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x_losficTitle: Sunshine
Rating: PG-13
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
x_los
Pairing/Characters: Seven/Ainley!Master
Prompt: revised from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
best_enemies' kink meme
Beta:aralias, who had Thoughts on commas
Summary: Eradicating a centuries-long infatuation is difficult, but there are ways.
“I’m sorry,” the man in black tells the Doctor, and that alone is damning, “but I’m afraid I don’t. Not even faintly.”
“This is some trick,” the Doctor sneers. He’s less convinced that it is one by the minute, but he needs it not to be true. “What exactly are you up to, hm?”
“At the moment, I’m conquering the system,” the Master says with no shame, arching an eyebrow. “Quite effectively, if I do say so myself. At least I was, until you barged into my TARDIS and started insinuating things I’ve no memory of, without any evidence to support your ridiculous claims that you're someone I should consider important.” The Master crosses his arms over his black suit and grey waistcoat, pausing to flick a speck off his jacket sleeve, and the Doctor is floored. When he’s in the room the Master’s attention swivels to him, just as the Doctor’s does to him. He’d never make such an indeliberate gesture as ignoring his oldest rival to attend to a bit of lint.
“I’m the Doctor.” He says it with what’s meant to be his usual air of declaration, but it tastes like a plea in his mouth, and it lingers between them with the stale pressure of desperation.
“So you’ve said. Are you going to leave of your own volition, or do I have to kill you? Only I’m rather busy at the moment, and disposing of bodies can be such a time consuming process.”
“You don’t know me at all,” the Doctor swallows, “You’re being perfectly honest for once, aren’t you, Master?” He fiddles with his umbrella, running a nervous palm over the smooth curve of the question mark handle, not knowing what to do with his hands—and how strange that is. In the Master’s company he’s always too busy with a hundred other thoughts to feel awkward in his own body.
“That is what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The Master seems more amused than exasperated. “So either you’re lying to me as part of some intriguingly complicated ruse, and I truly have never met you before in my life, or someone has been tampering with my memories.” At this the Master pulls a sour face. He intensely dislikes the thought that his mind might not be absolutely impregnable.
“No,” the Doctor’s eyes narrow, “no, I suspect that’s not quite the case. Give yourself a little credit, Master. You know exactly how good a psychic you are, the strength of your defenses. Given that and what I might perceive as a motive, I suspect you did this to yourself.”
The Master scoffs outright. “Ripping out my own memories? Lobotomizing myself? While perhaps possible, it sounds somewhat out of character. I’m beginning to think you don’t know me after all.”
“Oh, but there are certainly ways of achieving it, aren’t there?” the Doctor ponders. “I can think of half a dozen means of forgetting a person you’ve known for what amounts to your entire lives. You were always more interested in that sort of mental phenomenon, but until this minute I would have bet practically anything, that you wouldn’t have ever elected them.”
“And yet you seem to understand why I might.” The Master folds his arms and leans back against the console. “How very interesting. One might almost say your chagrin implies that you could have given me just cause.” The Master smirks: the look hasn’t changed an iota. The Doctor feels a very little like he might throw up. “Guilty conscience, Doctor?” The Master is observing the seasick cast to the Doctor’s face with some prurient interest.
“Think back,” the Doctor hisses, “and name your school friends.”
He does. Theta doesn’t merit a mention. The Master looks almost confused for an instant, eyes flickering uncertainly, when the Doctor asks if he remembers putting itching power in all Borusa’s collars, programming the Academy’s information servers to imply rude things about the Houses of those who attempted to access them, the dramatic meteor shower he’d seen and been struck with as a child, who he lived with when he’d been allowed to choose, where he’d been the day his mother died.
“Some of it does sound half familiar,” the Master admits, grudging and bewildered.
The Doctor doesn’t know if exerting this pressure is wise. The Master, free of his long-succored rage against the Doctor, might well be driven by less hate. Perhaps he’ll be less of a threat to the universe like this. But then, unhampered by his dominant obsession, he could also be a more effective killer. The Master has always known that every crime, every murder, drives the Doctor, who is perhaps his ultimate goal, further away from him. Will release from that awareness make him crueler or saner? Everything is a dangerously unsettled question, and in this regeneration the Doctor finds chaos unnerving. The Doctor should do what this regeneration of himself does best: step back and think calmly. Access the situation and plan for it.
