Chapter Text
One minute, I was running – running as fast as I could in the year 2025 holding a box of my childhood treasures - and then I was surrounded by red grass and silver trees, all on fire. And the sound of screaming and hate as a thousand thousand ships battled around me.
“Yana!” His voice is so far away, I know that voice. I have known that voice in all its iterations in every life. Every life? No, that didn’t make sense. How could I have more than one life?
“Koschei!” I screamed, even though I didn’t know anyone named Koschei. “Koschei, please!”
I was bleeding, I was maybe dying. I needed him. I’d been fine a second ago – before all this. But now I was bleeding and I felt a strange sensation as my hearts – heart, people only have one heart – went double time.
A face I did but didn’t recognize came swimming into view. I knew this face. I trusted this face. It had been him and I together, resurrected to fight in the war. His hand shot out to grab mine, to drag me up, and I heard the comforting one-two-three-four beat of drums that I heard every time I touched him. It was him. It was really him.
“You can’t regenerate. Not yet. They’ll be on us in a second,” he said – pleaded. He only pleaded for me, I thought distantly through the pain. Only for me.
It hurt, but it wasn’t so bad. I’d survived worse. Although that was with access to a med bay, which I definitely wouldn’t have before bleeding out. I knew he was right, though – if I regenerated I would be a beacon drawing them right to us.
“Okay,” I said (I lied).
“I’m getting you out of here,” he swore, and then I was on my feet again, leaning hard against him. I could feel the energy building up in me but tried to focus on pushing it down.
I heard him swear and then I was scooped up in his arms as he ran.
“Koschei-“
“It’s not far,” he said, not bothering trying for calm. We were in a war zone, after all. Every line of his body was taut with palpable tension.
“I’m slowing you down,” I realized aloud, with a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach.
He didn’t answer, just kept moving.
“Koschei… I’m slowing you down.” He had to make it. I knew he had to, he would exist later on. His path was in flux, but his timelines converged in one direction. He had to make it out alive. “You have to leave me.”
There was only one path in which we both made it. One.
I pushed at him weakly.
“Koschei, you have to live,” I implored him. “Leave me.”
“No.” It was said in half a snarl. “I won’t.”
“You have to,” I told him sharply. “Time demands it.”
He let out a short, hysteric laugh.
“I am the Master, Time can obey me.” The words were said with the reckless arrogance that I knew so well, but it was clear that the fear that had driven him to find me and run was still in the pilot seat. I wondered why – why he had given me the name Yana in the first place when I was newly resurrected, why he was bothering to save me at all when I knew what he was like.
(But I had always been the exception, some traitorous part of my mind whispered. The same voice that whispered things like that when I imagined silly things like having known him my whole life.)
I had always been sensitive to the path of time. They said they brought me back because when I gazed into the Untempered Schism I was inspired and that inspiration made me worthy, but I had no memory of that. Something in my resurrection must have gone wrong because unlike the Master – Koschei, some part of me insisted, like he did – I didn’t have any memory of my previous regenerations.
The thought of regeneration, though, brought me back to the present. The energy was lurking in me, building. I was holding it back as best I could but the more blood I lost the worse it would get.
One path. One chance. The Master had to live, but I – I wanted to live, too.
“Don’t leave me,” I pleaded out loud, burying my face in his neck. I was weak. He’d always brought that out in me. The weakness. I was the Marshall, I was a general, one of the most brilliant minds of the war. If Koschei was the perfect warrior, then I was the perfect strategist. I stood knee deep in the blood of our enemies and Koschei made me weak.
“Never,” he vowed, and when my arms tightened around his neck, his held me closer as if in answer.
The blood loss started to win out. I knew if I didn’t get to a med bay, nothing would stop the regeneration energy from tearing out of me, rewriting me completely and most importantly acting as a great, flaming beacon to alert the Daleks to our location.
One path. One chance.
I closed my eyes and prayed.
“Yana, wake up.” It was a sharp command, said both aloud and in my mind. He’d always been good at that, at slipping into my head. Never going too far, but further than was appropriate for the kind of comrades we were supposed to be. If people like him and I could even truly be called that.
I was in a med bay, I realized, blinking at the ceiling when I opened my eyes. The regeneration energy was at bay.
“I put you to sleep,” Koschei explained shortly. “There’s no time.”
