Archive of Our Own

The dawn sky is dull and overcast, young sunlight suffocated by grey. The Doctor strides across the beach, little stones crunching under her boots, and follows the scent of blood.

That’s the thing about Time Lord senses. It’s not something she thinks about all that much, these days, simply by virtue that she spent the last lifetime or so desperately avoiding her people as a matter of course. And now, obviously – well. Obviously. But the senses of a Time Lord are, for some reason, slightly more attuned to other Time Lords. It’s not the case with Shobogans – that sort of sensitivity is the only thing that can be achieved when a child is woven together, not just a walking, talking consequence of throwing two people’s DNA into a blender and seeing what sticks. And she can follow the logic. If nothing else, on a telepathic level she gets it – the psychic senses are more likely to latch onto a mind that is like for like, and touch telepathy gets wrapped up in all of that of course. But it goes beyond that. The voice of another Time Lord sounds louder in her ears than anything else. A Time Lord’s timeline glows in her time sense, golden and bold. Even sight is affected – when a Time Lord is in the room, suddenly they’re the only thing in worth looking at, bright and beautiful and crisp in a way that shifts everything out of focus. Impossible to ignore. And so, naturally, she’d made a point of making sure she ignored them from a young age, tearing her eyes away from everyone around her so that she could see everything else. The things that they wanted her to ignore. The things that were actually much more interesting, so-called weeds growing up through the cracks of reality.

And then there’s smell.

The strongest thing here should be the sea-salt on the wind that’s tugging at her hair. The stench of rotten seaweed. The decay of sodden driftwood that cracks beneath her footfall.

But instead, the thing that’s overwhelming her right now is the blood.

Time Lord blood. Sticky orange, liquid rust. The taste of iron sits, sympathetic, at the back of her throat.

It’s impossible to ignore, even if she’d wanted to. It’s written in her blood, stitched into her DNA – and at the back of her mind, the Citadel burns under a smoke-choked sky, the smell of Gallifreyan blood so thick that she chokes on it –

She clamps down on that thought hard, amputating it before it can fester and grow to rot.

Focus, Doctor.

It’s not long before she finds him.

The Master’s body lies face down and splayed out, his legs still caught in the gentle surf. The sand beneath him is stained dark orange, a spreading seepage of blood that leeches out of him, traitorous. His coat is missing, and that stupid checkered suit of his is ripped and torn, sodden with water and viscera. Even at a distance, she can tell his injuries are grave. He might even be dead. She can actually feel that possible timeline pressing against her skin, blistering.  Briefly, she flirts with the idea of pulling it firmly into being, setting his death in stone. But then, an instinctive, reflexive horror rises in her throat for just merely considering it, and she swallows, feeling distinctly sick.

She doesn’t even know how he got here, is the thing. The year is 1866, and he’s supposed to be still trapped somewhere in the early 2000s, according to the rough arc of his chronology that she gets from his timeline, rubbing like sandpaper against her own. They’re out of synch – but only slightly. Last time she saw him, only a few months ago, she’d thrown him to the wolves of the Kasaavin, letting them drag him off to their hellish dimension to do whatever they wanted with him. But that hasn’t happened to this version of him yet – this soaking, bleeding body on the beach. Somehow, he has to get from here to that moment that she’s already set in stone. If he really was to die here, it would cause a paradox so potent that it would rip a hole right out of her timeline.

This is how she justifies it all to herself.

If she saves him, now, it’s not because he deserves it. It’s not because she wants to. It’s just self-interest. Self-preservation, in fact. Actually, it would be basically temporal suicide if she didn’t, and all she has to do is make sure he doesn’t kick the bucket right here and now, so if she just drags him out of the sea and drops him off somewhere in 2002, that would be plenty, that would be more than enough, it would certainly be more than anyone else would do –

Within a few more strides, she reaches him, crouching down to examine him. It’s only then that she realises his injuries are even worse than she’d thought.

It looks like he’s been attacked by something. Blood is weeping out of wounds almost all over his body, the bare skin of his arms and face covered in raw, circular marks. Even his ears are bleeding – but worst of all is his right arm, which looks like something has bitten through it, the white of broken bone splintered within the deep red of exposed muscle. And he must have almost drowned, surely – he’s definitely been in the water. She reaches out, grabbing his shoulder and giving him a rough shove – but he doesn’t even stir. It’s only his timeline singing in the back of her perception, and the feeling of his mind brushing against hers when she touches his bare skin that tells her that, somehow, despite everything, he’s still alive.

How long has he been here, lying half-dead in the sand?

His skin is cool – no underlying burn of regeneration energy. Considering the state that he’s in, that’s…strange. His skin has a greyish tint, but it should be glowing, feverish with gold. She’s not sure what to make of the fact that it isn’t. Is he on his last regeneration? She never asked. He hasn’t given her the chance –

Anger burns deep within her, churning with blistering worry, and she shoves him again, harder this time, with a telepathic jolt for good measure. Banging on the door of his mind with a baseball bat.

CONTACT!! Open up!

At that, his eyes snap open, and he lurches into life.

Immediately, he starts choking, back arching, curling into himself as he hacks up all the water that had been in his lungs with an awful, ugly coughing fit. In a movement that must be sheer instinct, he reaches out, scrabbling for purchase, and his fingers find her wrist and wrap around it in a death grip. Instantly, he drags her under psychic waters with him, the pain of all his injuries slamming into her like a wave. She can feel the burn of his lungs, the raw sting of open wounds all over his body, the gnawing agony of broken ribs, the screaming shriek of his arm as a phantom pain in her own and, Rassilon, it feels like it’s been cut clean off, and the rage the rage the RAGE –

She tries to pull herself free, eyes watering, breaths coming ragged and panicked – but, with a force of will that could only ever be his, he yanks her in closer, right into his space. She blinks the tears out of her eyes to find herself face to face with the dark desolation of his.

“Hello, love,” he manages, a rasp, before he coughs again. The pain spikes, intolerable, and the Doctor finally scrapes together the presence of mind to slam down the shutters of her mind. In an instant, the pain vanishes, and he flinches. All she can feel of him now is the shivering of his skin against hers.

“What happened to you?” she hisses, desperately trying to feel irritated rather than any other emotion that she has no interest in examining. Her hand flits across his face, investigating his injuries, trying to piece together what caused them. “And what are you even doing here, you’re supposed to be stuck in the twenty first century –”

He huffs a shuddering laugh, shifting against her.  “Careful, Doctor. Someone might think you – you actually care –”

“Shut up,” she hisses, resisting the urge to give him another psychic shove. She doesn’t like the look of him – his eyes are glassy and unfocused, staring out to sea. She gives up with his face and takes hold of his shoulders instead, trying to drag him out of the water. He makes no attempt to be actively involved in his rescue, nothing more than a dead weight in her arms. She grunts with the effort. “You can at least try and help, you know, rather than just leaving me to do all the work and clearing up your mess –”

“Just leave me here,” he says, the words sucked through clenched teeth as she finally manages to haul him upright. He slumps forward, face pressed into her shoulder, ragged breaths brushing against her exposed collarbone.

She can’t help but laugh, bitter. In the back of her head, Gallifrey burns, and the bluish glow of his hologram stares at her with dead eyes. “And why should I make it easy for you?”  

He doesn’t say anything to that. She’s not sure if it’s because she’s actually rendered him speechless, or if he’s finally in too much pain to try and annoy her further. Most likely the latter, she thinks with a thrill of fear. He’s lucky he didn’t bleed out. He still could. His skin of his forehead, pressed against her neck, is unnervingly cold – even for a Time Lord. That might have been the only thing that saved him – slowing down his heartrates enough that his blood pumped out slower. He lets out another weak, pained cough, shaking against her.

