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The Doctor’s mad arch-nemesis was pretty much the last person that Graham O’Brien, retired bus driver and, more recently, retired intergalactic traveling-companion, expected to find in his back garden.
He’d heard a noise – in retrospect, a crash – and stepped outside. It was midmorning and midweek, which meant the neighbors weren’t around. No curious heads poked over the garden fence.
At first, he didn’t see anything wrong. He scanned for the usual: the TARDIS, crushing his begonias, or armed aliens filing out of a portal to invade the Earth. The TARDIS would be an especially welcome surprise after all these months. Yaz was going a little mad herself, he thought, with the lack of closure. If the Doctor had made it off Gallifrey alive-
Graham stopped himself. He wouldn’t wholly mind the Doc crushing his begonias, was all.
But when he leaned out his back door, all he saw was the slightly neglected stretch of his garden: grass and neat banks of budding spring flowers. A tangle of vines towards the back, still brown from the winter. The hunched garden shed with its cracked window, which Grace had been pestering him to fix for ages but he never had, and then everything had happened and-
He cut off that train of thought, too. He scanned the garden again.
Towards the righthand plot, the dirt had been disturbed. Peering closer, he saw a shape. A cluster of old fabric – no – it was a-
It was a man. A familiar man. With rising horror, Graham identified the dirty face of the Master.
He was spread-eagled in Graham’s garden, body nestled in a divot as though he’d fallen there from a great height. Dirt was piled in drifts around him, and purple fabric in mounds. His eyes, when Graham ventured close enough, stared sightlessly at the sky. Honestly, Graham thought he was dead.
His mind whirred through the considerations. You couldn’t just call 999 for dead aliens, he was pretty sure. He could call the Doctor, but she wasn’t exactly reachable on her best day, and anyways she might be – well. They hadn’t heard from her in going on three months, now. Even if he could have called her, he didn’t exactly want her to see this. It was… horrific, probably. Not exactly a tragedy, though.
Still, she’d known him, had the Doctor. He had, in some ineffable way, mattered to her. But Graham had seen enough in glimpses to know that whatever they had between them, it wasn’t something that could be untangled.
He stepped closer; something he wouldn’t have dared to do if he hadn’t been pretty damn sure the man was dead. Closer, closer, until he knelt beside the body in the soft dirt. His knees creaked as he settled himself down. It had rained yesterday and the damp lingered; it soaked cold through his trousers. He reached out a hand, thinking at least to close the staring eyes.
A hand shot up and clamped ‘round Graham’s wrist.
Graham froze. “Um.” His time with the Doctor had taught him to roll with the punches, if nothing else. “Hello.”
To his surprise and profound relief, the fingers unclenched.
“Hands to yourself, human,” came a croaking voice. Graham stayed frozen in the damp dirt as the Master levered himself up on his elbows. “I haven’t murdered anyone in ages, you know, and I’m starting to feel itchy.”
“Pull the other one,” said Graham, before he could stop himself. Horror rolled over him.
But the Master only shifted among the begonia sprouts. His fingers clenched spasmodically at the dirt. “Suicides,” he said nonsensically, “don’t count.”
He was, Graham noted distantly, wearing a dress. A good dress. It was quality make, that dress; layers of purple skirts and a tailored purple overcoat. In the disarray Graham could see the lace of underskirts peeking out. Not a cheap costume, then. But, well, he was alien. Graham’s experience of aliens was, by volume of exposure, mostly the Doctor, who treated the whole concept of gender as something of a cheap costume.
“… right,” he said, as his brain caught up with him. He placed his hands in his lap. “Um. Do you need. Um. Help?”
The Master dropped flat, rolling his eyes. Graham was mildly offended. Or, well, he would have been, had he been able to feel anything other than the panic he was actively suppressing.
“What I need,” said the Master, meditatively, scrunching his fingers deeper into the dirt, “is the Doctor’s bloody hearts on a…” he trailed off. Frowned. “This tongue,” he announced, “is not Scottish.” He pronounced Scottish with a heavy accent.
Graham sorted rapidly through a cascade of emotion. Horror, and, on its heels, hot fury. Then a fuzzy tinge of hope. Did need imply she wasn’t dead? If anyone could escape an impossible situation, after all, it was the Doctor.
“You’re one of his, aren’t you?”
Graham refocused. “I’m sorry?”
The Master’s mouth firmed. “Don’t play games. You don’t have the face for it.”
“I-”
“He leave you behind?” The mouth quirked, indecipherable. “He does that.”
“… who?”
