Spoiled for Choice: Chapter Eight: Pictures of the Floating World: Part II

[x_losfic]

Title: Spoiled for Choice: Chapter Eight: Pictures of the Floating World: Part II

Author: x_los          

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: Eight/Simm!Master, Eight/Jacobi!Master, the Rani

Chapter: part II of 8/12,

Summary: In the third year of the Master’s reign, he perfects Laz Labs technology. The Doctor as a box of chocolates.

Part Summary: Jacobi!Master and the Rani do the Time War. Simm!Master gets laid after far too many pages, and it isn't traumatizing!

Betas: skipthedemon and _coherent : for when your scene lacks direction and when you have no idea how to fix it, respectively.     

Special Thanks: People who mentioned wanting the next chapter, because I was soooo ready to consign this to the big bin of Unmanageable Projects I Have Wandered Off From. Thanks for the interest!

            
Previous/ Index

Pictures of the Floating World Part II

***

He’d found the Rani in pieces. A great hole gaped in her torso. Her blonde hair was matted with grime. She was missing a hand, and her left leg hung by a gooey thread.

Regeneration seemed to have been delayed by the disenfranchised state of her body. Sometimes the process held off for a period if the body died with severe trauma—playing dead served as a survival technique. The Master tried to help her along. He aligned everything where it should go, tucking her leg with its ripped skin and exposed bone back into its socket, returning her hand when he found it. Cellular regeneration tended to go better when there was a lot of organic material to work with. He waited and hoped she wasn’t too badly damaged to recover. She should, by his calculations, still have a good batch of lives left yet. She had always been less careless with herself than he and the Doctor.

A single gold line, like a thin wire, grew from her spine. It looped up and anchored itself in the charred flesh of her torso. At first the Master thought he was seeing things, that his eyes had been strained by staring at her remains for too long. Then vines of light raced from her spine to her extremities, more and faster, covering her until nothing was left untouched. Her jaw dropped and she gulped in air.

When the visible traces of her regenerative energy faded he went to her and helped her stand. She wobbled like a newborn fawn and shook him off. The Rani looked around the battlefield with wide, terrified eyes that fixed on the other still forms, which lacked her genetic advantage and would never stir again. With the exception of the birds nothing was left alive as far as the eye could see but them—the cell-sniffer bombs had spared not even the vegetation.

Outside the portable shield the Master carried, the bombs scuttled, their tiny legs mincing delicate paths across the field. Where they found living organic tissue they simultaneously emitted a noxious gas that ate right through protective masks and a microbe that consumed cells and spat out more of itself at an alarming rate. The Daleks liked to leave them behind when they couldn’t spare manpower to guard a taken world. They were exceptionally convenient—the regenerative capacity of the Time Lords couldn’t counter something that ate all organic tissue.

The Rani was inconceivably lucky that the Master had arrived when he did. It looked like she had tried to defuse one with a remote device, but hadn’t gotten quite far enough away to escape the blast radius. The Master clucked his tongue. She really should have known better. Sniffers exploded when tampered with, usually killing Time Lords who attempted to disarm them. When a cell-sniffer destroyed itself, the blast created inert food for the other bombs’ microbes, and the Dalek war machine marched on. A crate of the crab-shaped robots could decimate a planetary ecosystem within weeks, rendering it ready for Dalek ‘reallocation,’ as they so succinctly put it.

The Master was too late for the battle, held up by a particularly effective flanking maneuver by the Dalek space-fleet. Given the look of the field, if he’d come much earlier he’d probably be dead or incapacitated himself. Any later, and the Rani would have been reduced to fuel.

She stared at him, not comprehending any of her surroundings, displaying the amnesia that often accompanied regenerations with a high rate of complication.

“Who are we?” she demanded.

