Work Text:
The Master has a trick to surviving any situation, which he has used liberally over the centuries: he won't even consider the possibility of dying.
Losing a regeneration, of course. When he was younger and more foolish he had even given some away in the name of a disguise or another, hoping to hide from his own kind, when he still thought that those cowards might actually do something to stop him, and was still foolish enough to believe that the best way of dealing with them was to run rather than giving them the punishment that they deserve. He made mistakes, did quite a few things that he isn’t proud of, wasted some valuable opportunities, but that taught him some valuable things as well. Including that he could survive anything.
At times the way to survive was to run away, to abandon whatever plans he had and just run, leaving behind anyone and anything. If that were a possibility now, it’s what he would be doing. Instead, he’s not only in danger but trapped, and he can’t see a way to survive this.
The agoniser, as this cell was called when he was first brought in – when he still thought that he had just been taken by some overly enthusiastic scientists and would quickly dispatch them and steal anything of them that was worth stealing –, lives up to its name, and at some point they must have captured other Time Lords, or obtained information on them somehow, because the pain signs are being sent directly through every nerve ending as both a low-level electric command and a telepathic impulse, ensuring maximum disruption with minimal physical damage. That alone he should be able to block, it’s not that innovative as a torture device, and he has escaped others like this before, but it’s perfectly modulated to disrupt Gallifreyan thought patterns, a destructive telepathic resonance that interrupts each attempt at modulating his own responses. If he stays there for much longer, he might lose his mind. As it is, he already has trouble keeping track of time.
If he could concentrate any better, he might be able to come up with a plan, but until they come to take him out of his cell he won’t be able to. It’s almost impressive that they were able to neutralise him to this degree, this will earn them a painful death as he discovers what exactly they are doing there.
His moment happens after he’s been there for a few months, the sort of imprecise thinking that isn’t acceptable to someone like him, but it's the best that he can do with how his brain is at the moment. He stumbles as the agoniser is turned off, and wastes a few precious fractions of a second to reset his optic nerves and adjust his pupils to the light. That’s enough time for his time sense to realign, and sense the presence of another complex temporal event.
“I thought you’d be the one running this place. What happened, did you trust the wrong people and they betrayed you again?” the Doctor says, with just as much anger in her voice as she always has for him these days, but something about it sounds different.
Being rescued by the Doctor is the only outcome worse than losing his mind to an agoniser and then being killed, and he wants to say something biting back, but his thoughts are still hard to connect.
He tries to step out of the cell and misjudges the depth of the floor, stumbling forward and only keeping his head from hitting the floor by holding his arms in front of his body, allowing them to take the blunt of the fall.
“I’m sure this will ruin some of your gloating, but I never even heard of these people before,” the Master says, still from the floor, since by this point there might not be anything more humiliating than what’s already happening to him.
He’s sure that the Doctor loves this, it’s just like her to pretend that she cares about everyone and that she’s so kind – which he’s sure that the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, and others that she killed without hesitation wouldn’t agree with –, but she likes it even more when he suffers, especially if she thinks that he deserves it. She does have a cruelty that he admires, it’s just that it’s often reserved for him. He might even admire her more for this.
“They have some of the worst threats to the universe here, experimenting on them. I wonder if Time Lord made the cut or it’s just you,” she says, and when he tries raising his head, he can see that she’s doing something with the control panel.
So she knows more about this situation than the Master does, and she still thought that he had something to do with it. That’s typical of her, she can never see what’s right in front of her. Which is useful when he has a plan that depends on that, and it’s always a delight to have a moment of a grand reveal in front of her, just to watch her face as she finally realises what’s happening. But it’s not so good when he’s on this side of it, being accused of something that he didn’t do.
At least he gets to interfere with her plans, if her plan had been to get to him so he could expose more of what’s happening there. He would be entirely useless when it comes to giving her information, and she’s wasting time talking to him, which is always good. If he can’t make his own plans against her, at least he should get in the way of what she’s already doing.