Still flat on his back, the Master flicked his eyes to Graham. He sighed with all the concentrated melodrama of a preteen whose parent is being particularly obtuse. “The Doctor,” he said, with incredible patience, “is all over you. Left your timeline a real mess.” He squinched up one corner of his mouth in a dramatic wince.
All Graham’s time with the Doctor had not prepared him for this. “Uh…”
“It’s got loops. Humans don’t have loops, by design. Something to consider, next time a man in a box asks you to go traveling.”
“… right.”
The Master rolled his eyes back towards the heavens. “Are you going to kill me? You should,” he mused, “kill me. It’d get you all kinds of brownie points with him. Really top marks.”
“The Doc’s against killing. Generally speaking.”
“Oh.” He raised one dirt-encrusted hand in a dismissive wave. “All the genocidal maniacs say that.”
Graham’s panic was rising. This man had almost murdered them a dozen times over. Brought cybermen down on them. Destroyed the Doctor’s whole planet – as Graham knew intimately. He had walked past scorched walls and bloody handprints as they made their way through that dead citadel to exhume the Doctor from his clutches. There hadn’t been bodies, which he’d been grateful for at the time. Not that the gratitude had lasted long.
“Not me, though,” the Master continued. He levered himself up on his elbows again. He took in his grimy appearance and tutted, dusting dirt from his wool skirts, but it was a lost cause; that dirt was caked in deep. “I’m an honest genocidal maniac.”
Graham didn’t really have anything to say to that. He began calculating routes to his mobile, which he’d left in the kitchen by the kettle. If he got to his feet right now, would the Master stop him? Kill him? He had that – that gun or whatever, and Graham would bet he had uncanny aim. Running was out of the question, then. The Doc always aimed to keep him talking, but that was the Doc. She had something of a gift for gab that Graham didn’t share. Not when it came to homicidal aliens, at any rate.
But the Master was making no moves. Propped on his elbows, he looked like a zombie rising from a shallow grave. His warm complexion had gone greyish, his skin and clothes coated with gritty dirt, and small cuts peppered his face and hands. Like the Doctor, he kept himself well covered; it was impossible to know if he was hurt worse underneath the layers.
He paused, mid-dusting, to study his hand on his sleeve. “Goodness,” he muttered. “There go my rings.”
For lack of anything better to do, Graham played for time. “What are you, uh, doing here?”
“Just thought I’d drop in. Get it? Drop – ugh.” He made a face. “Hopeless, the whole human lot of you.”
Graham was offended enough to snap back. Something he would not have done were he in his right mind, only he’d just had an evil alien appear in his back garden, hadn’t he, so his mind was on a bit of a holiday for the moment.
“Shove off, then.”
The Master raised a brow. Graham’s stomach dropped. He blustered on, regardless. “You spend an awful lot of time on our planet, for someone who hates it.”
“Not my idea, believe you me.”
The calm was unnerving. Graham braced for the explosion. None came. The Master just groaned and rolled himself over to his hands and knees, contorted into an awkward, angular pose. His skirts bunched and tangled around him, making moving difficult, though that could have been the unspecified internal injuries he was, if Graham was any judge, probably suffering from. His face scrunched with pain; he hacked a cough, releasing clouds of gold dust. It rose in a glittering cloud around him.
“Um.” Graham recalled the Doc asleep on his sofa in her tattered suit, months and months ago. She’d been breathing out a golden glow just like that. She’d also, he recalled, fallen through a train roof right in front of him. What else could her kind survive? “You alright?”
The Master laughed like broken glass. “Never better. Now.” He shoved himself to his knees and dropped his head back. “First order of-” the laughter turned to a hacking cough “-business. Where is he.”
“Um.”
He turned towards Graham. That gaze was dark and disconcerting. “Don’t,” he warned, fingering a pocket, “make me ask again.”
Graham’s stomach dropped. Distantly, he considered running after all.
“She’s not here. The Doc, I mean. Not that I’d tell you if she were.”
“No?”
Dangerous territory. Graham dialed back his bravado. She wasn’t, after all, here. He couldn’t give her up by will or force.
“She’s been gone for months, mate. Sorry.”
The Master coughed again; hacking, hand pressed to his throat like he was choking. More gold escaped, rising around him like a perverse halo. When he dropped his hand from his throat, it was glittering, too.
Graham tried to force himself up out of the dirt. But he couldn’t quite seem to make his legs move. “What’s happening to you?”
“Hm.” The Master studied his hand, turning it over to the bloody palm. Graham skirted the question in his head – whose blood?
“I mean, the…” he gestured “the glowing. I mean, the Doc…”
The Master jerked his head up at her name. His glassy gaze sharpened. “You saw the Doctor? Like this?” He held up his glittering hand.