I took the hand he offered me then and sat up. From the way the wound on my shoulder (so close to one of my hearts) ached, he’d patched me up quickly rather than thoroughly. I tried to regain my senses. Still on Gallifrey. There were less of our people screaming now than there had been. We were… in a TARDIS. A War TARDIS, a type 94, judging by the standard look of the med bay and the distinct presence in my head. It didn’t feel right, though, as if-
“It’ll get us out,” Koschei snapped, sensing where my thoughts had gone. “I’ve repaired what I could.”
Our hands were still joined. Even if I weren’t aware of the skin contact, even if he tried to close himself off from me completely, I would have known because I still heard his drums in my head. Our little secret, he said.
They were screaming.
“What next?” I trusted him with my life. We’d had each other’s backs throughout the war, even if I fully didn’t understand why. The Master trusted no one. Koschei trusted me. He was the one who was going to get us out of this, because I had well and truly given up.
“The coordinates are set. We’ll go where no one will dare to follow, then…” his face shifted into a sneer. “Chameleon arch. No one will suspect us if we’re apes.”
He hated humans. I didn’t have the time or luxury to form such an opinion, but… something in me protested at the way he spat the word out like it was dirty. Still, I nodded.
“I trust you.” I wasn’t sure if I’d ever actually said it to him before, but he deserved to know. “Anything you need from me?”
I was a soldier, and while I was used to giving the orders, I was willing to follow his.
There was a war raging around us, after all. The war that would end the universe.
“Bond with me.” The words were spoken so keenly that I didn’t understand them at first.
“Koschei-“ He couldn’t be serious.
“I have never been more serious in my life.” The words were flat. Dark. “Bond with me, Yana. You’ve been mine longer than you know.”
I’d never thought about it before, if he knew me. Whoever I was before I was given the title the Marshall.
Because there had never been a Marshall before my resurrection – I’d searched every record I could find and there had only been one conclusion: my resurrection was wrong, or it had been tampered with. The only thing they couldn’t take from me was my true name, because it was ingrained in my soul and hidden there in the sacred ways of our people, secret and forbidden.
A secret Koschei wanted me to impart to him now.
“You knew me.” A statement. A question. “Was I bonded? Married?”
His eyes were so dark.
“Never bonded. Political marriage, no children. You died for good in your third regeneration and I killed your husband six times for it before it stuck. It was a mistake leaving you to him. We – I should have killed him when he dared offer for your hand.”
I didn’t question the ‘we.’ Or the… implications of dying so young before the war.
“Are my parents alive?” To consent, I didn’t add. I was… considering this, I realized suddenly. Considering marriage – bonding - as my people were slaughtered. A thought struck me. “Do I have any family left?”
Were there people I had once loved out there, dying as we spoke?
“No. Your mother died while you were at the Academy and I killed your father when I was done with your husband.” There was barely contained rage behind those words – though nothing like what I felt from him when he mentioned this husband. “I assure you, he deserved it.”
I was as alone in the world, then, as I thought. Though – not alone. Hadn’t Koschei been there from the very beginning? It was hard to a remember a time since my resurrection that I’d been without him.
I couldn’t imagine being without him. The very thought made my hearts twist in a feeling my stunted being couldn’t quite parse.
“I might never be the person you knew again,” I told him warily. “The resurrection took… everything. I might always be the Marshall.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re more you than you realize and you’re mine. And I won’t let you go again.” His hand slipped out of mine, taking his drums away for a brief moment before he was holding my face in both his hands his mind brushing insistently against my own as the drums pounded between us. “Bond with me, Yana.”
My feelings for him, that trust I couldn’t feel for anyone else, were forged in war and bloodshed. I might live to regret this. I might never remember it, living out the rest of my days as a human with no memories.
But if I didn’t do this, I would never forgive myself either.
“Yes.”
There was no ceremony. No handfasting and parents to consent and gladly give, just the oldest, most sacred exchange. His mind to mine, the drums echoing through us both, and his mouth to my ear, and mine to his, exchanging names. The only piece of myself I’d been allowed to keep when they took everything else away from me.
When he kissed me, it was with the entirety of his being bound to mine and tear tracks streaming down my face because as possessive and twisted as his love might be, it was desperate and all-consuming.