“You, my dear, are Ushasmielatrovadex, or more popularly the Rani. I’m an old friend. We seem to be rather at loose ends here,” he gestured at the grass-stripped battle scene, all spent carnage. It was peopled with bodies dissolving under the advance of the amethyst microbe and its host of busy, insectile, steel-grey carrier robots, which paused every so often to emit a violet plume of their biochemical cocktail. The tide of destruction was rolling towards them, slow now, but picking up speed with every second. It was an extraordinary scene that almost aspired to a sick lush gorgeousness.

The Rani looked, bewildered, at the brave new world she’d woken to. The Master thought she might faint on her feet. He offered her an arm.

“Perhaps we could retire to my TARDIS and get you something to drink, or a bed?” He led her away, shield generator in one hand and a new hand-held screwdriver he was experimenting with in the other. As they encountered the cell-sniffers on their way back to what appeared to be a giant, withered old dead tree, the robots smacked against the hard edge of the shield and tripped backwards over themselves, pushed back by its advancing energy field. Shutting the TARDIS door behind them he sat the Rani on his control chair and took them into the Vortex, far away from what had been Helenic Period Terra Alpha.

He had no idea how the Rani of all people had come to be involved in the conflict. Perhaps like him she’d been press-ganged into service. Perhaps he could get the details out of her when she remembered them herself.

***

“Mmm.” The Doctor looked over his shoulder. “Settles that question.” It had been almost four days since he’d woken. The Master relied on and resented each of them. They restored the Doctor even as they drew them inexorably closer to the tiny, dark horror in that box.

The Master thought he might have been panicking out of proportion. This was the Doctor, after all, who destroyed by omission, drifted haplessly to murder at the dictates of circumstance and accident, never with intent—whose moral center he trusted implicitly and reviled explicitly.

But on occasion he caught the Doctor looking at him with immense, poorly concealed pity and trepidation. And he remembered all the things the Doctor had done to him, to himself, to the universe at large, to pacify that roar of that moral center. Its call must be as deafening as that of his own drums, such is the vicious scope of its destruction.

                Oh god, he’d thought, it’s going to be horrible, whatever it is, and he knows it’s horrible, and he’s going to do it to me anyway. A pitiful childish bafflement rose in him. Why did the Doctor insist that they be unhappy? All the people who mattered were dead, what perverse need did he have to punish them still, when there was no society left to tell them that anything they did was wrong, no one left who knew enough about it to say with authority that they’d gone too far?

The Master was sprawled out on their bed, disheveled in a suit, and firmly avoided thinking about anything but the moment. It was a particularly satisfying moment to dwell on. The unclothed, unselfconscious Doctor, fresh from a shower, was seated on the bed’s edge, pressing at his own pale skin with his long, elegant fingers. The room’s light was soft and diffuse, and the Doctor’s auburn hair glowed electric red where it caught the shine, and rested in a dark, soft-curled shadow where it didn’t.

The Master felt boneless, looking at him. While he thought it often, even of forms that wouldn’t be conventionally considered terribly attractive, sometimes it still occurred to him as revelation does. It could still his hearts, how very beautiful his Doctor was.

“What question?” The Master asked lazily.

“Whether your screwdriver works by restoring some cellular memory of me or whether you’ve simply co-opted Matrix biodata.”

“Oh does it?”

“It’s biodata-- My tattoo’s gone.” The Doctor rubbed at his right shoulder. “There was a knot pattern right there. I got it when I helped a tribe on Abydeka. There was this flood caused by rogue nannites eating through the dams of the colonists living upstream, long story really, but they wanted to recognize the event. I always meant to find out how Nara Black ink found its way to Abydeka anyway.” Body modification of any kind tended to horrify or amuse Gallifreans, who considered it grossly tribal, to the extent that wearing make-up was quite the radical liberal-universalist statement.

“You let them mark you?” The Master’s emotional response was tangled. He didn’t blindly ascribe to his species’ taboos, but the idea caught him by surprise. He’d never really given any thought to it, other than observing irezumi when he’d been in Edo last. There was a stab of possessive jealousy that something touched and marred the Doctor and it wasn’t him. And a fair current of arousal at the image of this serene version of his lover, all lazy sweetness, squirming with closed eyes, biting a plump lower lip, poised under a chisel held by a steady hand, the Nara Black ink blossoming blue green under his pale skin. Defiling and decorating.

