburst?”
“What is wrong with you?” the Master exclaimed. “Just shut up about the future! Is there some reason you’re so determined to keep risking our timeline?”
It had to be part of a scheme of some sort. His future self must be trying to create a paradox on purpose, or some other kind of spacetime anomaly. Surely he wouldn’t be so recklessly self-destructive without a good reason.
Harry’s hand dropped from his face. There was no blood, but his nose did look like it was going to bruise quite badly. He stared at the Master, eyes dark and burning like coals.
“Fuck the timeline,” he said crisply. “The Doctor is going to abandon you again, in the past on this worthless planet, and again in the dimension of the Kasaavin. Again and again and again.”
The intricate architecture of the Master’s timeline gave a precarious groan. Both versions of him cringed, feeling it splinter, the pieces of it grinding against themselves like shards of broken bone.
“Get out of my TARDIS,” the Master spat. He clenched his hands into fists to control the shaking. “This has been fun, but if you keep endangering our plans before I even get the chance to pull them off, I’m afraid I’ll have to do something drastic.”
Harry barked out a laugh. “Guess what, shit-for-brains: our plan was a failure! I’ve already pulled it off, and it didn’t work! She didn’t kill me!” He darted forward, hissing his next words directly in the Master’s ear. “So tell me why exactly I should care about preserving the fabric of reality? What’s even left for us now?”
The Master pushed him, one hand planted on each shoulder, and he stumbled back.
“You’re lying,” the Master said fiercely, desperately. “I don’t know what you’re playing at here, but I don’t believe you. I’m going to reveal the truth to her among the ruins of Gallifrey, just like I planned, and then she’ll end it all for the both of us.” He wasn’t even sure if he was trying to convince himself, or merely trying to stop spacetime from imploding. But he couldn’t allow this new information to change his behaviour, or they’d both be doomed. His future self’s very presence here meant his actions were pre-ordained. The universe couldn’t tolerate for it to be otherwise. Causality was not flexible enough around the scar tissue of his timeline to withstand that level of incongruity, not anymore.
Harry huffed out a dull, humourless laugh. “Believe what you want,” he said. “But I did it, exactly like you said. I told her what I’d found out, did the very worst thing I could think of to do to her. And she was so angry. It was perfect. Happiest moment of my life. But she was still too bloody above it all to put us both out of our misery together.”
“That’s not possible. You mustn’t have explained it properly.” After all, learning about the Timeless Child had cracked the Master to his very core. The foundation of his existence— the history between them, Koschei and Theta, equal and opposite. His past, it turned out, meant nothing, and so his future meant nothing either. How could it not be the same for the Doctor?
“She’ll leave you on Gallifrey to die alone,” Harry continued mercilessly. “She won’t even pull the trigger herself, that’s how little you’ll matter to her. And it will all be your own doing. So why shouldn’t I cause a paradox and obliterate myself? Our timelines are so entangled, she’ll probably feel the kickback. It might even hurt. At least that way, I’ll die knowing she’s thinking about me.”
“If you’re that keen on self-obliteration, why not use the Chameleon Arch?” the Master suggested. “I bet she’d be so pleased to have O back, she’d even let you tag along for a while.” Of course, she’d still end up leaving him behind, like all her little companions. But if he used the Chameleon Arch, he wouldn’t know there was ever another option, and so he wouldn’t know to miss it. He’d have no memory of the time when he’d thought himself her equal.
“No,” said Harry, shaking his head. “No, I think we’re past that. But… you may be onto something there. What I really need to do is to stop being the Master. Stop being me.”
“Right,” said the Master. Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Might as well just stick with the original plan, the one where the Doctor killed him for good. He no more knew how to stop being the Master than he knew how to sprout wings and fly. His time in the Vault had proven that.
He remembered being Missy— mostly remembered dying as Missy. He’d been born out of her heartbreak and yearning and regret. He remembered her body burning in golden light, all her sharp edges and languid poise dissolving into something soft and frantic and vulnerable. Some pathetic, instinctive part of him, despite himself, always, always trying to shape him into something the Doctor might want to keep. His flesh knew what his mind couldn’t accept— he’d always been made for her. Made of her. So far below her he might as well be one of her human pets.
But he’d woken up alone. He’d been convinced, for a little while, that the Doctor would still be there waiting for him. Or if not, that the Doctor would come back. Or, that even if the Doctor had abandoned him again, at least he’d done the right thing. He’d stood by the Doctor, so maybe it was time to try standing on his own. Maybe this regeneration, his life wouldn’t revolve around the Doctor (for once).
And then he’d gone to Gallifrey.
So much had changed since then, anyway. It didn’t even matter. Missy’s devotion, the very thing that made him, turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all.
“Don’t tell me any more about it, whatever it is you’re thinking,” he told his future self. “I might still have a chance with Plan A, and I don’t want you ruining it for me.”
“Stars above,” Harry said wonderingly. “I never realised I was such a soppy little optimist, this time around. We hide it well, don’t we?”
The Master wasn’t sure it could be rightly described as optimistic, this dearly-held desire to bring about his own death. But the argument wasn’t worth having.
“Get out of my TARDIS,” he said again. “I’ve got groceries to put away.”
“Gladly,” said Harry. “Good luck with your plan, by the way. Even though it’s not going to work.”
“It will if I pull it off better than you did. But good luck with yours, even though it’s redundant.”
The Master gave one last admiring glance at the back of Harry’s waistcoat as he left. It really was quite a striking ensemble. He couldn’t wait to wear it.
The TARDIS dematerialised quietly, and reappeared in its customary spot in the shape of a shabby old house. The Master threw open the front door and ambled outside.
It was late afternoon, nearly evening, and the weather was finally starting to cool. There were a few small scraps of cloud scudding around the horizon, which the setting sun would light up like fire. It looked set to be a clear night, so it would likely get colder. And there would be such a remarkable view of the stars.
A faint breeze rustled through the thin patch of eucalypts surrounding the house. The Master walked through them, and out the other side. A lonely cicada hummed, then fell silent. Further away, small hopping rodents scurried through the spinifex, and beetle grubs burrowed into tree bark. On the warm currents of air rising from the distant salt pans, a bird of prey flew lazy laps of the vast, empty sky. Further still, humans lived, safe inside their dwellings. It could all be wiped out in the flip of a switch, the blink of an eye. A towering white cloud blooming on the horizon, a moment of silence, before the screaming heat that turned the sand into glass, and the billowing dust that swallowed the sky, and the total destruction of every living thing. The Master felt as though the desert was expanding around him, the planet rotating beneath his feet, and him, a tiny little speck in the middle of it all. Maybe he could lie down in the dirt and stay there. How long would it take the Doctor to notice he’d stopped replying to her texts?
He crouched down, and scrubbed his hand across the rust-coloured ground. If this was Gallifrey, it would all be covered in a layer of powdery ash. Much more restful to the eyes than all that red. It would be silent, and still. He and the Doctor could sit out on a hill for a thousand years together, and watch the burning wreckage slowly crumble into nothing.
It wasn’t going to happen like that. She had better things to do with her time, and he… he had a plan to put in motion.
Sighing, the Master stood up, dusted himself off, and strode back towards his TARDIS. The sun continued its gentle fall towards the horizon. The desert around him still teemed with life, unseen and unregarded, and he closed the door behind him.