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bagheera_sanAnother two last-minute ficlets. The Shalka fic is the beginning of a longer story, the other one is a stand-alone.
Title: The Key
Rating: Teen
Prompt: Misplaced
Pairing: Shalka!Doctor/Master (same continuity as Living Things)
Summary: Set after the webcast. Another mission from the Time Lords has unexpected consquences.
The Master put down the telephone. "We are to investigate a temporal distortion once again," he reported.
Allison yawned. Temporal distortions usually meant that she had to listen to the Time Lords going on about temporal physics for hours. They never tired of the argument about who had cheated worse on the exam in their forty-fifth year at the Academy and whose fault it was that they had been caught.
The Doctor flicked away a piece of dust from his sleeve with a bored and disgruntled expression. "Where?" he asked.
"An unusual place," the Master said, savouring the moment in which he commanded their undivided attention. "A place of many myths and legends – though I doubt you will enjoy our trip there."
"I'm already not enjoying it," the Doctor retorted. "Get to the point."
"Timing is everything, Doctor. I'm just trying to create a sense of anticipation. But I see that my efforts are lost on you."
"They are."
"Come on," Allison interjected. "I'm dying to know."
"Really?" the Master looked tentatively flattered. "See, Doctor? At least one person on this ship appreciates my attempts to boost morale."
"Actually I was just trying to get over with it," Allison admitted. "Sorry."
"Oh, well." The Master turned away from them and pressed a few buttons on the console with an air of diffidence. "We're going to the TARDIS graveyard."
*
The Doctor and Allison stayed away for a long time. The Master had only thrown a short glance at the scene outside. It was a place at the end of time itself, vast and desolate. The bleached coral bones of time capsules littered a bog-like landscape. Bones and blood and tears had formed a sort of ground. Torn cries ghosted over the plain. Some of the sounds here were soft and broken, others furious with madness, yet others were love songs of the lost. Rolling mercury clouds hung low over them, suffocating all light.
The Master waited with the TARDIS. Her discomfort and sadness were palpable and he could feel her latch more tightly onto him, until it felt as if she were strangling him with the need to keep him close.
"Nothing," the Doctor growled when he swept back inside, his coat flapping in the wind. He went past the Master and out of the console room without another word.
"What a horrible place," Allison said softly, trooping in after him. She didn't look the Master in the eye, tugging instead at the beads in her hair. "I think I'll skip dinner tonight."
He waited for the Doctor in the Doctor's room. Coming out from a long shower, the Doctor looked anything but tired. His hair stood out wildly from his efforts at towelling it, and his eyes shone with a clear, electric fever. The Master could see every muscle and sinew in the Doctor's gaunt shoulders and back. It was one of those nights when the Doctor teetered on the edge between eggshell sensitivity and the straining energy of a volcano about to burst. Just watching him, the Master felt hungry.
But to his surprise, the Doctor just slipped under the covers on his side of the bed, turning his bare back to the Master and lying perfectly still. Smiling to himself, the Master extinguished the gas lights and sat down on his side of the bed. He touched the cool, taut skin of the Doctor's shoulder. The Doctor twitched and shook him off.
"Not tonight," he snapped.
The Master drew back in surprise. Sometimes the Doctor was abrasive, and sometimes he said no as a part of their games. Sometimes 'no' meant 'make me', and sometimes it meant 'not like this', but it was never just 'no'. They were never quite able to deny each other completely. But this was just that. A rejection like a door slammed in the Master's face.
*
Before they had come to share a TARDIS, the Master had had many theories as to why the Doctor insisted on keeping human companions. One of them was that the humans did all those things that the Doctor, in his extraordinary brilliance, was incapable of doing, such as cleaning up after himself, keeping track of his things and cooking a decent dinner. This was apparently not the case. Allison, no matter how many unsubtle comments the Master made in her direction, hadn't so much as looked at a broom in the time she had been with them, and her culinary skills stopped at making a Gin and Tonic and drawing a pint.
The TARDIS was just as useless. The Master's TARDIS had always been sleek, tidy and neat, and he had been very economic with the infinite spaces inside her, keeping her at the lowest number of rooms possible. But since no one ever tidied up in the TARDIS, and the Doctor never kept any interest for very long, a nearly endless number of rooms just lingered, unused and messy for centuries. Others got lost entirely, probably ejected by the TARDIS when she got sick of the dirt. She probably swallowed dirty laundry as a defence mechanism. But trying to teach her how to keep order proved impossible. The concept seemed to be beyond her.