Then his hand came down on the last button and we were hurtling through the vortex in our desperate bid to live, pushing the damaged, stolen TARDIS further than any TARDIS had ever been pushed before. And both of us could feel it – it was too late to stop the journey but it was tearing the already damaged ship apart.
“Chameleon arch,” Koschei shouted, the drums a maddening crescendo shared between us amidst the waling of alarm sirens. “Now!”
“You first,” I insisted. We were narrowing down the paths now, only a few were left in which we didn’t survive. “It has to be you.”
Our nascent bond was flooded with a thought that took no name but he nodded sharply.
It took him seconds to program it.
His agony at undergoing the change was only mine for a brief moment – and then he was gone from my head, maybe forever. When I pulled him from the chameleon arch, he was just an unconscious little human boy bundled up by the TARDIS with a pocket watch tucked into his blanket.
The ship was screaming now, shaking and starting to rip apart, but it still-
Two paths left. Koschei – the Master – would survive.
I pulled the chameleon arch over my head as the interior dimension of the TARDIS started to give way to the vortex and screamed as the pain went tearing through me. An entire wall was ripped away, making the ship screech as I was thrown across the room into the matrix.
The last thing I saw was the heart of the TARDIS as I went barreling into it.
The light washed over me like a gentle thing, the roaring vortex, and the uncanny time sensitivity I had always felt narrowed the paths down to one. The muted song of a TARDIS grown for battle was the last thing I heard before I knew no more.
One minute, I was running – running as fast as I could in the year 2025 holding a box of my childhood treasures and remembering none of that – and then I found myself falling through golden light, lost at the end of the universe.
“This new regeneration, it’s kind of cheeky,” a familiar voice observed as the light faded and I was left looking at a man – an impossible man – in a brown suit with his back towards me, face pressed into a little window as he opened his mouth to reply.
That – it couldn’t be the Doctor.
The weight of the box in my hands – stupid little plastic treasures I’d kept from my childhood, gifts from my dad when I’d first watched Doctor Who as a kid – seemed to double, as though those shoddy replicas of my favorite props and a few homemade things rattled around like plastic had suddenly become metal and leather.
My heart – singular because Doctor Who is a fucking tv show no matter what strange inception-y dreams I’d had when this one started might suggest – was drumming in my chest.
I made the mistake of stumbling back before I booked it – and that made him turn around, his brown eyes meeting my blue ones for a single moment.
I clutched my box harder to my chest and turned on my heels and ran for all I was worth, uncaring of whatever outburst I was leaving behind me.
(He looked like he’d seen a ghost and not in a good way.)
“Have to get the fuck out of here,” I spat out as I ran, wondering why he looked at me like I was something bad, a nightmare come to life. “Have to wake up.”
My head was pounding. I took whatever random turns in this crazy place that my gut commanded me to because it had never steered me wrong. I had always been lucky like that. But wasn’t it strange, dreaming of the end of the world – of Utopia – and having the Doctor look at me like I was some sort of monster? Dreaming of these corridors that were taking way too long to navigate despite my innate knack for always getting where I needed to be?
Why wasn’t the dream fast-forwarding past this easily skipped content?
Why were my calves burning as I sprinted, my breath coming out in desperate, greedy gasps of air as I ran, my heart thundering in distress at the strain I’d been putting on it since I’d started running and hardly stopped?
“It’s stuck. It’s old, it’s not meant to be.” An aged voice protested. “Does it matter?”
Open the box. You have to open the box.
I could feel a voice calling out to me but I ignored it as I stumbled into the lab.
“No, it’s nothing-“ Martha started, then stared at me with wide eyes.
There was nothing in her eyes to suggest she knew me, only panic as the elderly man beside her held out a fob watch to her. She didn’t even seem to realize that I was wearing very obvious Earth clothing from her era.
She looked at me before looking back to Professor Yana, clearly freaking out – Yana, the name was so familiar and not just because of the episode….
Open the box. Show him the watch.
Harder to ignore. Almost impossible. I felt the pull so strongly my hand moved against my will, without my knowledge.
“Chan, who are you, tho?” The vaguely insectoid or crustacean alien female that didn’t know what was going on asked, but I didn’t answer.
Professor Yana stood across the room, clutching his watch close as he took in my face with a look of recognition.
