Chapter Text
There’s days when everything feels like old times, and they talk and laugh and there’s a twinkle in the Master’s eyes that she loves and can’t help but feel horrendously guilty for loving it. There’s days when they argue and she wants nothing more than to at least have the freedom to leave, and yet they’re trapped with each other. There’s days when one serving of the food that materializes for them goes untouched, and the Master still refuses to talk about it.
He never used to do that before. He always ate.
She brings it up one day when they’re tossing the Master’s carefully balled-up blanket between themselves, each sitting on their respective beds.
To her surprise, he rolls his eyes so theatrically that he almost gets hit in the face with his blanket. It’s a last-minute save, and one that almost ends with him instead slapping himself in the face. It’s a near-miss, and she snorts a laugh nonetheless.
If the Master notices, he doesn’t say anything.
“That’s not true,” he says, snorting himself.
She raises an eyebrow at him and catches the blanket that’s sent back her way. “What do you mean? You loved food!”
“I still do. Doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t just… not feel like it.”
“You were always hungry.”
“Still am.”
“Then… what?”
He sighs and gestures for her to toss the blanket over, which she does almost on automatic. This feels… important, somehow, even if they’re not really friends anymore, even if the time when this would truly have mattered is long past. What had she missed back then?
“Sometimes, when the drums would get too loud, and everything felt like too much, or too… hopeless, I just — I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do anything but curl up in bed. You remember that, surely.” His voice is quiet, especially on the last part, and the Doctor can’t help bur feel like he doesn’t want her to hear it.
Doesn’t want her to… what, contradict it?
Of course she remembers it. She used to tell him stories then, try to make him laugh. If he cried, she’d hold him and try to comfort him. Sometimes she’d come up with puzzles for him to put together, projects for him to work on, knowing that the moment it got its hooks into his brain, he wouldn’t be able to let it go. It’d worked more often than not, and he’d always just given her a look like he didn’t know whether to be annoyed or thankful.
Of course she remembers those days.
She’d just never realized that he hadn’t eaten then. Though come to think of it, when it’d all passed and he’d been somewhat back to his normal self, she’d had a habit of fetching them both some food, and he’d picked at his food in a strange mix of hunger and disinterest. She’d just never thought much of it.
“But the drums are gone, aren’t they?” she asks rather than commenting on the old days.
There are memories she’d rather not bring forth, not mention in the present. She holds them far too dear to risk mixing them with the complications of their current relationship.
And the matter of the drums does concern her. She’s never asked about them, really — she’d always just assumed they were gone. It made sense with that they’d turned out to be, and if he still holds himself to that pattern of four, she’d just figured it to be old habits, ingrained into his subconscious. But what if they weren’t gone? What if his last couple of regenerations had just learned to accept the drums now that there was no mystery surrounding them anymore, what if they’d just stopped talking about it?
To her relief, the Master nods. “They are. They’re gone. But everything else isn’t.”
“What everything else?” she asks.
He rolls his eyes again and tosses the blanket back with a little more force than before. “Really? Think about it, Doctor. Or do you really think either of our lives have been sunshine and rainbows? The Cloister Wars, the Time War. Your exile. Do you know where I’d escaped from when I went to meet you on Earth during those years?”
The Doctor nods, bouncing the ball in her hands for a moment. “The Shada,” she answers.
“They put me in cryogenic stasis. I was meant to spend the rest of my existence frozen.”
“Because of the atrocities you committed,” points out the Doctor, and she tosses the blanket back to him.
The Master catches it, fingers clutching the fabric with what looks to her like slightly excessive force. “Yes. Because of that. I guess you wish the pod hadn’t malfunctioned, don’t you? It could’ve made your life a lot easier.”
“The people who’ve died since then because of you certainly would.”
He scoots forward, the blanket clutched between both hands as he leans closer to her. “But what do you think, Doctor? Would you rather I still be there, frozen in a pod?”
“You wouldn’t have destroyed Gallifrey. Bill might still be alive. Martha Jones’ family wouldn’t be traumatized. Who knows how many other people wouldn’t still be alive? The universe would probably be a better place.”
“Yes or no, Doctor.”
There’s a long moment of silence, both answers trying to take shape in her lips at the same time. She’s not sure which one will come out, but it still surprises her to hear herself saying, “no.”
Clearly, it surprises the Master, too, for he blinks and straightens. “Huh.”
She doesn’t know how to explain it, really. To Bill, she’d once said that Missy was the one person in all her lives who’d ever been remotely like herself. To far too many people, she’d said that the Master was her friend. Her oldest friend. Her best enemy. But it’s not enough anymore. He’d crossed a line, and she should wish that he’d been frozen securely somewhere, for the sake of her entire species.
