Two Short Ficlets

[x_losfic]

Title: 1913: A Must-Visit for Masters

Author: x_los

Rating: NC-17

Pairing:  John Smith/Jacobi!Master (mentioned /Simm!Master, /Ainley!Master, /Delgado!Master)

Summary: “The best thing since the whole ‘exiled to Earth’ farrago.”

Beta: deborah_judge, eternally capable of making something half-assed something that seems convinced of itself.

A/N: edited request for best_enemies Anon Meme, title from a comment there

The older gentleman in the waistcoat shoving John Smith against the wall was almost apologetic about it.

“Word does get around,” he explained with a shrug before crushing their mouths together and sucking hard on John’s squirming tongue. He broke off and backed up slowly, moving towards John’s modest, narrow bed. The gentleman made a little come hither gesture with his crooked finger, and almost without knowing what he was doing John staggered after him.

The strange visitor sat down proprietarily on John’s bed, and John climbed into his lap, wrapping his arms around the man’s neck. “And you’re so rarely this accessible,” the Time Lord smirked, rolling so that John’s back hit the blankets and the Master loomed above him.

The Master Mark XVI had know this had to be good when his normally composed Twelfth regeneration had shown up in his TARDIS entirely unannounced, bouncing on the balls of his feet gleefully. The younger version babbled, grinning and disheveled, about a “tip from his successor,” how he “absolutely must see this” and how it was “the best thing since the whole ‘exiled to Earth’ farrago.”

Quite right he’d been, too. The Master couldn’t come close to approving of what the Doctor had done to himself, or fathom why he'd have taken this route, even if it was only temporary. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take advantage of the lapse in the Doctor's guard—1913 made a welcome diversion from the front, being pleasantly free of harping Time Lords who laughably assumed they knew better than the Master how to bring about destruction on a massive scale and screaming Daleks both. He could afford a dalliance before the fleet rendezvoused at Arcadia. Rassilon knew he needed one.

He’d slinked into John Smith’s room, creeping up behind him and enjoying the irony of the Doctor hunched over a desk, diligently grading papers. The Master cupped a hand around John’s eyes and reveled in the man’s jump. His little singular heart thudded wildly like a rabbit's caught in a snare. The Master pinned John to the chair with his other arm. “Guess who?” He whispered into the crook of his neck. The Doctor licked his dry lips, stuttered out a confused demand. Whoever this was had better stop playing tricks this instant. This was his private study, after all.

“Fine,” The Master nuzzled the exposed column. Even as a human the Doctor still reacted to that. He shivered in his seat at the familiar contact, bending into the caress of lips on his neck in the particular graceful way the Doctor always did, in any regeneration. The two of them had long ago developed a very specific vocabulary of touch. The Master was delighted to reacquaint him with it. “I’m certainly not adverse to studying you very privately indeed.”

“I,” John Smith gulped. The man clearly wanted to fly, but he was tethered to the ground by ludicrous human mores that were nothing of the Doctor’s, and so less than nothing to the Master. “But who—I just can’t—”

It was cruel to cage birds, grotesque to limit something that needed to soar. That was the Doctor though, always clipping his own wings and insisting he didn't mind being broken.

“Oh,” the Master soothed, “I think you’ll find you can.” A quick revival of his classic hypnotic pick up line and the human form of the Doctor, freed of his inhibitions (and it had been as easy, as gentle an encouragement as opening a latch and letting the door swing open), was twining into his latest Master’s arms like a tom mewling for catnip.

“This is lovely,” the Doctor smiled dreamily up at him, silly with acquiescence, “but it seems to happen to me a lot lately.”

“Uh huh,” the Master muttered, indulgent, unscrewing the cap of John’s pomade bottle, “Undress, Doctor.”

“That’s not my name, all these men with their ‘Doctor’ this and ‘Theta’ that—if I’m to be molested in the night, my ravishers could at least get the name they say when they find satisfaction correct,” John sulked, squirming his way out of his pants while still staying on the bed, revealing interesting glimpse of this version’s highly articulated hipbones and paper-pale skin.

The Master licked his lips. “Strip John then, you never could pick a pseudonym. And the shirt as well. Rassilon you should eat, I could play your ribs like a xylophone. Are they not feeding you here?”

“I mean it though,” John pouted, confused, unbuttoning his shirt and leaning up into the Master’s caress when he had the buttons sorted, “Really a lot. First was this terribly excitable Londoner. And after that there was this sort of Anglo-Indian chap. And then this one I think was lost from the Shakespeare troupe that came through? All of them wanted me to call them—” John licked his lips nervously and blushed, “Well. It’s going to sound a bit silly. They all wanted me to address them as Master.”

“Not a bit silly,” the Master said cordially, enjoying the Doctor naively mouthing his name like it was dirty, “I go by that too, in fact. I’ll want you to say it quite a lot, with as much oomph as your decidedly silly singular little heart can manage. Legs up, dear.”

“I’m not going to remember this in the morning, am I?” John frowned and complied, “I never do. Only I think I might like to remember. It always feels incredible.”

“Thank you, but it’s 1913. If your decrepit TARDIS managed the transition correctly at all, your fragile period sensibilities could have you retching at the prospect.” The Master’s voice was brisk, and his fingers were efficient as he prepared John.