Worry twists in her gut, vicious. She grits her teeth against it.  

“Don’t throw up on my coat,” she says, just to make sure he knows what her priorities are here.

A shaky breath falls from his lips. “I was attacked by squids.”

“Of course you were,” she mutters as she starts trying to get her arms under his, pointedly not looking at the way his right forearm dangles sickeningly, the angle all wrong. The worst part is, it looks like he genuinely did get attacked by squids. The raw circles on his face are almost certainly from where the suckers had grabbed hold of him. “Can you get up?”

She tries to stand, hoping he’ll get with the programme. He makes an uncertain attempt, leaning on her heavily, searching for stability in the blood-soaked sand. It’s only her grip on him that keeps him from collapsing to the floor when his knees buckle.

“I am not carrying you,” she hisses at him as she yanks him back up again. She looks up at the TARDIS parked on the beach less than a hundred metres away. Already, the distance feels like miles. But still, she begins, one step at a time, to drag him into her sanctuary. “You still haven’t told me how you got here. Don’t think I didn’t notice that –”

“I admire them, y’know,” he mutters, faintly nonsensical, and not replying to her at all, she realises with a chill. Her gaze catches on the blood trailing out of his ears. “The squids.”

“The ones that attacked you?” she asks, testing.

The Master just huffs another laugh, but she doesn’t think it’s in reaction to her. “At the end of it all, they – they stayed true to their nature –”

“Master,” she says, clear and cautious. “Can you hear what I’m saying?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says, more choked laughter slipping out of his mouth. He spits out the words like they’re poison. “You couldn’t possibly –”

He cuts off with a pained sound as he stumbles. She shifts her grip on him, keeping him upright, and tries to ignore the smell of his blood. Frustration bristles with her. If he didn’t react to her using his name, then he definitely hasn’t heard a single word that she’s said since he woke up.

“Fine – don’t tell me anything helpful, then,” she mutters to herself. He’s clearly burst his eardrums, on top of all the other injuries. Maybe whatever attacked him – squids or otherwise – dragged him down too deep too fast, the pressure taking its toll.

Well, whatever. That’s his own fault, probably.

And it’s easier, she thinks, to say that than actually replying to him. Than letting the seared image of Gallifrey burn across the back of her retinas, inescapable. Than thinking of who he was before – of O, smiling under an outback sky, staring at the horizon. Of Missy, stood before her in the dimness of artificial twilight and not looking at her –

You’re right, she thinks, as she drags him through the sand. I don’t understand you at all anymore.

It doesn’t get much better when she reaches the TARDIS.

Almost immediately, the TARDIS wheezes with a warning groan – or, maybe, it’s a sound of protest. Indignation. Against the edges of her mind, she feels the faintly disapproving psychic presence of her ship, swelling the telepathic waters like a whale just under the surface. The Doctor rolls her eyes.

“Well maybe,” she hisses, “if someone had told me that the Master was here back when we were travelling to Barton’s party, things might have gone a bit differently –”

Not that differently. Gallifrey would still be a graveyard.

The console trills pointedly. In her arms, the Master spits a bitter laugh, looking around with a haphazard gaze.

“Oh, how rude,” he mutters. “Come on, Doctor. Aren’t you going to –” His words torque into a choked cough – “to tell your ship to – behave in the face of its betters –”

 The TARDIS wheezes again, and the lights deepen into a furious red. The Doctor, hands full of half-delirious, half-drowned Time Lord, resorts to growling in frustration.

“Just help me,” she says to her ship, hating how even her voice is carrying the exhaustion that she hasn’t been able to shake for months. The bone-deep weariness that she’s been dragging behind her like a rotten corpse ever since she opened the TARDIS doors and saw Gallifrey in ruins. She should be better by now. She should be okay. But she can’t seem to keep anything in her hands for long enough to cling on. “Please.”

At least the Master can’t hear her.

Her ship doesn’t respond psychically – but ahead of them, behind the stairs, a door opens. The white light of the medical bay spills out into the angry glow of the console room.

“Thank you,” the Doctor breathes, and starts dragging them both towards it.

Once they’re inside, the door closes itself behind them – a silent apology, she thinks – and she unceremoniously deposits the Master on the first bed that she comes across. He laughs as she walks away, a weak, choked thing, and she studiously doesn’t look at him as she moves around the room, grabbing equipment and supplies. There’s an easy way, of course. Well. Easy-ish. She still doesn’t know exactly how much regeneration energy the Time Lords gave her at Trenzalore, but she remembers distinctly how it felt. How aware she was of that golden vault of liquid power, molten honey stirred right down in the depths of her. They couldn’t have given her much, surely – another regeneration cycle, at the most, and that’s only if they’d been really keen to have her stick around, which as a rule they aren’t. But it had dripped from her fingers, gushing and blazing, and for just a moment, it had felt infinite. Like she could go on forever, if she’d wanted to.

She’d used it to help River, back when she still thought she was on her last regeneration. At that time, it hadn’t felt like she was low – truly, she hadn’t really noticed the difference. But she’d known. Thirteen regenerations are built into the base code of every Time Lord, and that’s just how it is. A fact of biology. So what harm was it in healing the broken wrist of someone she loved? What difference did it make?

What difference would it make now, when she was already running on extra time?

Well, the difference was all down to who, of course. She has little interest in giving the Master any of her regeneration energy, not when he’s burnt through his own supply more than once already, and only gotten himself more lives through various horrific methods. He’s already had more chances than he deserves. And if he wants more regeneration energy, then he shouldn’t have gone destroying the one place that could give him more. If he wants to live, he shouldn’t have killed everyone –

But –

But.

Well.

She dumps the supplies she’d grabbed on the work surface beside his bed, and stays there for a moment, not turning. The shape of him breaches her periphery, curled into himself on the bed, still laughing quietly to himself. Semi-delirious. A perfect picture of pathetic.

Actually, she tells herself. Actually. The only other method she has of healing his probably ruptured eardrums will take about an hour or two to actually work, and since connecting with his mind is clearly a no-go right now, considering what happened when she merely touched him without having her shields up…

She just wants answers, she tells herself, as she flexes her fingers, reaching deep into herself, calling up that singing gold. She deserves answers.

And so, before he has chance to react, she twists on her heels, lunges towards him and grabs his head, covering his ears before channelling her focus into dumping regeneration energy right into his ear canal.

In an instant, with a ferocity that catches her by surprise, the Master lurches violently, grabbing her by the wrists and shoving her off him. And she feels how much the motion hurts him, intense enough that it crashes through her, even against the shutters of her mind, like a collapsing wave. Her mind splinters at the shock, rotten driftwood, flash-blinded. She flinches back, letting him go, and comes back herself moments later clinging to the edge of the bed behind her. She blinks, breathless, and finds the Master sat up, pressing himself into the wall at the head of the bed and breathing hard, his still-injured arm cradled against his chest. His eyes are piercing and full of a potent, abject fury, deep and wine-dark as a roiling ocean.

“Never,” he growls, voice shaking, “do that to me again.”

“What, heal you?” she snaps, pulses hammering in her throat. Words spill out of her, a panicked, unsettled ramble. “Usually people say thank you, d’you know that? Although don’t go thinking that I did it out of any sense of obligation, ‘cause if I didn’t – if I’d cared about that I’d’ve done your arm first, which looks like it’s about to fall off, by the way, I don’t know if you noticed –”

The Master leans forwards, a spits blood onto the floor with such viciousness that she can’t quite stop herself from flinching. For a moment, he stays like that, just staring down at the splattering of dirty orange. His still-weeping arm sluggishly continues to ruin his waistcoat.  