Disorder had its advantages, of course. A stroll inside the TARDIS could be as exciting and surprising as discovering a new continent, and sometimes just as baffling. The Master still hadn't figured out why the Doctor kept five working Spitfires in his Zeppelin hangar, or why there was a room containing nothing but swampland and a disgruntled hippo.
He drew the line at cleaning, though. He had rooms of his own that he kept in a state of perfect order, and with insistent nagging and many long arguments, he had trained the Doctor to the point where the console room and the Doctor's own rooms stayed neat most of the time. The Master ignored the mess in the rest of the TARDIS, even when it pained him. Therefore he nearly didn't give the thing on the jam shelf of the pantry a second glance. As a part of TARDIS circuitry it clearly didn't belong there, but that was the Doctor's problem. A moment later, however, he nearly dropped the jar of jam he was holding and swivelled back around to pick up the impossible thing on the shelf.
It was part of a telepathic circuit, a pattern storage device, one of the bits of a TARDIS that was mostly organic and impossible to duplicate through mechanic means. No larger than his palm, its metal shell was cold and dead, but when he pried it open, eyes wide in shock, the inside was a healthy shade of golden-green. Swallowing, the Master closed it again. If his own body had been organic, his hands would have been shaking. No living TARDIS would voluntarily part with this circuit, but he knew where this had to have come from. A few weeks ago they'd visited a place where hundreds of these circuits would have been ripe for the taking. The Master was secretly glad that he hadn't been able to leave the TARDIS, what he had tasted of the TARDIS graveyard in the Doctor's nightmares was bad enough. It had been an especially odious task given to them by the Time Lords; perhaps the High Council had wanted to remind the Doctor that if he defied them, his TARDIS could well end up there, another shivering wreck among the insane and the lost. The TARDISes in the graveyard weren't dead. Only their owners were.
Jumpy as a thief, the Master slipped the circuit into his pocket. He quickly closed the pantry door and walked away for several minutes, then suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. What kind of fool was he? The Doctor wouldn't leave that lying around, not that. It was an obvious trick, some kind of cruel trap. It had to be. The Doctor had left it on the shelf for him to find and the Master had done exactly as the Doctor wanted.
But why? The question almost hurt, it was so hard to wrap his mind around the Doctor. When it came to manipulation, the Master had nothing on the Doctor, and he regularly fell for the Doctor's tricks. But this wasn't a harmless prank. It couldn't be. It was the Master's key to freedom. Using this device, he'd be completely independent of the TARDIS' telepathic circuits, able to leave her whenever he wanted. It couldn't be a test, either. The Doctor had to know that the Master would have to seize the opportunity. It was almost a matter of honour.
For a long moment, the Master was terribly aware that his brain was electric, his bones cold metal, his skin finely grafted, lifeless plastic. There was no blood in his veins to freeze, no hearts to skip a beat. But he had red, viscous anger, and the black tar of bitterness in spades.
It wasn't a trick or a test. There was nothing the Master could prove. It was a message, glib and blunt and impersonal: you can leave now. The door is over there.
*
At dinner, the Master was silent, watching the Doctor and Allison eat and chatter and joke with each other. The Doctor looked good. Even his most cutting remarks were uttered with the glimmer of a smile in his pale eyes. There was a flush on his gaunt cheeks, his hair kept falling forward into his face as he laughed. He didn't even seem to notice the Master's presence, but when it got late and Allison excused herself with a yawn, he turned to the Master and said, "Are you coming?", taking the answer for granted.
The Master followed him to their bedroom without comment. All the way there he stared at the Doctor's back, thinking of the myriad ways he could have hurt him, but they arrived and the Master had done nothing. Suddenly they were standing in the middle of the bedroom, and he let the Doctor kiss him. "You've been quiet all night," the Doctor observed with a cruel, knowing smile. "Something on your mind?"
The Master didn't reply. He went to sit down on the edge of the bed and started to undress, mechanically and methodically, as was expected of him. Naked and with barbed wire wound tightly around his mind, the Master lay back on the bed. Looking down at him, the Doctor laughed. "My, my, aren't you needy. I'm going to have to do all the work again, don't I?"
It was hard to smile a smile that didn't derail into something uglier. "Why, is there something you'd like me to do for you? Some way in which I may still serve you? You should have said so."
"You're right," the Doctor agreed. "Let's do this straight forward."