“It’s you,” he breathed, his grip on his watch so tight that his knuckles looked as though they had lost all blood. “You’re-“
I dug through the box without thinking, heart pounding.
My hand slipped under the lid and I was surprised to find my fingers brushing against smooth metal, which surprised me, as though the toy I’d had for well over a decade had somehow turned to pure silver. The replica of the Master’s watch I’d played pretend with before, that I’d taken to school like I was so cool and edgy for it when I was in high school.
Trust him. You must get away from the Doctor.
The voice was full of fear. It was so, so convincing.
I pulled out the watch and approached him carefully, as one would a wild beast.
The voice wanted me to show him the watch, so I would show it to him. The Doctor had looked at me like I was a fucking ghost dalek thing? Fine, I’ll listen to the voice in the box and hand over the toy. Maybe it was a cure for the drums or something. There couldn’t be two watches that said ‘the Master’ on them in Gallifreyan. It would probably create some kind of paradox. Given that it was a woman’s voice I heard and the fact that it literally had the Master’s name on it, according to the prop department that made it, I wondered if it was Missy in there.
“I’ve waited so long for you,” Yana breathed, taking a step towards me. “Your face, imprinted in my mind since I was a boy.”
Martha stared at the watch in my hand in horror as I dangled it in the air, my gaze on Yana’s unblinking. And then she took off running.
…The never-ending drumbeat. Open me, you human fool. Open the light and summon me and receive my majesty.
Give him the watch, Marya Oakden. You can trust him.
How, I wanted to ask as both voices slammed into me at once, one demanding and cruel, the other pleading. How could I trust-
Yana looked down at his watch and slowly moved to open it.
“Did it look like they could see the watches, Martha?” The Doctor asked with urgency as he tried to focus on getting the ship to Utopia safely into the air.
“See them? Doctor, she pulled it out of a box and handed it to him!” Martha felt like she should be excited but the Doctor’s caution filled her with dread. “It was like she knew what it was from the start, like the perception filter didn’t affect her at all.”
The Doctor was quiet, thoughts racing. He worked faster.
Tears streamed down my face as the Master dragged me into the TARDIS with surprising strength given that Chantho had still shot him. I hadn’t been able to save her. I hadn’t been able to do anything.
I was just a useless waste of space sitting on the TARDIS floor, staring at my wrist that ached from how he had grabbed me.
It hurt. How could it hurt, if this was a dream?
(The Doctor was screaming outside the TARDIS doors.)
The Master screamed too as he regenerated. Then he laughed.
“Now then, Doctor!” He cried out in triumph, dancing around the console like a maniac. “Oh, new voice. Hello. Hello. Hello!”
The watch that had started out this morning as a plastic toy murmured words of reassurance from where it was newly stashed in the Master’s pocket but they didn’t get into my head the same way now that I wasn’t holding it. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him.
“Anyway, why don’t we stop and have a nice little chat where I tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me?” He asked sarcastically. “I don’t think!”
The Doctor responded but I couldn’t quite make out the words with my human hearing. The Master clearly could, though, because he listened like he was savoring whatever words were said before he callously demanded, “Use my name.”
Trust him. He’ll keep you safe. The only remaining watch crooned to me. Trust the Master.
I didn’t, though, how could I? I was a stupid human and the watch was trying to trick me. Now that it wasn’t as close it couldn’t impress its will on me like it had when I handed it over. But it maintained its claim that somehow I was better off with the Master.
I was stuck in the TARDIS with him. I was going to die.
“End of the universe.” The Master called out mockingly. “Have fun. Bye-bye!”
I watched him slam a button on the console and then heard the tell-tale sound of the TARDIS dematerializing.
The Master’s manic eyes turned to me.
“Tell me your name.” It was a command. I was in the deep end and I couldn’t swim.
“Marya,” I tried to say neatly, to not make him angry. “Marya Oakden.”
He approached so quickly that I didn’t even notice him slipping the fob watch out of his pocket until he was holding it out in front of him as he towered over me.
“Marya Oakden,” he repeated, letting loose a little hysterical laugh. “I gave you life, Marya Oakden. Care to tell me how you ended up at the end of the universe in twenty-first century earth clothes?”