                “What did it look like?” The Master sat up and crawled over to him, trailed his fingers over the skin in question. It was slightly warmer than his own, as always.

                “A stylized wave to represent the flood water. Looked rather like a highly modified Celtic knot pattern to me.” The Doctor caught the Master’s hand, which was still investigating the area, drumming over the skin, and used it to pull the Master flat against his back. “Stop fidgeting, would you?” He asked with no heat in his voice.

He let the Doctor’s momentum guide him. He splayed his palms over the Doctor’s chest and settled his legs on either side of the other man to accommodate him, so that they were somewhat enfolded and he could speak almost directly into the Doctor’s ear.

                “If you miss it, you should get it again.” The Master surprised himself with how definitive his answer was. The idea appealed to his sybaritic nature, and the more he thought of it the less strange it seemed. The more perfect. There was an enchantment to the permanence of leaving an indelible mark—it would be something of the Master’s own design and execution, obviously, no anonymous artisan was going to touch the Doctor.

                “I can hardly go back and ask the Abydekan tribesmen for a do-over.” The Doctor pointed out. “And it’s not terribly vital. It was a lovely little thing, though.”

                “No need to go back. I’d sort it out myself.” He raised a hand to card through the Doctor’s long hair and imagined an intricate traditional kakushibori on the inside of his thigh. Some hidden carving only they would know about, a flower with the Master’s circular signet secreted among the petals.

He remembered his frustration of some months ago that the Doctor’s fifth body bore no proof of having been his so completely, and for so long. He need never feel like that again. Something as elegantly simple as an image would remind the Doctor whose he was. The Master could feel his lips fighting to stretch in a contented cat smile, just picturing it. He would always, always know it was there. Waiting for him.

Such possessive gestures as sharing a name or physically demonstrating a union had been chortled at among his species, thought unsophisticated. But the Master hadn’t ever really cared much for the stilted, self-conscious posturing of the other Time Lords. Gallifreyans had mocked difference, sentiment and passion with the facility and contempt only really attained by the desperately jealous. At least he and the Doctor had always understood that, and refused to be cowed by such pettiness.

“Could be fun,” the Master whispered into the Doctor’s ear, enticing, “I can draw this time around, still—that seems to stick through my regenerations. How do you fancy a chrysanthemum? The imperial flower. Well, among other less noble associations,” the Master grinned softly. With its tightly gathered petals, the flower had a long association with certain homosexual acts in Japanese iconography.

                The Doctor laughed. Said, “Thanks, but I’ll have to decline,” as if nothing had ever been more ridiculous, as if he’d never even consider it. Which was really, really the wrong answer.

                The Master snapped the Doctor’s head back. He moved so suddenly that the Doctor choked out a startled gasp. The Master held him at a painful angle, with one hand fisted in his long hair, while running his fingers along the Doctor’s throat in slow, soothing motions.

                “Since when do you get to decide what we’re doing, hm?” He almost whispered into the Doctor’s ear. “If I want to carve my name into your skin you’ll thank me for acknowledging you. So emboldened by your little stunt. Do you think I’ve forgiven what you did to me, or whatever it is you’re planning on doing?” He tightened his grip on the Doctor’s neck. “And with such deliberate intent. If I snapped your neck now it’d be a crime of passion, not premeditated. Oh Doctor, it wouldn’t be half as vicious as what you managed. You should be thanking me.”

                “Thank you Master.” The Doctor rasped out, seeing what was needed to calm the Master and playing into his partner with the ease of long experience. A performative scum of fear bubbled through the Doctor’s words. It was a reaction, and after the past months it was so wonderful to hear the Master thought he have might gasped if he hadn’t bitten his lip.

                Shocked that the Doctor was submitting, the Master couldn’t help it. His response was a little Pavlovian. He was hard against the Doctor’s back, and hissing low like the snake he briefly was.

                “Again.”