The Master stopped the hand with which the Doctor reached for the bedside table. "Why bother?" he asked, his voice low in a way that could almost have doubled as seductive. "You can't hurt me."
"Of course I can," the Doctor retorted, but he didn't sound shocked or disinterested. He would go along with the Master's suggestion if the Master insisted on it. His hand played along the inside of the Master's thigh.
"Simulated pain," the Master said and laughed him in the face. "It's not real damage."
*
Overriding the Time Lord's remote control over the TARDIS was an easy thing. The Master even went through the trouble of disguising it so they would be less likely to notice – but if they did, it was the Doctor who would pay. He materialised her in the dead of the night on a wealthy and highly developed fifty-first century human colony and slipped out quietly. He had debated with himself whether he should make a grand exit, or do something spiteful like murdering the human girl before he went, but that would have looked like jealousy.
He sensed the TARDIS' confusion as he stepped out of her, and apologized with a soft pat to her wooden blue exterior; she was the one he was a bit sorry to leave. She had character, and with a good engineer to take care of her, she was an old but excellent ship. The TARDIS had sustained him and harboured him at the brink of extinction, and it felt like the first painful gasp of birth when he severed their gentle connection.
The Master wandered off into the dark streets, a bit lost in the suddenly cold and unprotected space. It reminded him of that first time leaving Gallifrey. He didn't notice the sky and the stars in it, or the strange, enticing scents in the streets, he didn't even notice the grime in the small alleys or the occasional roar of a stellar engine in the upper atmosphere.
Title: Balance
Rating: all ages
Pairing: Three/Ainley!Master
Prompt: Horses
Summary: set after Five Doctors and Planet of Fire
Rain pours down, washing the scorch-marks from the Master's velvet, and cooling the burns on his ankles. The Doctor has slowed the horse down to a cant, but it still keeps slipping on the wet leaves. Another reason why the Master is uncomfortable with the whole idea of riding an animal, besides the bouncing and the fact that he has to cling to the Doctor's shoulders like a frightened child.
"I think our ways part here," he says.
The Doctor glances over his shoulder. His white curls are plastered to his head by the rain. The Master doesn't want to know what he looks like after he was almost burnt at the stake and then oh-so-dashingly rescued by the wrong Doctor on horseback.
"Don't be ridiculous," the Doctor replies. He sounds annoyed, which isn't very surprising. "They're still following us, and I know your TARDIS is hidden in the castle."
It's true that his chances are much better if he stays with the Doctor. But things have happened to make the Master wonder why the Doctor would even care. "The last time I asked you for a ride, you wouldn't even hear me out."
"The last time we met before that, you shot me," the Doctor retorts, and the Master smiles at his youthful indignation. The Doctor doesn't know what is yet to come. And that must be why he adds, relenting a bit, "But you really were going to help me in the Death Zone, weren't you?"
"I made a mistake." His mistake was that he thought that this Doctor would be the most likely to listen to him. But the Doctor's next comment shows that there is no rhyme and reason to the Doctor's actions, none at all. One will listen to him one day and kill him the next, the other will sneer at him but save his life.
"Besides, I couldn't very well let you burn at the stake."
"Couldn't you?" Low-hanging branches slap their faces, and cold water runs down his face, slipping under his collar. He remembers the way the flames licked up his body, the way he pleaded with the Doctor. "You never know."
For a while the Doctor doesn't reply. The Master uses the silence to think about the things he owes the Doctor: one attempt at his life, and one attempt to save it. He likes the symmetry of fair play, at least in theory. It feels strange to hold on to the Doctor. If he doesn't think too hard, the Master forgets that he isn't the man he was when he knew this Doctor, that his body isn't several degrees too warm, that only one heart beats in his chest, that his single heart wasn't even wounded by the Doctor's betrayal and that it isn't stuck in his throat from being so close, so alone with the Doctor.
"Some things never change," the Doctor finally says, picking up the conversation again. "Life goes on, but you still cause trouble and I have to clean up your messes."
There are things the Master will never say in reply to this. That things have changed. That a long time ago, he was sure things would change, but not for the worse, that he waited for them to change. That he is glad now that things have changed in a different direction, because it is far easier to deal with the Doctor who hates him than with the one who can't make up his mind.
That one day, the Doctor will recoil from his touch, and not let him drop his hands from the Doctor's shoulders to his waist, where they rest more comfortably. The Doctor doesn't comment on the fact that the hands that creep under the folds of his opera cloak are slightly too warm, and slightly too self-assured. Instead he pats the tired horse, muttering soothing nothings to it.