“They can’t be that good as collectors, if they haven’t taken you for their experiments. You’re certainly worse than the Daleks, at least they’re honest about wanting to kill,” the Master says, rolling to his back so he can face the light for a bit before deciding to stand up.
He just needs a few more seconds to recover, and then he can run out of there and leave the Doctor behind. The only problem is that he’s seen what these people can do, and he’s the only person who can hurt her like that, so maybe he’ll have to stay a little longer, just to make sure that she’ll get out of there too.
For a terrifying moment then, he considers the possibility that he’s wrong. Maybe they did take her, and she just so happened to escape. With what was done to her, her telepathic imprint should be indistinguishable from that of a regular Time Lady, but there might be some neglectable difference that was enough to keep the agoniser from locking on properly. It would be one more proof of what she really is thrown on his face, another reminder that their childhood and youth together were only lies, but that’s not why he hopes that this didn’t happen. He doesn’t want them to have touched her, to have hurt her. She’s his oldest friend even if he might not be hers, and he refuses to give up on the title of her best enemy. He still hasn’t forgiven the slight of calling Davros her archnemesis, and he has a plan to take complete control of the Daleks from him as revenge that he hasn’t had the time to put in practice, but he knows that there’s only one enemy who can truly challenge her and force the Doctor to see who she really is.
“We won’t have much time to leave,” she says, completely ignoring his accusations, as she always does when he says something that she doesn’t want to think about. “This is an artificial planet, held together in between the gravity pool of twin stars. At its current position, if it loses power to the forcefield…What am I saying, you know what’s going to happen.”
It’s only because she’s not looking at him that he allows himself a smile. For a second there she forgot that he wasn’t one of her pets and was explaining things to him like he was three years old and had never heard of the word ‘physics’. Now that he’s recovering, he can feel the exact gravitational pull of each star, and how the artificial planet is actually positioned in an unstable orbit. They must depend on propulsion to keep them from falling towards whichever star is closest, and on a forcefield to keep a stable atmosphere and to keep it from breaking into pieces. They’re too close to the stars, which is great for defense as there are very few ships that can navigate through something like this, and even fewer sensors that could detect their presence there, but if anything goes wrong, it would be catastrophic.
He sits up, realising that the Doctor is the catastrophe that came their way. She’s going to destroy the planet, killing everyone inside. How appropriately cruel of her, and she probably still has some excuse that she can give herself as to why that’s not actually wrong.
“If you deactivate the forcefield, then you won’t have time to get to your TARDIS. Are you really willing to kill yourself here just to stop these people?” the Master says, turning away from her to stand so she won’t see him struggle.
If he had a few minutes of quiet, he would be able to repair all the damage done to his nerves, and then he could walk out of there on his own. As it is, he’s not sure if he’ll have that time, and either way he can’t waste the concentration on that when he still has the Doctor to deal with, right there with him. It would leave him too exposed, too vulnerable to her.
“What? No, I’m not killing anyone, but their power is already failing. I tried boosting the forcefield with everything they have, so no more thrusters, we'll be in freefall soon enough, but that should be enough time to leave, and we'll have an atmosphere until then,” she says, and he sighs in disappointment.
It would have been good to see the Doctor destroy this place, especially after suffering through so much here, but of course she’s still trying to wash her hands from the situation. The power failing and her presence there can’t be a coincidence though, so this is still her doing, even if she doesn’t want to admit as much. He knows that this is what she does, tells herself that she has no choice, or that it's not really her fault, when she's this destructive force.
He turns to her for only a brief moment, really looking at her for the first time since she arrived. She seems well, not injured, no visible damage at least, and she keeps looking over her shoulder as she’s still trying to do something with the control panel. If their lives depend on her ability to make this system work while knowing nothing about it, then they might as well be dead already. She’ll waste too much time trying to preserve life support for the entire planet, when that power would be best spent assuring their own escape.