I clutched my box closer to myself. If the watch I’d had inside it was real, he couldn’t take anything else out of the box. It would be too dangerous. I had a replica of Jack’s vortex manipulator in there. Regardless of what the watch wanted me to do, it was imperative that the Doctor locking the coordinates of the TARDIS be enough to trap him in Martha’s time so that the Master’s plan could be stopped. Maybe… Maybe I would give him the Vortex Manipulator so that he could escape after preferably not being shot by his wife. That way the Doctor wouldn’t be forced to watch over his funeral pyre.
“I’m – I’m from the year 2025. Something happened to me… glowing golden light, and then I ended up on your base.”
This seemed to perturb him a little, but he set it aside.
“Do you have a nickname, Marya Oakden?” He asked curiously, his eyes trained on me. “Something you prefer to be called?”
I hesitated. Not too long, because I knew I had to snap out of it and answer before he lost patience. But – why did he want to know that?
“My friends call me Yana,” I admitted, keeping careful stock of him and how his face changed.
His smile widened and stretched until he looked almost deranged.
“We’ll keep that our little secret then,” he told me coyly. “No telling the Doctor if he catches up. And no letting anyone else call you that, either.”
I nodded. What else could I do?
I watched him close his eyes as he pressed the watch to his cheek with a shudder of pleasure that should have been scary or disturbing to see…
And then the TARDIS was landing, we were - back in 2006, I assumed – and the Master? He had work to do.
I don’t know what I expected to happen to me, exactly. I was thinking I’d get shunted out of the TARDIS and left to make my way through the vortex like Jack did, but we landed safely enough and before long the Master was tinkering away at something with spare parts he’d scrounged up or ripped out of things.
He didn’t speak to me so I tried not to take up too much room as he just focused on his work. Eighteen months. That’s how long I would have to survive him just until the Doctor returned. Maybe if I could escape somehow, I considered, or got him to let me go… I might be able to meet up with the Doctor at one of his previous adventures. But then… he looked at me like I was a monster. He must have recognized me from somewhere. What if I did manage to get away from the Master and then fucked up one of his adventures and he got rid of me?
“You don’t ask many questions,” the Master drawled suddenly, breaking me from my thoughts.
It was just me cradling my box of secrets sitting on the floor of the console room.
“I… don’t want to interrupt.” I paused, recognizing the device coming together in his hands. “Is that a laser screwdriver?”
He blinked, but smiled.
“Yes. No point in going out those doors unarmed. We have a lot to do and that will be easier with tools at hand.” He studied me for a moment, a little quirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Even as an ape you’re leagues more intelligent than the rest.”
His eyes darkened with some sick interest.
“Do you hear her? The voice from the watch?” He asked, the words heavy and burdensome in the air. There was no point in lying to him.
“Even now,” I admitted, because I did. She was whispering to me from his pocket, soothing me like some child. Not like a mother, but like someone else who had also been a scared child. I didn’t trust her because she was pushing me to stay with the Master, but other than that she seemed to want to keep me calm, which was… worrying.
Why would a Time Lord – Lady – that was clearly helping the Master and wanting me to stay away from the Doctor want me to stay calm?
Unless she blamed the Doctor for the Time War? The Master had been brought back to fight in it, so maybe watch lady was just taking the Master’s side kind of like taking a stand for their people. Maybe she was just misguided?
“She’s trying very hard to comfort you,” the Master observed. “Why is that?”
I stiffened. Couldn’t help it. What the fuck was I supposed to say? I couldn’t let him know about the show. What could I say that wouldn’t make him force that out of me?
“You’re afraid.” There was anger in his tone. “You shouldn’t be. Has the Doctor already poisoned you against me?”
I shook my head wildly as he approached.
“No. I’m – I’m from the year 2025. I’ve never met the Doctor before today and we didn’t talk at all. I just… don’t know how I got here.” That was true enough. My intuition wasn’t screaming danger at me and I trusted it, so I tried to slump my shoulders and appear less anxious. “The watch told me to trust you. It keeps telling me to trust you, that I’m… safe with you.”
“Of course you are,” the Master dismissed. “I saved you. Me. Not the Doctor. Me. If it wasn’t for my intervention you would be dead and gone.”
I had never met him in my life. But then – a past or future regeneration, maybe? I tried to think of them and which one I might have met because it sounded like… well, I’d been running, hadn’t I? Maybe the Master was the one who brought me to this universe?