“Why would I thank you?” he says. Every ounce of humour has vanished from him.

“Would you rather I’d left you on that beach?” she asks, unimpressed, her hearts beginning to get back under control, even as anger coils in her gut like a snake waiting to strike. “‘Cause I can drag you back there, if that’s what you want.”

He doesn’t answer her.

She rolls her eyes, and then turns back to the supplies, rummaging around for a temporal bandage. She really does need to sort his arm out as a priority, but she’s honestly not in the mood. Of course, a temporal bandage doesn’t actually help with healing, but what it does do is temporally suspend all biomass wrapped within it in a sort of stasis – usually used in emergencies to give medics time to get patients out of dangerous areas, without risking the injuries getting worse. A stop-gap. Perfect for when she has other things she’s more interested in doing that pulling him out of the hole he dug for himself.

“How’d you end up here?” she asks as she riffles through. “You’re supposed to be in the early 2000s.”

The Master huffs, derisive. “Ah. I see. You just healed my ears to question me.” A distant sense of amusement creeps into his voice – but his tone has lost the crazed brightness of before. Now, he just sounds tired. “Very good, love – I must say, I approve. I’m sure your pets would, too. Where are they, by the way? Oh wait, I forgot – turned to crisps in a plane crash. How unfortunate.”

They’re actually at a random space market that she’d told them to explore on their own whilst she did ‘essential maintenance’ that none of them actually believed was real. It’s only fair, she supposes. It had been the fifth ‘essential maintenance’ excuse in a row, and she’s not sure how much longer they’ll wear it for. Especially if they come back and find the TARDIS gone again, like they did yesterday when she showed up seven hours later than she’d intended to pick them up, and they’d been stuck in the middle of Ming Dynasty China for a bit too long, which would have been fine if there hadn’t been a brief, teeny little skirmish with the Mongols that had led to an emperor getting slightly kidnapped. Graham had made a bit of a mountain out of a molehill about it, attempting to have words with her after they’d all got the mud out of their clothes. Sternness, dressed up as worry. He’d been trying to grandad her.

Why weren’t you back in time? Where d’you go, cockle?

Really not a big deal. Hadn’t even been her fault, for once.

She’s trying to think of a suitably snide response to the Master – one that reveals nothing and keeps her very much in control of the conversation – when she opens a drawer, and the bandage she needs is right there. Ha! She sends a mental flicker of gratitude in the direction of the ceiling, and feels the TARDIS floor hum beneath her feet.

As she turns, the Master eyes the bandage warily, before trying to pretend that he did nothing of the sort, leaning his head back against the wall. He scoffs. “Or not, then. How disappointing. I’ll have to try harder next time. Honestly, it’s a miracle you’ve not gotten them all killed yet. I’m almost impressed. How do you manage it, with three to keep an eye on? It’s only a matter of time, you know. But that’s what happens when you’re an irresponsible owner, I suppose.”  

He’s trying to rile her up, she thinks. Getting under her skin, a splinter under a fingernail. She doesn’t let herself rise to the bait, instead reaching for his arm. He immediately shifts backwards, pitching away from her.

“Do you want me to amputate your arm?” she snaps, ignoring the bristling paradox at the edge of her time sense. He had both hands, is the thing, when she last saw him. She senses the ghost of another timeline, the smell of ozone blistering at the edges of burning time. The Master, in the dark of that warehouse, stepping out of the shadows after seven decades, one arm cut short and still dripping with blood.

“I want you to leave me alone,” he hisses at her, vicious. She can’t help but choke on a bitter laugh, unable to swallow the sheer irony of that.

“Really? Funny, that. Not exactly the vibe I got from you chasing me across the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, or from the fact you pretended to be my friend for years –”

“Clearly didn’t try hard enough,” he cuts in, gaze fixed on her face. He leans forward then, right into her space, his eyes glassy with pain but focused entirely on her, wide and dark as black holes. “What’ll it take, love? How bad does I have to get before you – ngk!”

He chokes off with a pained grunt as she grabs his arm, not even trying to be gentle as she begins to wrap the temporal bandage around the awful, gaping wound.

“You wanna bleed out on a beach somewhere? Fine,” she says, as she pulls the binding tighter, trying not to relish in his shuddering gasps as she does it. “But you’ve got questions to answer first. You don’t get out of explaining that easily –”

His uninjured hand grabs her wrist, ice-cold, and she freezes.

“You know, then,” he breathes. “You went home.”

And even with her telepathic shields bolted down, she can’t help the way her mind aches to lean towards his. Magnets, held apart by force – but the sense memory is too strong, and she can taste the acrid ash of burning embers. Hear the crackling of flames. Smell the blood.

“Why?” is all she can say, the word ripped from her mouth. Her eyes snap to his. “Why did you do it?”

He stares at her, then, almost reverent. No, accepting. Like someone who knows they are about to die, looking directly up at the thing that will destroy them. Horizon watcher, staring at the oncoming storm, and not caring that this is the end. For a strange moment, he almost looks at peace.

“Because,” he says, simple, “it’s in my nature.”         

And all she can think of is the Adelaide Gallery. Innocent people, dead by his hand. The way he’d laughed – the way he’d enjoyed it –

“It’s like – it’s like knowing
I’m in the right place,” he says,
breathless, and knowing that every
single word is just twisting the knife in
the wound that Missy left in her gut
when she turned her back on
everything they’d tried to build –
“Doing what I was made for –”

Seared into her eyelids, Gallifrey burns.

She pulls the bandage, tight, into its self-sealing position with a harsh tug that makes the Master suck in a breath. She tries not to be too irritated when he turns it into a deranged laugh. And again, again, she can’t seem to shake the thought that this didn’t have to be this way. There was a chance, between her previous face and Missy, and she’d been so close that she could reach out and touch it. And she had reached out, wiping the tears from her friend’s face, and knowing exactly how it felt to hurt so deeply and knowing that it was a good thing –

“So that’s all this is, then?” she hisses, those aching memories burning into fury like the desolate ruins of her home planet. “Rubbing in my face that none of it ever meant anything?”

“Or maybe it meant everything, love,” the Master says back, breathless. “Who’s to say?”

She drops his arm, stepping backwards. Sick of him. “Why are you here. Give me an answer.”

He laughs again, delirious. “Oh, are you sure you want to know, love?” He sinks down onto the bed with a heavy thump, still a mess, soaked with blood and seawater. “Should be careful. You can find all sorts of things on the ocean floor. Might stumble upon something that would – upset your delicate disposition –”

“Fine,” she says, airy, as if she doesn’t care. Because she doesn’t – not about him, anyway. Not right now. “I’ll find out for myself. That sounds much more interesting than sitting here and listening to you go on and on whilst making sure you don’t die because you were stupid enough to do this to yourself.”

She turns and storms out of the room, a thunderhead. His laughter grows wilder as it rings in her ears, lightning over a churning sea.

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” he gasps between breaths. “Don’t you want answers? Aren’t you going to make me tell you –”

She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of turning around.  

The only reason she’d even found him had been because she was looking.

Time is a tricky thing. People can meet out of order all of the time – she knows that far too well, seeing as she and River were never in synch, to a frankly ridiculous degree. There can be all sorts of reasons why this happens, but as a rule, Time Lords attempt to keep things mostly in line. TARDISes can help with that, to some degree, thanks to their connection to the Web of Time. Of course, the Web of Time is (was.) maintained by Gallifrey, and whilst she doesn’t think the Master would be so colossally stupid enough to damage the very fabric of reality, it hasn’t escaped her notice that there is no-one left on Gallifrey keeping all those anchored threads in check. Which means that, at some point, things are going to get a bit more tangled up. Timelines might become more chaotic. Maybe her and River were even a symptom of that, retroactively – the ripples of what the Master has done spreading backwards through the universe.

