Let No Man Put Asunder: Chapter 1 (Part I)
Jun. 1st, 2010 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losficTitle: Let No Man Put Asunder: Chapter 1 (Part I)
Chapter: One : ?
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
x_los
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Five/Ainley!Master, Leela, Rodan
Summary: By the end of What Rassilon Hath Joined Together, the Doctor was the president of Gallifrey, and married. To the Master. Who was about to re-enter academia, and going to try not to kill anyone for ten minutes together. Clearly the presidency will be interesting.
Beta:aralias, who is probably eating nice wedding cake right now, the jammy thing. Know what I have to eat? Pate and some bread. And I'm not even sure I like pate.
Let No Man Put Asunder
The Master was having a hard time deciding which was more unacceptable: the atrocious décor of the Presidential suite, or its appalling security.
For its part, the décor included some truly inexcusable mauve-and-beige sponge painting.
“Mauve is the recognized intergalactic signal for danger,” Borusa’s deposed High Secretary had said in defense of his late, unlamented superior’s taste, having abandoned any attempt to defend his moral choices. “Danger—that’s rather, er, sexy, don’t you think?” His delivery suffered from his never having used ‘sexy’ as a descriptor before in his lives.
The Master did not think. Or rather he did, but not (if he could possibly help it) about the perilous allure of sponge painting.
The security, meanwhile, appeared to consist of the Palace Guard and good intentions. Having executed a president in this building before, the Master was not impressed with the defensive capabilities of either. He glared at the milling adjuncts as they loaded up the former President’s belongings for return to his House. No doubt they were mentally doing the same with their own possessions. Promoting a presidential support staff had degenerated into a purely political means of distributing favors some generations ago. Borusa’s band had no reason to expect to retain their prestigious attaché positions after a regime change. All the more reason then to want to covertly rid themselves of the former-renegade incumbent and his inconvenient husband.
Two days ago the Master would have sneered at the likelihood of such a scenario provoking a political assassination —Gallifreyans (excepting himself) were usually far too boring to consider anything of the kind. The day before yesterday, however, he couldn’t have imagined that he would turn out to be that inconvenient husband. Given his new position, he was taking the threat rather more seriously.
The Presidential Suite in the citadel was composed of both offices and living quarters. Borusa’s Guards defended both, but the Master severely doubted their reliability. Given the outrages to tradition and aesthetics the Master had witnessed since returning to Gallifrey—the deep corruption on both fronts in the very Council Chambers, for Rassilon’s sake—the Master could hardly call the place safe. It was even possible that the wallpaper of yet-to-be-revealed rooms in the Suite might have some sort of (and here the Master winced on behalf of offended taste) floral print. He and the Doctor simply couldn’t be expected to sleep here.
The Doctor—nursing a heavy hangover from the drugged marital aid—looked around the room with a bleary, uncomprehending unhappiness. The Master felt a stab of sympathy for him, having to endure all this on an already queasy stomach. The carpet was taupe with salmon spackles. The Doctor was absolutely right—power truly had driven Borusa to madness.
“My husband and I will retire to my personal accommodations for the night. Perhaps we’ll consider occupying these quarters when he’s in better health, and ready to deal with the staff.” The Master tsked at the enormous, moldering tapestry covering the whole of one wall, and absently offered his arm to his woozy husband. “And to give serious consideration to some fabric swatches,” he murmured darkly.
The Lord High Secretary boggled at them. “You must be joking.”
“No,” the Master corrected him, “I was stating facts. You need never question whether I’m joking. When I am it will be perfectly clear, because whatever I’ve just said will be terribly amusing. Given your last employer’s lamentable sense of humor, I can understand how you might be confused. Recollections of my own youth are mined with his puns. I avoid thinking of whole decades because I dimly recall an unhappy witticism of his from that time. If I examined the period too closely I would undoubtedly remember the remark in full.” The Master clapped the man on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate the distinction, in time. The Doctor and I will retire to my apartments until he’s rested. Tell Chancellor Flavia we’ll be in touch.”
“You can’t not take up residence in the Presidential Suites!” the Lord High Secretary sputtered. “It’s unheard of!”
The Master—busy tugging an insensate Doctor out of the room—paused. “And yet I just told you as much. Perhaps your confusion stems from a hearing issue, Lord High Secretary? I’d look into that, were I you, which fortunately I am not.”