“Sometimes I dream about you and those other men, on nights when you don’t visit me,” John admitted, breathy as the Master breached him in earnest. John starred up at the stranger, trying to make eye contact, “I think I know you.”

“Typical,” the Master rolled his eyes and his hips in one smooth motion, “You always think that.”

John looked at the Master’s shoulder and tried to speak evenly despite the heady thrill of being filled. “I dream I want you with me so much it feels like my hearts will break under the strain of it. Can you imagine that?” The Master stilled inside him, and John took a deep breath. “Two hearts, I mean. Mad, I know.” John half chuckled awkwardly, but then sobered. “I wish you’d stay ‘till morning.”

“John,” the Master rested an open hand on his chest, “You don’t mean that.”

“I know what I mean. I’m a grown man, you think I can’t sort my own feelings? All my life I’ve never felt so much for anyone as I do for you in bloody dreams!”

“Maybe you do know what you want, then,” the Master smiled, a bit rueful, “But he doesn’t. Never has. I don’t know that he ever will.”

Sweet, terribly human John thought he could speak for the Doctor because he caught the barest fragments of a Time Lord's inconceivable mind in dreams. It was like a man being presented with a thread and thinking he could grasp the tapestry it came from. The Master was too used to the Doctor's evasions to let himself believe that John could be voicing some quintessence of the other man's feeling for him. Any such tendency towards naïveté had been ground out of him centuries ago.

John opened his pretty, willing mouth to object to the Master's dismissal. “Shush,” the Master used a touch more hypnotic suggestion, “Just don’t think about it any more.”

The Master began to fuck John again. He alternated long stokes with quick, emphatic bursts. His eyes snapped closed in painful bliss when John clenched and screamed a version of his name he shouldn’t have known in this form. When the Master came a few strokes later he had the courtesy to bite his lip and not say anything at all.

***

Title: Silk Tie

Author: x_los[Unknown site tag]

Rating: NC-17

Pairing:  Ten/Simm!Master (historic Three/Delgado!Master)

Summary: Eroding their common ground.

Beta: deborah_judge: for lo, once the ending of this was truly lame, and she said unto me, 'Um. No.'  Verily, she was correct.

A/N: edited request for best_enemies Anon Meme

The Doctor hadn't expected to wake up young again, with a familiar salmon-coloured tie gagging him. It still tasted like it had the first time the Master had shoved it in the Doctor's mouth--like silk, and, ever so slightly, like skin. Then, as now, it had just been uncoiled from its resting place on the Master's neck, where it had been tight-strung all day. Where it had taken on a touch of his flavor from the contact--faint, but a Gallifreyan's senses could still discern these things.

The Doctor couldn't help but recall the ties' debut. The Master had hauled the Doctor out of a prison cell, still weak from the Keller Machine, fucked him over the warden's desk, and unceremoniously tossed him, staggering from the abuse, back for a confused Jo to tend to when he'd finished.

To the Doctor's hyper-sensitive nose, which brushed past water and cleaning products and centuries like the misdirecting cues they were, the tie even still smelled of the cologne the Master had used in that body—oranges and anise.

Smell was the sense best correlated to memory. The Doctor had caught a whiff of something similar enough to trigger him while wandering a bazaar in Carthage a year ago and felt instantly aroused. Unfathomable loneliness, cut through with shame, had swelled over him in the next second like a wave. That encounter had been far from romantic, and while it might be understandable to occasionally miss Koschei, missing the Master was an act of self-delusion, and yearning for him involved a willing suspension of disbelief.

The reality of having the Master back had turned out to be far more terrible than the content of his fantasies. He thought of Earth and felt sick with guilt for having wanted this. Dreamed of this. Gotten off to the memory of it when he'd thought the Master lost forever.

"Was that as good for you as last time?" the Master drawled. He didn't even seem to mind the Doctor's lack of response, sated as he was. He eased the tie out of the Doctor’s jaw with a smirk. His fingers compulsively stroked the moist silk, tracing near-fond whorls.

The Doctor wondered if in the lonely nights of the past centuries the Master had wrapped the tie around his neck and tightened it until it hurt just right, his other hand jerking his hardness in imitation of the rapid rhythm of Theta's bobbing mouth. He had probably wound it around his cock like a streamer on a Maypole and remembered, curled his fingers hard around his constrained length and pretended he was fucking the Doctor instead of his own hand. How many of these images were products of the Doctor’s imagination versus telling telepathic bleedover from having just been in contact with the Master was a matter of speculation, but the pictures were awfully vivid to be anything but flashes of recollection.

"You do seem to take to captivity," the Master muttered, "I'd almost say you missed this thing, the way you've sucked the salt off it." His mad grin was soft with afterglow. "I like it when you're greedy."

"Yeah. It was as good as the last time," the Doctor assumed a thoughtful expression, "but then I wasn't thinking of you then, either. Good thing about gags—no one hears what name you might have screamed. Spares everyone hurt feelings and embarrassment, that."

The Doctor grinned under the rapid crack of the back of the Master's hand across his face. Had he wanted to hear he'd been mourned, been missed? In the last years, in the centuries before? He had the world at his feet and he wanted the Doctor to thank him for it? The Master left without speaking, looking raw. As if something he’d valued had been tainted beyond recovery.

The slap helped. It made the Doctor feel slightly less ashamed to have come for him, gagging out pleas for more around an old silk tie, while Earth burned beneath them.