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This time when she awoke, the self destruct read six minutes and thirty-six seconds. A full nine seconds lost from the last loop.
She tried to coordinate her limbs to stand, focusing on the flow of blood and minute muscle contractions; a complicated little task, standing was, which, usually, she took for granted. Even so, her brain did the math on autopilot. The time loop was escalating, and by a factor far too high for comfort.
The Master was already awake and working. He’d bled the wiring out the door mechanism, copper loops unspooled around him. His fingers were knotted in the tangles, making quick work of reversing the polarity. He was almost there, almost-
She lunged for him. They went down in a tangle as the door, rusty, screeched open an inch.
He gave a snort of laughter as she scrambled – or tried to – off of him and through the door. It was a standard space-grade blast door: thick titanium alloy, gasket-sealed to protect from oxygen leaks. It should have slid smoothly open along its track. But the rust – oh, the rust was everywhere. She could taste it, the rust.
The Doctor got her fingers in the gap and yanked. But from her position, knees on the floor, she didn’t have the leverage. Or the grip strength. Time loops, apparently, really took it out of a girl. And the oxygen deprivation. That wasn’t helping, either.
The Master picked himself up with a huff of laughter. “Careful love,” he said, sunny, spitting out his respirator. He grabbed her wrists and yanked her, effortlessly, away from the opening. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
She snarled and fought, wrenching her wrists, trying to twist free. He tutted, deftly evaded a kick from her left foot, and dropped her to the rusty floor. Out of the way, like spare parts.
“I’ll hurt you, you mean,” she hissed. But the words were a pathetic gesture, and she knew it. And he knew it. And Missy knew it, too.
“Five minutes, fifty-nine seconds,” she observed from her corner. Head tilted, purple skirts crushed against the bulkhead wall. She’d watched their scuffle unmoved, not lifting a finger to help one way or the other. “You sure we’re using our time well?”
Missy had a respirator, too, swinging from one hand. In this century, rescue respirators were small cylinders, the size of a cigar. You clamped your mouth on it, sideways, and got some minutes of breathable air. Quite a few minutes, if one also had an internal respiratory bypass.
“I’m optimizing,” the Master shot back. He retrieved his own respirator from the floor, some inches from the Doctor’s grasping fingertips, and tucked it into a pocket. “Twenty seconds for the door, sixteen for the Doctor-” he blew her a kiss “-right on schedule.”
The Doctor shoved herself up. Fingertips to elbows, to knees, and finally, to her feet, spine unfolding like a creaky lawn chair. It took effort; it took all the sheer, stubborn grit she could muster. There was enough oxygen in this ship’s internal atmosphere to keep her alive, but only just. Without a respirator of her own to bolster her oxygen intake, she was firing on half cylinders.
She clawed her fingernails into the wall, sharp-edged rust cutting into the heel of her palm, and dragged herself to standing. “Get out-” she lurched forwards “-of my way.”
She fell towards the Master. With insulting ease, he planted a hand right in the center of her chest. She lacked the strength to push through it. She grabbed for his wrist, desperate to keep her feet.
He regarded her with pity. “Oh, love. Deep breaths.”
“I’m going,” she said, with a clarity she hadn’t had the last few times around, “to kill you.”
From her corner, Missy chimed in. “And here I thought you were going to save me.”
“You first,” she snapped back, breathless.
“Cheer up, love. This is good for you. Well.” He considered. “Not for your organ function. But low atmospheric concentration is slowing the oxidation in your blood. Really, you ought to be thanking me.”
He wiggled his respirator at her. She refused to humiliate herself by reaching for it again, but it was hard; every instinct in her body was screaming for air. She tried for a measured breath; slow; even. But it felt like breathing through plastic; like her lungs couldn’t expand. The lack of air was a painful weight on her chest.
“Or you could just give me the antidote,” she managed. “Clearly you have one.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
She bared her teeth at him. He flashed a grin. From her lean against the wall, Missy did, too.