The fact that she doesn’t isn’t something she can explain. It’s nothing she can justify.
It just is, and she’s ashamed.
Yet the look in the Master’s eyes, that spark… it makes it difficult to be ashamed. In those moments, all she can see is her best friend, all she can see is Koschei.
He tosses the blanket back over to her, and she catches it with a small gasp.
She’d forgotten the game.
From the look on his face, she’s not entirely sure that he remembers it, either.
He’d been trying to goad her into saying that yes, she’d rather he have been frozen all this time. It’d give him all the more reason to hate her, she supposes, and maybe he needs that, in these moments where they get along. Maybe he needs that as much as she needs the reminders of why she shouldn’t look at him and think of the friend that she used to have, running free under that red sky when they managed to get away from their tutors.
He’d been trying to goad her, she figures, and he’d gotten a very different result from what he’d expected.
The little jumping jack image appears.
They both stand wordlessly and head for the door, the balled-up blanket forgotten.
It takes one single attempt at a conversation with one of the Silence for things to return to normal. The Doctor goes through the usual routine of realizing that she’d forgotten about that neighbor of hers, and the Master laughs and teases her as though he doesn’t look just as surprised as she is, and the tension that had built up around them dissolves.
They laugh and roll their eyes at each other. They talk. They argue about which side of the cube they’re each going to occupy. And when they make their way back to their cell, they go back to their game of catch like nothing ever happened.
And so it continues.
They joke, they argue, they laugh, they tear each other to pieces, they play catch, the Doctor begrudgingly reads a few pages out loud to the Master —
It’s not perfect, but sometimes it almost feels like the old days.
Maybe that’s what brings it on. The Doctor won’t ever know — it’s not like nightmares are a rare occurrence for her.
She’s standing on Gallifrey, the red sand beneath her boots, a red sky above her head. There’s a certain sense of wrongness, but she doesn’t have time to interrogate it — it’s merely a moment before Dalek ships appear in the skies. She knows then what they want, though she doesn’t know how she knows it.
They’re going for the Cloisters.
A wind picks up, whipping coarse sand against her face. It blinds her in a sea of red — red sand, red ground, red sky, and all around her she can hear the Daleks’ shrill cries of EXTERMINATE. Where’s Koschei? She needs to find Koschei, he’ll be able to help, he’ll be able to guide her to the Cloisters. They need to find them, they need to help to defend them. The Daleks can’t get to them, they can’t be allowed to claim them for themselves. The whole universe could be at stake, and she’s lost in a sea of red, red, red —
There’s a sudden warmth, and she feels herself relaxing as a hand find hers, a guiding beacon in the storm. She doesn’t need to be able to see to know that it’s Koschei, leading the way, bringing her in out of the sandstorm. She follows easily, she trusts easily. He’ll get her home. No, better than that — he’ll get her where she needs to be.
It’s as they cross into the Capitol that she feels everything slipping away from her. The sands seem to shift again, but it doesn’t scare her this time. She just feels herself float —
And her eyes blink open.
She doesn’t want to move. The surface under her isn’t comfortable, but she’s grown as used to it as to the idea that the discomfort of her bed is worth the extra hours of entertainment, the feeling of floating between dream and reality, that half-haze that allows for the most wondrous dreams. Sometimes she’s back on Gallifrey. Sometimes she’s exploring the universe with the fam. Always, always, she’s somewhere else.
But the warmth, she realizes as she begins to tease dream from reality, the things that make sense from the things that don’t — the warmth is still there.
Slowly, she moves her head and her eyes enough to look around —
And she finds that the warmth belongs to the leg that’s pressed against the top and back of her head, going all the way to the top of her spine. It also belongs, she supposes, to the hand still in hers, and the other one resting lightly on her shoulder.
The Master.
He seems to notice her eyes staring at him, and he retreats, hands returning to his sides as he scoots back to the corner of the slab of stone she calls her bed.
“Ow!” she complains as the movement pulls at her hair.
“Sorry, sorry,” he offers, and to her own surprise, the Doctor thinks he means it.
“What are you doing here?” she demands. “This isn’t your side of the cell.”
He shrugs. “You were having a nightmare.”
“So what? I have them every other night. You do, too. We’ve always had them.” She remembers it still, so clearly. Back in the Academy, her dreams had been of tutors chasing her, of stealing a TARDIS and getting caught, then being thrown in the Death Zone as a brand new punishment invented specifically for her. Stress dreams about exams mingled with nightmares about Daleks and Shakri in bizarre narratives, and she woke so often panting from fright and anxiety. And there Koschei had been, not unlike the Master now at her side.
Koschei hadn’t looked at her like this, though — with apprehension so poorly disguised as nonchalance. He hadn’t had to.
“You called my name,” he offers.
