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“What is it about him, then?”
“You must have theories.”
“Mm, sure. Rumors fly, you know.”
“I dread to think.”
“I’d rather hear it from you, though.”
“You really want to talk this through?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sit.”
“Alright.”
“How would you describe my life, River? What’s the gist?”
“Well. I suppose… you run around getting into trouble in time and space. Exploring, learning, helping. Interfering. Seeing the universe.”
“Alone?”
“Not if we’re lucky. With a friend. Or a few.”
“What kind of friend?”
“Competent. Can hold their own. Asks smart questions, welcomes trouble. Wants to escape—or to travel, to see it all.”
“Right. Yes, exactly. Why do I travel with someone else, River?”
“You get lonely.”
“No.”
“Okay. You need someone to temper you.”
“No. Helpful, but not why.”
“You need someone to hold you accountable. Someone with a smaller perspective.”
“Again, a perk. But not why.”
“Okay. Why?”
“That’s the template.”
“The template?”
“We ran around getting into mischief together. Exploring, learning, getting each other out of trouble, asking questions, breaking rules. Rarely alone, always allies. I don’t know another way to live. The way I live now… this is what I’ve always wanted from my life. How I learned to learn, even.”
“But?”
“But it was never supposed to be me and someone else. It was supposed to be us. Me and him. I don’t travel with company for any practical reason, I was conditioned to it. There’s this void inside me that used to be filled by the person most like me in the world. And now it’s just empty.”
“So you don’t talk to yourself when you’re alone.”
“What?”
“You talk to him.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“What happened?”
“Same thing that happens to everyone. Make one bad choice and let yourself spiral.”
“But what happened?”
…
“After we graduated, the Master and another young Time Lord developed a rivalry. I doubt he even remembers what about. Someone said something and it escalated until the other Time Lord threatened the Master’s life. The Master killed him first.”
“And then found himself blowing up the stars?”
“Something like that. More like blew up a town and then had his life threatened again because he blew up a town, so he blew up a planet. Had his life threatened again because he blew up a planet so he blew up a star. Escalating self-protection loop ending in infamy.”
“That’s a lot of murder for a man you keep forgiving.”
“Yes, it is. And the rest of the universe, rightfully, might never forgive him.”
“So it’s your job?”
“He is my responsibility.”
“Why? Because you used to be friends?”
“Because we are friends, River. I am his only friend. Maybe the only person he cares about other than himself. The only person who remembers how they used to hurt him, the mistakes he made, what made him cry or laugh, what his hopes and dreams were, why kindness is so difficult for him. What his living room looked like. Where his family kept the good cakes. His favorite horse’s name. His name. How he wants to die. The things he’d never do. And he knows mine.”
“You think he cares about you?”
“I don’t think anything about the Master. I know things, or I hope them, or I remember them, but I don’t think them. I know he cares about me. I hope he changes. I remember that he’s capable of it.”
“He’s changed before?”
…
“Why do you ask, River? What brings this up?”
“There’s a look in your eyes when you talk about him that you don’t get any other time. A look I’ve never seen on you. I’m curious.”
“And?”
“And… the people you love are important to me.”
…
“You’re a remarkable person, River Song. But you should know that he doesn’t feel the same.”
“You could be wrong about that.”
“What?”
“You might be wrong. He stayed well away from Rose. He’s never dared to come near me. Why? If he’s trying to hurt you, to get to you, why target only your friends and avoid your family, your lovers?”
“The Master knows me. He knows who I’d kill for. He’d like not to die. ”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’ve killed more than he has. I don’t like it, but it’s true. If I trusted that I wouldn’t kill people, I wouldn’t have so many rules. Besides, we fought together in the war. He’s seen my… brutality.”
…
“So what’s his game, then? Why does he do what he does? You seem to think it isn’t just his fundamental nature, so you must know what it actually is.”
“The Master values two things. Power and attention.”
“But not just anybody’s attention.”
“No, not just anybody’s. Mine. What’s a human’s attention, to a Time Lord like him? Nothing. He targets humanity to get to me. He created the Cybermen, a few separate times, for my attention. He invaded Earth for my attention. Built me an army.”
“Some prophecies suggest he destroys Gallifrey for your attention.”
…
“Spoilers.”
…
“That’s why he never kills you. The end goal isn’t to destroy you, it’s to spend time with you.”
“It’s like a game.”
“Keep away.”
“Yes, if you like. Besides, there’s no fun in killing a Time Lord. Boring, really. More fun to provoke me. Get me as angry as he can. To push me too far— not far enough that I’ll kill him, but far enough that I might try.”