He doesn’t ask her what she’s doing, he doesn’t have to. He has seen her work and worked with her often enough that he can just step next to her and start typing, complementing her own attempts at diverting power, knowing what she'll try to do before she does.
“Your TARDIS isn’t here, I scanned for it, so if you’re thinking of running away, your best bet is a Dalek ship on hangar C2,” she says, not commenting on what he’s doing, although she must have noticed that he cut all life support to about three quarters of the planet, the regions more distant to them. He didn’t bother checking for life signs, although he still hopes that some of these scientists had been there.
Of course his TARDIS isn’t there, he didn’t go there by his own volition, but he’s not so careless as to leave it around where someone who’s attacking him might find it. Except if that someone is the Doctor, apparently, but things have always been different between them than with anyone else. There isn’t a plan that he can make that she can’t figure out, given enough time, and in turn he knows the way that she thinks better than anyone else. So he’s not surprised that there are things that only she can do against him.
His TARDIS will still be in pre colonial Metebelis 3, where he had been collecting telepathic enhancement crystals for this trap that he has planned for the Doctor. The satellite network was a low resource way of having limited telepathic control over the Doctor’s favourite pet planet, but with enough crystals he should be able to build a signal tower to give him complete telepathic control of a population of about a billion sapient beings. He just hasn’t decided if he’ll try finding a time where the Earth had a population around that number, or go to one of the more established human colonies, since the latter might give him more time to properly mould the society to be exactly what he has in mind. It’ll be a surprise for her, so he can’t say anything about it now, but he’s not too concerned about that. He’ll find his way back to the right planet and time easily enough, it’s not the first time that he has been separated from a TARDIS and had to improvise.
“I notice you aren’t offering me a ride,” he says, although he would have no intention of going with her either way.
Being rescued by her is bad enough without delivering himself to her captivity like that. He wouldn’t quite say that he would rather die, although he had once convinced the Doctor of it, but it would be something to take into consideration. He just can’t stand the thought of giving her that much control over him.
But he says it because he knows that it’ll hurt. It’s the reminder that as much as she tells herself otherwise, the Doctor isn’t willing to save everyone, and she isn’t willing to save him. He still doesn’t know what she’s doing there, but she didn’t come to save him, at most she came to stop him, and the only reason why she’s not doing that now is because she found a bigger threat that she has to deal with first. That doesn’t mean that she would trust him, or that she wants to help him, although he knows that she wants him to survive. What he’s not sure is if she knows that now. It seems to be an awareness that she keeps on gaining and losing, the universe is too boring a place without him in it. He feels the same way, and at least he can admit it, some of the time.
He tried to kill her before, he will try to kill her again, but it’s only because he knows that in some impossible way she would return, there’s nothing that he could do to rid the universe of her, and even if he were to remove every trace of her from everywhere else, she would still exist in him, in his hearts and his mind, traces of her from every time that they made Contact, the only mind that he knows better than his own. She forgets that sometimes, until the reality of being truly alone sets in and she remembers that he’s the only one who understands her.
Or at least he was. Even this was robbed of him, now he knows that she had an entire other life that he never knew about, and he carefully analysed every memory, wanting to keep on knowing her better than she knows herself, but there was so little of it. He knows more than she does, but even that isn't saying much.
“As if you’d come with me. I’m just waiting for you to shoot me and run away,” she says, then uses her sonic screwdriver to send through the last changes in the code as some queued commands, which should buy them a couple extra minutes. “Now let’s get out of here before anyone else realises we’re here. Between the two of us, almost everyone here would rather have revenge than try to escape.”
It’s something that he did notice when going through the system. The first sign of security failure was that every single containment cell in this place was unlocked, which of course led to generalised chaos. He can hear shooting and screaming in the distance, he just wasn’t concerning himself with it, but it seems like the type of thing that the Doctor might do. So these people collected horrors of the universe to experiment on for what he’s sure are nefarious means that he would have loved to take over, and the Doctor’s reaction to that is to release those horrors on them. She probably considers it some sort of poetic justice.