The problem was twofold – fourfold, if you counted the Master, which the Doctor was trying not to do. This ship was drifting, rudderless, which itself wasn’t much of an issue – in space, you could go for years; centuries; without an obstacle to hit. She’d die of old age a dozen times before their freefall became a problem.
They didn’t have years, though. They had – she checked her mental calculations – five minutes, forty-two seconds.
They were still five compartments out from the main control deck. This ship was built for long journeys in deep space, and beautifully suited to purpose. It was spiderlike in form, with eight “legs” around a central hub. Each leg was variegated into compartments, separated by heavy blast doors. In an emergency, these autosealed to avoid oxygen loss and limit damage.
Which was great, if you were on the right side. Not so great if you had five titanium blast doors, sealed, between you and the cancel button for the self-destruct.
Why the self-destruct had been set wasn’t much mystery, though it had taken the Doctor precious minutes to work it out. This ship was being eaten from the inside by rust. Which didn’t sound like an emergency, granted, but it was a particularly virulent rust. A rust-pathogen, devouring everything in its way.
Oxygen included.
Eight minutes, nineteen seconds after she entered the ship, it self-destructed.
The Doctor had died in all kinds of fun and interesting ways, but she wasn’t altogether sure she could regenerate with her constitute atoms scattered across a league of empty space. She’d worked until the last second, unwilling to give up even the slightest chance at survival. She brought to bear every bit of her cleverness; her tenacity; her memory of dropping the fam off, of Ryan saying see you tomorrow, yeah? Just a little shy with her, still; not totally trusting her to come back.
When the blast hit, she’d had her head and hands inside a wall, frantically cutting electrical connections. She felt it coming at her, hands scrambling for purchase and-
She’d like to say she didn’t remember the sensation of being blown to bits. But she’d never been so lucky.
The engines blew first. That took out the core of the ship, setting off a chain reaction of nanoexplosives along each corridor’s length. The soundless sunburst of detonation must have been glorious to see: the white glow of the blast rising, then falling, yellowing, fading to dull orange. Fragments shooting out in all directions, velocity taking them to all corners of the universe.
But at least she’d seen it coming. Had time to send a silent apology out to Yaz and Graham and Ryan, her fam, who would never know that she’d tried, she’d really honestly tried to make it back to them, to keep a promise for once in her damn life…
She’d come to with a horrific headache. The feeling of her flesh made whole again was disconcerting. She slapped a hand to her face, feeling her forehead; the depressions of her eyes; the ridge of her nose; all the same as they’d been for months, now. Her heels and ankles, sore from balancing in the light ship’s gravity. Sick to her stomach, but explosive dismemberment would do that to you.
“Morning, love,” came a voice, and the sick feeling doubled.
“Is it?” she’d mumbled. Her tongue too thick and her head too full, calculating, pulling at timelines. She hadn’t understood, yet. She’d been too caught in the shock of survival.
His face, dark and bearded, swam into view above her.
“Still wearing that awful vest, I see.” She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the blur from her eyes and the fog from her head. “Still evil, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, well.” A woman’s voice. “Eye of the beholder, etcetera etcetera.”
The Doctor’s stomachache intensified to the point of retching – she had to shove herself up on her elbows, gasping, to keep the bile from rising in her throat.
Missy was on her knees, skirts spread, one hand idly picking at the hem of her sleeve. On the Doctor’s other side, the Master, peering at her like a child about to tug the wings off a moth. Ignoring her stomachache, the Doctor scrambled fully up.
“You…” her mouth felt full of cotton “and you…”
She’d no idea they were on the ship with her. Granted, she’d only been there eight minutes before the explosion, but still. She felt, as she always did, that she ought to have known.
Neither would say what they’d been doing. But she wasn’t stupid. This ship was infested with super-rust, pulling the oxygen from lungs; cannibalizing the iron in the bloodstream; grinding the gears and levers of the ship to a halt and wearing holes right through the hull… it had the Master’s hand all over it.
But something must have gone wrong. The rust pathogen getting out of hand, perhaps, or the ship’s crew responding unpredictably. Humans did that, she thought with a surge of irritable pride. They sent emergency signals and planned escapes. They fought furiously when cornered.