“Muuh,” The Doctor whimpered. For a very attractive man, he looked like hell. Not even ‘hell warmed over’ so much as ‘hell very lightly toasted.’ He had started the day annoyingly fresh and chipper, as per usual, but, as it wore on, the aftereffects of the drug, staggered like its initial onset, had blossomed into pain, confusion and lassitude. And, for hours now, they had been dealing with a cavalcade of Ministers who didn’t give a fig for the Doctor’s slowly deteriorating state.
“Come along, Doctor.” The Master forcibly linked their arms to guide the Doctor’s incompliant limbs through the doorway.
***
The Presidential Shuttle was, thankfully, less gauche than the office. The Master, irritable after a day of the inconveniences that accompanied ruling the planet as an elected official rather than a conqueror (and not even that, merely assisting the Doctor’s regime), flipped on the com and growled his home address into the system.
Dematerialization travel on Gallifrey proper was limited, as it had to be delicately managed so as not to interfere with Gallifrey’s carefully maintained artificial positioning outside of time. Most transport planetside consisted of fast shuttles, flung hither and yon by traffic controllers. The controllers took a start location and a destination entered by passengers, and then mapped a course compatible with all other travel in the city. They used the same massive logistics computers that an older, more ruthlessly expansionist Gallifrey had once organized her battle fleets with.
“Do you think Borusa kept painkillers in here?” the Doctor asked, his voice thin and reedy with pain. The Master turned to look at him. His hair was matted to his temple, sweat-sticky. He smiled weakly at the Master. “You might have warned me the next day was going to be this awful.”
The Master chuckled, crossing to the Doctor. “When exactly in the course of last night do you think you might have been interested in hearing about the side effects? Besides, it isn’t so very terrible, usually.” His sneer was at odds with his softly chiding tone. His ungloved hand made a soft pass over the Doctor’s slick hair. “Only you drank so very much.”
The Doctor laughed with light bitterness at his mistake. “And I’m paying for it now.”
The Master raised an eyebrow. Now implied that the Doctor hadn’t found the drug’s earlier, aphrodisiac affects much of a torment. “You should have paid attention in Gallifreyan Sociohistory.”
“Gallifreyan Sociohistory,” the Doctor said, “had no business being before second sunrise. That alone should have signaled Borusa’s oncoming madness. Who deliberately schedules anything that early in the day? Oh, how could we have missed the signs?” The Doctor’s sardonic expression dissolved into a wince. “You have no idea where he might stow drugs?”
“There’s not so much as a glove compartment for them, no,” the Master said, glancing around and feeling useless. A big believer in gloves, the Master was also keen on compartments for the keeping of them. Borusa’s shuttle’s lack of same was yet another proof of the man’s inadequacy. He ran a tentative hand over the Doctor’s head again. “We’ll arrive soon enough.”
“Soon enough for you,” the Doctor sniped tiredly. “Not all of us found a convenient potted plant.”
Within a microspan the shuttle had delivered them to a private docking bay. The Master leaned forward to access the console and keyed in a security code. Then another. And another still.
“You’re paranoid,” the Doctor pointed out rather redundantly. He looked and sounded a little better to the Master, having evidently perked up in the absence of the unending barrage of government functionaries.
“Merely thorough,” the Master answered, distracted, as he entered a rotating modulation based on irrational numbers.
“No wonder you were so handy at Rassilon’s puzzles,” the Doctor observed. “Your own personal security is positively labyrinthine. Do you plan to tell me how these work at any point, or am I to remain trapped in here at your whim?” The Doctor would have tried arching an eyebrow, but he had a suspicion that would hurt.
“How very La Belle et la Bête of me,” the Master mused, leaning back and letting the shuttle slip in past the unfurling locks. “The majority of these are intended for when I’m off-planet, and won’t be activated during the course of our daily lives. If you give the government plenty of reason to break into your abode, and if you plan to be systems and centuries away at the time, you cannot be too careful.”
“Er,” said the Doctor, who hadn’t visited his own apartments since fleeing Gallifrey with Susan. His family still on the planet had let him know when agents of the state had invaded the unassuming rooms in which he’d raised his son and, briefly, his granddaughter. His abandoned possessions had been itemized, catalogued, and stored in a massive warehouse with the personal goods of others who’d fallen out of favor with Gallifrey.
