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He scans the horizon, under the Australian sun, brimming with anticipation. Any moment now, she'll arrive, and he's been waiting so, so long.
He always plays the long game, moves two steps ahead. He sees the timeline laid out before him, and every time he wins. It's easy to follow the path downstream, easy to enact the plan. His is an outcome guaranteed.
And then the TARDIS materializes, breaking the horizon line. She steps out into the dust of the outback, and the timeline begins to crack.
He introduces himself. It's all part of the plan. Lure her in, let her drop her guard, twist the knife when she trusts him the most.
She's looking at him with an expression he can't name, and just as reliably as ever, like a bloodhound on a scent trail, she pushes past him, curious and diligent and unrestrained.
He's waited so long, her eager intensity catches him off-guard, makes a home in his chest against his better judgement. He sees the timeline, his guaranteed outcome, and it would be so easy to best her once and for all.
All the pieces are in place. Everything is set. All that's left is to spring the trap.
The moment comes.
And he doesn't.
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The timeline falls apart, and his guaranteed outcome vanishes with it, though he finds he doesn't mind. He has her attention, more than he's had in centuries, and as they work together to dismantle his own trap, things are almost as simple as they once were, back at the Academy.
She doesn't know that, though. He can't ever let her know.
She's looking at him, as the fam files back into the TARDIS, exhausted but alive and relieved. He sees the timeline, bent out of shape, pointing away from him.
She starts to nod goodbye, before he interrupts.
"Let me come with you," he implores, fueling his innocent façade with as much clarity and sincerity as he can muster.
She smiles. She's looking at him, and she smiles, and the timeline bends back around.
"Thought you'd never ask," she says, and pushes the door open.
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She's looking at him, expecting an answer. She, whose alias is so welded to her identity it may very well just be her name. She, who texted him for years without asking this question. Her Horizon Watcher.
"I'm O," he says, holding his smile firm. It's almost easy, if he doesn't think of what the real answer is. "Just O."
"We're not at MI6 anymore," she says by means of justification. Beside her, Yaz and Ryan nod, Graham tilts his head.
He could end this right now. Jump off the tightrope over the fault line. The cracks run deep; he pursues them with a thought. But it's been a second too long, and she's still looking at him.
The future beckons. He shakes his head.
"Orwell," he says. Her smile blooms as she glances at the other three in approval.
"Orwell!" she repeats, her voice ringing with delight. He wonders why she can't feel the foreshocks beneath his feet.
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The thing is that for all that he's a master of disguise, he's not O, and he can't hold it together forever. Deep in her TARDIS he lets loose, a screaming anguish that leaves his throat raw and his knuckles bruised and bloody.
He's the one who brought this on. He's the one who devastated Gallifrey, orchestrated a mad plan to get her attention, to rub her face in it and show her just how far he'd go to pay them back for what they've done, except now it burns at the back of his head like the twin suns she'll never see again.
He hides his wounds, rejoins the team. They laugh as they head off on a new adventure. She never suspects a thing, but of course, she wouldn't.
She's looking at him with an expression he can't name, and it coils around him like a python, leaves him dizzy and unsettled. At the same time, he basks in it, plays with her, indulges her need for the sharp and witty and smart.
He laughs until he can't take it anymore, and then he finds a corner to hide in, and lets it all out in a tidal wave of rage, bleeding through the cracks of his persona.
It goes on and on, this ouroboros. He tells himself he's happy. He almost believes it.
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He's the cause of it, again.
He's so used to ripping his way through other people's futures it's practically an instinct, but as O, he at least has to pretend to care. And he does, in a way. He cares when she's looking at him, when she smiles like she's got him figured out.
She doesn't, of course.
But as much as he knows how foolish and softhearted she is, he's never been on the receiving end of it. This time, she's the one who bests him, reaches out after another moment of triumph, tugs at his arm to pull him into a hug.
He jumps back—their hands brush past each other as she's left with her arms hovering in mid-air. It's a close call; he can't ever let her know, can’t let her feel his two hearts, even though he wants to now more than ever, and it hurts.
So it goes. The fault line rumbles. And this time it's not just him: Graham, Yaz and Ryan feel it too. They look concerned, alarmed, even.
And she's looking at him like she doesn't know what she did wrong.
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The ouroboros goes on and on.
He thrives on tension, or so he thought. He’s spent a few lifetimes antagonizing his best enemy—he knows how their game is supposed to go.
But it’s different now, because he’s changed the game. On edge, they both are, not because he deserves it—though Rassilon knows he deserves it—but because he’s twisted the dynamic so far out of shape it’s unrecognizable. Still, he can’t let it go, not as long as she’s looking at him like he’s brilliant, even as the cracks run deeper and deeper still.
“Orwell,” she calls him softly during a rare moment of downtime, and it’s hard not to snap at her, especially when he’s in the middle of doing something as ridiculous as cooking breakfast.
But Orwell is the kind of guy who cooks breakfast, he assumes.
He hums and flips an omelette, enveloping himself in absurd serenity, enjoying the moment for all it’s worth, before the rumbling at his feet turns into a full-blown earthquake, as he knows it inevitably will.
“Orwell, is everything all right?” she insists, and though her voice is gentle, she inserts herself between him and the skillet, far too close for comfort. He steps back automatically, having rehearsed this move too many times. “You seem like you’ve been avoiding me.”
“She’s right, you know,” says Yaz. Clever Yaz. Too clever, he thinks.
“Might be hiding something,” agrees Ryan.
“Omelette’s burning,” he says.
He’s still two steps ahead, but he’s no longer sure in which direction he’s going.
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He realizes what's about to go wrong about two seconds before she does.
It's not surprising, with the way he's always been able to see patterns, twist every system to his advantage. Once, he would have gloated, lorded it over her. But now, even as his legs carry him at a full sprint, every voice of his past selves is cursing her for not being just that bit quicker.
They curse at him, too, yell at him for what he's become, so committed to the part he’s forgotten why this all started, but he has something none of them have. She's looking at him, he can feel it, and then she's running too, just two seconds too late.
He reaches the overloaded plasma spark, yanks the engineer aside, throws himself onto the conductor; His hearts beat a frantic 4/4 time rhythm as he redirects the current—
The last thing he hears, before the spark blasts him just below the diaphragm, is her scream of "ORWELL!" echoing off the engine room walls.
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Her storm-colored eyes hover just above his, flickering soft around the edges like a miscalibrated hologram.
"Two hearts," she mouths, her voice inaudibly scraping at the air.
He can't feel his midsection, nor can he feel the warmth of impending regeneration. But in his chest he feels the ba-da-ba-dum she no doubt feels too.
Her eyes cut at him like ice shards, and he opens his mouth to say—
What can he say? Sorry?
The words won't come to him, anyway.
She's looking at him, looking—no, seeing. Seeing him, finally. Seeing through his mask.
“Oh,” he says.
The Master closes his eyes, and thinks of what a curse it is to be seen.