At some point, though, someone had set the self-destruct. Now, it was a race against time, and against him. If she’d had her TARDIS… but her TARDIS was several blast doors away, sealed off from her when the self destruct had been set.
Her TARDIS which, in the desperate moment of detonation, had cocooned them all in this unstable pocket of time. But it was degrading at a rapid rate, time unspooling like the wiring in the walls. If she didn’t make it up to the control room in time, this ship would blow, again. Even if they could hide someplace where they weren’t ripped apart on impact, the force would send them all hurtling into the void. Time Lords were pretty durable, as humanoids went, but not even they would survive that.
The Doctor envisioned it, briefly. Tumbling through the void of space, suffocating, capillaries bursting with the loss of pressure, going blind and deaf as her cells ruptured; the sunburst of regeneration; then repeat, ad infinitum. Not even infinite regenerations would give her the means to change her trajectory in space. She might drift, rudderless, cycling through death and rebirth, until the heat death of the universe.
It might be worth it, if she took the Master with her.
But they were six loops gone, now. And the Master, times two, still seemed to have control of the situation.
“Come on, love,” the Master cajoled. He had his arms around her again. Missy was shoving open the door he’d unlocked, rust flaking off wherever her hands and skirts touched.
“Five more minutes,” the Doctor mumbled, heels dragging.
“Four minutes, thirty-eight seconds,” he corrected. “But close enough.”
He hauled her across the threshold. Already, Missy had crossed the length of the next compartment, ducking crates and boxes. She jacked a panel off the wall by the next sealed door and got to work.
Above the door, lights strobed. The self-destruct warning, counting down in alien symbols. The Master eyed it.
“Your TARDIS is slipping. The loop shouldn’t be decaying so rapidly.”
“That’s what you get with a Type 40,” Missy opined. Her hands worked quickly, stripping wires out, recombining. “It’s got nothing on a decent Type 70.”
“My ship is saving your life, and you want to complain? Really?”
“I’m just saying, love, you were stealing it anyways.” The Master shrugged. “Could have picked something with more style. More panache.”
“You’re one to talk! You were getting by with a vortex manipulator,” she reminded him “for years until you went back to-” Abruptly, she snapped her jaw shut.
At the door, Missy didn’t move; didn’t make any indication that she’d heard. But the Doctor knew she had.
The Master was grinning; his face a rictus of cheer. The Doctor set her feet and yanked away from him. She reeled, grabbing the side of a rusty metal crate for balance. The rust cut into her fingers; she felt the wetness bloom as it drew blood. Probably introducing more pathogen; hastening her death. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The first time around, she’d searched out her options. If they could escape the ship, they could simply let it explode, and return to pick up the TARDIS from the wreckage. A few tons of explosive wouldn’t so much as scratch the TARDIS paint. And this ship had been carrying escape pods which, the Doctor found out too late, were all jettisoned. But that was a good thing, she thought, holding tight to her optimism. She had to hope that meant some of these people, at least, had gotten away.
The second loop, she’d tried heading backwards. Only two sealed doors separated them from an auxiliary control, and some ships in this class, if she recalled correctly, had emergency access from auxiliaries. The Master and Missy both solemnly agreed to this plan, helped her to fight her way through the sealed doors, only to find the auxiliary pilot a bloody, dismembered mess on the floor of the chamber. And no emergency access.
She’d blown to pieces with the Master laughing twice over in her ears.
The third loop went much the same way, except they’d gone in the other direction. And hadn’t made it. Time ran out on the third, fourth, and fifth loops as they worked their way through the doors. Each time they got a little faster; a little more efficient. And each time, the loop got a little shorter.
Missy snapped together another set of wires, and the next door scrolled open. Three to go.
The Master hauled the Doctor off her crates, dragging her a few inches before getting an arm beneath her shoulders. She coughed, spitting blood as he pulled her through the doorway, trying to brace herself. She’d been here before and in three, two-
The body coughed, heaving weakly.