Whatever. The point is, she’d been looking for him. Specifically, she’d been looking for the version of him that she last saw – the one she watched, grinning with obscene victory, as the Kasaavin had taken him back to their home dimension as a traitor to their kind.

She doesn’t technically know that he’s escaped, but he must have. He’d get bored down there, for a start – but mostly, he’s tenacious. And he has a plan. She knows that, because she put a stop to it, back in that hanger in 2020, but she’s not naïve enough to think that this means it’s over. Because she’d watched that hologram. Over and over and over, in between planets and whilst she was pretending to do maintenance. She’s practically memorised the cadence of his words. The bottomless ocean of his anger. Of his grief –

“I had to make them pay for
what I discovered,” he says,
burning blue against the dark.
“They lied to us –”

She’s not seen him like this. Not ever, across all of their lives. He’s been angry before, sure – he’s been a great many things. But never this. Never so all consuming. All he is, she thinks, is fury. A rage, drowning him from within, a roaring flood that takes everything around him with it.

He destroyed their home. Gallifrey is gone, by his hand, and she’s the only person in the universe who knows exactly how that feels.  

But the point is – he’s out there, somewhere. Somehow. And she’s not going to get caught off guard again. Not this time. She’s going to find him first, she’s going to come for him, and she’s going to get her answers –

And she’s found nothing. No sign of him, anywhere.

Except…

Except here. 1866, half dead on a beach, and no explanation.

She sighs, leaning heavily against the TARDIS console, giving herself a moment. Two moments. A headache is beginning to bloom behind her eyes.

Then, not able to bear inaction for a moment longer, she reaches across, sets the coordinates, and throws down the dematerialisation lever with a snap!

She’s not going far. The TARDIS thrums with the landing in a matter of seconds, and immediately she’s bounding towards the door, arms flailing to keep her balance. She doesn’t hesitate, immediately grabbing the doors and pulling the open, revealing nothing but deep blue.

Despite herself – despite everything – a ghost of a smile tugs at her lips. She steps right up to the edge of the TARDIS door, and looks out.

She’s at the bottom of the ocean, parked on an outcrop – and it’s beautiful. Seaweed and kelp coils around her in great forests, reaching up to the faint, rippling light of the surface above them. The light of the TARDIS, warm and yellow and foreign in these depths, attracts the attention of schools of curious fish, scales flashing as they flit between interest and nervousness. A long, gorgeous eel weaves its way through the fronds of seaweed to her right, entirely uninterested in her or anything else. Everything stays just out of reach, at the invisible boundary where she knows the TARDIS shields are protecting her, giving her air to breathe.

For a moment, she’s enraptured enough that she forgets all of it.

Then –

Movement in her periphery. Instinctively, she flinches back, right as a tentacled mass about the size of a human adult throws itself at the TARDIS shield above her. The squid stops short, pressed against the shield like it’s a sheet of thick glass, and in the centre of the writhing tentacles, she sees a vicious beak snapping, like the creature is trying to bite through the barrier to get to her.

For a fleeting moment, she thinks of Missy, eyes burning, hand pressed against the glass wall of the Vault.

But then, she gets a hold of herself, and pulls the sonic out of her pocket and points it at the squid. That familiar electronic whine fills the air, and the squid’s skin flashes with bioluminescent warning. A few seconds later, the creature is gone in a burst of bubbles, but she’s got some – hm. Interesting information.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she murmurs, frowning. According to the sonic, that had been something approximating a Humboldt squid – which, in itself, isn’t strange at all. They’re pretty common in this particular part of the ocean, if she remembers her marine biology right, which she probably doesn’t because she got most of it from copious descriptions of fish in Jules Verne novels. No no no, the strange thing about that squid had been that the sonic seemed to think it wasn’t quite a Humboldt squid, That, and it had detected advanced technology inside of it.

“What did you do to them?” she hisses to herself, horrified. Because this has got to be the Master’s work – it stinks of it. Random experimentation on creatures he considers below him? Well – actually, no. When she puts it like that, it sounds much more like the Rani, but since she’s more than likely dead along with everyone else on Gallifrey –

She breaks the neck of that thought as she shuts the doors and stalks back over to the console, before jamming the sonic into a sensor conduit. The TARDIS grumbles at her.

“Sorry,” the Doctor mutters. “Just – tell me what this is and what’s he’s up to. If he’s left a ton of advanced technology in squids in the 1800s and I spend the next few hours chasing after them and trying to remove it, I’m gonna be extremely cross –”

But then, the screen bleeps at her. She grabs it, pulling it closer – and then stares, not quite able to believe what it’s showing her.

“But that can’t be…” she murmurs. “Unless it is. But that’s –”

She pushes herself away and runs back down towards the doors, flinging them open once more. But this time, rather than staying in the doorway, she steps out, into the protective air pocket provided by the TARDIS. The ocean floor is a carpet of cracking barnacles under her boots, but she barely notices, too enraptured by what she can now see. Just over the edge of the outcrop, built into the deep canyon that goes down even further into the darkness, is a structure. A dull, angular shape in the shadows that doesn’t belong here. Not at the bottom of the ocean. Not in this time.

She points her sonic in that direction, and thinks with all that she has. Let there be light!

Immediately, she feels something shift – timelines changing potential. Below her, in the valley, lights flicker into existence as a facility comes to life below her. A hulking, metal monstrosity that’s too smooth to be from this time period, too slick, too advanced –

But whatever it is, incongruent or not – the most obvious thing about it, as more lights flicker on around it, is the gaping hole in one side. A dark, lifeless wound. Critical failure. As deadly as a hull breach in space.

And that, she thinks – that does sounds like the Master.

It doesn’t take her all that long to find a way into the base. The TARDIS lands her right in the middle of a helpfully dry corridor, and she steps out into dim emergency lighting and exceptionally dull interior decorating. Her noses scrunches.

“Concrete,” she mutters as she closes the TARDIS door behind her. “I hate concrete. At least paint the walls or something. Little mural or something, I love a mural, you could have fish –”

She starts walking down the hall as she rambles, making a bee-line for the bulkhead door that blocks the way forward. Right next to it, embedded into the wall, is a little computer panel – and, if she’s clever, which of course she is, she reckons that’s all she’ll need to figure out exactly what’s happened here.

A quick sonic and a bit of minor rewiring later, and she’s in. And it does not take long to discover that this place is an anachronistic research station called Nautilus, and it actually hails from the twenty-third century. From what she can find, the purpose of the mission seems to be researching species that have gone extinct in their time – such as Humboldt squids – due to increased ocean acidity and other climate related issues, and trying to find ways to reintroduce them. She finds an entire document arguing the case for setting up a base in 1866 as opposed to 1966, 2066 or 2166, where such a thing would be immediately noticed and thus have an unknown impact on the timestream. Fascinating stuff – but also not really what she wants to know. She flips through data records and lab notes without reading anything, only stopping when she finally gets to a crew manifest, and finds an anomaly. A late addition to the crew, months into the base’s operations – and one day before the records indicate a catastrophic breach in the outer wall of the main research chamber.

A new scientist. Dr O McMaster.

She opens the file, and immediately those wine-dark eyes stare back at her, rendered into pixels.

A fathoms-deep anger churns in her gut, leviathan stirring from slumber.