This was done more out of spite than out of any need on the part of the state. Nothing brought to the CIA’s warehouse was ever thoroughly examined, utilized or auctioned off. Perhaps, now that he was president, he could, with just a simple signature, summon back all the things he’d had to leave behind. With a word he could reclaim the property in the hills that had been seized when his mother died, and the living trust she held it in lapsed. The beloved summerhouse hadn’t even been sold off to another family that might have had some use for it—no one but their family had been so unfashionable as to want to live outside the capitol. It had been left by to rot unused. The Doctor wondered if the old hermit K’Anpo had gone back to the mountains after the Doctor’s own third death.
“Expecting to be carried over the threshold, Doctor?” the Master teased, not unkindly, from a corridor that the shuttle doors hadn’t opened onto a second before. The Doctor blinked, startled out of the dreamy, half-drugged reverie. He stood, caught his balance, and walked to meet the Master slowly. The Master ushered him into a lift, and again entered a pass code before pressing the button for the top floor.
“The laboratories are located on the lower levels, to minimize the chance of accidental damage to the living areas. There’s one I rarely use that might suit your needs, if properly outfitted.” The Master bit down the jibe that a dilettante like the Doctor might well be satisfied with a single working laboratory. He wouldn’t have meant it, and the Doctor was too ill to properly appreciate his insults and banter satisfactorily. “The vehicle hanger is below that.” The lift stopped with a light ping, and opened onto a much plusher, less industrial corridor. “Our apartments are straight on.”
Behind a thick, silver-wood door, ringed with lights that glowed a soft green at their arrival, lay an expansive room overlooking the city. The sunset, visible through the thick shield that distorted the light, shaded from burnt sienna into aubergine. The Doctor caught a glimpse of a real kitchen—something of an oddity on a planet where food replication was commonplace.
Though he’d never known Koschei to cook, he could easily see him enjoying the intricate process of it all: the carefully planned recipes with their subtle deviations, the emphasis on a lot of big, shiny, very sharp knives. It didn’t seem quite fair that in addition to growing more morally reprehensible as time went on, the Master had also developed in pleasant, interesting ways as he’d aged—that because of the Master’s stupid ambition, the Doctor had been cheated out that growth and the company of his best friend.
A long table of the same silver wood as the door and the wainscoting stretched out in the middle of the dining room. It was massive, gray and as severe as a sacrificial altar, though its legs were elegantly carved. It was too long for one man, or even one family, to reasonably dine at. The entire aesthetic of the place was all very Master. It was all very not-this-Master.
“Who’s your decorator?” the Doctor teased tiredly.
“My twelfth self,” the Master said shortly, “I apologize for the bookshelves.” They were rather too groovy for the rest of the room, in a teak, circular sort of way.
The Doctor blinked in surprise. “You were back as late as that?”
“I used this as a base of operations for some time, and quite successfully.” The Master smirked at his own daring. “The materialization corridor I designed allowed me to enter and exit Gallifrey undetected by the authorities.” The Master’s smug smile settled on the Doctor. “Didn’t you wonder how I learned of your exile? Or from where I obtained access to the heart of the Matrix?”
“Well yes, but I never expected you to have the gall to set up shop in your own quarters.”
“The only location in which I could be sure of the security, Doctor.” The Master rapped the cream and silver papered wall with his knuckles. “I may modify it, since I expect our stay will be of some duration.”
The Doctor felt oddly uncomfortable at the suggestion. It was so obviously that Master’s home, now that he knew to look for it. A book lay open on the table, face-up. The Doctor walked over, tracing his finger over a line of text, recognizing Wells. The perfect temporal stasis field that kept house in the Master’s absence meant that dust hadn’t dared settle in the intervening centuries. He might have left a moment ago, for how fresh the room looked.
A box of components had been left out on the dining table, because a younger Master had taken the one he’d been hunting and immediately gone out, never to return. The Doctor felt an odd surge of compassion for the man who’d left this place in what had evidently been a hurry. Had he headed to Earth? Or to the black hole that had claimed that body before the next Doctor met the shriveled shell of him, blackened and miserable.
The Doctor could still hear the sound of the Master’s skin cracking, his burnt muscles pulling as he moved. The anguish the Master must have suffered defied imagination. So many people had died to make him whole again, but when the Master had last left this place, none of that had come to pass. All that suffering might still have been avoided with a little more care. The Doctor suspected he might have handled things—handled him—better.