“Yeah. Well, the day we met…” was he giving away the Doctor’s secrets? But it didn’t seem like it. The Master wrinkled his nose.
“Didn’t say what happened, did she? Didn’t, hm, mention me?”
“Why would she have?”
“Well. I killed her.”
Not possible. Every neuron in Graham’s brain lurched to a halt. It just didn’t seem possible. The Doctor was too much idea to be mortal.
“Well.” The Master tilted his head. He waved a hand; gold trailed from the fingertips. “Close enough. Giving myself-” another cough “-the points on that one. Double points.” He grinned.
“That’s-”
“Oh, it was fair play.”
“It wasn’t,” said Graham, grimly. “I was there.”
“No,” said the Master, after a moment. “I’d have remembered. You’ve got more hair.” He squinted. “Or less.”
Graham wasn’t totally sure what to do with that.
Anyways, the immediate problem, i.e., the dead alien in his back garden, had resolved itself. Into a host of other problems, true, but the Doctor wasn’t here and Graham wasn’t qualified.
“Get out,” he said, because it was about the only thing he could – theoretically – control, “of my garden.”
“Touchy,” muttered the Master. He clambered to his feet. In his beard and wide skirts, he looked very alien to Graham’s eyes. He stretched his arms towards the sky, straining the buttons on his bodice. It didn’t look as though it had been tailored to a man his size; the seams strained around the chest and arms. Gold flickered around his wrists. It flashed in the crevices of his cheeks and jawline, sealing shut the tiny cuts there. Graham had to glance twice to believe that one. But where the lightning had played over his skin, it was smooth.
Graham got to his feet, too. “You hurt my friend.” He couldn’t, quite, bring himself to say killed. “You’re not welcome here.”
“Fine by me. It’s a rubbish garden.”
“I mean the planet,” snapped Graham.
A shark grin. “That, too.”
“You wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t I?” He dragged a finger along the crinkled length of a dead vine. “I daresay I’ve seen more of it than you. More of the universe, too.”
That stung, but not for the reasons he probably thought. “More misery,” said Graham, who wasn’t quite sure where his boldness was coming from. But it was his garden, wasn’t it? His planet. His friend, dead among the ruins. He wouldn’t disgrace her memory by cowering. “More suffering. More death.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” the Master whined, with a passable mockery of O’s wide-eyed stare. Then: “No, sorry.” He attempted solemnity, hand on heart, then broke into rasping giggles. “I cannot tell a lie.” Gold flared from the pores around his nose as he snorted.
Graham was about to say something to the effect of obviously when the Master rallied himself long enough to say:
“Didn’t actually kill him, though, if you want to get technical about it. Not for lack of trying, I assure you. I brought the cybermen.”
“Yeah. Could have done without those.”
Carefully, Graham flattened his expression. It was hard to tell truth from lies with the Master, and he didn’t want to play that game. But there was no help for it; hope got its claws in whether he willed it or no. The Doctor wasn’t human and she wasn’t particularly breakable. The day he’d met her, she’d fallen through the roof of a train and popped right back up like it was nothing. If anyone could have survived what had happened on Gallifrey…
Thing was, Yaz was clinging too hard; she’d gotten stuck. It wasn’t healthy. But Graham knew grief intimately, and he knew the grating misery of uncertainty. Yaz had gone too far these last months, holding so tight to the hope that it was choking her. Graham couldn’t live like that; life, such as it was, had to go on. But that didn’t mean he was quite ready to count the Doc out yet, either.
Graham took a step back. Whether she was alive or not, whether the Master had killed her or not, it didn’t change the fundamental calculus here: the Master was dangerous. As much as Graham wanted him out of his garden, he couldn’t be left to roam the city. Graham was just readying himself to do something definitely stupid and probably fatal when the Master sagged, doubling over with the force of another explosive cough. Without thinking, Graham reached out an arm.
Once it was out there, it was too late to take it back. Thankfully, the Master didn’t take it. Nor did he immediately kill Graham, which was a real blessing. Graham was acutely aware that nearly everyone in this man’s proximity had died horribly, the Doctor, possibly, included. Rapidly, he shuffled that last thought off into a box. She was either out there or she wasn’t, and either way, she wasn’t likely to be swooping in to fix this situation.
Belatedly, he reconsidered 999. Then dismissed them again. The police wouldn’t have had a hope of containing the Doc if she didn’t want to be, so what hope would they have against her psychotic nemesis?
All of which meant it was pretty much up to Graham. Which wasn’t… well, it wasn’t ideal. But he’d spent quite a lot of time in the Doc’s company. He’d picked up a thing or two. And the thing about the Doc was, it didn’t factor into her equation whether or not she thought she could win a fight. She just rolled up her sleeves and jumped in. When people need help I never refuse, she’d said, and mostly she’d lived up to it. Had died for it, maybe.
