Chapter Text
The TARDIS hummed, as it always did, of course, when resting quietly in the emptiness of the sky, the most lonely point in the universe - but the best view to see the stars.
The Doctor had learned to distinguish the tiniest of the hum’s changes in the very same way you learn to distinguish the breathing of someone sleeping beside you. But in the last few weeks there had been a new note, almost imperceptible, as a mild annoyance, as if the TARDIS being irritated by an itch.
It had taken the Doctor three days to understand where it was coming from. Of course, it was coming from the TARDIS, there was no doubt it regarded his old friend. But regarding what caused it, well…you can call him with an attention deficit, as the reason of the annoyance was something so obvious he should have considered it sooner.
The answer was the new thing entered in the TARDIS lately. Well. Not that it was it was an easy answer, as several thing happened in the last week.
Both the Doctor and the TARDIS have been unceremoniously doubled by the Toymaker.
It wasn’t the cause. The cause was something smaller, unexpected. Something even obvious, if he had a thought coherency to allocate on such a mystery.
He himself have been affected by this small thing, in a subtle, unconscious manner.
Said small thing had been allocated in a small case on the second shelf of the left-hand cabinet in corridor C, between a jar of Doublethian sand and a photograph of Donna at her wedding he attended as soon as he had the time to go back and attend it - of course, without being seen.
He'd placed the case there almost without thinking, the very same evening he bi-regenerated and he and he-but-hotter defeated the Toymaker. What a day. No time to think to put things in the right place, really.
The case contained the Golden Tooth he picked up from the floor, that small, absurd, heavy golden thing, and carried it inside.
Leaving it there felt wrong. Like leaving someone on the street.
And even if the person inside would have deserved such a treatment, well…
This version of him was surely very soft hearted.
He said to himself, it was because leaving the Master unguarded was more dangerous than having them on board with him.
After a week, he was fairly certain he'd left somewhere in corridor C. He wasn’t really sure he had walked that corridor in the last week - or in this specific regeneration- excluding the day he put the case back on the shelf.
But one day, he felt he had lost something.
Of course, he hadn’t.
He glanced at the shelves, the case was small, gold-hinged, unremarkable. He picked it up without particular ceremony, turned it over once in his fingers, and put it back.
He went back to the Delta corridor, just to be sure he hadn’t lost something there.
Came back twenty minutes later and picked the case up again.
He stood in the corridor with the case balanced on his palm and looked at it with the vague expression of a man trying to remember if he's left the gas on, then put it back on the shelf between the sand jar and a photograph of Donna at her wedding, and went to make tea.
Three weeks later, a badly-calculated jump through the Kasterbine belt rattled the TARDIS hard enough to send half of corridor C's contents to the floor. The Doctor walked through afterwards for a damage assessment - the objects simply fell down the shelves, nothing looked damaged. He found the case under a Sontaran’s dismantled armour.
He picked it up. Examined it. Turned it over with more attention than he'd given it before.
"Alright," he said quietly, and opened the small box.
The Tooth sat in a small indent of dark velvet, exactly as he had positioned it weeks ago. Gold, slightly asymmetrical, utterly ordinary except for the fact that it absolutely wasn't. He tilted the case toward the light. Ran his thumb carefully along the edge of the tooth, checking for anything the impact might have caused.
Nothing. Not even a scratch.
He tilted the case the other way, just to be thorough.
Stop that.
Not a voice. It was more a wave of rage moving through his hands nerves up to the base of his skull, and then penetrating through the back of his mind, reaching his motor cortex, moving keys in his brains just so to shape thoughts, and then creating patterns of word without a specific voice - just a rough connecting with his temporal lobe, collecting what his brain would associated with the Master’s voice. A dark, dusty tone, very obviously furious. And such fury translated with a growling sound. Apart for that thought, apart for the emotion, he can’t really say if the incarnation trapped in that tooth is a Master ha already known, or someone he has never met yet. He hadn't even an idea, if it was supposed to be a female or a male voice.