                “Thank—thank you, Master.” The Master’s unoccupied hand stole down to find the Doctor’s cock, and wrapped around it. The Master’s expression was a little blissful, and he drew lazy circles on the Doctor’s prone throat. He’d not touched his weak lover since he’d woken, respecting his frailty. That same caution now dulled his anger, but not his lust.

                “I wish you were well enough for half the things I want to do to you.” He admitted, beginning to give the Doctor a slow hand job, thumb stroking at the vein running the length of that pale cock. He wanted to sully its whiteness, make it flush with blood, just like the Doctor’s vermillion, gulping throat. His fingers flitted between long strokes and drumming the head. “Mm,” he craned his head around and licked at the Doctor’s shuddering Adam’s apple, “You can’t know how much I want inside you again. Waiting feels like agony, like my skin’s burning,” he laughed, “and I should know.”

He left unstated the implication that the Doctor should be slavishly grateful that the Master wasn’t taking what he wanted regardless. He was taking care of the Doctor—it was implicit in controlling the other man that he knew what was best, that he was capable of putting the Doctor to better use than the Doctor ever found for himself.

“Thank you for waiting,” the Doctor murmured, and the Master relished his concession that his body was so completely the Master’s that not being fucked right back into a coma was a privilege, not a right.

                “You didn’t then? Not when I was,” the Doctor paused to pick the word least likely to rankle the other Time Lord, “sleeping?” It didn’t occur to the Doctor to feel violated about the prospect—they’d passed such small sins between them long ago.

                “Once.” The Master admitted, not ashamed to have exercised that prerogative, “But let’s not talk about what you reduced me to, hm?” He squeezed the flesh in his hand, drawing on it in a long, tight stroke, “I’d much rather hear you scream. As you’re a bit weak for that, I’ll settle for whimpers. Keen if you must, you used to do it so prettily.”

The unrelenting clench of the Master’s fist on his cock reminded the Doctor, with a sweep of nostalgic pain, of how good it felt to be fully inside the other Time Lord. He hadn’t known that sweetness since a cold, damp night spent in a cave centuries ago. He should have been kinder, should have said the right words instead of the easy ones. Should have stayed, should have lived up to his better nature and tried. It wouldn’t have cost him anything but pride, and now he might never have that again.

The prospect hurt but the Doctor suppressed it, like he suppressed the deep-structure ache at the invasive thing tethering their minds together, which stung all the more because once they’d had something similar in nature but infinitely finer in realization. The Doctor endured with the same fortitude that had let him survive the horror of the War, and his crushing loneliness in its wake. But he was tired, and he wanted to give in to something that would surpass the low ache of living. If it could only be for tonight, that wouldn’t cheapen it. Hadn’t he and Koschei always dreamed of running away together?

The Doctor laid his head back on the other time Lord’s shoulder, turning his lips to meet the cheek, and whispered “Master,” feeling the long shudder work its way down the body pressed against his own. The Master breathed harder and worked the Doctor’s cock in earnest, abandoning his teasing pace for something still leisurely but more purposeful.

“That’s it, pet, give it to me.”

“Master,” the Doctor whimpered softly right on cue, into his partner’s skin. He’d turned kittenish with physical exhaustion from pressing his body into this so soon after having woken.

But he didn’t want to stop, didn’t think he’d survive if the Master stopped. Those had been agonizingly lonely months for the Doctor, completely detached from the world outside his own body. He hated few things more than being alone with himself. The nature of his scheme meant he’d had little but the Master on the brain, and that always left him eager for just this kind of confrontation. His coma had been frustrating in every sense of the word.

The Master opened his mouth to inquire how it felt, but before he could get a word out the Doctor preempted him with “Good, god, exquisite, just like that, you’re so, so—that’s so perfect,” and the Master smiled smugly at how well the Doctor knew him, upping his tempo, adding little flourishes in accordance with how prettily the Doctor appreciated his efforts.