And there wasn’t a thing Graham O’Brien could do about that.
Thing was – she’d left a mark, hadn’t she? Torn begonias and crushed sitting room chairs and a toaster half-dismantled. An empty chair where Grace used to sit. A memory of Tzim Shaw: and yet, you falter. The trek through the Gallifreyan citadel, hours of hiking up alleys and dead ends, expecting to see the Doctor’s broken body at any turn. And he hadn’t faltered. One way or another, the Doctor had left her mark on him.
He took a breath. Step one: ignore the voice in his head telling him to run. This was always step one and yeah, it was harder without the Doc there, but he’d had practice hadn’t he.
“How did you get here?” he asked. Because it seemed like a fair question and, well, he hadn’t been murdered yet. Might as well try his luck a little.
“I got executed,” said the Master, mournfully, “a century or so back. All downhill from there, really.”
Graham took another breath.
“Right. Okay.” He tried, desperately to think what to do next. What would Yaz do? Something heroic and Doctorish, probably. He wanted to call her, only his mobile was by the kettle still and anyways heroics weren’t something he particularly wanted to encourage these days.
“More directly,” said the Master, who seemed to be taking Graham’s question with worrying seriousness, “you might say it was a moment of… hm. Self confidence. Overconfidence.” His mouth twitched. “My own worst enemy, you might say.”
Drowning in the despair that he might never get this man out his garden, Graham said, “I, uh. Know the feeling.”
The Master studied him, pitying. “I doubt you do.”
Graham had been waiting, panic fluttering below his ribcage, for the Master to make a move. So when he stepped forwards, Graham, despite his little pep talk to himself, flinched. The Master grinned maniacally and abruptly Graham recalled the airplane bomb. How delighted he’d been with the terror he’d caused. He was calm now, more or less, but that meant nothing. Graham had seen him snap from one extreme to another in a heartbeat.
The Master took a step. Then another. He lifted his heel to step over the garden border, skirts dragging. Graham caught a glimpse of torn stockings and lace petticoat as he stepped; hesitated; overbalanced. He floundered for a moment, rocking back on his heels. He tried, but whatever was wrong with him ran too deep; he scrabbled at the air, failed to rebalance. He toppled, gently, back to the soil.
He hit the ground with a whoof of breath. He looked surprised, and a little irritated, to have landed back there. Not good. Graham took a step back.
“Um. I’ll… um. Do you want a cuppa?”
The Master eyed him. “Poisoned?”
“Um. No?”
He flopped back in the dirt, skirts asprawl around him. “Pity. Time was the Doctor’s pets would have poisoned me without a second thought.” He considered this, a disappointed wrinkle deepening at his mouth. “He used to have standards.”
“I uh. I’m not in the habit of poisoning people.” It felt, Graham reflected distantly, very surreal to be having this conversation in his garden, with the begonias just coming in.
“I am,” said the Master, wistfully.
“Okay.” Graham shifted on his heels. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
The Master hmmmed vaguely. He stared at the sky. Graham looked up too. There was no hovering spaceship or dark rip in the spacetime continuum. He had no notion of where the Master had fallen from. There wasn’t even an overhanging tree.
“Um. I’ll just…” he stepped back, moving slow and careful. But the Master didn’t even seem to notice. His eyes didn’t so much as flick over to Graham. Which fit the pattern well enough; he’d only ever been interested in them insofar as they could be tools with which to torture the Doctor. And the Doc wasn’t here.
Still, he was a little surprised to make it back through his door alive. One backwards glance showed him that the Master hadn’t moved. He was still a tattered lump of skirts in the dirt. It was a little pathetic, actually; hard to reconcile with the man who had tormented and nearly killed them.
He reached for his phone first, because he wasn’t stupid. In a burst of unreasonable hope, he fired off a text to the Doc’s last known number. Then one to Ryan to tell him not to come home for a bit, explain later. Then, after some consideration, a third one to Yaz to see if she had a contact number for UNIT. If anyone on Earth had even a slim hope of containing the Master, it would be them.
Then he turned on the kettle. When in doubt, make tea.
He took his time taking down mugs, unwrapping the tea bags, rummaging in the fridge for the milk. The whole time his skin was crawling; he kept anticipating the Master’s hands on his neck or a laser blast to the spine. He remembered the Doctor’s face on the plane, the moment she’d seen through his disguise. Graham had never seen her like that. The horror. The panic in her voice as she’d shoved them away from the bomb. She kept her panic on a tight leash, usually, and he’d never seen her admit so openly that she couldn’t fix it. It had, through the lens of retrospect, an uncomfortable echo of their last moments on Gallifrey. She couldn’t fix it, and so she sacrificed herself to it.