It probably wasn’t even hard for him to walk in here. He would have known too much to be anyone from this time period – and who else would be here? Who else would come to a research base in the bottom of the ocean that wasn’t bothering anyone? He probably didn’t even have to use hypnosis to convince them that he’d been sent from the future to join them – and, oh, maybe that was it. Maybe he’d tried to get back to 2020, somehow. Take a short cut – maybe with a dodgy, blackmarket vortex manipulator, or who knows what other temporal shrapnel that had ended up down the plughole of 2002. Only, it must have backfired. Sent him backwards rather than forwards, to the 1800s. Maybe he’d gotten himself stuck here, and sought out the only people capable of time travel in this period. Tried to steal their tech from them, and decided to destroy them all just for the hell of it, rather than just asking for help like a normal person. These people were scientists, she thinks, immediately feeling a sense of kinship with them. Pioneers, far from home. They’d have helped him. They’d probably have been glad to. He could have even helped them in return, but instead –

She attempts to go deeper into the files, trying to piece together precisely what happened. According to the audit log, there’d definitely been some high-level overrides that had led to an explosive accident that caused the breach – and she can’t see who made those overrides, but she doesn’t need to. However, the Master clearly didn’t manage to destroy the whole base – the corridor she’s standing in is evidence enough of that. It looks like there were failsafe measures in place in the case of a wall breach, hence the bulkheads, and the central computer system seems to be very intentionally water resistant, with the flexible capacity to work around the damaged nodes in the flooded section. According to the systems, the flood was pretty much contained to one particular area, keeping the rest of the facility intact. But, then, hours later, the base had gone into automatic shut down due to no internal activity – and that can’t be a good sign, the Doctor thinks to herself.

She immediately goes to check the internal sensors for any life signs – and here, she hits a problem. The sensors in the dry sections of the base are all in working order. But in the breached section, naturally, there’s nothing but white noise.

Other than her, there are no life-signs detected.

If anyone survived this, they’re through that bulkhead. And they might have, somehow – the Master did, after all.

“Alright, Doctor,” she mutters to herself. “Time to open some doors.”

It doesn’t take much effort – but it does take a few more cables than expected, connecting up the wall conduit to the TARDIS systems so that she can actually access the rest of the CPU and get the automatic systems to be under her control instead. Within minutes, she manages to properly seal off the breach by expanding the TARDIS shields, before activating the emergency pumps to drain the water. She can’t save every single room, but she can save the main research chamber, which seems to have been where the scientists were mostly monitoring the squids, according to the schematic. The one thing that she can’t get access to is security footage – at least, not from the rooms that she cares about. There’s footage from corridors and hallways and rooms that don’t matter, but none from the flooded section. But – but but but – according to the protocols that she has been able to dig up, there’s some kind of emergency security system that contains everything that gets recorded in the whole facility – data, CCTV, life sign fluctuations…the works. A black box, of sorts. If she wants to get a full picture of what happened here, she needs that.

Naturally, it’s under the console in the main research chamber.

She taps her fingers against the console, impatient, watching the drainage progress bar and not thinking about the person currently dripping blood and seawater onto the floor of her medbay.

There’s a part of her that aches to go back in there. To make sure he’s okay. But that part, she tells herself stubbornly, is just the part of her that sees his face and thinks of O. But O was just a fabrication. Something fake, no more than a knife to cut her with. A lie –

“– everything we were told was a lie,” he says,
shaking his head, and his eyes look
just like they did
when they were kids,
and she’d shaken him awake from
a nightmare, because he never woke up
screaming and crying like her. No.
Instead, he was only ever haunted.
 
“We are not who we think, you or I –”

I just wanted my friend back, she thinks to herself – before she grabs that thought by the throat and holds it under the water until it drowns. In the back of her mouth, she can still taste smoke. Still smell the blood. Her fingers clench on the edge of the console, knuckles turning white.

The screen pings at her, wrenching her out of her memories. Drainage complete.

Showtime, she thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. Instead, she just swallows, and goes to see what horror the Master has left for her.

It’s carnage.

The main research chamber is an absolute wreck. She walks carefully across the wet floor, the entire room still dripping with the last vestiges of sea water. The breach had been a floor above this one, almost directly above, and when she looks up, the high ceiling is a gaping hole up into the sea above. The only thing holding back the colossal wall of water over her head is the TARDIS shields, which flicker slightly with ripples of gold as fish swim right up to the boundary, curious. Another large squid glides by, ominous. Its eye catches hers, and she can’t help but look away.

Debris is everywhere. Scattered equipment and bits of metal from where the ceiling caved in are mixed up with seaweed and silt and dead fish. Three of the walls are still covered with equipment, including five diving suits that hang limply on their racks, useless. Whatever happened, it was too fast for anyone to save themselves, she thinks. But the most dramatic thing is, without a doubt, the wall directly to her left – only, no. Wall is the wrong word. Right ahead of her, so tall she has to crane her neck to see the top, is the shattered remains of a glass screen that once formed the barrier between the research chamber and a gigantic, white tank. A breath hitches in the Doctor’s throat. Yes. The squids must have been on the other side – and this is where the scientists ran their experiments from.

She steps forwards towards the main control desk that stretches right along the entire width of the tank, hungry for more information – but something cracks under her shoe. She stops, lifting up her boot, before crouching down to pick up the item on the floor.

A tiny doll of a person, no bigger than her thumb.

Deep, desolate anger swells in her gut.

She knows better than to think it’s something so innocent.

For a start, she recognises the face of the lead scientist from the crew manifest.

Why does he do this? Why does he come to places that want nothing more than the pursuit of knowledge, the preservation of a species against the odds, a place that could have helped him if it had even occurred to him to ask, and just…destroy it? For no reason other than he finds it fun. For no reason other than because it hurts her.

She doesn’t know him anymore. That boy under the sheets, trembling from a nightmare; the woman behind the glass, who’d cried in the TARDIS because she felt something – she sees neither of them in him. He’s just a hull breach, sucking out everything she cares about into the unforgiving vastness of death by drowning. He’s just gasping for breath when there’s no air to breath. No hope. No witness. No reward. Just pain, and nothing.

She hates him with everything that she is.

The tiny dead scientist drops back to the floor with a plop as it hits the water. The Doctor doesn’t look back at it as she strides over to the main console, ducking underneath. She knows what she’s looking for. There’s no point in wasting time, especially when she sees another miniaturised body lying on the floor like a discarded toy. She finds the black box, still slick with water, yanks out the cables connecting it into the main systems, and hauls it back to the TARDIS.

She spends the next hour sat crossed-legged on the console room floor, muttering to herself as she tries to coax information out of the damn thing. Turns out it is water resistant, so the fact it got wet was significantly less of a problem compared to the fact that it got hit by a massive deluge of water, not to say anything of the pressure of that much ocean suddenly pouring into a room. That, and it turns out that even obscure anachronistic research bases have security codes, and she thinks she probably only has one shot at getting the data inside without wiping the entire thing clean as a matter of protocol. As a result, she’s got it plugged into as many outlets as she can, running several diagnostics and hacking protocols at once in the hope of hitting lucky on something. She doesn’t feel like waiting around to do one after the other. She needs to know what he did, and she needs to know now.

She could travel to the future and tell their families, she thinks distantly, as she untangles get another wire. At least, that way, they’d know. They’d know what had happened. They’d know why –

Why?

You don’t understand, he’d told her, and he’d been right in more ways than one. Because how could she? How could she understand?

Only, now, she thinks that maybe she does. Because she’d thought that Missy had been getting better. She’d thought things were going to be okay. She’d trusted her, and then –

And then, she’d turned her back.

She’d turned away.

They’d been so close, and then she’d just…

It never meant anything. It meant everything.

She feels dizzy. Her mind swims, lost in churning waters. She has to put down the cable in her hand before she pulls it apart, breaths coming in ragged gasps.