“Right then,” he announced with cheer that somehow still felt malevolent when he slid the last panel of his new laser screwdriver closed. “This is done. Time to raid the TARDIS for everything else!”
Being in the TARDIS was, of course, every Doctor Who fan’s ultimate dream. Being accessory to raiding the TARDIS not only without the Doctor’s permission or presence but with the Master leading the way, who was going to turn it into a Paradox Machine was… upsetting.
Extremely upsetting.
I followed him quietly because he’d impatiently held his hand out for mine before dragging me along, not letting go. He was muttering to himself but all I could think of was how wrong this was. In the TARDIS, planning to steal from her. I wanted no part of it. I wanted-
Was this why the Doctor looked at me like I was a monster, I wondered? Did he somehow know before I did that I was going to invade his TARDIS with the Master?
We walked with purpose down random hallways until even I was able to cotton on that the TARDIS was being difficult. She was the Doctor’s, after all. But the Master was a Time Lord and very proficient at the hypnotism/telepathy stuff who was definitely aware from the start because right then he snarled with impatience and let go of my hand to – do some Time Lord mind thing to bludgeon the poor old girl’s will until the hallway we were in shifted into presumably the one he wanted in the first place.
I watched how the lights flickered and dimmed and tears sprang to my eyes.
I thought for one second I felt something brush against my mind – but that couldn’t have been right.
“Wardrobe!” The Master exclaimed with satisfaction, throwing open a door. “We’ll be needing disguises, of course…”
We? I thought, stomach churning with a sharp spike of anxiety as I followed him in.
The Wardrobe was huge and (because the TARDIS was still fighting him) an absolute mess. How we were supposed to find anything here, I didn’t know. The Master, though, strode over to some kind of touch console and soon racks of clothing were being shifted away until there was a much narrower selection.
Suits and coats and shoes and stuff, all within the realm of what a well-off, respectable person would wear in 2006 as far as I knew. There were dresses too, as far off from the suits where the Master was already digging around as possible.
I swallowed. I wasn’t too out of period. I was wearing a loose cropped black star wars t-shirt with dark denim high-waisted shorts and my favorite bookish tights that I’d found online that featured the mountain and stars design from ACOTAR. I’d probably be fine if I went out like this. I knew people in the UK didn’t typically dress as freely or loudly as Americans (at least they didn’t when I went to Scotland to visit family), but I shouldn’t stick out like crazy. Just maybe look a little alt, which wouldn’t exactly-
“Pick a dress, Yana. A red one.” The Master instructed impatiently, frowning at me suddenly. “And a coat. You’ll need one, being… human. It’ll be too cold for you outside.”
I wondered how he knew that but didn’t dare ask. He clearly knew when and where we were, maybe because he had been able to read the coordinates the Doctor locked the TARDIS into. I forced myself not to hesitate and started looking through the pro-offered tea dresses. They were all fancier than what I usually wore, and older looking too which wasn’t really me. I tended to dress young for my age anyway, so tea dresses weren’t…
I finally pulled one out that looked fine. It was a bit 50s, but I sort of liked a vintage look anyway and 2006 fashion wasn’t it from what I remembered of it. This would do. Now… a coat.
One option presented itself. Just one. A classic black car coat, vintage fitted that made me think of Jack’s coat but clearly modern with a stylish heavy zipper going down the front. The material was something like wool but softer. Probably alien. I would have said it was the most beautiful coat I’d ever seen, but I had seen it before.
It was a perfect replica of the coat my Nannie had bought me for my birthday on our last visit to Scotland together. Classy, elegant. When I’d tried it on she’d told me I looked beautiful.
“Thank you,” I murmured as quietly as I could to the TARDIS, hesitating for a moment. “And I’m sorry.”
Sorry wasn’t enough for what was coming, but I didn’t dare say anything else.
I felt something brush against my mind vaguely – like seafoam touching your toes while you walk on the beach but you don’t get to feel the water itself – and then a door swung open to my right. It was a small room with a huge mirror and a dressing table and little implements that were all delightfully Rococo in style, so girly and soft and elegant that it felt like the TARDIS had picked it out of my brain. I’d always loved 18th century style things…
“I’ll just get changed now,” I announced as carefully as I could, afraid of aggroing the Master as he threw suits that all looked the same to me onto the floor. Seemed like he was pretty picky now that he was freshly regenerated, sort of like the Doctor. I tried not to think too hard on that, instead grabbing the first pair of black heels that look my size and easy to walk in from the pairs provided by the TARDIS.