But the Doctor is a person as well as a collection of interests and responsibilities. He can’t think past how much the blank, detached politeness in the Master’s manner revolts him. He needs the Master whole and proper—he needs the Master to recognize him. If the Master’s done some abomination to his own mind, then it’s only a kindness to fix him. The Doctor begins to tell himself that what he’s known he was going to do since he accepted that the Master was telling the truth could be—no, must be an act of charity. Which feels better. More rational. The Master’s only done what he always does: made a stupid, rash, willful decision and carried it out with his ungodly cleverness to its terrible conclusion. The Doctor is fixing it. Mending him. That’s as it should be.
What isn’t as it should be at all is the Master, tilting his head at him, studying him objectively. “Some kind of lover,” he pronounces.
“What makes you say that?” the Doctor asks, challenging the process by which the Master came to his conclusion instead of denying it.
The Master chuckles, low and rolling. “What else could possibly have made me do something as monumentally eviscerating as what you’re suggesting?” Dubiously, he sniffs at the Doctor’s diminutive stature and unprepossessing hat. “I must have cared about you a great deal.”
The Doctor shuts his eyes, briefly. When he opens them again, he finds the Master examining him more carefully, as if to determine what exactly it was about this Doctor that he must have found so destructively fascinating.
“Black holes,” the Doctor helps him.
“Hm?” The Master pauses, looks him directly in the eye.
“You can’t see the thick, burned heart at the centre. You can’t see the massive gravity. But you can feel it ripping at you. And you can see it destroying whole systems—you can watch it bend and then break light, and space, and time itself. That’s how you know its nature. That’s how you come to understand its strength. And it’s horrible, obviously—it’s a force of destruction. All that majesty, and it’s never once turned to creation.
“It rips whole worlds to shreds, and there’s nothing you can do to alter, or to stop it, though your whole life is spent in trying. And it’s grotesque. But it’s sublime. There’s nothing more powerful. More hideous. More beautiful.” The Doctor stares at him, unashamed, though in the back of his mind he understands that he will be, and very soon. The addendum is unnecessary, but he can’t stop himself. “That’s what kind.”
The Master is staring at him, and there is something a little like terror in his eyes. The Doctor knows he’s done it, because Koschei looked at Theta like that the first time he fell in love with him, across a millennia and more bodies than the Doctor cares to count. It’s more than shared history between them: it’s who they are.
“I should kill you,” the Master says at last, “for doing that. For not allowing me this. I had someone,” and if the Doctor thinks that’s a subtle shock, a light boil to the blood, it’s no preparation for the smothered sentence that comes next, “and I thought I might come to actually—oh, how I must hate you.”
The Master walks him to the wall, and nearly snaps the Doctor’s wrist with his sudden grip. He shoves the Doctor’s hand up to his forehead in an unspoken order to fix him. “I expect you know your way around,” he sneers, and the Doctor is plunged without warning or preparation into the Master’s suddenly open mind and, like a drowning man fighting his way up towards the surface for air, he’s struggling, untangling the knots around whole areas of the Master’s brain, because it’s all he can do, here.
It takes some time. The Master’s mental work has always been defter than his. These knots had to be made exceptionally complex to contain their contents. The Doctor is not insulted by the will involved in the work he’s undoing, the determination to annihilate the very thought of him, the mere idea of him. That would be childish, and he can’t afford it.
When he emerges the Master is looking at him with a tender, closed loathing, and so the Doctor knows he’s managed it. The Master turns away abruptly, and the Doctor, unaided, stumbles after him into a stark bedroom. He can tell it’s not the Master’s own, just something the TARDIS cooked up. That’s a crafted snub, but the Doctor is too exhausted to comment or care. The Master faces the mirror, taking off his cufflinks.
“Undress,” he says to the Doctor, and it isn’t close to a suggestion.
The Doctor hesitates.
“I believe you know,” the Master says, tone stark as the room, “how very deeply you owe me.”
For once the experience isn’t sublime and powerful and hideous and beautiful. It’s sad. As sad as realizing the star you observe in the night sky is long deceased, and the light you love is its walking corpse. Every constellation a morgue. Every wish made morbid.
Every thrust is a defeat. Every gasp a death rattle. They come undone, are left boneless and exhausted and pitiful as decaying bodies. The Doctor wishes their fucking were the starlight of something long gone. Eventually the light of dead stars is allowed the luxury of fading. The easing into death. But he knows neither of them is that lucky.