Missy was already halfway across this compartment, purple skirts trailing through the bloody, rusty pool around the body. He was laid out on the floor, limbs crooked at awkward angles. The strobe of the emergency light flashed over him, outlining his body in an eerie glow.
He was the second mate. She knew this because of the markings on his shirt: beautiful geodesic patterning across the shoulders. The rust was far gone on him. The human body contained far more metal than most people realized: iron in the blood; calcium in the bone; zinc and magnesium and manganese distributed across cells. The rust pathogen attacked every molecule; merciless. It had left this man’s fingers and mouth blackened; blood trickling from his eyes and nose as the rust tore into the flesh.
The Doctor dug in her heels. Like she had last time, and the time before that. She’d wasted two loops trying to save him. There wasn’t a hope of it, she knew. But knowing didn’t make it any better.
He gurgled.
She tried, and failed, to breathe.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Her stomach turned at the breathy excitement in the Master’s voice. He dropped his hands from her – she swayed, but kept her feet – and squatted by the dead man. Dead, or close enough.
“Horrific,” she breathed.
He tutted. “There’s beauty in everything, love. That’s your whole schtick, isn’t it?”
She refused to dignify that with any real response. “Beauty. Sure.”
He raised a brow at her. From his knee, face upturned, he looked beatific. “The rust, love. Surely even you can see it.”
“I can see corruption.” She felt blank; drained. Red was scaling over the skin on her wrist, worse than the previous loops. Which shouldn’t be possible. The time loop must be degrading more rapidly than she’d realized. “Corrosion. Death.”
“Beautiful,” he murmured, again. He skimmed his fingers over the man’s chest. It rose; fell; rose; erratic.
“It’s sick.”
“It’s chemistry.”
“You can say that about anything.” She warred with her feet, wanting to close the distance, to comfort the dying man, but not wanting to play into the Master’s game.
“Corrosion,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard her, “is combustion.” He peered close at the red flaking off the dying man; red rust and red blood. “An explosion happening in slow motion.”
Her stomach roiled. She itched her wrist and rusty residue flaked off. It itched like anything, her wrist.
“Come along,” Missy called, impatient, from ahead. Already she was working at the next door. “We’ve done this one already.”
The fingers of the body’s hand curled in, twitching. His lips formed a word, but not one she had a hope of hearing. Not that she needed to. She’d seen enough death to hazard a good guess.
The Master kissed his fingers and touched them, gently, to the man’s forehead in bloody benediction. “Ah, well.” He hoisted himself to his feet and returned to her. Taking her arms; tugging her gently forwards, towards the next door.
He wasn’t quite dead yet, the man. She dug in her heels.
“Love,” said the Master, calmly, pityingly, a rock at her side, “there’s no one left here to save.”
“No one left I can save,” she ground out. Dizzy from the anger, or possibly the oxygen deprivation. “At any rate.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. His hands around hers clenched a little tighter, fingers spasming with suppressed rage.
“Oh, have you given up the old crusade?” called Missy. Fishing, again; her voice cheery but her eyes sharp, tracking the space between the Doctor and the Master; tracking her future. “Lessons didn’t take, I see.”
“You skipped one too many,” snapped the Doctor. Then immediately regretted it. They were playing with fire here, the three of them. The temporal fog of meeting herself would only go so far, and if Missy learned too much…
“Maybe my teacher bored me,” she sing-songed. “Bored me to absolute death.”
It had occurred to the Doctor that she could simply… say it. Out loud. Answer the unasked question in Missy’s sharp gaze. What’s with the tension? Oh, well, I left you alone for a minute. And while my back was turned, you killed everyone we ever knew.
Sounds like me, the Missy of her imagination said.
The Doctor forced her thoughts off that path. Too much was showing in her face.
“Yeah,” she said, forcing her tone to neutral. “And I guess I learned to recognize a lost cause when I see one.”
The Master, giving up the façade of care, yanked her forwards. His hands on her damaged wrists were painful. She gritted her teeth so as not to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.