“Don’t worry, my dear, if anyone will take revenge on you, it’ll be me,” the Master says, and then he turns to the door, but it opens before he can reach the controls.
The metal door makes way to a Dalek, and he doesn’t have time to react. He hears the noise of the Doctor’s sonic, but whatever she’s trying to do, it’ll be too late. He has just enough time to duck out of the way, but the noise tells him that she's right behind him, and he can't make the decision to let her be killed in his place, at least not fast enough to convince his legs to move.
The last thing he hears, quite predictably, is, “Exterminate!”
-
The Master has been killed by Daleks before, and the one thing that he remembers about this sort of attack is that their weapons hurt. The only good thing about them is that they are quick, and after being killed he usually didn’t have to deal with that pain as soon as his failsafe came into effect, and every time before he had a failsafe of some kind.
This time he didn’t, and what surprises him the most about this is that the pain doesn’t stop. He’s not awake, he barely has any awareness to spare, but the pain is still there, and it takes him a moment to realise that at least some of that is his circulatory system attempting to compensate for only one working heart. He shouldn’t have even one working after a direct hit of a Dalek weapon, but he can worry about that once he wrestles his way back into consciousness.
He’s still trying to connect with his higher neural functions when he feels the hits on his chest, two hands pressed together, hitting right over his right heart, perfectly aimed, first to his back, and then his body being turned over so his front can be hit as well. The strikes are hard enough that he feels a couple of ribs cracking, but they have the desired effect, the right heart resumes beating, and after a couple of irregular beats, falls into rhythm with its twin, returning to him that dreaded drumbeat that left his head that still makes itself known on occasion.
His hearing connects before motor function or sight, as the blood flow approaches a normal rhythm, and the first thing he hears is the familiar hum of a TARDIS, and more specifically of a bad tempered TARDIS who hates him personally. The second thing that he hears is the Doctor’s voice.
“You don’t get to do this, you don’t get to make me the last one again,” she says, and she hits his chest a couple more times than it’s necessary before thinking to check for his pulse.
Her touch on his neck sends a shiver down his spine, the sort of thing that she might get away with doing around her pets, but he knows how intimate it is to touch him so close to a Contact point, although her mind is still firmly closed within itself. Not that it matters, although their telepathy is usually limited to close proximity, between the two of them that hasn’t been necessary for centuries. They know each other too well, they can find each other across time and space if they concentrate enough, neither can ever truly escape the other, and if he tried now he could still talk to her even as her fingers leave his neck and she falls back.
Instead, he waits until he can connect with his speech centres, and grunts as he forces his eyes to blink. As he already knew, he’s in her TARDIS, which is a bit surprising. He wouldn’t have thought that she would take a risk like this, but she’s still capable of surprising him.
Of course he’ll have to use this against her, and at least try to take over her TARDIS. By now she’ll almost surely have improved her security features, and even if she hasn’t, the TARDIS will have, specifically when it comes to the Master. He’s sure that the repairs that he offered weren’t enough to make it forgive him for the paradox machine, and the Doctor’s TARDIS, much like the Doctor, can hold a grudge. But not even trying to take over her TARDIS and kill the Doctor would be unthinkable after she was careless enough to bring him there. It's simply not how things are between them, and he has to follow the logical next step in their dance, even if they are waltzing towards the abyss.
“Will you just sit still for a second? You were hit by a Dalek weapon, and not just any Dalek, that was a Time War Dalek. You’re lucky I was able to disperse some of the energy, or you might not even have been able to regenerate,” the Doctor says, and she tries to sound angry, but that’s hard to do when she’s rubbing tears out of her eyes.
The Master might have been closer to death than he realised if that’s her reaction, but he’s mostly impressed that she was able to disrupt a Dalek weapon so quickly. Well, that and, he wants to know how she killed that Dalek before it fired again, because he’s sure that that’s what happened. They wouldn’t be there otherwise.