The Master glanced over at what I was holding. A red dress as instructed. He smiled all teeth when he looked at it. Scanned the coat, the box I was clutching. His eyes narrowed.
“What’s in that box?” He asked, eyes sharp. I could practically feel his thoughts churning. The watch had been in there, after all.
I told the truth. Well, as much of it as I dared.
“I was cleaning out my grandparent’s house and… I was taking some things home with me. Your watch was in it, along with some toys from my childhood.” I tried really hard not to think about the odds that they weren’t toys anymore. “My dad died when I was a kid and I guess my grandparents just ended up holding onto his - my - stuff. I was still holding onto the box when I ended up at the end of the universe and… I guess I can’t bear to let go.”
The corner of his mouth twitched in displeasure.
“You’re right. It is my watch,” he told me, hand drifting over the pocket where the watch I had given him resided. “Get dressed. And get rid of that box. You won’t be needing it any longer.”
I nodded but my throat was thick. Maybe the TARDIS would help me stash the box where the Master would never find it? But then… how would I survive if I escaped him without the vortex manipulator or psychic paper? I’d – I’d have to figure something out.
I changed quickly once the door was securely shut behind me. It wouldn’t stop him from getting in, not that I expected him to bother, but it made me feel a lot better knowing it was locked while I was vulnerable. I pulled on the jacket for good measure, finding it warm and comforting and so, so soft.
I looked at the box I’d placed on the dressing table and wondered if I could salvage anything from it and just… shove it in my pockets or something. To preserve the memories. I could hide the tech if it really had become real, and maybe keep whatever wasn’t.
My hands slid into my pockets to check the size and – and I froze.
They were bigger on the inside. The TARDIS – she gave me a coat that was a replica of my favorite coat with pockets that were bigger on the inside.
“Sexy…? Do I… in the future-“ I can’t bring myself to say it. I hope since she can get in my head anyway she knows what I’m asking, even though I’m afraid of the answer. But no – that can’t be. I’m helping the Master. Sort of. And the Doctor – the way he looked at me. It was not a look of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey you’re a past companion who died or got hurt look of sadness. He looked at me like I was a cyberman or a dalek.
There was no way.
The TARDIS could get in my head and probably knew what I was thinking, though. And it was only natural she would try to help the Doctor by keeping the vortex manipulator away from the Master. Maybe the coat… was a little nudge to let me know that hiding the contents of the box was doing the right thing.
I take my hands out of the pockets I couldn’t find an end to and open the box.
Inside were the toys of my childhood. Well, the Eleventh Doctor’s sonic screwdriver was a later addition to the box; I’d bought it myself when I was older, thoroughly charmed by the fact that it worked as a real screwdriver, but I digress. The ‘psychic paper’ my dad had made for me out of an old passport sleeve looked like new leather. The replica of Jack’s vortex manipulator was metal and leather where it had been scuffed cheap plastic. There was even a bag of jelly babies that had looked old and worn and definitely expired in 2025 and had somehow magically been restored to newness. I wondered if they were safe to eat.
There were some old photos too. The last pieces of home I will ever see again.
Tears spring to my eyes as I struggle to think of how I’m supposed to survive the next eighteen months, even less the Year That Never Was.
“Yana! We have work to do!” The Master shouts from the other side of the door. “Hurry up.”
I wipe the tears away furiously.
“Sorry, I was struggling with the dress zipper, but I’ve got it now,” I lie as I quietly start shoving the remainder of my childhood into my pockets. “Should I put on makeup before we go? To match the disguise?”
I don’t want to put on makeup, but I’ll do it if it gives me a minute to breathe.
“Just come out,” the Master snaps back, impatience building in his voice.
I carefully close the box and throw it in a wastebin so that he hopefully won’t be able to tell that I took all the stuff inside. Then, I zipped my coat over my dress and prepared to face the… well, drums.
“Perfect,” the Master breathed when he saw me. A sly smile spread over his face. “You look like a politician’s wife.”
If I survived this, I realized with numbing despair, it was going to be a long eighteen months. And that would only be the beginning.