And she remembers, then, how she’d been looking for Koschei as she’d tried to navigate the sandstorm. She doesn’t remember calling his name, but she must’ve — and she’s sure that the name that she called wouldn’t have been Master, but rather Koschei. And he still came. Out of all the nights, he came on this one.
“What was it?” he asks after a moment. “The nightmare.”
The Doctor hesitates, but only for a second. Why not tell him? If it’d been about the Timeless Child, maybe she’d have opted to keep it to herself, but it’s ancient and shared history. Really, he’s the only person she can talk to about it, the only one who’d understand.
“The Cloister Wars,” she says.
“Really? That was thousands of years ago. We were still in the Academy.” There’s no judgement in his tone, though, only surprise and a little amusement.
She nods. “Something must have reminded me of it.” Like the Master being there, spending all this time with him like they were still back there, running through the streets of the Capitol. “It was the sandstorm, do you remember that?”
It’s his turn to nod. “The invasion came as a surprise. We’d snuck out of the Capitol and into the Drylands for the day; we had no idea what was coming. Just trying to hunt down enough scrap to build ourselves a little shelter out there.”
“But the Dalek saucers were flying too low, kicking up a wind. Probably on purpose.”
“We got separated. I couldn’t see anything. The ground and the sky, it all looked the same. All the same red. I tried to call for you, but the sand almost made me choke.”
The Doctor runs a hand through her hair, and she could swear that she can still feel sand in it, all these regenerations later. There is, of course, no sand — it’s long gone, and she might never see it again. But still, she feels it. “The call to arms had come, and we were barely old enough for it, but we knew it wouldn’t matter. If we didn’t report in, we’d be in so much trouble. Not hearing it, not finding our way back, it wouldn’t be an excuse.”
“We’d be in more trouble, if anything,” agrees the Master.
“You took my hand. I don’t know how you found me in the middle of that, but you did, and you took my hand.”
“Your psychic signature, I think. I don’t know, I — it felt like reaching around blindly in the right direction.”
“And you led us back.”
“I walked. That’s all I did, I walked. I didn’t know where I was going.”
The Doctor smiles, and it doesn’t feel like a betrayal, because she’s smiling about Koschei. Koschei didn’t destroy Gallifrey. Koschei led her safely back to the Capitol, and helped to get the sand off the two of them before they ran and reported for duty like nothing had ever happened.
“I was so scared they’d figure out that we’d been out in the Drylands that I forgot to be scared of the Daleks until they were right there. They were so much bigger than I had expected.”
“You were scared of everything,” snarks the Master.
The Doctor snorts. “Like you weren’t.”
“I was,” he admits, and it takes her so much by surprise that she finds herself turning towards him. “I was terrified. They were yelling and firing and it wasn’t anything like the simulations. Anything like what we’d trained with. I hadn’t even ever wanted to be there.”
“You didn’t act like it,” whispers the Doctor.
“I didn’t have a choice. Neither did you.”
“I froze.”
“Because you knew I’d pull you out of the line of fire.”
She’s not sure if it’s true or not, if it even can be true — had she had enough awareness for that? Was freezing a choice on any level? Could it be not a choice, but a response she allowed herself because on some level, she felt safe in the knowledge that Koschei would protect her? It’d happened before, she supposes, a long time before that day, on a terrible afternoon involving a river, a rock, and a bully named Torvic. She’d frozen then, too. And again, Koschei had come to her aid.
Before she can say anything, before she can argue, before she can challenge him to prove his point, the Master is on his feet and making his way back to his bed. He doesn’t look back at her once, doesn’t demand an answer, doesn’t say anything at all. He simply lays down on his bed, his back turned to her.
She wants to say something, she wants the conversation to end on anything but this note that makes something in her throat feel tight, but as much as she might not be the best with social cues, she thinks she’s getting this one loud and clear — he doesn’t want to talk. Anything she says is only going to make matters worse, is only going to push him to snap, and she doesn’t want an argument.
Truth to be told, she’s not sure that she knows what she wants. It’s moments like these that always send her head spinning.
So she simply clutches at her blanket and turns on her side, positioning herself so she can look at the Master easily. It’s not comfortable, but it’s never comfortable, and it’s as close to him as she can get. She can’t cross the line that she drew on the floor.
No, crossing it is his role. She’s the one who draws it, and he’s the one who dances over it, secure in the knowledge that it’s an age-old ritual of theirs.
But she can only watch and wait.
And if she sees how he’s moving, working away at something that’s impossible for her — and very importantly, she discreetly checks, the cameras — to see, she doesn’t say anything. Whatever it is, she’ll find out sooner or later. He might’ve been working on it for a long time, and she might not even have noticed.
She never does pay too much attention until it’s too late, does she?