He pulled her through the door, Missy turning, businesslike, to fix her eyes on the next one. Three to go. They had – she fumbled for her count – two minutes, twelve seconds. They were making poor time.
Her hate clarified as she stumbled in his wake. He’d made her complicit in keeping his secret. What he’d done to Gallifrey was unforgivable, and now she was irreducibly part of it. Every moment on this ship, she made the choice not to say it to Missy; the choice to keep their horrific timeline intact. Some last, lingering scrap of her heritage kept the secret of it locked in her chest: a Time Lord guarded time. Who would she be if she ripped it open instead?
“We need to move,” she said, fixing her own eyes on the next door.
“You’re the one holding us up,” the Master pointed out. “Holding vigil for every dead human lying around the place…”
Her anger surged. She fought it, forcing bile back down her throat. He regarded her like he could hear every unspoken word, anyways. Behind him, Missy regarded her too.
That was the worst part: Missy and her sharp gaze. Every touch, every glance, every bitter word gave their future away. The Doctor tried, and failed, again, to figure out where Missy was in her timeline. She’d referenced their “lessons,” which meant she had to have been in the vault already only-
-only the Doctor had thought she’d locked her up well enough. Had thought she hadn’t had a chance to get out and-
-and what was she doing on this ship, anyways-
“We lost nine seconds this loop,” she hissed, shoving all other thoughts away. “That’s a decay rate of-”
“Oh, save it, love.”
She was spiraling and he knew it. And she knew it, too. And-
“Rust doesn’t happen in vacuum.” She could hear the breathy lisp in her own voice. The pressure on her chest was excruciating.
Missy and the Master watched her, blank.
Chemistry, as a rule, didn’t happen in a vacuum. A molecule needed other molecules to react with. Electrons spinning off; recombining. Reduction and oxidation; two halves of a whole reaction. She reached again for the Master’s pocket, thumb tucked in like Houdini taught her. She made her body big and her expression exaggerated; sleight-of-hand was all about misdirection.
Her hand slid in, fingers seeking the respirator. If she could just breathe, just think-
“Ah! Naughty.”
Thin fingers caught her wrist. The touch was agony against her damaged skin. Immediately she was furious with herself. She’d been so focused on holding the Master’s attention that she’d forgot Missy-
They pinned her with identical looks of deadpan amusement.
The Master made a show of patting his pockets, withdrawing the respirator and waggling it under her nose. “Hope springs eternal, eh, Doctor?”
“Not eternal,” suggested Missy. She came in close behind the Doctor’s shoulder; breath on the Doctor’s neck. “We only have, hm, twenty-six loops or so left. If the decay holds steady, which-”
“-which it’s not, it’s jumping by a factor of-”
“-losing at least six seconds each time-”
The Doctor closed her eyes. She let their voices wash over her. They circled her, doing the math out loud only she’d already done it, herself. She knew they were running low on loops, as it were. But twenty-six more tries had to count for something.
Which did not mean they could waste this one on pointless arguing.
“Fine,” she muttered. Her head ached so horrifically she thought she might go blind from it. It pulsed in time to their heartsbeats, times three. “Whatever. I’ve got to do,” she said “everything by myself around here.”
She didn’t wait for them; just turned towards the door. Two more to go. She checked her internal clock, then wished she hadn’t.
“Has anyone got my sonic?” she asked the door. But she didn’t wait for Missy or the Master to respond. She jacked the panel off the door mechanism and got to work. It wasn’t actually complicated work – just a little time consuming. She began stripping out wires with her fingernails.
It hurt. But everything did, so that wasn’t really a problem, one way or the other.
“I’m begging you,” said Missy. “I’m on my knees for you to get rid of that stupid sonic screwdriver.”
The Doctor held out a hand without looking. “Give it back.”
A pause. The sonic dropped into her hand. She clenched her fingers around the smooth circumference of it, feeling suddenly better despite the sting in her palm. She’d made it out of spoons, with her bare hands, while her fam looked on. She was no stranger to a desperate situation, the Doctor. And this time she was sitting on twenty-six do-overs – decay notwithstanding.