“Far enough that you won’t forgive him?”
“Exactly.”
“Why does he care? What’s so distasteful about your forgiveness?”
…
“Imagine you grow up rich. Powerful. Strong. You’re offered all the resources you need to become a true genius and all the power you could want to control the world. You excel at everything, all the time. But you have no friends. You can’t. You try, but even your own family is off-put by you.”
“I think I can imagine some of that, yes.”
“Imagine that’s your childhood. You are unimaginably clever, and so funny, but everyone around you knows you’re a bit mad. You try, you really do, but there’s something about you that isn’t quite like everyone else. When you get emotional, your first instinct is cruelty. You don’t want it to be, it just is. Other children cry when they’re happy or upset or lonely; or they create, or they talk, or they yell. You get mean, truly cruel. And nobody wants to be friends with a mean person. They’re all intimidated by you anyways, nobody can keep up. The professors you like the best are impressed by you, but never want to be alone with you. Nobody does.
“But you try anyway. You keep trying. Every time you mess up and try to start over, you’ve ostracized more people. Eventually, they learn. They stop forgiving you.
“One person, though. You have one friend. He listens. He understands. He doesn’t feel the same way but he empathizes, and that makes you jealous, but it also makes you grateful. You’re almost the same, the two of you, and when you’ve driven everyone else away it’s okay, because you have him. When you screw it all up and don’t know why, you can ask him. He knows that it’s harder for you to be kind, not by your own choice but by some twist of nature. He tries to help, but mostly he just never leaves. Together, neither of you are really lonely. You can have a childhood filled with learning and adventure, just the two of you.
“You hurt him, of course. You hurt him over and over but he always forgives you and he always understands, and sometimes he hurts you back and that’s okay too, because the two of you are different. You’re different together. When you hurt him, he’s never angry for long; if anything, he just gets annoyed.
“When you try to be good, he’s there to help you. He promises he always will be, and you believe him.
“But here’s the thing. A Time Lord lives too long. You try to be good for long stretches, decades, and you succeed, but then you relapse. Where a human would get to atone and live a full life knowing they just have to abstain for twenty, sixty more years, you have to grapple with the concept of sobriety for eternity. And it is exhausting. The constant pounding in your head makes you irritable, which makes you cruel. For some reason, it doesn’t actually get easier to be kind with time, it just gets more painful. To feel love from others, you have to be someone you aren’t, and that ends up meaning that nobody ever actually loves you. Cruelty takes the edge off, and so you always relapse. And nobody forgives you. You work so hard, and everyone else just sees it as the bare minimum, and they all still hate you. Most of them would rather you be dead. The universe would be better off without you.
“Eventually, you give up. It’s too hard. Too much work for no reward. You lose hope. But you know it’s possible to change, with the help of your friend. And you start to resent that.
“Because if only he didn’t exist, your cruelty wouldn’t be a choice. Everyone gave up on you, you’d have no way out, and so all the decisions you make and all the deaths you cause and all the horrible deeds of your life would be inevitable. If someone wants to stop you, they’d better just kill you, because this is who you are. It’s out of your control.
“But he’s still out there, and you really can’t bring yourself to kill him. It isn’t his fault, anyway. As long as he believes in you, though, there’s a way out, and that is painful. That makes all your choices your own fault. It means every death you cause is preventable.
“So you devise a plan, and another plan, and another plan, all with a single goal: to push him so far he abandons you. Then you can be cruel in peace, knowing there’s no other way, just following your instincts until they get you killed.”
“So, if you forgive him, it means his actions remain his own. If you abandon him, he wins, and it’s your fault.”
…
“How long has he gone, in the past, before relapsing?”
“He’s tried a couple of times since we left the Academy. The longest was three years and 19 days. Then someone said the wrong thing at a dinner party and he smashed everything in the room, lost his reputation, ran away.”
“What did you do?”
“Tried to find him. Never stopped. Cried for weeks. Still do.”
“When you ran away…”
“Yes.”
…
“You worry about him?”
…
“Terrible pilot but a great mechanic, you know. He installed the swing under the console that I use to make repairs. I was absurdly tall, that regeneration. He made fun of the way I had to stoop. Have you ever seen the bottom of it?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“There’s a Gallifreyan inscription. ‘Thanks for trying. From your Master.’ He put it in before giving up. He made it a year, and then left. Disappeared. Just got too hard. TARDIS remodels, but it’s always there. He must have hardwired it in.”
“You’re crying.”