It’s her fault, isn’t it? All of it is her fault. She’d made a promise, sworn an oath, to guard a body in a box, only she’d not been able to let Missy die, and she’d not been able to keep her in there, and now Gallifrey was destroyed all over again, and if she’d just –

And it’s right then, as she clenches her fists so tight that her nails cut little crescents into her palms, that she hears a clatter from the doorway that leads deeper into the ship. She twists around, lurching to her feet, just in time to see the Master’s knees buckle as he crumples against a crystal pillar.

“What are you doing in here?” she growls, breathless with lingering panic. The Master still looks as awful as he did when she left him – the only difference she can see is that his gaze is even more feverish and glassed over than before. He huffs a quiet, weak laugh.

“Oh,” he says, chuckling to himself. “Thought you might’ve left, love.”

“Why? Hoping to steal my TARDIS?” she spits, before striding over to him, anger turning her veins to ice. She crouches down in front of him and grabs him by the collar of his stupid waistcoat, yanking him forwards. “That’s what you were there for, wasn’t it? Hoping to steal the time travel tech of that research base, and thought you’d have some fun while you were at it? Couldn’t even resist it long enough before you had to kill someone, is that it?”

He laughs again, breathless. “Guess I – I couldn’t help myself –”

She shakes him again, rough. “I saw it. I saw how you left them. What did you do? Shrink them all, then decide that wasn’t good enough? Had to blast a hole in their base whilst you were at it?” She chokes on a bitter laugh that tastes like ash. “Serves you right, then. Those squids got loose, and they went and attacked you straight away, did they? Maybe they didn’t like it when you killed those scientists right in front of them –”

And again, he just laughs, fiercer than before. “Oh, and wouldn’t you like that, love? Mere animals having more of a conscience than me –”

And then, he lurches forward, grabbing at her coat, eyes wild and bloodshot.

“Do you know what the humans called them?” he breathes, fingers fisted tight like she’s the only thing keeping him from sliding into the depths. “The squids –”

“They’re Humboldt squids,” she answers, confusion polluting her anger. “They’re just –”

“Diablo rojo,” he breathes. “Red Devils. Because humans don’t like it when they’re – when they’re not the top of the food chain. And so that means anything that comes after them is evil. Is abhorrent. Even if it’s just – just scared. Even if it can’t help its own nature –”

“Like you, you mean,” the Doctor says, patience worn right through. Threads coming apart, frayed and snapped. “Unable to stop yourself hurting people.”

“They’re not decent or kind,” he spits. “They’re not evil. They were just – they just –”

His voice cracks, splintering into an awful cough. He curls into her, still clinging to her coat, head pressed up against her collar bone. He’s not cold anymore – he’s feverish, shaking with delirium, and she suddenly wonders if even he doesn’t know what point he’s trying to make as he spits more blood onto her trousers. The smell of it nearly overwhelms her.

And him clinging to her like this – it’s familiar, in a way that makes her teeth ache. How many times has she held him – has he held her – across all of their lives? How many times has it only been the two of them, bleeding and shivering against the rest of reality?

But it’s not like that anymore. It can’t be. As much as she desperately wants her friend – both O and the boy she once knew under an orange sky – that person doesn’t exist anymore. He doesn’t. He doesn’t. That friend is dead and gone, changed in too many unrecognisable ways – or, maybe, simply never existed.

“I should’ve known you’d see it this way,” he says, ragged. “You always – you always do –”

“You don’t even know what you’re saying,” she hisses back, trying to get him to his feet. She should get him back to the medbay. Actually, she should throw him out into the ocean, paradoxes be damned. She should just be done with this. It would save lives, is the thing. If she’d just stopped being so selfish and let Missy die, all of Gallifrey and a whole base of scientists would be still alive right now. “Come on, get up –”

“Other side of the glass,” he murmurs. “You can’t just – you can’t just change them –”

“You’re delirious,” she says, pulling his arm over her shoulders.

“The squids,” he clarifies, another laugh tumbling from his lips. “But you’d never – you think you have the right –”

He tries to pull away from her – and for a moment, she tries to cling onto him, if only out of instinct. But then he yanks hard, desperate for a reason she can’t fathom, and in the next moment they’re falling apart, the Master crashing back against the crystal pillar. He barely manages to stay upright, clinging on for dear life.

“Why are you being like this?” she hisses, fury choking her like saltwater in her lungs. Her hearts are pounding in her chest, loud in her ears. “I’m trying to help you –

“And I didn’t ASK YOU TO!” he roars, bloodied spit flying from his teeth. “I never asked you –”

“If you’re talking about Missy,” she snarls. “Then I’m pretty sure you did, actually –”

But he just laughs, bitter and wrong. “Did she? Did she know what she was asking?”

The Doctor just stares at him. “You mean you. You did.”

And he stares at her then, eyes dead as the ruins of Gallifrey. “I’m not her.”

The Doctor swallows. It’s one thing to think it. It’s another to hear him say it. “You were.”

A bloodied grin tugs at the Master’s lips. “You can’t change me, love. Can’t make me someone I’m not.”

“I’m not trying to,” she spits back. “Not anymore.”

“Then why are you here?”

He hisses the words, pulling them through his teeth like it actually pains him to say them. She can’t help but frown, something painful twisting in her chest at how little she understands him.

“Because –”

But she can’t explain it either.

She swallows. Composes herself.

“If all the lies and the killing is who you are, then – then this is who I choose to be,” she tells him, clinging to the truth of it. “I wasn’t just going to leave you on that beach to die.”

He doesn’t give her an answer to that. Instead, he just closes his eyes and lets his head drop down against his chest, still laughing quietly to himself. Like all of this is just some game to him. Just some joke, and at some point over the years she stopped getting the punchline.

She shouldn’t help him. He’s given her reason upon reason to just leave him to rot. It almost seems like he wants her to do that.

But it’s that, more than anything, that makes her step over to him again. Take his arm, and haul it over her shoulder. He does nothing to fight her – in fact, he leans against her, letting her take most of his weight. It feels more like him giving up than anything else. His breath tickles her collarbone, his hair brushing the line of her jaw, and for a moment her senses are overwhelmed, and he is the universe.

Maybe he really can’t help his own nature. But she’s been actively fighting hers all her life – because they are the same, in more ways that they can bear. It’s why she chose this name. Made this promise. Never cruel, never cowardly. When people need help, I never refuse.

And the Master has never just been ‘people’. He’s always been so much more than that, even when she’s hated that fact. Even now, when she can barely stand to look at him because all she sees is the blistering ruins of Gallifrey, the faces of her friends as they screamed for her help –

Even now, they’re tied together.

His future is her past – and his past, her future. Whatever he’s discovered…

If she lets him die here, she thinks, then she’ll probably never understand.

Maybe she never will, even if he lives.

“You should’ve,” he breathes, finally answering her, words nothing but a shudder. “Wouldn’t that – that’ve been something, love?”

She looks up at the ceiling, despising everything he is and everything that’s led them to this point. But all she sees is the orange glow of the crystal pillars, and in her mind she’s forever looking up at that marmalade sky.

She has a choice to make. And this is the only way she can go.

“I’m not doing this for you,” she tells him. And then, she pulls him back in the direction of the medbay.

By the time she’s dealt with all of his injuries, almost an hour has passed. Her anger has settled, kicked up silt sinking back to the ocean floor, a lead weight in her gut. Simmering. She heads back into the console room, headache pressing against the confines of her skull. The moment she steps through the doorway, the lights dim to a cool, comforting blue. A sigh slips from her mouth.