Graham wanted to respect that. Really, he did. It was noble, probably. Brave, definitely. But it was hard when he already knew so acutely how it felt to be left behind.
And the Master had been in control every step of the way: O and the crashing airplane; the cybermen; the moment he’d forced her through the portal to Gallifrey. It pained Graham a little to admit it, but the Doctor had been playing by his rules from day one and she’d never recovered her footing.
And now he was in Graham’s back garden, in the dirt, in a dress that looked like he’d snagged it off a Victorian schoolteacher. It was all a little much to process.
He still had no earthly idea how to handle this situation. But there wasn’t anyone else; there was just him. He’d just have to make it up as he went along. After all, the Doc always did.
Graham fixed his grip on the mugs and took a breath. Then he nudged open his back door and stepped out.
The garden was empty. The Master was gone.
He stayed frozen on the back stoop for a long moment, cataloguing every branch and sprout, just in case the Master had moved and Graham had missed him, somehow. No flash of purple presented itself. Nor blue, neither, not that he’d been looking.
Cautiously, Graham approached the spot where he’d lain. The ragged outline of a body was visible in the dirt, and the places where his skirts had scraped the topsoil off. One low-heeled pump was abandoned under a bush. It looked far too small for a man’s feet.
There were no footsteps in the dirt, shod or otherwise; nothing to show where he might have gone. Not that Graham was stupid enough to go looking.
Graham placed his mugs down beside a crushed begonia. They steamed gently in the cool spring sun. He studied the imprint of the Master’s body. The outline where his arms had been spread. The scraps of squashed blooms. It didn’t help him to make sense of things.
His phone buzzed. The rising hope was miserably familiar, as was the cliff of sharp disappointment as he raised it to see that it was just Yaz, calling. He tapped to answer. She didn’t wait for him to even say hello; she was already talking, asking what had happened and if he was okay, she had a number somewhere for someone who worked for some shadowy letter agency…
He let out a breath, letting Yaz’s chatter fill the hollow. He felt the way he’d felt for months after Grace; like she might open the door at any moment. Every time he heard a footstep on the tread that hope would rise and, inevitably, crash. Months since the Doc had died on Gallifrey and Yaz, he suspected, was still waiting on the crash. She clung so tight to her hope and he was horribly afraid that wasn’t a good thing. She was probably, he suspected, calling from the blank TARDIS. She’d been spending long days there, calculating out maths that neither he nor Ryan could get their heads around. Maths, Yaz could do. But grief was Graham’s forte.
“Thanks, love,” he said, interrupting the flow. “Listen. You been sleeping lately?”
A pause. “Graham-”
“I’m old,” he said, for once feeling it. “I get to granddad you a little.”
A long pause. “I’m close. I mean the navigation system’s a nightmare and everything’s written in circles – circles, honestly – but I’m close. Graham, I can feel it.”
“Yeah. If anyone can figure it out, it’s you.” He smiled, and hoped she could hear it in his voice. “Hey, when you find that number, bring it ‘round, will you? I’ve got a cuppa with your name on it.”
Another pause. She hated to leave that TARDIS these days. He suspected she’d taken to sleeping there. Which couldn’t be healthy. But it also, as he was acutely aware, couldn’t be helped. Grief took its own shape, and it took its own time.
Awkwardly, Yaz attempted to change the subject. “So… what happened? You didn’t say.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Honestly, Yaz, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe my old eyes are just seeing things.” It would be a simpler explanation.
Silence, again. It ticked past him. Hope rose, fell, and rose again.
“I’ll come.”
“Okay, yeah. Tea today? I’ll get Ryan back here, too.”
A snort of humor. It was more life than he’d heard in her yet. “Good luck with that.”
“I don’t need luck. I’ve got his favorite pizza place on speed dial.”
A real laugh this time. “That’ll do it.”
They hung up. The divot in his garden looked a little less like a body. He squinted. He wondered if he really had made up the whole thing. A hallucination. He’d held his own hope a bit too close and this was his penance.
He studied the garden for any hint of purple. But it was all bare; nothing but the dirt and the cracked garden shed and the begonia sprouts, splintered shafts just peeking through. There were always breakages, when the Doc’s life leaked into his. At least this time it was only the begonias, which could be resown easily enough.
Graham stooped to lift the mugs. His phone buzzed again; Ryan, maybe, or Yaz with another thought, or-
He let it buzz, not looking, letting the hope rise and rise and rise.