“Leave it,” the Doctor muttered. He allowed himself a small, nostalgic fondness for the deep carpet. For the long couches, and for the man who’d lain on them and read a human book, and no doubt thought of him. “I like it.”
“It’s outmoded, Doctor. I can certainly do better.” The Master spared a look of disdain for the heavy navy draperies. He seemed disgusted, as if he wished to eradicate all the earlier things he’d done and been. Briskly the Master swept down a corridor to the right of these main rooms, and through another wooden door, revealing his private suite: a bedroom, and a study.
“It’s lovely,” the Doctor held firm, trailing after him. “I wish you’d leave it.”
“Bathroom,” the Master ignored him, pushing open another door off the bedroom, showing the Doctor in. He headed back into the main rooms, mentioning something about updating the security codes.
“Perfect,” the Doctor sighed appreciatively, unsurprised but pleased to note that the Master had forgone the quick sonic shower in favor of a more decadent, old-fashioned water basin. It was the quaint type in which water cascaded down in sheets from the walls at adjustable pressures. As the user desired, it either drained like a shower or pooled deep enough to swim in, depending on the settings chosen.
The Doctor—who was tired and who ached from rather a lot of physical exercise with muscles he was unaccustomed to using—opted to soak until he couldn’t feel his thighs at all, let alone the pain in them.
When he’d finished he grabbed a charcoal grey dressing gown off the hook and tied it around his waist, nothing with subdued amusement that it was much too short for him: it hung several inches above his ankles. He walked out into the bedroom.
The Master looked up from his data entry pad. He blinked at the Doctor, who stood there in his own former self’s clothing, looking as if he weren’t really sure what to do next. The lights behind him in the bathroom automatically shut off.
“Shall I take the couch tonight?” the Doctor asked, caution in his tone.
The Master started. If the little bastard wanted the couch, couldn’t bear to share his husband’s bed, he could damn well—
The Doctor shifted his weight awkwardly to his other hip, and the Master realized he was simply asking because he had no idea if the Master wanted to fuck him, but not sleep with him. The Doctor wasn’t quite naïve enough to presume that their continued marriage was necessarily anything more than a contract for his body, the use of which he would be expected to occasionally exchange for the Master’s good behavior.
“Come to bed,” the Master snapped. It might have been for the sake of convenience, or out of consideration for the other man, but truthfully, he wanted the Doctor in his bed. He had a host of accompanying fantasies featuring the Doctor over all sorts of surfaces, but ‘in his bed’ was chief among them, and the need was as old and persistent as superstition. For longer than the Master could remember, he’d wanted the Doctor to belong to him enough to sleep beside him. Wanted it so hard he’d thought he’d break.
The Doctor padded over. He slid his long, damp legs neatly under the covers. They brushed against the Master slightly, and the Master shivered.
“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured. He paused a moment “Do you want—”
He was using that cautious tone again, letting the sentence hang, deliberately unfinished. Did the Master want something from him? Did the Master want to use him in accordance with their bargain? Did he require of that of the Doctor, who was sick with exhaustion and obviously just wanted to sleep,?
“I don’t need you to offer because you feel obligated, Doctor,” the Master said, tone harsh, setting down his data pad and pulling out the light by its chain.
In the dark of the room, to which their eyes had yet to adjust, the Master slid a hand under the cool sheet, through the front panel of his old robe, and laid a palm on the Doctor’s stomach. The Master felt the sharp rise and fall of the Doctor’s startled breath. He savored the silky, damp skin like a luxury, unspeakably soft against the calluses on his fingers. They were a tell that the body hadn’t always been his own. Would a Time Lord ever engage in enough physical labor to alter his body in such a fashion? The Master let his lids drop closed, savoring the clench of the muscles under his palm.
“When I want something from you, I’ll take it. Show initiative as it pleases you.” It would certainly please him. He grinned to himself, imagining the Doctor pressing tentatively up against him in their dark bedroom, wanting. He slid his hand down the Doctor’s thigh and out of the robe’s confines, settling it on the bed between them. “But don’t offer me what’s mine.” Like a patronizing, disinterested paid whore.