Rating: PG-13
Author:
x_losPairing/Characters: Seven/Ainley!Master
Prompt: revised from
best_enemies' kink memeBeta:
aralias, who had Thoughts on commasSummary: Eradicating a centuries-long infatuation is difficult, but there are ways.
“I’m sorry,” the man in black tells the Doctor, and that alone is damning, “but I’m afraid I don’t. Not even faintly.”
“This is some trick,” the Doctor sneers. He’s less convinced that it is one by the minute, but he needs it not to be true. “What exactly are you up to, hm?”
“At the moment, I’m conquering the system,” the Master says with no shame, arching an eyebrow. “Quite effectively, if I do say so myself. At least I was, until you barged into my TARDIS and started insinuating things I’ve no memory of, without any evidence to support your ridiculous claims that you're someone I should consider important.” The Master crosses his arms over his black suit and grey waistcoat, pausing to flick a speck off his jacket sleeve, and the Doctor is floored. When he’s in the room the Master’s attention swivels to him, just as the Doctor’s does to him. He’d never make such an indeliberate gesture as ignoring his oldest rival to attend to a bit of lint.
“I’m the Doctor.” He says it with what’s meant to be his usual air of declaration, but it tastes like a plea in his mouth, and it lingers between them with the stale pressure of desperation.
“So you’ve said. Are you going to leave of your own volition, or do I have to kill you? Only I’m rather busy at the moment, and disposing of bodies can be such a time consuming process.”
“You don’t know me at all,” the Doctor swallows, “You’re being perfectly honest for once, aren’t you, Master?” He fiddles with his umbrella, running a nervous palm over the smooth curve of the question mark handle, not knowing what to do with his hands—and how strange that is. In the Master’s company he’s always too busy with a hundred other thoughts to feel awkward in his own body.
“That is what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The Master seems more amused than exasperated. “So either you’re lying to me as part of some intriguingly complicated ruse, and I truly have never met you before in my life, or someone has been tampering with my memories.” At this the Master pulls a sour face. He intensely dislikes the thought that his mind might not be absolutely impregnable.
“No,” the Doctor’s eyes narrow, “no, I suspect that’s not quite the case. Give yourself a little credit, Master. You know exactly how good a psychic you are, the strength of your defenses. Given that and what I might perceive as a motive, I suspect you did this to yourself.”
The Master scoffs outright. “Ripping out my own memories? Lobotomizing myself? While perhaps possible, it sounds somewhat out of character. I’m beginning to think you don’t know me after all.”
“Oh, but there are certainly ways of achieving it, aren’t there?” the Doctor ponders. “I can think of half a dozen means of forgetting a person you’ve known for what amounts to your entire lives. You were always more interested in that sort of mental phenomenon, but until this minute I would have bet practically anything, that you wouldn’t have ever elected them.”
“And yet you seem to understand why I might.” The Master folds his arms and leans back against the console. “How very interesting. One might almost say your chagrin implies that you could have given me just cause.” The Master smirks: the look hasn’t changed an iota. The Doctor feels a very little like he might throw up. “Guilty conscience, Doctor?” The Master is observing the seasick cast to the Doctor’s face with some prurient interest.
“Think back,” the Doctor hisses, “and name your school friends.”
He does. Theta doesn’t merit a mention. The Master looks almost confused for an instant, eyes flickering uncertainly, when the Doctor asks if he remembers putting itching power in all Borusa’s collars, programming the Academy’s information servers to imply rude things about the Houses of those who attempted to access them, the dramatic meteor shower he’d seen and been struck with as a child, who he lived with when he’d been allowed to choose, where he’d been the day his mother died.
“Some of it does sound half familiar,” the Master admits, grudging and bewildered.
The Doctor doesn’t know if exerting this pressure is wise. The Master, free of his long-succored rage against the Doctor, might well be driven by less hate. Perhaps he’ll be less of a threat to the universe like this. But then, unhampered by his dominant obsession, he could also be a more effective killer. The Master has always known that every crime, every murder, drives the Doctor, who is perhaps his ultimate goal, further away from him. Will release from that awareness make him crueler or saner? Everything is a dangerously unsettled question, and in this regeneration the Doctor finds chaos unnerving. The Doctor should do what this regeneration of himself does best: step back and think calmly. Access the situation and plan for it.