Title: The Key
Rating: Teen
Prompt: Misplaced
Pairing: Shalka!Doctor/Master (same continuity as Living Things)
Summary: Set after the webcast. Another mission from the Time Lords has unexpected consquences.
The Master put down the telephone. "We are to investigate a temporal distortion once again," he reported.
Allison yawned. Temporal distortions usually meant that she had to listen to the Time Lords going on about temporal physics for hours. They never tired of the argument about who had cheated worse on the exam in their forty-fifth year at the Academy and whose fault it was that they had been caught.
The Doctor flicked away a piece of dust from his sleeve with a bored and disgruntled expression. "Where?" he asked.
"An unusual place," the Master said, savouring the moment in which he commanded their undivided attention. "A place of many myths and legends – though I doubt you will enjoy our trip there."
"I'm already not enjoying it," the Doctor retorted. "Get to the point."
"Timing is everything, Doctor. I'm just trying to create a sense of anticipation. But I see that my efforts are lost on you."
"They are."
"Come on," Allison interjected. "I'm dying to know."
"Really?" the Master looked tentatively flattered. "See, Doctor? At least one person on this ship appreciates my attempts to boost morale."
"Actually I was just trying to get over with it," Allison admitted. "Sorry."
"Oh, well." The Master turned away from them and pressed a few buttons on the console with an air of diffidence. "We're going to the TARDIS graveyard."
*
The Doctor and Allison stayed away for a long time. The Master had only thrown a short glance at the scene outside. It was a place at the end of time itself, vast and desolate. The bleached coral bones of time capsules littered a bog-like landscape. Bones and blood and tears had formed a sort of ground. Torn cries ghosted over the plain. Some of the sounds here were soft and broken, others furious with madness, yet others were love songs of the lost. Rolling mercury clouds hung low over them, suffocating all light.
The Master waited with the TARDIS. Her discomfort and sadness were palpable and he could feel her latch more tightly onto him, until it felt as if she were strangling him with the need to keep him close.
"Nothing," the Doctor growled when he swept back inside, his coat flapping in the wind. He went past the Master and out of the console room without another word.
"What a horrible place," Allison said softly, trooping in after him. She didn't look the Master in the eye, tugging instead at the beads in her hair. "I think I'll skip dinner tonight."
He waited for the Doctor in the Doctor's room. Coming out from a long shower, the Doctor looked anything but tired. His hair stood out wildly from his efforts at towelling it, and his eyes shone with a clear, electric fever. The Master could see every muscle and sinew in the Doctor's gaunt shoulders and back. It was one of those nights when the Doctor teetered on the edge between eggshell sensitivity and the straining energy of a volcano about to burst. Just watching him, the Master felt hungry.
But to his surprise, the Doctor just slipped under the covers on his side of the bed, turning his bare back to the Master and lying perfectly still. Smiling to himself, the Master extinguished the gas lights and sat down on his side of the bed. He touched the cool, taut skin of the Doctor's shoulder. The Doctor twitched and shook him off.
"Not tonight," he snapped.
The Master drew back in surprise. Sometimes the Doctor was abrasive, and sometimes he said no as a part of their games. Sometimes 'no' meant 'make me', and sometimes it meant 'not like this', but it was never just 'no'. They were never quite able to deny each other completely. But this was just that. A rejection like a door slammed in the Master's face.
*
Before they had come to share a TARDIS, the Master had had many theories as to why the Doctor insisted on keeping human companions. One of them was that the humans did all those things that the Doctor, in his extraordinary brilliance, was incapable of doing, such as cleaning up after himself, keeping track of his things and cooking a decent dinner. This was apparently not the case. Allison, no matter how many unsubtle comments the Master made in her direction, hadn't so much as looked at a broom in the time she had been with them, and her culinary skills stopped at making a Gin and Tonic and drawing a pint.
The TARDIS was just as useless. The Master's TARDIS had always been sleek, tidy and neat, and he had been very economic with the infinite spaces inside her, keeping her at the lowest number of rooms possible. But since no one ever tidied up in the TARDIS, and the Doctor never kept any interest for very long, a nearly endless number of rooms just lingered, unused and messy for centuries. Others got lost entirely, probably ejected by the TARDIS when she got sick of the dirt. She probably swallowed dirty laundry as a defence mechanism. But trying to teach her how to keep order proved impossible. The concept seemed to be beyond her.
