Chapter Text
Just another night in paradise. Missy was trying her hand at needlework, on the recommendation of Mary, Queen of Scots. “When ye want tae stab a man, but need bide your time, a wee bit of linen makes a surprisingly good substitute,” she’d advised over the temporally-altered Spacebook chat Missy set up last week. Or was it last decade? It was hard to tell in here.
The little bald fellow was just outside, twiddling with the vault’s security settings. Missy had parked her chaise lounge right by the door in an attempt to intimidate him. It wasn’t working.
“Oh! Here he comes!” he chirped.
“You’re being cheerful,” she heard the Doctor say. “I’m against cheerful.”
“You and me both,” she scoffed. Up til now, Baldy had been whistling while he worked. Missy desperately wanted to push her needle into one of his secondhand lungs. The tension, the release, the spurting blood. It would feel so satisfying.
“Bill told me about your little adventure,” said Baldy. Missy scoffed harder.
Once every decade or so, the Doctor bent the rules of his self-imposed seclusion, and took a bright (by human standards) young student under his wing. Baldy always fretted more over the vault when the Doctor was preoccupied with one of these pets. This latest model was called “Bill.” She was the first mentee that the Doctor had taken off-world, on a little field trip to Gliese 581b. Missy knew this because, for weeks after, Baldy simply would not shut up about it as he reexamined every nanochip of the vault door.
“You see?” said the android. Missy could hear him smiling.
“I see what?” the Doctor asked.
“Well, you don’t have to go to outer space to find monsters. There’s plenty of things ‘t want to kill you right here on Earth.”
“Result.”
“Hmm. Actually I’m not that hungry,” mused Cue Ball. Missy imagined the Doctor had brought down more Earth cuisine, fried and salted and packed in paper cartons. It was a weakness of his.
“Well I am,” the Doctor countered.
“Obviously.” the android chuckled. Absolutely maddening, a peon in a good mood. “You know sir, if you don’t mind my saying-”
“Pretty sure I do-”
“If you keep packing away takeaways down here, not to mention upstairs with Bill, you’ll be as big as me soon enough.”
Missy snorted with laughter. That would be quite a feat. Egghead had a circumference to rival his height, while the Doctor was notoriously vain. Although, if Missy recalled correctly, his most self-satisfied regeneration had been one of the rare few that approached ‘slightly stocky.’ She’d rather liked that version of her friend: bold, cunning, and not too nice.
“Don’t worry; I’d never steal your signature look,” the Doctor quipped. “You can take the rest of the night off. Go on, go and do whatever it is that you do. Actually- what do you do? No,” the Doctor stopped himself. “Never tell me that.”
The two men bantered a bit longer. Missy rolled her eyes. She was against banter, unless it was between rivals of great and nearly-equal wit.
With Tweedle-Dum finally gone, the Doctor set to the task of opening the door. The first buzz of his sonic screwdriver set off a blaring, flashing alarm within the vault. Missy had sixty seconds to return to the dais, lest she receive a nasty electrical shock through the floor. Not enough to kill a timelord, of course. Just a moment of blissful unconsciousness, followed by a steel-wool headache and some rather uncomfy foot blisters.
She threw aside her needlework- a little wall hanging declaring BLESS THIS PRISON- and skipped up to the dais. She sat primly at the piano bench as the forcefield went up and the alarm switched off. As he worked through the numerous locks, the Doctor once again attempted to justify himself to her.
“I’m stuck here too, you know?” he wheedled. “Apparently getting fat on takeaway.”
Missy giggled to herself. Her stomach did a strange little flip-flop. She pictured her friend leaning back before a spread of empty, greasy cartons, self-satisfied as he folded his hands over his mere hint of a paunch, his chin retreating to confer with its soft understudy. The image came to her easily, she realized, because she’d seen it towards the end of many a recent evening.
Was Humpty-Dumpty right about something for once? Had the Doctor been packing it away lately?
And more importantly, could Missy make him pack away a bit more?
It was a mad idea, sure. A silly, pointless scheme. What good would it do Missy to fatten up her friend?
Well for one thing, it would keep her entertained while he lectured her on the ethics of “goodness.”