Chapter Text
The Doctor is staring at him.
Usually, this is the ideal scenario for the Master. The center of the Doctor’s attention is where he should always be. Especially after pulling off such an extensive evil plot as this one. He had been waiting to see the expression on her face for a long time. Truly, he has outdone himself this time.
Hence the gloating.
And the sound and lighting package.
And the dancing.
It’s really the first time in… well, a while, that he can remember having this much energy. This time, the scheming has been proceeding incredibly slowly, lack of motivation on his part dragging progress to a crawl. He researches. He theorizes. He organizes. He plots. He moves his minions into position. He daydreams about her reaction. He imagines what it’ll be like to finally be someone worth loving, the way they used to love each other, not so long ago. He’s not dim enough to believe she’ll ever feel anything other than disgust for him again, not after his actions on Gallifrey.
But overall, his progress moves as slow as molasses. There were many days that he hadn’t the energy to do anything more than stare up at whatever ceiling he’d managed to collapse under the night before, negative thoughts about being less than swirling unpleasantly in his head.
But now, finally, at the endgame, with the Doctor right where he wanted her, trapped and judging by the look on her face, slightly perturbed, he’s gripped by a manic energy that leads him to twirl around the room, only mostly in time to the music. It doesn’t matter. Everything’s going exactly to plan. He deserves this. He’s also well aware the next bit is going to be nastily painful for everyone involved, so why not take advantage of this momentum while he still has it to rub her imminent demise in her smug face.
But as he continues to victory dance, the Doctor appears to be thinking very hard. At first, her face showed only the horror and fear he expected from his grand reveal. But slowly, her expression changes to concern, as if she’s mildly worried she is watching his mental breakdown. Then to a deep concentration, a slight wrinkle of her nose, as if she’s working some complex mathematical problem out in her head. Finally, incredulity, and of all things, amusement. And that, of all things, is the final straw.
The Master slams the button controlling the music with more force than is warranted and stalks over to her, still trapped in a dead Dalek shell.
“And what, my dear Doctor, could you possibly find funny about your imminent death?” he asks her.
She smiles sweetly up at him and says the one thing he never imagined she would say to him at this exact moment.
“You know, you’re right.”
Taken aback, and immediately suspicious, all he can respond is, “Am I?”
“Yes, I think so,” she answers easily, “Mind you, the situation was a bit different last time, but the Time Lords did put me through a forced regeneration that one time.” She pauses, adding, “You remember, it was the one before I was stuck on Earth, when I was working with UNIT for almost a whole regeneration, and you kept showing up and bothering me.”
“I very much doubt I bothered you that much, Doctor; you were bored to death, don’t pretend you weren’t.”
The Doctor continues with her line of thought, as if she hadn’t heard him. She wrinkles her nose, clearly reliving some distasteful memories. “Did not care for it, very unpleasant, was horribly dizzy for quite a bit after, completely out of it for almost a day after, not actually sure how I even got in my TARDIS afterward, was probably…”
At this point, the Master put a hand up, hoping to stall the Doctor’s verbal diarrhea for at least a minute. “Doctor, I’m begging you, please get to your point.”
“Yes, right, well, I’m just saying, as the person with some experience with this,” she shifts in the Dalek shell and then drops her proverbial bomb, “It’s not going to work.”
The Master is speechless for several seconds. For one horrifying moment, he’s sure he’s missed some obvious mistake, but he pulls himself back together. He scoured what’s left of the Matrix archives to piece together this information. He’s worked on the theory millions of times. She’s literally just heard it and has every reason to try to throw him off. He’s certain this will work.
“Pardon?”
“Yeah, I thought about it and it’s not going to work like you think.”
No, still not making any sense. She’s too certain of herself, and despite how he’d like to laugh at her, and then prove her wrong once and for all; he really needs to see where she’s going with this. He crosses his arms and decides to humor her.
“And what is it that you think isn’t going to work?”