But the Doctor is a person as well as a collection of interests and responsibilities. He can’t think past how much the blank, detached politeness in the Master’s manner revolts him. He needs the Master whole and proper—he needs the Master to recognize him. If the Master’s done some abomination to his own mind, then it’s only a kindness to fix him. The Doctor begins to tell himself that what he’s known he was going to do since he accepted that the Master was telling the truth could be—no, must be an act of charity. Which feels better. More rational. The Master’s only done what he always does: made a stupid, rash, willful decision and carried it out with his ungodly cleverness to its terrible conclusion. The Doctor is fixing it. Mending him. That’s as it should be.
What isn’t as it should be at all is the Master, tilting his head at him, studying him objectively. “Some kind of lover,” he pronounces.
“What makes you say that?” the Doctor asks, challenging the process by which the Master came to his conclusion instead of denying it.
The Master chuckles, low and rolling. “What else could possibly have made me do something as monumentally eviscerating as what you’re suggesting?” Dubiously, he sniffs at the Doctor’s diminutive stature and unprepossessing hat. “I must have cared about you a great deal.”
The Doctor shuts his eyes, briefly. When he opens them again, he finds the Master examining him more carefully, as if to determine what exactly it was about this Doctor that he must have found so destructively fascinating.
“Black holes,” the Doctor helps him.
“Hm?” The Master pauses, looks him directly in the eye.
“You can’t see the thick, burned heart at the centre. You can’t see the massive gravity. But you can feel it ripping at you. And you can see it destroying whole systems—you can watch it bend and then break light, and space, and time itself. That’s how you know its nature. That’s how you come to understand its strength. And it’s horrible, obviously—it’s a force of destruction. All that majesty, and it’s never once turned to creation.
“It rips whole worlds to shreds, and there’s nothing you can do to alter, or to stop it, though your whole life is spent in trying. And it’s grotesque. But it’s sublime. There’s nothing more powerful. More hideous. More beautiful.” The Doctor stares at him, unashamed, though in the back of his mind he understands that he will be, and very soon. The addendum is unnecessary, but he can’t stop himself. “That’s what kind.”
The Master is staring at him, and there is something a little like terror in his eyes. The Doctor knows he’s done it, because Koschei looked at Theta like that the first time he fell in love with him, across a millennia and more bodies than the Doctor cares to count. It’s more than shared history between them: it’s who they are.
“I should kill you,” the Master says at last, “for doing that. For not allowing me this. I had someone,” and if the Doctor thinks that’s a subtle shock, a light boil to the blood, it’s no preparation for the smothered sentence that comes next, “and I thought I might come to actually—oh, how I must hate you.”
The Master walks him to the wall, and nearly snaps the Doctor’s wrist with his sudden grip. He shoves the Doctor’s hand up to his forehead in an unspoken order to fix him. “I expect you know your way around,” he sneers, and the Doctor is plunged without warning or preparation into the Master’s suddenly open mind and, like a drowning man fighting his way up towards the surface for air, he’s struggling, untangling the knots around whole areas of the Master’s brain, because it’s all he can do, here.
It takes some time. The Master’s mental work has always been defter than his. These knots had to be made exceptionally complex to contain their contents. The Doctor is not insulted by the will involved in the work he’s undoing, the determination to annihilate the very thought of him, the mere idea of him. That would be childish, and he can’t afford it.
When he emerges the Master is looking at him with a tender, closed loathing, and so the Doctor knows he’s managed it. The Master turns away abruptly, and the Doctor, unaided, stumbles after him into a stark bedroom. He can tell it’s not the Master’s own, just something the TARDIS cooked up. That’s a crafted snub, but the Doctor is too exhausted to comment or care. The Master faces the mirror, taking off his cufflinks.
“Undress,” he says to the Doctor, and it isn’t close to a suggestion.
The Doctor hesitates.
“I believe you know,” the Master says, tone stark as the room, “how very deeply you owe me.”
For once the experience isn’t sublime and powerful and hideous and beautiful. It’s sad. As sad as realizing the star you observe in the night sky is long deceased, and the light you love is its walking corpse. Every constellation a morgue. Every wish made morbid.
Every thrust is a defeat. Every gasp a death rattle. They come undone, are left boneless and exhausted and pitiful as decaying bodies. The Doctor wishes their fucking were the starlight of something long gone. Eventually the light of dead stars is allowed the luxury of fading. The easing into death. But he knows neither of them is that lucky.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 05:06 am (UTC)Nice story!