“Understood,” the Doctor murmured, suddenly surprising the Master by rolling over, perching over him, and lightly kissing him on the lips. Oh how very human of him, that gesture—so unexpected and yet entirely Doctor-esque. “Goodnight, Master.”
Before he could lie back down and resume his original position, the Master caught the Doctor with a hand at the small of his back. He didn’t say anything, but the Doctor could see his eyes now, below him. Bright and expectant.
He dipped his head to the Master’s, touching his lips to his, so the Master felt him just whisper ‘husband,’ as if anyone but the Master might overhear. He ran his tongue over the Master’s lower lip with a surgical delicacy and kissed him properly, slowly sliding deeper into the Master’s mouth with a kind of wary authority. The Master pulled back after a long moment.
“Better,” he said, still feeling slightly bereft when the Doctor climbed off and turned to face the wall.
***
The Master awoke to a note where the Doctor should have been. It read ‘work, sorry.’ The modifiers that indicated the circular sentence’s time of composition showed it to be not yet an hour old. The Master groaned with frustration. He’d had such plans for this morning.
In his closet, the Master pulled out a disused box from behind more recent acquisitions. Sliding back the top revealed the neatly stacked robes of a Prydonian Chair. He winced with self-indulgent exaggeration. Of all the many things he did not want to do today, ‘re-enter the clutches of academia’ was down at the bottom of the list with ‘ask the Doctor all about his thoughts on modern English cricket’ and ‘go back for lovely catch-up chat with Chronos.’
At the front reception desk of the administrative offices, the Master was, to his surprise, waved through before he’d even attempted to hypnotize anyone. The High Chancellor of the college looked up from his data pads when the Master entered his office.
“Ah,” he stood, “you’ll be wanting your office then, won’t you?” He removed a key from the top drawer of his desk.
“Certainly,” the Master said silkily, giving the man a suspicious look. Inwardly he was floundering. He’d come in prepared to threaten, and to insinuate that, via his connection to the president, there would be the Direst Consequences if he wasn’t reinstated. “But I might ask why you’re being so very obliging.”
“Think nothing of it.” The College Chancellor smiled brightly at him. “In point of fact, the rooms haven’t been disturbed at all since you left. You’ll find your materials in good order,” he dropped his voice to mutter, “presuming you left them in any.”
The Chancellor had a rather low opinion of the Master’s neatness. Once he’d walked in to have a word with his latest acquisition, only to find a young, freshly appointed version of the professor before him standing, hair askew and face coated in grit, over the smoldering remains of a time experiment. The Master had hastily tried to explain—something about an interfering friend’s idea of a joke—but without listening the Chancellor had swept off with a raised eyebrow, shaking his head at this Master’s idea of professionalism.
The Master braced both hands on the College Chancellor’s desk, leaned down to fix his superior with a hard look, and smiled toothily. “That’s terribly kind of you, but I’d still like an answer. A real one, if it wouldn’t inconvenience you. Not that I don’t appreciate flattery, but I do so enjoy being in possession of all the facts.”
The College Chancellor arched an eyebrow. “It’s only a matter of time before our—shall we call it ‘aggressively capable?’—government returns its more useful lost lambs to the fold. I anticipated that eventually, after you’d got,” here a euphemistic hand gesture served to convey ‘several centuries of variously successful schemes and an undeniably impressive body count,’ “out of your system, you’d resume your position.” The Chancellor organized the data pads on his table, suddenly enthralled with stacking. “And that you’d appreciate finding things as you left them.”
It dawned on the Master that—wry, detached façade or not—the Chancellor had been simply terrified that the Master would come back to find a paperweight absconded with, and kill them all. This shifted the workplace dynamic to something the Master found rather amenable.
“Of course, I’ll want my research grants back.” The Master ever so casually rapped his fingers on something hard in a pocket of his robe. It was actually just a book he’d brought along for his anticipated hours of purgatorial boredom in the waiting room, but it might well have been a hard-bound doomsday weapon. The Chancellor swallowed.
“Surely the standard allotments for a staff-member will suffice.”
“Oh, surely not,” the Master countered smoothly, well aware that he hadn’t even justified himself by presenting the outlines of any of his latest projects—although he was getting a little excited by the prospect of pursuing some of them in the college’s exquisitely appointed laboratories, with a variety of not untalented upper-level students to pawn the boring bits off on.