Headache or no, she was going to open that damn door.
She fumbled it. The wires sparked a little but they were so rusty; too corroded to carry a charge without shorting. She worked with singleminded desperation, stripping out the worst of them, swapping them for fragments that might have a shot. The rust bloomed from her hands, shedding bloody dust over her work. Decay escalating in more ways than one.
“Are you going to just stand there?” she snapped.
A heartsbeat. Two. Three.
Missy moved in beside her. She put her shoulder to the Doctor’s, pressing close so that the Doctor could feel the cool solidity of her, softened by her layers of clothing. She put her clean, perfect hands to the tangle beneath the Doctor’s wrecked ones.
“Two minutes,” the Doctor whispered.
“A lifetime.”
“It might be, at that.”
A smile quirked Missy’s mouth. The Doctor had to look away.
They made it through the door. A slog up the compartment to the next, the Doctor failing, fighting for breath. Her chest in crushing pain but she ignored it, ignored it, stumbled forwards. Sometimes it was Missy’s arm around her; sometimes the Master’s.
With just over a minute to go, they made it through the next door. Just one more, and she repeated it like a mantra. One more door. One more door…
Halfway there, she tripped. Missy hadn’t been expecting it; it hadn’t happened in the last loops. She ripped free of Missy’s hands, tumbling forwards. She hit the floor arms first, saving her face but sending stinging pain through her wrists and elbows. The breath whoofed out of her and for long, horrific seconds she gagged, dragging desperately at the thin air, rust cutting into her knees and palms.
Hands on her arms; her shoulders; dragging her upright. The Master’s hands, it turned out. She reeled away on instinct.
“Almost there,” he soothed, so convincing, like he wanted her to make it.
“Liar,” she breathed. Talking was getting harder – her favorite activity. Add that to his sins.
He met her gaze. Gallifrey strung between them, thin as the oxygen in the air. He hadn’t pulled his respirator out in awhile, she realized. He was gasping a little. His eyes burned red with the lack of air.
Good. Let them both suffer.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
It burst from him, like it had been killing him, that she wasn’t asking. Killing him like it was killing her.
“Shut” -breath- “up.”
“How eloquent, love.”
She stumbled forwards, catching herself against the corroded door. Red flakes came away on her hands. She fumbled for the access panel, resolutely refusing his gaze.
He hovered, hands up, as though to catch her if she fell. “Ask me.”
“Why bother?”
He grinned, sharp. “I might tell.”
He wouldn’t. She knew that; she knew that. But she still felt the words form in her mouth.
She cleared her throat to rid herself of them. “What about shut up did you not understand?”
She yanked, hard, on the wires. Several came loose in her fist. Red rust on the wires; red dust on her hands.
He caught her hands, wires and all. His fingers threaded through hers. She was so weak; too weak to push him away.
“Ask me, love. While we’re seconds from death, ask me.”
She stared at him, eyes red and furious. The curve of his cheek and the contour of his nose were so familiar. As intimately familiar as her own face.
Over his shoulder she could see Missy, watching.
“I’d rather die.”
“You’re about to get your wish, love.”
Oh, she hated him. She hated his stupid checkered vest and the way he tilted his head, just like Missy, which she hadn’t remembered until just now. She hated the lies and the games and most of all she hated pretending, teeth gritted, to keep the timelines intact, that Gallifrey wasn’t-
Nineteen seconds. The Doctor stared at Missy. Her eyes were having trouble focusing; almost, it looked like concern creased on Missy’s face. “How much of it was a lie?”
“Wrong question,” murmured the Master.
“I’m not asking you.”
Missy’s face. Those little brow wrinkles. The Doctor tried again to pull Missy’s timeline from the ether. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t read it. It all just came back wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
“It was all a lie,” the Doctor hissed. “I know it. So just-” she coughed, choking on airlessness “just say it-”
She hit the wall, then the ground. Legs folding jellylike beneath her. Her head whacked the door frame on the way down, ringing her headache brighter. Dazed, she took a gulping breath of thin air. Then promptly coughed it all back out her lungs.