At least this answers his previous question, she does know that she doesn’t want him to die. Everything else he’s willing to use against her, but not this, and so he lets her hide her tears, and doesn’t mention anything about them. He gave her these tears, but he feels no joy for them. Instead, he has to fight the urge to reach over and wipe them gently with his thumb, holding her face.
“I’m fine, I won’t regenerate,” he says, because he can’t think of any other provocation, and if he doesn’t say something soon she’ll know that he noticed the tears.
It happens to be true, but he has no particular reason to hide this from her, so he doesn't mind telling her the truth. He’s hurt, he’s in pain, but he’s still a Time Lord, and his body can take much damage before regenerating is the only option. Right now, he’s not even close to it. If that heart had been stopped for long enough for the muscle to die, then he might have, but he would still be able to hold it off until he was away from the Doctor. Unlike the Doctor, he can regenerate quickly and immediately get his bearings so he can continue with whatever plan caused his partial demise, but he has no intention of showing her this kind of vulnerability now, even if only for a couple of seconds. And these days he would rather avoid regeneration completely for as long as he can, his disdain for his past faces only surpassed by his theoretical disdain for his future ones.
“You wouldn’t be able to,” she insists, and that might also be true. Between what was done to him during his time in captivity and the Dalek attack now, he’s not sure if the right connections could form to collect enough energy to start the process.
It’s not the first time that he faces the possibility of actual death, but his strategy remains the same, and it always works. He’s sure that he can’t die, he wouldn’t accept it, and especially not if the Doctor is there to witness. Not without a plan for him to come back. Death is never an option without resurrection, he won't accept it.
“You know it’s not my first time with Daleks,” he says, sitting up and immediately regretting it with how it makes his head spin.
His blood pressure might still be equalising after the trauma to his right heart, but as they are both beating in rhythm now there’s no reason to think that it won’t return to normal in a few more minutes. He still has all his parts, none of these injuries should be lasting, and he won’t regenerate, so this is about the best result that he could hope for, considering the situation that he was in. Hurt, but he'll recover in a few days at most, and before this he'll be able to fight if he has to.
He’s afraid that the Doctor might notice that he’s still in no condition to stand, so he looks away from her, pretending that he’s just studying his surroundings. He does that as well, it’s all good to be aware of one’s surroundings when captured by an enemy, but he doesn’t expect to find anything that he doesn’t already know.
So he’s once again surprised when his eyes land on a display screen, and it has several windows open with different rumours about a group who captured a Time Lord, and on the corner of the screen, a distress signal sent in with a familiar TARDIS identification. He didn’t set it up before being taken, and he hadn’t programmed it to that, and as he actually knows how to control a TARDIS, unlike the Doctor, his shouldn’t do things that he doesn’t order it to. But he did… he did think of the Doctor as he was being taken, and with the hit of the telepathic weapon that they used to capture him, it’s possible that some signals were crossed and his TARDIS misinterpreted that as a quest for help. Which he would never have sent, especially not to the Doctor, at least not intentionally.
But this means that the Doctor knew that he was on that planet and that he had been captured. She would have had to go there to rescue him, not just to stop whoever was doing all that kidnapping and experimenting. She knew that he was taken and was searching for him, and then came raining down righteous furry that destroyed an artificial planet in the process, the way she likes best, by releasing enemies on each other and letting the blood be on their hands so she can stand tall above it all.
She went there to save him, and when he was hit by a Dalek weapon, she brought him to her TARDIS to save him. As he takes a more careful look of the situation, he can see that he lost a shoe in the process, and his clothes are wrinkled and even slightly ripped at parts, so she probably dragged him there, all the way from his cell to wherever she had parked, and there are some medical devices on the floor around them, Gallifreyan technology that she must have nicked from the war by the looks of it, at least a couple of which he recognises as specifically designed to attempt to treat wounds from Dalek energy weapons.