“You must understand those funds have all been reallocated,” the Chancellor tried. “Assigned to those staff members who, er, didn’t take leaves of absence—”
“I’ve been on an academic sojourn,” the Master corrected. “A practical research term, if you will. And isn’t it interesting how fluid funds are?” He picked up and pocketed the office key on the desk. “First given over to my use, the reassigned, then—who knows?” He quirked an eyebrow at the man. “Though one hopes such confusions may be resolved by the next departmental meeting, which is?”
“In two days, half past second sunrise.”
“On the dot,” the Master promised, intending to arrive a quarter of an hour late at the least, the better to establish his new relationship with the department right off the bat. It wouldn’t do for anyone to assume he could be induced to participate in sickeningly earnest discussions of ‘the direction out department is going in’ twice monthly. He’d hate for anyone to think that he could possibly care about office politics, or faculty vs. student sporting matches of any kind.
He strode off, taking the stairs to his office at a jaunty pace, humming obnoxiously.
***
The Doctor was not hiding in his Presidential office while Borusa’s remaining staff squabbled like animals over who got to take what office supplies. He was not disconsolately sipping his tea, nor was he sullenly wishing everyone would just go away. He was regrouping, really.
He’d showed up early, determined to do something, only to find that the first order of business was just to wait whilst this horde of sulky bureaucrats seeped out of power like water from leaky pipe.
There was no hastening them. There was no helping. There was only enduring the endless bickering. He could still hear it, drifting under the door.
“Well, if you think you’ve some claim on the sonic paper-sorter, then far be it for me to—”
“What exactly are you suggesting, Tammishalondreill?”
“Nothing, nothing at all, just that perhaps the sonic paper-sorter more properly belongs to the government, or to me, who always used it. But of course you know best, dear…”
The Doctor had tried to rally them to give him situation briefings, but all of them had been busily abandoning ship. They’d only barely been respectful enough to not tell him to fuck off when he suggested anyone report to him on anything.
“What a disaster!”
The Doctor briefly wondered why his internal monologue had suddenly become shrill, external, and female, but upon looking up he quickly put down his teacup.
“Rodan!” He grinned weakly. He was actually happy to see a Time Lord for the first time since he’d arrived at the Presidential Suite. “Delightful to run into you again. What brings you here?”
“You, obviously,” she snorted, “Fine mess you’re in. Again.”
“Well,” he smiled weakly. “Not really by choice, this time.”
“That’s no excuse.” Rodan seated herself primly in the seat on the other side of his desk. “None of them have briefed you, or so I understand from the incredibly rude reception I got outside. Anyone could walk in here right now, by the way. I certainly had no trouble. I took the liberty of asking Leela to drop by and do something about the security. She does so enjoy hitting people.” Rodan pulled out a stack of data cards from a box she set on the table. “Anyway, here’s the latest departmental memos.”
“How did you manage to get a hold of these?” the Doctor asked as he leafed through the cabinet reports. He pulled out his wire golden spectacles and began to peruse them in earnest. “I was under the impression that they were highly classified.”
“Access to the traffic matrix entitles one to the exercise a little prurient curiosity,” she shrugged. “It’s an awfully boring job.”
“One for which you seem startlingly over-qualified.”
“Well,” Rodan rolled her eyes, “I’ve often mentioned to Leela that I think she could come in for me and no one would notice.” Rodan clearly didn’t think this expression (the equivalent of ‘a monkey could do it’) was at all unkind. For a very clever woman, she often didn’t think. Gentle prodding towards civility slid off her like rain hitting a thick, cheerful oil slick. Fortunately, Leela, used to the Doctor’s parade of high-handed behavior, just shook her head at the many social inadequacies of Time Lords and let it pass.
The Doctor leaned back in his chair, properly thinking now. “Leela’s just who I need, excellent idea—and I’d like Andred as well, if you’d be so kind as to call him too. Send them in to me when they arrive.”
The Doctor, braced by tea and an exceptionally efficient friendly face, began to compose a staff manifest in earnest. “Incidentally, how do you feel about being my new High Secretary, Rodan?”
Rodan considered it. “Can I start by telling everyone in the antechamber to stop shrieking at each other, clear out, and leave our paper-sorters?”
“I’d expect nothing less.” He offered her his hand.
“Right then, sir.” Rodan shook it firmly. She got up, flung open the door, and began screaming. By the time the door hit the frame behind her, largely blocking out the noise, the Doctor felt quite recovered.