He doesn’t want to figure it out in his mind, so he simply says:
"Just checking for damage," the Doctor said mildly.
I know what you're doing.
"Good. Then we don't need to discuss it."
He closed the case, replaced it carefully on the shelf.
***
He noticed the dust eleven days later.
He wasn't looking for it. He was simply passing through corridor C on his way to somewhere else entirely, and his eyes catched the case at a particular angle. There it was, a thin film of dust across the box.
He stopped.
Stood there for a moment.
He wasn’t bothered by the box itself, really. It was just a cheap thing he bought for 3 pounds. But it made him realise - he picked the tooth up from the ground!
He hadn't bothered to clean it!
He went to the medical bay and spent a ridicolous amount of time selecting a brush. He considered the standard artefact brush too stiff for something this small. He decided to came back with one he'd replicated specifically: softer bristles, narrower head, as he was going to restore an ancient piece of jewelry from the Tholemaic era.
He opened the case on the shelf, took the tooth out and began brushing softly.
Small, circular movements. There was some dust indeed, and it came away easily. The gold underneath was actually quite fine, he noted, in an objective and completely detached way. Good craftsmanship, he must admit it.
This is humiliating.
"You're not doing anything. I am."
You're brushing my— you're brushing me. With a tiny brush. That you apparently went and found specifically…
"Replicated, actually." Corrected the Doctor absentmindedly, keeping brushing the surface.
A pause.
That is so much worse.
The Doctor didn't say anything, simply shrugged. He kept brushing. The TARDIS light threw small gold arcs across the corridor ceiling, and the hum in the walls indicated that his intervention was not required in the control room, so that he could take his time.
"You're structurally fine, by the way," he said, after a while. "In case you were wondering."
I wasn't.
"No, I know."
I wasn't worried.
"I didn't say you were."
Another pause. Longer this time, and with different weather in it.
Satisfied with his job, he replaced the tooth in its velvet indent and closed the case with a soft click. Stood there with his hand resting on it for a moment, not quite ready to let go.
"Goodnight," the Doctor said finally, to the shelf, to the corridor, to no one in particular.
***
Now it had become routine.
Every now and then, he would pass through corridor C. Stop. Take the case from the shelf, rest it in the palm of his hand, open it and take a look at it for a moment.
The Golden Tooth was always there, of course. It couldn’t walk away, escaping, not even moving. It looked banal, if you didn't know what it was. If you didn't know who had slipped into that desperate trap, as a consequence of the desperate prayer at the moment everything was collapsing.
The Doctor wondered, which version of his friend was inside. Not that it matters, really, but it would be a good story to know, wouldn’t it?
He knew very little about his friend, if and how he managed to escape and survive in the last adventures they shared lately. If the one inside was one of those specific incarnation of the Master, of course. What condition could have put his friend in the corner?
The Doctor almost expected the Tooth could detect those though and find a unique way to answer back, as he run the brush over the surface with that quiet concentration. This allowed contact, and therefore gave them the opportunity to communicate, in a way.
Not that the Master would be willing to answer his eventual questions.
He mostly complained.
I hate this place.
It came, as always, as a flavour converted and reassembled by his brain. Something indefinite that can get a sense only with a hand of his Time Lord’s advanced cognition. The Doctor didn't stop brushing.
"I know," he said quietly. "You've mentioned."
***
Those weren't conversations, exactly. More like moods. This version of the Master - the Tooth Master, as now the Doctor almost fondly called them, weren’t very chatty. Theatrical, as they can be. Maybe they were trying to communicate way more than they actually do, but his brain wasn’t assembling everything correctly.
Or maybe, and expectely, they didn’t want to surrender to what they considered the worst of the insults the Doctor could show them: pity.
You should have left me there.