A breathy, half-shrieked “oh God! Master!” when he coated an index finger with slippery precome and used it to trace a delicate circle around the perimeter of the head of the Doctor’s cock, before he palmed it and gently squeezed, earned the Doctor the fingers of the Master’s idle hand playing at his entrance, toying with the skin.

The Master slid away slowly, their sweat-slick skin clinging, and the Doctor, eyes wide and bereft, caught at his retreating arm with an enervated panic.

“Where are you—” The Doctor began, but the Master pushed him up and back on the bed. He pressed his palms again to the Doctor’s chest, guiding him to lay down, and slid between his legs, parting them and licking his way up the insides of the Doctor’s thighs before descending with a voracious mouth on the Doctor’s twitching cock.

“Ah!” The Doctor’s head lolled back, eyes wide, and he buried his hands in the Master’s short, velveteen hair automatically. One of the Master’s hands lingered on the Doctor’s chest, tapping, but its rhythm was growing slower, more indolent. The other wrapped around the based of the Doctor’s cock, guiding it into his mouth and stroking the bereft body of it while he focused on tonguing the head or licking the frenulum.

Shaking, his entire body wracked with exhaustion and adrenaline, the Doctor started to cry. Looking up, the Master frowned in confusion, but continued when he realized it was just a reaction to the physical stress. Seeing how close the Doctor was, he shoved his mouth all the way down, until his nose was smashed against the Doctor’s pelvis. He closed his eyes and swallowed, triggering the Doctor’s climax. He let the spurts hit the back of his throat, licking the underside until the aftershocks passed, only sliding off when he was sure the Doctor was fully spent.

Crawling up the Doctor’s chest, he slid his tongue into the other man’s slack mouth, and then retraced the tear tracks running down his face in long licks, savoring the salt. This Doctor always tasted of pumpkin, and, funnily enough, ginger to him. The salinity of the skin just heightened the flavor.

Idly he shifted back down, giving the Doctor two of his fingers to suck and moisten in his mouth. He removed them only to work into the Doctor’s ass, gently, curling and dragging them inside until the Doctor was quivering like jelly. Too drained to get hard again, the Doctor simple stared with big glass glazed eyes, muttering wordlessly in pleasure and petting at the Master’s hair. When the Master felt satisfied, he withdrew, and the Doctor weakly held out his trembling arms to him, embracing him as tightly as his lassitude could permit.

“Can I say it?” he asked, not wanting to be so churlish as to repay what he’d just been given with something the Master didn’t want to hear, but needing to voice it.

“If you must,” the Master muttered tonelessly, but from him that was nearly enthusiastic permission.

“I love you. I love what you do to me. No one makes me feel like you do.” He said it in a way that implied this extended outside the haven of their bed.

“I love you so, so much,” the Doctor moved his lax hand to the Master’s hard length, only to have it caught, entwined with the Master’s fingers and pressed to the bed.

“You’re too weak still to be reciprocating any favors,” the Master rebuked.

“But I want to. I missed touching you. And you’re still—you still need me.”

“No need to push yourself into regenerating over it,” the Master snorted, rolling the boneless Doctor over so that his dick was pressed into the Doctor’s arse, “We can compromise, hm? Press back into me,” he instructed, and the Doctor complied as readily as he could. He thrust into the Doctor’s sweat slick ass cheeks, keeping a restrained rhythm. Soon he spilt himself all over the Doctor’s skin, whispering his name, squeezing the hand that still clutched his on the sheets.

They slept. For the first time since the period when they were half psychically bound to each other as young men had come to an abrupt, messy end, they were comfortable enough in sleep to press into each other’s dreams. The Doctor walked through a Puccini opera, with the notes made tangible and given mass. The Master dreamed of sakura, their petals curling up into fire and falling away in ashes that pulsed to the beat of his drums as they drifted down into a dark, shapeless expanse that resembled the Doctor’s hollowed-out mind. The drumbeat was as terrible and indefatigable as he himself was.

The Master woke up with a start, as he often did, and fitfully settled himself back into sleep. This time he dreamed Ushas, perched in the unprotective shade of a parasol with a handle made of bone. She looked both frightened and wistful. Her imploring eyes were fixed on him, just as they had been when he saw her truly die.