“See, hear me out,” she shifts and appears to be trying to free her hands, as if she needed to wave them about to make her argument. After a few seconds of tugging, she gives up trying to free herself, huffs an annoyed breath, and leans forward as much as possible. “So, you’re going to make me regenerate, right? Only for you to regenerate into me, you also have to regenerate. Have I got it so far?”
“You’re certainly grasped the basics,” the Master says faintly, wondering if she was about to explain his plan blowing up in his face in front of a crowd of Dalek and Cybermen, who would definitely take advantage to kill them both.
“Right, so we both regenerate and then you are going to possess my body, probably leaving your own in some kind of stasis, correct?”
“Technically, we both regenerate, but it’s not like I’ll be changing my body’s face. I’m changing your face. Into mine.” He hopes that sounds menacing. He doesn’t bother telling her that the “stasis” he’s leaving his body in is a generous description at best. If this doesn’t work, his abandoned body is going to be a wreck. He’ll have to regenerate himself for real this time. If he can. Hopefully. It’s not like this is a mess he wants back either way.
Fortunately, the Doctor seems to have missed his introspection because she is still talking.
“So,” she said like she was delivering a final blow, “I’ll just have regenerated, I won’t be dead dead, like what you did to poor Tremas, the last time you decided to go around stealing bodies. It’ll be your consciousness in my brain.”
“Exactly, I’ll be in your body, therefore erasing you from existence.”
“No no no, listen to what I’m saying,” she sounds frustrated now, like she thought he was being thick on purpose. “You’re going to be in my body, with my brains, with all my memories, my habits, my likes and dislikes. I’m not going to be dead; I’ve just regenerated, you’re going to be in here with me. You’re just squishing us together in one brain.”
“And I’ll change them all to suit my purpose, as I undo everything you’ve ever done and ruin everything you’ve loved…”
“Master,” she cuts off his monologuing, truly annoyed now, “This isn’t going to work.”
“Yes,” he says, rage rising, always so easy to call on these days. “It is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it… look,” he desperately tries to reason with her, suddenly again aware of the large number of homicidal aliens behind them, silently watching their bickering. He goes to point a threatening finger in her face, but thinks better of it, when she narrows her eyes, clearly calculating the lunging distance needed to bite him. He hastily pulls it to safety and tries again, aiming to deliver his next words to convey that he is fully in control of the situation. “If you’re that confident, when it doesn’t work, you can tell me I told you so.”
“After you’ve made us both regenerate for no reason, you mean,” she says sourly, then seems to also remember they’re surrounded by a large number of her arch enemies. “So, how’s your “Fam”,” he could hear her sarcastic air quotes, “going to deal with your evil plan to kill me and destroy the Earth falling through? You are awfully chummy with them, considering the Daleks and the Cybermen both have active death warrants out for you.”
One of the Daleks chose this moment to helpfully add, “DALEKS DO NOT NEED HELP FROM TIME LORDS TO CONQUER THE EARTH. WE ELIMINATE ALL FAILED TIME LORD EXPERIMENTS AND CONTINUE WITH PLANS FOR UNIVERSAL DOMINATION. DALEKS WILL BE THE SUPREME BEINGS IN THE UNIVERSE!”
“Right, yes, illuminating, thank you,” the Doctor nods, as if that was the response she expects. To be fair, it probably is. The Master certainly should have been more surprised by the imminent betrayal by his supposed allies. He wondered what it said about him, that all he felt was a bone deep fatigue. Nothing good certainly.
At least his CyberMasters hadn’t decided to chime in too. It won’t stop them from shooting everything in sight as soon as the Daleks started. But at least it was less embarrassing, considering he made them.
Ah well, that was a problem for future him.
“So, no pressure, then, right?” the Doctor said, smiling brightly up at him, “Can’t wait to see how this turns out.”
The Master just let out a sigh. If this didn’t work, it was going to be a very long evil plot.
“Doctor, just…get in the box, ok?”
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Having already aired her grievances, the Doctor lets herself be shut in the regenerating apparatus with surprisingly little complaint. It was only once the Master begins to connect to her TARDIS’s broadcasting system that she protests.
“Oi, leave Yaz out of this, she doesn’t need to get involved in your…strange little plot,” she says, eyeing his handiwork distastefully.