Disorder had its advantages, of course. A stroll inside the TARDIS could be as exciting and surprising as discovering a new continent, and sometimes just as baffling. The Master still hadn't figured out why the Doctor kept five working Spitfires in his Zeppelin hangar, or why there was a room containing nothing but swampland and a disgruntled hippo.
He drew the line at cleaning, though. He had rooms of his own that he kept in a state of perfect order, and with insistent nagging and many long arguments, he had trained the Doctor to the point where the console room and the Doctor's own rooms stayed neat most of the time. The Master ignored the mess in the rest of the TARDIS, even when it pained him. Therefore he nearly didn't give the thing on the jam shelf of the pantry a second glance. As a part of TARDIS circuitry it clearly didn't belong there, but that was the Doctor's problem. A moment later, however, he nearly dropped the jar of jam he was holding and swivelled back around to pick up the impossible thing on the shelf.
It was part of a telepathic circuit, a pattern storage device, one of the bits of a TARDIS that was mostly organic and impossible to duplicate through mechanic means. No larger than his palm, its metal shell was cold and dead, but when he pried it open, eyes wide in shock, the inside was a healthy shade of golden-green. Swallowing, the Master closed it again. If his own body had been organic, his hands would have been shaking. No living TARDIS would voluntarily part with this circuit, but he knew where this had to have come from. A few weeks ago they'd visited a place where hundreds of these circuits would have been ripe for the taking. The Master was secretly glad that he hadn't been able to leave the TARDIS, what he had tasted of the TARDIS graveyard in the Doctor's nightmares was bad enough. It had been an especially odious task given to them by the Time Lords; perhaps the High Council had wanted to remind the Doctor that if he defied them, his TARDIS could well end up there, another shivering wreck among the insane and the lost. The TARDISes in the graveyard weren't dead. Only their owners were.
Jumpy as a thief, the Master slipped the circuit into his pocket. He quickly closed the pantry door and walked away for several minutes, then suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. What kind of fool was he? The Doctor wouldn't leave that lying around, not that. It was an obvious trick, some kind of cruel trap. It had to be. The Doctor had left it on the shelf for him to find and the Master had done exactly as the Doctor wanted.
But why? The question almost hurt, it was so hard to wrap his mind around the Doctor. When it came to manipulation, the Master had nothing on the Doctor, and he regularly fell for the Doctor's tricks. But this wasn't a harmless prank. It couldn't be. It was the Master's key to freedom. Using this device, he'd be completely independent of the TARDIS' telepathic circuits, able to leave her whenever he wanted. It couldn't be a test, either. The Doctor had to know that the Master would have to seize the opportunity. It was almost a matter of honour.
For a long moment, the Master was terribly aware that his brain was electric, his bones cold metal, his skin finely grafted, lifeless plastic. There was no blood in his veins to freeze, no hearts to skip a beat. But he had red, viscous anger, and the black tar of bitterness in spades.
It wasn't a trick or a test. There was nothing the Master could prove. It was a message, glib and blunt and impersonal: you can leave now. The door is over there.
*
At dinner, the Master was silent, watching the Doctor and Allison eat and chatter and joke with each other. The Doctor looked good. Even his most cutting remarks were uttered with the glimmer of a smile in his pale eyes. There was a flush on his gaunt cheeks, his hair kept falling forward into his face as he laughed. He didn't even seem to notice the Master's presence, but when it got late and Allison excused herself with a yawn, he turned to the Master and said, "Are you coming?", taking the answer for granted.
The Master followed him to their bedroom without comment. All the way there he stared at the Doctor's back, thinking of the myriad ways he could have hurt him, but they arrived and the Master had done nothing. Suddenly they were standing in the middle of the bedroom, and he let the Doctor kiss him. "You've been quiet all night," the Doctor observed with a cruel, knowing smile. "Something on your mind?"
The Master didn't reply. He went to sit down on the edge of the bed and started to undress, mechanically and methodically, as was expected of him. Naked and with barbed wire wound tightly around his mind, the Master lay back on the bed. Looking down at him, the Doctor laughed. "My, my, aren't you needy. I'm going to have to do all the work again, don't I?"
It was hard to smile a smile that didn't derail into something uglier. "Why, is there something you'd like me to do for you? Some way in which I may still serve you? You should have said so."
"You're right," the Doctor agreed. "Let's do this straight forward."
The Master stopped the hand with which the Doctor reached for the bedside table. "Why bother?" he asked, his voice low in a way that could almost have doubled as seductive. "You can't hurt me."