The Doctor, still asleep, curled into him more tightly, not noticing their uncomfortable stickiness, and with his mind pulled the Master out of his nightmare like a tide moves the sand. Slow and determined, they came to share an improbable, amusing dream of taking tea with some Sea Devils and a bubbly, whip-sharp professor they’d both thought brilliant in their seventies, who was filching all the muffins and telling good enough jokes that they didn’t much object.

In the morning, they woke simultaneously, eyes opening already looking at each other, the Doctor pressed a kiss to the Master’s temple and slipped out to clean himself off. The Doctor had the grace not to pry into the Rani’s demise. He would not mention it until the Master brought it up himself. In his absence the Master drifted into his vacated warm spot and curled up to go back to sleep, feeling safer than he had in centuries.

But when he fully woke the lurking box reoccurred to him, like a toothache suppressed by sleep flooding back into his awareness. Of course this was temporary, he thought, resigned to bitterness. What had he expected? The Doctor couldn’t ever just be content. He needed the teeming universe, flooding into his senses and complicating everything. He didn’t even know how to go about simply being satisfied.

In the end the Master consigned his fantasy of marking the Doctor to the high mental rubbish heap that held all his other unrealized impulses. All the things he’d even thought to want for them, but had been unable to say to the Doctor.

                Because there wasn’t any point to it. Not really, not if the Doctor didn’t want it too.

                He only thought of it again once, when the Doctor passed him a plate at breakfast a few days later and the motion revealed the clear, blue-veined delicacy of the inside of his wrist, presenting to the Master the notion of nagasode, an image just there. He looked down at his black pudding and speared it so hard the plate clattered. The Doctor glanced over, a little confused, but didn’t comment, and went back to the novel he was idly perusing in between bites of honeydew. It had been, the Master told himself, a stupid idea anyway.

***

This was a war without a front. There was nowhere to retreat, no real refuge anywhere in space or time. Anywhere a TARDIS had traveled, Dalek technology latched onto, sucking on the path through the vortex like parasitic creatures. They left no safe place to hide, to escape the battle. They made none of the fine liminal judgments of who was and was not a renegade that the Time Lords themselves did.

The Rani had been pulled into the conflict after successfully dodging increasingly desperate Time Lord pleas for her to come into the Citadel, with all her sins pardoned, and vow allegiance. A Dalek squad arrived on her pet planet Miasimia Goria, intent on burning through her subjects to get at her, not terribly interested in her history of noninvolvement. They saw only a dangerously competent Time Lord and sought to remove the cancer of her potential before it metastasized. When she told the Master that it had taken them less than four hours to reduce centuries of her work to ashes, she was as shaken as he’d ever seen her.

She looked small in a white shirt of his, miles too big for her diminutive new body, belted with a salmon-colored silk tie from Earth. She inspected her new legs—she wasn’t terribly tall this time—incased in some of his old velvet leggings. He had her rub her hands on the material and then put it down so that the TCE had some organic material to latch onto.

The Rani watched with some scientific appreciation of his toy, now that it was disassociated from the nauseating frying-fat smell that usually accompanied a primitive being shrunk. Wearing his clothes was a trifle awkward. She wanted to grouse that he’d shrunken the pants a tad too much, but he was being exceptionally good to her, for him, and anything was better than washing and redressing in clothes irreparably stained with the gore of her own lost body.

The regeneration sickness has largely passed. She was done throwing up and had recovered all of her memories. The suspicion that some of them could have slipped away and she’d never know, which tended to haunt her after she’s regenerated, for no particular reason other than that she despised the loss of control it represented, continued to taunt her. She was still shaky on her feet, wary, getting accustomed to her new body.

They were sitting in the kitchen of his TARDIS, all stainless steel and dark wood. The ship was set to a Traken Third Keeper style he found both lovely and ironic, considering what had become of its planet of origin.