“I was already going to pull your TARDIS here, love. After all, it’s going to be my TARDIS soon enough,” he replies, connecting frequencies. “Not my fault your little pet is still onboard. Besides, are you suggesting it’ll be safer for your lovely Yaz if she arrives with no knowledge of what I’ve done to you? Do you typically go around leaving her defenseless and in the dark?”
The Doctor’s pinched eyebrows and mutinous muttering suggests how much she’s enjoying this conversation. Awfully hypocritical of her, being able to dish it, but not take it. Give her one little push and she’s all angry. Exactly like how he always remembers her. So self-righteous, always believing she’s the only one who could possibly be right. Never listening to a word he says, even when he is really is trying to help her.
He's working himself up into a snit, stripping wires and slamming connectors together as if they’re personally wronged him. He takes a deep breath and blows it out again, aiming for calm and landing on mildly irritated. Close enough. At least he’s done here. He glances back at the Doctor. She’s still regarding him as if he’s a bomb about to go off. Well, at least he’ll never have to worry about her opinion again.
He takes pity on her. He’ll finish putting her out of her misery soon, after all.
“Don’t worry so much about her, love. I’ll be sure to tell Yaz everything.”
The Doctor snorts and he just about hears her mutter, “Good luck with that,” but then she straightens up and throws him a dirty look through the glass. “Hurry up with your stupid, devious plan before I regenerate out of boredom.”
With that, there’s not much more to be done than connect the call and step into his side of the regeneration apparatus. He looks over at the Doctor, but she’s watching the monitor, displaying the interior of her TARDIS, and Yaz, who seems to have grasped that her Doctor is in mortal danger with remarkable speed. The Doctor is saying something to her, trying to appear calm for her friend’s sake, but the Master knows her better. He can see all her thoughts, plain on her face. Her fear for her companion, the futile last second escape plans, the worry that, this time, the Master might finally be right, may finally have outmaneuvered her; they all pass over her face in an instant.
And in a moment, they’ll all be his.
The Doctor meets his eyes. He smiles at her gleefully as the energy from the cyber-planet begins to power the machine.
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There’s no such thing as a non-painful regeneration. Even the Time Lords sequestered on Gallifrey, where they relied on medical intervention to smooth over the “distressing” and “messy” bits of the process, could never totally eliminate the agony of simultaneous death and birth. Both the Doctor and the Master have been on the run from their people for literal millennia, and as such, a very long way from these comforts. Neither of them are strangers to an occasional regeneration that goes sideways. Many have been violent and there are very, very few that could qualify as peaceful.
This one, though, is shaping up to suck worse than normal.
It’s terrifying and painful, and at this exact moment, the Master wishes he had thought this bit through more. It had sounded like a great idea, on paper, when it was the Doctor doing the dying part. Much less fun now that he remembered that he was also going to have to do the dying part, to be reborn. But really though, surely worth it in the end. After all, the Doctor was only getting the dying and he’d get the second part.
Much better.
Nothing more than she deserves anyway.
He’s made up his mind about that and would not be changing it. Not this time.
He could feel the Doctor’s mind, brushing against his as they became one. She is still terrified, that is clear, but there’s something else under that. A sharper probing mischievousness, as she confirms something in his mind that he hasn’t thought to shield from her.
“I do love being right, you know,” she thinks at him, smirk clearly heard in her mental voice, “Just remember, come find me when you’re ready to surrender!”
Well, that sounds ominous. For a minute, the Master hesitates. If she is still this certain, here, now, seconds from death, maybe she isn’t just trying to make him second guess himself. Perhaps, that is a good enough reason to wait, go over the plan one more time, make sure there isn’t anything he was missing. Even with a greater chance of rescue, since Yaz is already on her way; it would be better to not do something he’d end up regretting.
But the process is already underway, far too late to stop. And with a blinding burst of pain, everything goes white. He feels an identical burst of pain from the Doctor and then she disappears from his mind, a horrible void he hadn’t anticipated. For some undefinable amount of time, there is only agony. And then, the Master wakes up.