He feels a tightness in his chest that has nothing to do with his recently stopped heart. He knows that she cares, in her own way, but that doesn’t make it any easier to be confronted with this much evidence, because in the end he knows that it won’t change anything. She may come to his rescue and save his life, she’ll probably let him escape when he tries, but the next time that they meet they’ll still be trying to kill each other. Nothing ever changes between them, except for the worse.
“No, but this time it wasn’t a trick,” she says, cutting through his spiraling thoughts.
The worst part is that she’s right, of course. He has used a few different tricks to escape death at Dalek lasers, or not so much escape as overcome it, but this time he hadn’t had a plan or a way out. He’s still alive because of the Doctor, and that’s just one more reason to hate her. It’s just one more instance of him being inextricably tied to her, to the point where he would never know who he would be without her, even before considering how much of what made Time Lords comes from her. He hates her so much, and he wants to hold on to her and never let her go, because most of all he hates that he lost her.
“No trick, just you setting Daleks loose on a genetic manipulation research facility and nearly killing me. I would expect no less from one of your plans,” he says, hoping that it’ll hurt as much as it hurt him knowing that in some part of his mind she’s still the one that he’ll call when he needs help.
She’ll always be the one, and she won't help with most of what he would want her to, but she’ll come running if it’s a life or death situation, even for him. She'll still drop everything and come running to save his life. He doesn’t know how to feel about that.
What he knows is that he’s been seriously hurt and he’s trapped in her TARDIS. She doesn’t know that he realises she knows where his TARDIS is, and she hasn’t said anything about it or offered to drop him off, so they can both pretend that this isn’t an option and she’s thinking of keeping him. And his body and mind need at least a few days, maybe even a few weeks to recover fully. Maybe they could pretend that he’s in no condition to escape just yet, maybe they could steal a few moments before going back to how things never change. Carve out a little pocket of time for themselves in the vortex that would be impossible anywhere else, before they return to the flow of time and let it push them away from each other.
He couldn’t stand any more than that, he’s had enough of captivity and the Doctor’s moralising, but he thinks that he could stand it for a few days, before the fear of losing him wears off and she remembers exactly how much she hates him. Maybe just for a little while, that balance of theirs can tip closer to love, although even now he can’t forget how much he hates her. It's both, it's been both for as long as he can remember, so long that he doesn't think that he even knows how to untangle these two feelings anymore when it comes to her, and they might just be one and the same.
“Not just Daleks, and probably not just genetics. They had Cybermen, Movellans, Sontarans, Rutans, Ice Warriors, and that’s only what I saw,” she says, purposefully ignoring his accusation, which is as good as a confession that his theory is right, with a slight adjustment, she set her own enemies loose in that place to have the cover that she needed to rescue the Master, which does feel different from her doing that to stop him.
“Then I should have known you would come to stop them,” he says, then lays back down on the floor as the spinning of his head only marginally improves. He’s not sure how much he would be faking a need to recover by staying there.
The Doctor sighs, and he can feel her mind buzzing with all the things that she wants to say, but he knows that she won’t, just as he won’t thank her for saving him. It’s always the same thing with them. So many things that they can’t say, but even if they did, it wouldn’t change anything. Nothing that they can say, nothing that they felt, that they still feel for each other can overcome the ways in which they’re opposites. He almost wishes that that was enough to make him stop caring about her, but he doesn’t know how to exist without her, and he knows that she needs him to define her just as he needs her. This at least wasn't taken from him, she might have had another life before, but she was someone else. Who she is now, she is because of him.
“Of course I came,” is what she settles on, of course she came when he asked for help, however unintentionally, of course she came. Of course she would come to save him.
The Master has nothing that he can say to that, but if she’s so determined to save his life, then he supposes that he can stay there for a while. And maybe while he’s there he can convince her to destroy another planet, he knows that she’s capable of it. Even now, he’s still the one who knows her best.