“It’s what he always says. Thanks for trying.”
“Do you ever see him without trying to kill each other?”
…
“Pitriche’s. Armistice grounds. It’s a restaurant in the Ampereata system. We ran into each other there once. Both in a bad place. We had dinner. Just talked, pretended we were the easy kind of friends. It was nice. So we made it temporally hallowed.”
“Temporally hallowed?”
“It means the truce you make there exists throughout the fullness of time. Before the restaurant ever existed, and after the entire galaxy is destroyed, that specific place in the universe will be sacred, just for the two of us. No violence. No threats. Just friends.”
“Do you go there often?”
“Sometimes when I’m travelling alone. Just to see if he’s there. Maybe he wants to come with me.”
“And is he ever there?”
…
“He sent me a note once, on the psychic paper. Just a reservation confirmation. Asked me to try again. Lasted a couple weeks.”
“How does it usually end? Just leaves? Blows up?”
“Just leaves. Always just goes away. Thanks for trying, it was fun. Thanks for trying, wish you hadn’t. Maybe next time, thanks for trying.”
“Any good memories?”
“God, River, so many. That’s why I try. It’s not really because his cruelty would be my fault, but because I miss him. I don’t have that rapport with anyone else, I couldn’t. There are all these inside jokes, these references, these stories that I don’t even remember until we’re together, and it’s a delight that I’ve never felt anywhere else. I am so much funnier when I’m with him, you know. I just can’t tell the same jokes with anyone else. Even if they were intelligible, they’d just make me sad.”
“There are moments like that for me, with Amy and Rory. I don’t have any other childhood friends, they were all I had. We shared teachers and class pets and heartbreaks and secret hideouts in the garden. I get to be a different person with them, and I miss that me when I’m away for too long.
“Will you tell me one of them? Good memories with the Master?”
…
“A year or so into one of the reform eras, we were traveling together. We’d gone on a tour of the most red things in the universe. The deepest rust colors in the natural world, the brightest crimson, the most shocking ruby. It took about a month and we spent all of it in the TARDIS.
“Sometime after we left Adivan, the location of the most vibrant red blood moon, he got hurt, dislocated a shoulder. Now, normally, I would have just popped it back into place and let him heal it with regeneration energy, but he had recently developed a machine that used subatomic extraction to mimic an object’s state at any previous moment in its history and, hypothetically, if the actual object interacted with its past state-”
“-it could be restored to that exact condition. Would that work?”
“Good question. It had been working with inanimate objects and had even brought a small frog back to life, but I hadn’t wanted to test it on any live or large creatures.”
“So he wanted to try to repair his shoulder with it.”
“Of course.”
“That’s what you would’ve done, anyway.”
“No I wouldn’t!”
“Yes, you most certainly would. It’s just stupid and self-sacrificial enough to be your modus operandi. But go on.”
“He was physically incapable of setting it up, so I had to do it while he shouted instructions at me the whole time like I hadn’t been watching him build it for a year.”
“Ah, that’s where you get it from.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, sweetie.”
“Anyways. I had everything perfect, but he told me I had to twist the dial another quarter clockwise, and I told him that would throw everything off, and he told me to do it anyway, and I told him no, and he told me it was his shoulder and his machine and anyways, he’d repair the TARDIS chronoaxels next time they crashed if it got me to shut up and set the machine correctly. So I did exactly what he said and I turned it a quarter dial clockwise.
“And he stepped into it, flipped the switch, and it instantly repaired his shoulder, back to new. He even had a clean-shaven face since he’d set it to restore him to his physical state earlier that morning.
“But, what he hadn’t realized was that the setting he’d applied when he had me twist the dial hadn’t been cache-cleared since the frog attempt. So he was fully healed and comfortable, but for the next couple of days or so, he had some… ah… froggy traits.”
“Froggy?”
“Yes! His eyes were all buggy, his steps had this weird bounce to them, and I could swear when he laughed there was a bit of a ‘ribbit’ to it.”
“Oh, god! That’s incredible. It went away eventually?”
“Oh, and he was in a horrible mood by then. The jokes, the frog bits, but mostly the fact that I’d been right and he’d been wrong. I think about that every time I see a frog. I still have the machine, actually, it’s in my Master trunk in the second store room. “
“You have a Master trunk?”
“No. I have about fifty. But there’s only one in the second store room, with the most useful bits in. Most of the rest of it is in its own room.”
“Archived?”
“Shows up when I need it. I put things in there and she tucks them away for me, the old girl.”
“What kind of room?”
“His bedroom.”