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 06:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 06:37 am (UTC)Thanks! :)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 07:02 am (UTC)“I believe you know,” the Master says, tone stark as the room, “how very deeply you owe me.”
That hit hard. It's possibly my favourite line in this.
But - and I realise neither of them know this - I really don't think he does. Owe him.
I keep thinking: the only way this fic could have not been inevitable is if the Master had erased the Doctor's memories first. Which he didn't. The Master clearly wanted to forget the Doctor, but he didn't want it enough that he could pay the price of being forgotten by him. Really, I think the debt goes both ways.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 08:50 am (UTC)So is this a sort of rebuttal to the audio "Master"? Because I can actually see Seven allowing the Master to forget him... or at least, I don't know, give it some time, stick around a while and watch him before he succumbs to the urge to meddle. Although of course the situation here isn't quite the same, the Master is still destructive, just without his memories of the Doctor.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 09:23 am (UTC)We know he's still taking over a system, but he could be pretty not-crazy about it? Writing it I had no idea whether he was engaged in a rather unthreatening conquest of one area, a la Rani and Maisma Goria, or typical Ainley!Master universal domination insanity.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 09:34 am (UTC)he didn't want it enough that he could pay the price of being forgotten by him.
This really reminds me of a discussion I was having the other day, where we figured that even if the Master /could/ go back and never have met the Doctor, he'd hesitate to even in the blackest mood. While it would probably have made his life infinitely less complicated, he'd have to countenance the idea that the Doctor wouldn't remember him. And what would he do if while he changed dramatically, the Doctor remained much the same person? How eviscerating /that/ idea would be?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 11:08 am (UTC)as i said earlier, i also love the whole thing. the idea (which, as i said anonymously) was not in any way what the prompt asked for, but it's a lovely, horrible idea. and it's good to see the doctor being desperate to be acknowledged (i.e. the inverse of everything - in a way this is a little simm!master 'how about that. i win' but of course the doctor fucks everything up by being great again and it's just as bad) and them having the sex, but it not being good or angry, which is also interesting and unusual.
also the whole black holes metaphor, obviously, and 'that's what kind'. tis excellent, even though i know you wrote this after you'd seen... survival.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 11:59 am (UTC)I feel a little bad for not properly writing the prompt, though. I mean there it sits, and I only /allude/ to him sleeping with someone in passing before it's all 'doctor doctor doctor.'
I v. nearly didn't include 'that's what kind' b/c I thought it was redundant/too blunt, but there it is anyway.
Having seen more of that era, you know, I think Survival may actually be one of the better/more coherent ones?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 12:30 pm (UTC)that makes me sound very callous, i didn't mean it like that, but if you look at theother things you've re-written, you re-wrote lots of it and here you mainly cleaned up. i did actually pull up the original one when i was looking at it. some places i changed it back to the way it used it be.
and if you'd tried to get rid of that's what kind, i would have put it back in.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 12:35 pm (UTC)'That's what kind' /is/ too obvious/self-indulgent, though. And I meant the first time I wrote this, I questioned it. It stays now because I like it, but really I know it's a bit bludgeoning.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 01:14 pm (UTC)You're welcome! :)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 05:27 pm (UTC)It makes me wonder, though, about the Master, and what's going through his head here. I mean, I can easily imagine him doing it, but I have a hard time imagining that he wouldn't regret it. Beyond their actual relationship, I think they're both the kind of people who would rather that the universe kill them a little every day than live safe and never feel that kind of intensity. And I suppose, from a certain point of view, the Doctor does give him that choice here. His metaphor of the black hole could've feasibly served to scare him off rather than entice him. If he didn't know the Master so well, at least.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 11:12 pm (UTC)Honestly. After the collapsing twin star bit in "Animal Crackers" I can't think of those two any other way.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-28 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-28 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-28 11:10 pm (UTC)Yes, they're both theoretically 'better to have loved and lost' style people in their general approach to the possibility of wonderful/devastating experiences, I mean, they both ran away, didn't they?
And I /love/ the point you make about the description being as easily as warning as an enticement, b/c I didn't think I was writing it that way, but it's patently true: if you're sufficiently sane, you hear that and run. So it /is/ a sort of last-ditch 'if you're not /you/, who could never resist me/us, then you're not mine anymore.'
no subject
Date: 2008-10-29 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-29 03:32 am (UTC)