"Of course I can," the Doctor retorted, but he didn't sound shocked or disinterested. He would go along with the Master's suggestion if the Master insisted on it. His hand played along the inside of the Master's thigh.
"Simulated pain," the Master said and laughed him in the face. "It's not real damage."
*
Overriding the Time Lord's remote control over the TARDIS was an easy thing. The Master even went through the trouble of disguising it so they would be less likely to notice – but if they did, it was the Doctor who would pay. He materialised her in the dead of the night on a wealthy and highly developed fifty-first century human colony and slipped out quietly. He had debated with himself whether he should make a grand exit, or do something spiteful like murdering the human girl before he went, but that would have looked like jealousy.
He sensed the TARDIS' confusion as he stepped out of her, and apologized with a soft pat to her wooden blue exterior; she was the one he was a bit sorry to leave. She had character, and with a good engineer to take care of her, she was an old but excellent ship. The TARDIS had sustained him and harboured him at the brink of extinction, and it felt like the first painful gasp of birth when he severed their gentle connection.
The Master wandered off into the dark streets, a bit lost in the suddenly cold and unprotected space. It reminded him of that first time leaving Gallifrey. He didn't notice the sky and the stars in it, or the strange, enticing scents in the streets, he didn't even notice the grime in the small alleys or the occasional roar of a stellar engine in the upper atmosphere.
Title: Balance
Rating: all ages
Pairing: Three/Ainley!Master
Prompt: Horses
Summary: set after Five Doctors and Planet of Fire
Rain pours down, washing the scorch-marks from the Master's velvet, and cooling the burns on his ankles. The Doctor has slowed the horse down to a cant, but it still keeps slipping on the wet leaves. Another reason why the Master is uncomfortable with the whole idea of riding an animal, besides the bouncing and the fact that he has to cling to the Doctor's shoulders like a frightened child.
"I think our ways part here," he says.
The Doctor glances over his shoulder. His white curls are plastered to his head by the rain. The Master doesn't want to know what he looks like after he was almost burnt at the stake and then oh-so-dashingly rescued by the wrong Doctor on horseback.
"Don't be ridiculous," the Doctor replies. He sounds annoyed, which isn't very surprising. "They're still following us, and I know your TARDIS is hidden in the castle."
It's true that his chances are much better if he stays with the Doctor. But things have happened to make the Master wonder why the Doctor would even care. "The last time I asked you for a ride, you wouldn't even hear me out."
"The last time we met before that, you shot me," the Doctor retorts, and the Master smiles at his youthful indignation. The Doctor doesn't know what is yet to come. And that must be why he adds, relenting a bit, "But you really were going to help me in the Death Zone, weren't you?"
"I made a mistake." His mistake was that he thought that this Doctor would be the most likely to listen to him. But the Doctor's next comment shows that there is no rhyme and reason to the Doctor's actions, none at all. One will listen to him one day and kill him the next, the other will sneer at him but save his life.
"Besides, I couldn't very well let you burn at the stake."
"Couldn't you?" Low-hanging branches slap their faces, and cold water runs down his face, slipping under his collar. He remembers the way the flames licked up his body, the way he pleaded with the Doctor. "You never know."
For a while the Doctor doesn't reply. The Master uses the silence to think about the things he owes the Doctor: one attempt at his life, and one attempt to save it. He likes the symmetry of fair play, at least in theory. It feels strange to hold on to the Doctor. If he doesn't think too hard, the Master forgets that he isn't the man he was when he knew this Doctor, that his body isn't several degrees too warm, that only one heart beats in his chest, that his single heart wasn't even wounded by the Doctor's betrayal and that it isn't stuck in his throat from being so close, so alone with the Doctor.
"Some things never change," the Doctor finally says, picking up the conversation again. "Life goes on, but you still cause trouble and I have to clean up your messes."
There are things the Master will never say in reply to this. That things have changed. That a long time ago, he was sure things would change, but not for the worse, that he waited for them to change. That he is glad now that things have changed in a different direction, because it is far easier to deal with the Doctor who hates him than with the one who can't make up his mind.
That one day, the Doctor will recoil from his touch, and not let him drop his hands from the Doctor's shoulders to his waist, where they rest more comfortably. The Doctor doesn't comment on the fact that the hands that creep under the folds of his opera cloak are slightly too warm, and slightly too self-assured. Instead he pats the tired horse, muttering soothing nothings to it.