“You don’t even have a bedroom.”
“I have plenty of bedrooms, I just don’t keep stuff in them. They’re for bed-based activities. It’s my TARDIS, my stuff is all over the place, I don’t need a room for it. You have a bedroom. Amy and Rory had a bedroom, everyone has a bedroom. She makes a new one for everyone. If I need sleep, I use an empty one.”
“Has he always had the same bedroom?”
“I suppose. I didn’t spend much time there when he occupied it, and I doubly don’t in the meantime. Never noticed.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really, I never spent much time in there.”
“But you certainly noticed. What’s it like?”
“You could probably ask and she’d show you. She’d do anything for you.”
“Now, don’t project.”
“Hah.”
“Well?”
…
“It’s ceilingless. Well, not really, but it looks like it. Just projects an image of the nearest chunk of space or sky, it’s pretty dizzying. Massive, too, at one point there was an entire nuclear laboratory setup and still room for a king-sized bed and a fireplace with a sitting area. He had an aquarium too, but just with rare marine plants, no fish. He always had expensive taste, so it was usually decorated in some kind of contemporary Time Lord posh decor. Deep colors, dark wood, no sharp edges or right angles anywhere, mostly lit from below for dramatic effect, all that horrible velvet texture.”
“Tassels?”
“Oh yes.”
“Gaudy.”
“No kidding.”
“And his stuff is still in there now?”
“In trunks, mostly, yes. Under the bed and along the walls.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Keepsakes from our childhood. And just life stuff he left behind from the times we got to be together. Clothes, books, half-finished prototypes, pictures of his family.”
“Wait, pictures of his family?”
“Yes. His parents. And his wife and daughter. Arcturus, his dog, and Benvolio, his lizard.”
“He doesn’t seem like a sentimental person to me.”
“No. Once they died, he put the pictures away. Too painful. I still keep them, though, of course.”
“A daughter?”
“Mhm. She was incredible, I’ll say that much. Brilliant, funny, and very fast. Great runner, best swimmer you’ve ever seen. Died in the war, of course.”
“And his marriage?”
“She died before the war, when the Master’s daughter was young. They were only together for a few years. They were both from very affluent families. They’d been betrothed for a long time.”
“Arranged?”
“Not common among Time Lords, but common among families that care quite a bit about their image.”
“That seems to be universal.”
“Where there’s marriage, anyway.”
…
“What was he like, as a parent?”
“Honestly, pretty incredible for the first decade. Once his wife was dead and his daughter was in school, he was less consistent. That was around the time he really broke. I checked in on her every once in a while. She adapted well. Then she died, along with mine. They all did. They all do.”
“Was it around the same time when you both had children?”
“Yeah. Back before both of our lives blew up and we were pretending we’d live like normal, respectable Time Lords. We were bored out of our minds, I can tell you. It’s a beautiful kind of life to have when you want it, but not when you’re just doing it out of obligation.”
“Didn’t last long, did it?”
“Longer than you might think. But so long ago. I was basically a child.”
“Of course.”
“And then he screwed it all up and I ran away.”
“To find him?”
“Among other things.”
“Did the prophecies mention his role in the making of the hybrid?”
…
“The cloister wraiths did, when they spoke to me in the matrix. When people came asking about the hybrid… There were only so many choices to make. I didn’t see him for a long time after that.”
…
“Just one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“What do you miss the most? About being his friend?”
…
“I miss his instincts. His tactical, mechanical, humorous instincts. There are times in my life still where I want to pause and see what he says next because I know it’s going to be better than what I would come up with. I’m so much faster with him, and it’s more fun. Funnier. More dangerous, more reckless, more idiotic, sure. But so much fun.”
“I get it.”
“I know you do. I know. You would’ve loved each other, I think, in some world. Some reality.”
“You know, it’s funny. I think the things the people love the most about you, the things they’re most grateful for. You do them because of him.”
“Sometimes I wonder who I’d be. Wonder who he’d be, if we hadn’t met. What the universe would look like.”
“I don’t know that the universe would have let that happen.”
“No. Probably not.”
“Sometimes you wish it had.”
“I wish a lot of things. We both do. The cruel truth is that the thing we both want, more than anything, is our best friend back. But we’re both too stubborn to change.”
“Is he out there now?”
“Missy is. Skaro. She tried to make me kill Clara, that much I remember. Told her to run.”
“Do you think you’ll ever see her again?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Will you try again?”
“Of course I will.”
“You’ll forgive her?”
“Of course I will.”
“Always and completely?”
…
“Always and completely.”