I’ve been here, she thought, frustrated. They stared back at her: the Master and the Master, matched in purple. Missy’s purple skirts and the Master’s purple jacket. He wore that jacket like Teflon armor. Like Missy wore her skirts; like Saxon had worn suits.
“Why’d you lose the black? I liked it, the black.” She heard herself babbling but couldn’t stop. “More honest, I thought.”
Missy crouched before her. There was something in her eyes, behind the anger and the hate and the infuriating pity. There was something there, but not something the Doctor could articulate. Not something Missy could articulate, either, she supposed, and that was probably why they were here, enemies, again-
Missy reached out a hand, cupping the Doctor’s cheek. Her fingers were ice against the burning fever. The pathogen worked fast.
“I’ve always been more honest than you thought me, love.”
“Liar.”
Missy just shrugged, like she didn’t care whether the Doctor believed her or not. More lies.
“Do you regret it?” she breathed, wasting precious oxygen, unable to articulate it because the timelines, oh, the timelines, and she had one job-
Missy’s face, so close, hovered moonlike in the Doctor’s vision.
“I’m not in the habit of regret, Doctor.”
“I am,” she whispered. Hysteric giggles erupted. “Oh, it’s my favorite habit, regret is.”
Missy’s mouth firmed. “If regret were the worst of you, Doctor, we wouldn’t be here.”
“This ship.”
“Yeah.” A quirk at the corner of her lip; indecipherable. “This ship.”
“Why rust?” It had been worrying her. Pathogens weren’t so hard to engineer, if one had the aptitude. And the Master had always had aptitude in spades. But to make a bioagent of rust…
Missy tilted her head. “Can you feel it?” she pressed a hand to the center of the Doctor’s chest.
“Right here, it’s working. Corrupting. Corroding. Every particle of iron in your blood; every molecule of copper and magnesium. It’ll kill you, given time.”
“Which we haven’t got,” said the Doctor. “For once.”
Missy grinned; sharp; all teeth.
The Doctor coughed again. It shuddered through her weakened body, copper welling in her mouth. She spat blood on the floor. It was orange-red, indistinguishable from the rust. Missy’s eyes followed it with interest.
“It’s corrupting you,” murmured Missy, “from the inside. The one thing I never managed to do.”
Ghostlike, he appeared behind Missy. The shape of him blurred and dark against the rusty ship or maybe, maybe that was just her vision going. His cheeks were hollows beneath the fuzz of beard. His eyes red-rimmed and exhausted, and she didn’t think it was all a show. Maybe he really had been more honest than she ever gave him credit for.
Not that it mattered. She knew everything there was to know about him: he was a murderer, and he didn’t regret it.
She was a murderer. She regretted it. It made no difference, in the end, to the dead.
Missy was so close. The Doctor could see every little clump of mascara in her eyelashes. Always overcommitting to the bit, they were.
“Or maybe he has better luck. But don’t tell me, love.” That brittle grin. “Love a surprise, us girls…”
Seven seconds. This ship was gonna blow. The Doctor wasn’t even trying anymore; none of them were. The rot had too deep a hold in her. Not even resetting time could wipe it clean.
“Six,” murmured the Master, hovering behind Missy’s head. She couldn’t focus; it looked like there were three of him. But there were only the two, and neither were giving in. “Five.”
She held Missy’s gaze. Missy was mouthing the countdown along with him. Eyes red-rimmed and tired.
-four-
The corruption was working its way through her, knives in her chest. Splitting her lungs and slicing up her veins.
-three-
It would only be worse next time. There was never any better between them. Every time she saw him, he was worse. Every loop; every regeneration. For a heartsbeat she’d had Missy. Add that to her regrets.
-two-
Deathbed confession time. She wondered if she could get a secret out of them. But they were smiling, still; Missy and the Master; sharp; pained. They’d killed for their secrets, and they were about to die with them, again.
Again, and again, and-