“I had nine billion people.” She muttered, taking a sip of the glass of water he’d offered her. He put a hand on top of hers, and she didn’t seem to feel it. “Nine billion. And- and for nothing, not to any end. Such a waste.”

He looked about him at the graceful, organic arches and wondered idly about the population of the empire felled in an instant by the collapse of Logopolis’s anti-entropic efforts. That had to have been—well. He hadn’t meant to do it. ‘Sloppy’ and ‘pointless’ weren’t his favorite adjectives.

“Surely you didn’t care all that much about the primitives?” He tried, wondering if the Rani was just resentful of having failed, having her work interrupted, both of which seem so much more quintessentially her than this vacant expression. It unnerved him, because Ushas was the predictable, dependable one.

“They were my primitives.” She hissed. Ah. That he could understand. “My work. My people. I want the Dalek emperor to burn.” She took a swig of her water and swished it about her mouth, before continuing, meditative and unconcerned. “I’m vaguely curious as to whether he’ll scream if I melt off his armor and give his banal biological form a chemical bath.” She giggled girlishly. “And anyone who wants to interrupt my experiments for a chat in the future can look to them for an example of how well I treat my callers.”

“What if I should want to drop by and check up on you?” The Master raised his eyebrows to give her a faux hurt look, trying to joke her down from her rage and knowing he’d succeeded when she smiled self-mockingly at him.

“Well, you’re not completely useless,” she amended. “So you may as well come to tea, provided you’re prepared to assist in a few trials and you bring good nosh. Speaking of tea, how’s he?”

“How should I know?”

She gave a barking laugh.

“The middle of a war? Please. You know where he is right now. You know what his assignment is. You think he’s doing it wrong.”

He didn’t say anything to confirm her accusations, but if the Doctor would establish a damn mine field blockade over the planet he’s guarding, rigging up something like the signal trigger mechanism sonar device similar to a laser they’d made during that encounter with the aquatic Silurians, both the Doctor and the target he was sitting on would be a damn sight better protected. Had the Doctor learned nothing from that encounter about the importance of tight security?

“The look on your face.” The Rani smirked. “You never change. It’s sweet actually. You’re my universal constant.”

“Shut up, Ushi.” He retorted, and she scrunched her nose in adorable disgust at the diminutive of her real name. She hated the twee old word she hadn’t heard in centuries, and she was fresh out of water.

“Don’t you have wine, Kosh? Anything good?”

“And why should I share the good stuff?” He grinned.

“Because I’m your best friend who still talks to you? Besides, only alcoholics drink alone. I hope I don’t have to hold an intervention for you. It’d be rather ill attended. Well, Thete would show up with cookies and punch and whine up an oncoming-storm about how your drinking drove you to immorality.”

“God no, he can’t bake. Remember when he burnt pasta?” The Master’s facial expression conveyed the degree of loathing only attained by former significant others who had once had to eat their partner’s cooking endeavors with smiles and good grace (because it was their anniversary and he’d really tried, the idiot) and then run to the bathroom to gag up pasta bolognaise that was alternately mushy and crispy. “Anything but that.”

“Does anything include Shobogan Merlot?”

“It might.” He conceded, popping up to fetch a bottle from the cellar the TARDIS had conveniently relocated behind the door that normally led to a long-unused formal dining room.

The Rani took advantage of his absence to observe the flowing girders erupting in brisk, almost masculine stylized flowers at their capitols, to run a considering hand over the dark marble table top, engraved with a pattern she blinked and recognized as an artistic model of the structure of water molecules. Some TARDISes did get creative when they were allowed to run free—some people even ascribed different ‘personalities’ to the things, though she didn’t credit it.

“What is this theme, art deco?” She called down the stairs after him. He’d disappeared into the darkness.

“Not quite,” he shouted back, pleased because her general ignorance of the style’s planet of origin probably meant she didn’t hear about that little ‘oops, I lost a chunk of the universe, Traken, what Traken?’ debacle, and he wouldn’t on the receiving end of her caustic tongue about it. He was awfully pleased she was too absorbed with her science to bother to check up on the journals covering major history shifting time-distortions. Probably hard to follow subscriptions as an exile: he’d just always done the leapfrogging route and pilfered the Matrix directly. All the results, none of the subscriber’s fees.