“Thank you,” she breathes, barely a scrape against the air. Her boots resonate against the deck plating as she crosses over to the console, thankfully not squelching any longer. She kicks a loose cable out of her way, before leaning back against the console and throwing her head back, closing her eyes and trying to ignore what feels like a glacier crawling from her chest to her stomach. Trying not to think about the Master, lying unconscious in the medbay. In fact, she decides to think about much more exciting and interesting things like Large Hadron Colliders and poetry by George Byron and the physics of lava lamps and the mathematical formula to calculate the probable number of species of fish in a particular stretch of ocean, because she can’t think about nothing, she’s never been able to just think about nothing –

The console bleeps, snapping her out of her thoughts. She turns around, alarmed, and then remembers how she’d left about ten diagnostics running on the black box from the Nautilus lab. Immediately, she moves over to the screen, gaze taking in all the information displayed before her, and – yes! One of her quantum scrambling programmes actually worked –

“All data recovered? Oh, I am extremely clever,” she says to herself, a grin tugging at her lips that soon turns into a grim line as she begins to work her way through what she can access. It doesn’t take her long to hack her way through the last few firewalls and crack open the actual files within. Immediately, she goes for the security footage. When she’d checked the audit log back on the base, it had told her the exact time that ‘Dr O McMaster’ had arrived onboard. She goes for that time first, and immediately finds the footage she’s looking for – the Master, right there, walking down the corridor, talking with the head scientist. No sound, though. Her hands dart over the console, and by the time she’s managed to get the volume up, the corridor is empty. She switches to footage from the main research chamber, and there she finds them again. The scientist and the Master are still talking, the past set in stone and pixelated light. A chill ripples over her, ghost ship sighted on the horizon. Every single person she sees in this footage – from the head scientist to the other researchers working at consoles in front of that enormous tank – is already dead.

“– of course, you understand it’s only out of mere curiosity,” the Master is saying, gushing like he really is just an excited, newly-graduated researcher on his first field assignment. Like a data analyst in MI6 that she’d met lifetimes ago, nervous and delighted to meet an alien with two hearts. “I’ve just never had a chance to look at a temporal engine like the one you have here up close, and I took an extra module in chrono-engineering –”

“Yes, yes, of course,” says the head researcher, mildly dismissive – and ha! So, he was there just for the time travel technology. He must have stolen something, before he flooded the place, or been planning too before he got sidetracked with wanton destruction. Bitter anger bites the back of her throat like bile. Even if he’d just done that, it would’ve been bad enough – effectively stranding all these people here in a time that was strange to them. But he couldn’t even stop at that. He had to go and kill them all as well, one by one. He couldn’t just let them be.

Which means there’s probably pieces of tech that he’s stashed away somewhere that she’ll need to clear up, along with figuring out what she’s going to do with an entire twenty-third century research base that definitely can’t just get left around in 1866. There’s probably some protocol for dealing with that, built into the Nautilus systems. Auto-return, maybe. Still. Here she is, running damage control, all over again, and she is so sick of it.

She reaches for the controls, speeding up the footage, before stopping a few minutes later. The pair are now stood directly in front of the computer bank, other researchers all sat at their stations, looking up at the tank. And this time, clear in the footage, she can see ten squids darting through the water, serene. Their skin flashes faintly, communicating with each other with light rather than sound.

“So far we’ve been trying to alter their ability to be able to withstand the acidity of the water in our time, mostly by attempting to make changes to their DNA structures, but also via other means,” another scientist is saying. “We’ve experimented with controlled exposures, implanted technology –”

The Doctor frowns, a little uncertain.

“Fascinating,” the Master says in the footage, sounding like he’s genuinely interested, but the Doctor can see he’s restless. His fingers, hidden in the darkness by his side, tap a rippling pattern against his leg. “How many of them do you have here?”

“Just these ten, currently – although, when we need more, we can get others. Plenty around, at this time.”

“I see.”

A pause. One of the squids bonks against the window, its tentacle pressed against the glass. The head scientist turns to the Master, patting his shoulder, and it’s only by the slight jolt of his head that the Doctor can tell the touch caught him off guard. What had he been thinking? Had he already seen, right then, the opportunity he’d had?

“Let’s get you properly set up on the computers, and then you can get your hands dirty, eh?” says the head scientist. The Master smiles, giving him all the smooth, faux-nervous pleasantries to the man he will kill within twenty-four hours. The Doctor feels so intensely nauseous watching him schmoose that she fast-forwards again, faster this time, watching ghosts move about in blurs of motion until suddenly she spots him again, hours later, back with the other scientists. She lurches to turn it back to normal speed – and almost immediately, her gut churns with dread.  

For once, it’s not the Master that’s the problem. No – it’s the squid, currently in the centre of the glass tank, writhing in the grip of mechanical arms that have reached through the water to grab it, and now appear to be – to be torturing it –

Deep, deep within her, something shifts, sick and ancient.

“We’re using real-time gene-splicing attempt to make specific changes to the DNA,” one of the scientists is explaining, entirely unmoved by the obvious distress of the animal right in front of her. “It’s a delicate process –”

“A painful process, it appears to me,” the Master says, smooth. He’s leaning forward on the chair, staring right at the creature above him, watching as its skin flashes, its panic writ in bioluminescence.

“Some pains are necessary,” says the head scientist. “For the good of the future.”

“Of course,” murmurs the Master. He doesn’t shift from his position. When the squid lashes out, tentacle hitting the glass with a resounding BANG, he is the only one that doesn’t flinch.

The Doctor stops the footage then, very aware of the tightness of her chest. For a moment, the rest of the reality feels distant. Removed. Wrong side of the aquarium glass. Her hands move of their own accord across the screen, taking her out of the security footage files, and opening the research recordings.

What were they doing to you? she thinks, the squid still writhing in the back of her mind.

What she finds is disturbing. File upon file of experimentation, some no more than simple tests, others downright cruel. Repeated exposure of the squids to higher levels of acidity after experiments to see if anything worked. Vivisections, to understand the biology. Implanted technology to influence pain receptors so that the squids didn’t notice the acid. Altering of DNA, to make them more resistant, make them less aggressive – and this was the worst, in the Doctor’s opinion, because not only were the experiments clearly painful and distressing at the time, but they continued to be so afterwards. They were using gene-splicing on a species that was ancient history to them, and the results were mixed, often failures. The ten squids that were in the tank were only ten of forty-eight specimens that the base had worked on over its time there. The previous thirty-eight? Failed experiments. She’d found a whole reef of files dedicated to their dissection.

She finds herself back to the security footage, looking for other cameras – and stumbles across tapes from the main office of the head scientist. There, she discovers footage from mere hours before the base flooded, and where she finds the Master, sat in front of the mahogany desk as the head scientist relaxes in his own chair, holding a glass of whiskey.

“So what happens when you succeed?” the Master is asking. “I presume you do the same procedure with a number of other subjects and take them back to the present with you?”

“I highly expect we won’t succeed,” admits the head scientist. “It’s far too intricate a task, to tinker with ecology. That’s not particularly the point. The point is more – optics.”

“Oh?”

“Consider the question: why are we doing this? To reintroduce Humboldt squids to a time that doesn’t even need Humboldt squids? No, of course not – what our time needs is morale. What use is it, bringing back an extinct species, if it doesn’t make people feel better about their current predicament? The state of the world is dire, but see what good science can do – reverse the so-called irreversible! Of course, whatever creatures we release will hardly be Humboldt squids anymore, after all the changes we’ve made to their DNA – and I hardly expect they’ll last long enough to reproduce. But it’s not about saving the squids. It’s about making our donors feel like they contributed to something that meant something.”