" We both know I shouldn’t" the Doctor sobbed one day, the Master being unexpectedly more assertive. Maybe he was getting better at understanding them!
I would have left you.
"Yeah, I know" repeated for the third time that week.
So, why you kept me? To humiliate, sure!
"Absolutely not. Someone has to keep you."
He closed the case with a soft click and replaced it on the shelf.
He stood there for a moment with his hand still resting on the case.
"Besides," he added, quieter, "it's not like I have something particularly urgent to do."
Which was, technically, true. He had promised Donna. Had said the words out loud, in her kitchen, with Rose watching him from the doorway with that expression she had - a bit annoyed, as she hoped to enjoy travelling with the Doctor a bit more -.
He had meant them, genuinely, in the moment. I'll stay. I'll be good. I'll learn what retirement looks like.
He was learning.
***
"You're doing that thing again," Donna said one day, while refilling her glass with some wine.
"What thing." Asked the Doctor, biting a piece of lasagna the two of them managed to burn in the microwave.
"Don't know, old man, this...thing." She pointed at him with the bottle. "Your eyes go a bit..." she made a vague gesture. "Lost. Which, for you, is saying something of no good."
The Doctor looked at his plate.
"I've been thinking about something," he said. "A puzzle. Sort of."
"Sort of a puzzle."
"Something I don't have enough information about. Something I'm curious about. And I can't quite..." he turned his fork over, "...I can't quite get at it."
Donna studied him for a moment.
"Is it dangerous?"
"No."
"Is it going to become dangerous?"
The Doctor considered this. Well. "Dangerous" is certainly an understatement when it comes to Kosc...to the Master, right?
"Donna."
"That's not a no, that's a Donna." She pointed the fork at him now. "I know your system."
He smiled - the genuine one, the one that still surprised him sometimes when he caught it. Maybe therapy was working, right?
"It's fine. I promise."
***
He thought about it on the walk back. He thought to many things, but the most relevant was...
Which version.
That was the question that kept surfacing, unhelpfully, at odd moments. Which one had begged for their life, and faced - and lost - against the Toymaker.
He ran through the different version of them the way you run through a list you've memorised. Any of them could have begged for their life. Well, almost all of them. Round-face was a bit too obsessed with his own pride to beg someone. Maybe his policy was restricted to the Doctor only.
The communication was too fragmented to be certain. Too much interference, too much compression. The voice was certainly weird. The emotional register felt familiar in a specific way, but specificity was hard when the whole history of the relationship was essentially one long continuous murdering each other attempt, conducted across centuries and incarnations.
He turned into corridor C and stopped at the shelf without consciously deciding to.
Picked up the case. Held it.
"I've been thinking," he said, taking the case in his hand, to whatever was listening. "About which one you are."
The response came as if different string assembled layer by layer in his mind.
Does it matter?
"No," the Doctor said honestly. It didn't change, which version of his frien...of the Master was contained, as long as it was the Master. And therefore, the safest place would have been his TARDIS, no matter their face.
"But it would be a good story to know."
A long pause. The TARDIS hum moved through its registers, low and attentive.
Then, from somewhere underneath the usual dark weather, something that wasn't quite an answer:
You wouldn't believe it if I told you.
The Doctor felt something shift in his chest. Not quite hope. Something quieter.
"Try me," he said. "I've got time. Remarkably little else to do actually, at the moment."
Another pause.
You're going to be insufferable about this.
"Almost certainly," the Doctor agreed.
Bring me a cuppa.
Without actually questioning the request - and without complaining for the lack of "please" and "thank you" - and considering a cup of tea barely a treat, he put the kettle on. He brought their tea back to Corridor C.
He sat down on the floor with his back against the shelves, which was not dignified, but retirement had done strange things to his relationship with dignity. He placed the case in front of him on the ground, close to the second mug, and waited.
The TARDIS hummed.
The new note was still there.
And, slowly, the Tooth Master began to talk.