But remembering the aquatic Silurians, he kept reminding himself to see what became of The Clangers. He’d been following that, and then no one bothered to put it out on DVD. Did humans have no sense of what was important? All of The Endurance he could shake a TCE at, and never the bloody Clangers! It was enough to make you want to destroy Japan.

“So are you traveling with me for a while then?” The Master ascended the stairs and planted a bottle of Merlot in front of her. He turned his back to find glasses. She was surprised, because he was normally anything but direct. And it was a little unusual for him, for either of them, really, to want companionship. But she didn’t currently possess a TARDIS, and he was probably going to need help. They had a common enemy. She had nothing better to do. She was tired and sick and vulnerable and had missed him, missed both of them, sniping at each other and skipping class to snog and trying to wheedle her into sharing notes the night before the exam.

Ushas missed being young and invincible, being part of a trio and having her best friends at her side, coming up with some brilliant mischief and saying terrible, hilarious things about the professors they all loathed. They’d been so unguardedly happy then. She’d been productive since, she was proud of everything she’d accomplished (everything she’d just lost, actually), but she couldn’t really say she’d been happy in the past centuries. Not like that. It hadn’t seemed important, or really possible.

She didn’t want to go through the war, in which she was now inextricably involved, alone.

“Guess I am.” She said neutrally, and his shoulders seemed to relax, which was odd because she’d not noticed any tension in them before. But that wasn’t so surprising. The Master was a performer, and nothing if not good at what he did, she could give him that.

“Does he have anyone?” She refused to be cowed out of her curiosity, and, to be entirely honest, her concern, because this was so huge and terrible a conflict that it swept away lingering anger and antipathy as if it had never been, and Koschei’s touchiness regarding serious discussion of his favorite subject wasn’t more important than her hope that Theta won’t have to do this alone.

“No.” The Master set down the glasses, not looking at her. He wasn’t pretending ignorance, which was refreshing. “He dropped off his latest pets. Suppose he didn’t want to send them home as shoeboxes of ash. He’s alone.”

“Poor bastard.” She muttered.

“He’ll survive.” And there was the ghost of guilt on his face, because he always wanted the Doctor alone and vulnerable, cut off as he himself was. But now, like this, it was useless to him, and seeing what it did to the Doctor he half wished he never wanted it at all. And he couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate that, not even in the privacy of his mind.

“I hope so.” This was not going to be a clean war, and she had no inherent faith in her people’s ability to win. Ushas had looked at the scope of the battle as laid out to her by the Master’s archives and seen fallen planets and stolen technology and every chance of the death of her species: the end of all life in the universe that doesn’t speak in screams and sleep in its armor. Even the Doctor, persistent as a weed, had no guarantees in this.

Suddenly a shadow was over her, and she looked up, curious. Koschei grabbed her face with one hand.

“He’ll survive.” The Master repeated in a stone cold tone. He was uttering an absolute truth, the way people in suicide cults speak of their religion. He dropped her head abruptly and turned away.

The Rani suddenly understood something she never had before—why the people of some planets erupted in jibbering, screaming terror upon hearing her childhood friend would be calling to pay them his regards. The look in his eyes carried implicit threat—he could, he would, do so much more than kill you.

“Yes. I suppose he must.” She reassured him, because the Master clearly wanted so badly to hear it repeated to him in another’s voice, not just the echoes of his own words tossed back by TARDIS walls on terrible days. The Rani could tell that even from the brief telepathic contact she snuck in during the touch.

While normally the Rani had no use for tact and considered it beneath her, she could make an exception for her oldest friend and new flat mate.

And if anyone lived, it would be the two them. She’d meant her joke. The Doctor and the Master were as inexorable as any scientific law she knew. Perhaps that was what she liked about them.