“Even if it means nothing at all,” the Master murmurs, sounding like he approves – but, oh. The Doctor can hear the edge to his tone, dangerous as the warning flash of a startled cephalopod. “What do the squids matter, anyway? But I can’t help but be impressed at your dedication to the task. Coming all the way back here –”

“Well, it’s a proof of concept, of course – that’s the real science happening here. If things get bad enough back home, we could consider temporal relocation – for those willing to fund it, of course, you know how expensive these sort of things are to run. But for now, at least, we are fighting against the greater enemy that humanity faces – hysteria. If people discover that the ecological damage is irreversible – that the damage we’ve done is too great –”

“They might try and do something about it,” the Doctor murmurs, her anger flowing down new paths. Branching out. Cold-fingered realisation is coiling its grip around her throat.

“I understand,” purrs the Master, still playing the enamoured student, but the monster she knows is waiting in the wings. “Perfectly.”

She shuts off the footage, and goes back to the camera in the main chamber. It doesn’t take her long to find what she’s looking for. The next morning is filled with panic and carnage. In a matter of minutes, the footage switches from normal operations to terror as the Master strides into the chamber and begins his takeover. Three scientists are miniaturised in seconds. The rest, he savours. She turns the audio off. He sets up shop in the main chamber, letting the other scientists come to him, predator laying a lure – and she bears witness as he makes them beg, makes them suffer, all whilst the creatures in the tanks behind him watch on, silent. Eventually, the head scientist makes the mistake of trying to reason with him, and after the Master threatens him into doing something on the console – probably, she reasons, overriding some safety mechanism that will lead to a catastrophic hull breach – he gets miniaturised too, right along with all the other scientists who’d been held hostage.

And then, the Master stands alone. Bathed in the bluish light of the squid tank, and the red flashes of alarms on the walls around him.

The Doctor checks the timestamp. It’s barely minutes from flooding.

She expects him to do – well, something. Start dancing around and laughing manically. Make one last dash for the temporal engine to steal parts. But he doesn’t. Instead, he turns and clambers right up onto the console, climbing over buttons and switches, and sits on the sill. As she watches, he leans against the tank, forehead resting against it, and after a moment, he lifts his hand up to press against the glass too. For several seconds, nothing moves.

Then, the squids come.

They’d been hidden just out of sight of the camera, near the top of the tank – but they swim down to him, skin flashing with luminescent colour. They gather around the small, strange figure in their midst like a halo, almost curious – just eight of them, now. Two had died whilst he’d been there, she remembers from the dissection reports.

“What are you doing?” she murmurs after a few moments, watching the seconds run down to the ending. “Move.”

But he doesn’t.

He just sits with the squids. He sits there, the contours of his skin lit with greenish light, until the camera begins to shudder. And then, moments later, the footage disintegrates into a raging rush of water, and the camera cuts out.

For a moment, the Doctor just stands there, staring at the screen, which has returned back to the file menu. Around her, the TARDIS whorps and groans, like an underwater base creaking with the pressure of the ocean above. For several seconds, she has to close her eyes, swallowing the strange, awful, desperate truth that has risen in her throat. She doesn’t move. The hum of the timelines fades to nothing.

Then, she looks up at the ceiling, blinking away the blurriness in her vision. She turns to the console, rooting out the wires that are connected to the black box on the floor. Without a word, she pulls out the many connection cables, and within a few seconds, the screen blacks out to nothing.

She ties up the loose threads. Anachronistic bases are sent back to their home time period, minus their horrifying data. Squids are tracked down, implanted technology carefully removed, and the worst of their pain soothed. And then –

Then, she finds herself in the medbay once again, curled up in a chair beside the Master’s bed.

He’s out for the count – not a surprise, considering his injuries. She thinks she has it all pieced together, now. The squids must have attacked him in the water, perhaps in terrified confusion as the room flooded, the pressure so intense that it smashed right through the glass of the tank. In retrospect, she thinks half of the Master’s injuries – the broken ribs, the burst eardrums – were probably from that rush of water, rather than the creatures themselves. Either way, it hardly matters. They were just scared animals. Just creatures, trying to escape.

What had he said?

At the end of it all…they stayed true to their nature.

Asleep like this, she finds that she can see that boy in him. The one who’d found her, all those years ago, curled up under rough blankets in a barn. Who’d lain beside her in crimson fields, blades of red grass brushing his cheek.

Instinctually, barely even thinking, she reaches out, her fingers tangling in his hair.

“I think,” she breathes, “that I do understand, now.”

The Master says nothing. There’s just the clicks and whirrs of the medbay around her, and the sound of his quiet breathing.

“It wasn’t like that, with you and me,” she continues, voice cracking. “I mean – I didn’t want it to be like that. Maybe you thought it was. Maybe Missy did. But I think –” She swallows. “I think that you saw those creatures, trapped behind glass, forced to become something new. And then –”

She closes her eyes. All she can focus on is the feeling of his hair between her fingers.

“I guess you liked that they attacked you,” she murmurs. “That they destroyed the first thing in sight the moment they were free.”

Gallifrey burns, ash choking her lungs.  

“But the thing is,” she carries on. “And I know you’ll hate this. In fact, I’m pretty sure you didn’t want me to even realise – but the truth is…I think I did change you. Because you saw those squids. You saw them, and you –”

And he sat with them, anger burning in his hearts, and pressed his hand against the glass and waited for the end to come

He’d felt empathy.

He’d seen those scientists torturing those creatures, and he’d stopped his plan. He hadn’t gone for the temporal engine. He hadn’t found a way out. Instead, he’d destroyed them all, even though it had nearly killed him doing it.

Without witness, an old voice whispers in her head. Without hope. Without reward.

Missy stands in her memory, clear and sharp as glass. Her hand pressed against the wall of the vault, staring right into the hearts of her.

I don't even know why I'm crying, she’d said, once, tears streaming down her face, and it had been the most terrifying thing the Doctor had seen. Because it had given her hope. It had made her think that maybe they didn’t have to be like this. Maybe –

Maybe.

“But the thing is,” she murmurs, the truth pouring out of her now that there’s no-one there to hear it. “The thing is, Master, that –”

Her voice closes on her, choking. Gallifrey, again. Burning, burning, burning. The psychic resonance rings in the back of her skull, the screaming imprint of a massacre. The weeping wounds of thousands of amputated timelines. The stench of blood –

“– I had to make them pay,” he hisses
holographic projection bright
and burning against the dark,
“for what I discovered –”

She thinks of him in that security footage. Waiting. Biding his time, before enacting his complete and utter destruction with precision, dedication, and unwavering resolve.

She imagines him, in the ruins of Gallifrey, doing the same on a planet-wide scale.

“What could they have done?” she breathes. “What did you find out that made you do that?”

What did they do, she wants to scream at him, that meant you had to obliterate a billion hearts to in a useless attempt to heal your own?

She opens her eyes, and looks at him. The boy she once knew. The man who has become a stranger to her.

And it scares her, more than anything. Not because of what happened here – not because of what he did.

No.

What scares her is that she thinks – she knows – that if she’d wandered into that base and found what they were doing…found them torturing those creatures, for the sake of morale. For no reason other than pure pointless selfishness of a people who didn’t care enough to stop them going extinct in the first place – well. She may have – she might have –

On a bad day. On a good day –

She thinks that she may have done the same thing that he did.

And she’s not about to find out now. Once he’s stable, she’ll take him back to where he belongs in 2002, and let the circle of their timeline complete itself. Maybe muddy his memories, just to be safe. But after that, she knows the moment will come. Their timelines are creeping towards each other, trajectories falling into orbit with the destructive inevitability of gravity. He’ll find a way to escape the Kasaavin. He’ll find her, with no warning, and he’ll bring pain and death and devastation in his wake with a gleeful grin and desolation in his eyes.

He’ll take her back home. To Gallifrey. And whatever it was he discovered –

She’ll be standing, once again, watching security footage, and realising who the real monsters are.

And she’s terrified of what that knowledge might turn her into.