***
The Master hadn’t yet finished sorting through the papers on his desk when there came a polite knock on his door. This was followed by an impolite ‘just opening it despite his pointed lack of response.’
“Ah,” a woman in Oakden House robes entered, gave him a flinty smile and seated herself in a chair without being invited, “the Master in his latest, I presume. Well done with the reappointment. That was quicker than we’d expected.”
“Thank you.” The Master set down a file and didn’t verbalize that it was quicker than he’d expected as well. “What can I do for you?”
“For your House, actually,” the thin woman pulled out a dossier, and set it down on the desk between them. “We’d like you to take on an assistant.”
The Master rolled his eyes. “It may have escaped your notice, but I’ve been living without any reference to the wishes of my House for some time. I’m not taking one of your castoffs under my wing simply because they might be able to claim some distant relationship with me. I plan to engage in work of some importance. Your underling, no doubt a better spy for Oakden interests than a scientist, could only inhibit my progress.”
“When Oakden says ‘we’d like,’ that’s not precisely what we mean, is it?” The woman leaned back and folded her hands in her lap. “We’re quite pleased to have erased the black mark of your exile and gained the prestige of counting the husband of the President among our number—but my, it’s a delicate situation, isn’t it?” she mused. “Why, without the patronage and support of your various kin in the high courts, for example, your husbands’ position remains somewhat precarious. As, by extension, does yours.”
“You wouldn’t threaten us in earnest, not when some opponent of yours might replace the Doctor.” The Master leaned back in his chair, giving her a critical, evaluative look.
“Oh, who can say?” She examined her nails, flicking a spec of grit from underneath one. “As you’ve been abroad some considerable time, let me assure you that Oakden, of all the Houses, still produces the finest lawyers. Your marriage contract has been published, incidentally. Given the complexity of some of those archaic marriage rites, it just might be read that the Doctor’s responsibility as outlined in that contract extends beyond your person. In the event of your unfortunate demise, he might find himself bound to another member of House Oakden. We’d let him choose from a pool of suitable applicants. He does seem to like fresh little things, doesn’t he? Those alien companions you see him with on the holonews are all rather of a type.
“Just think - a lovely young wife—one who knows her duty to her family. A girl of that sort could make him happy enough, couldn’t she? Perhaps more easily than an old, bitter enemy might.”
She looked up at him for the first time in the course of the interview, and the Master was startled to note that she was a new regeneration of someone he dimly recognized—a cousin of his mother’s, with similar eyes to hers. Having emphasized how replaceable he was, she clucked her tongue almost sympathetically and leaned in, taking the prerogative of an elder family member towards her junior.
“Oh Koschei. You’re clever, experienced—you have the potential to be quite an asset to us, and to do very well for yourself. You’ve been away long enough to forget how these things work. We hate to loose talented people over little misunderstandings like this.”
With a tight smile, she stood. “Learn to play ball, hm?” She arched a brow at him, disinterested and vicious as a knife. She opened the door, and snapped her fingers. With an expression of concealed irritation, a young man, awkward in his own body, shifted in.
“Surielovnetchka, this is the Master. This is an unparalleled opportunity for you, child, to work with a,” her expression fluttered nastily, “unique intellect. Do make good use of it, won’t you?” She pinched the boy’s cheek hard. “I’ll leave you to it then. I’m sure you’ll get along splendidly.”
She swept out, her elegant, inky robe trailing behind her like a lingering cloud. The boy sullenly kicked at its tail as she passed.
“Look,” the boy began as soon as the sound-proof door slid shut, “if you’d wanted an assistant she wouldn’t have spent that long talking to you. She’s not exactly large on pleasantries. We’ll just tell them it’s going splendidly. Occasionally we can write individual progress reports on something so boring they won’t bother to read them. I’ll go back to my research projects, and you’ll do,” he frowned anxiously, making it clear that someone had failed to properly brief him on his new employer, “whatever it is that you do, unmolested. And that’ll be that. All right?” He wavered slightly against the severity of the Master’s raised eyebrow, and felt compelled to add, “Sir?”
The Master leaned back and gestured to a chair. “Be seated.”
The boy sagged into it. ‘Be seated’ was the prelude to a longer discussion than he’d really wanted to have about all this. “What was that name again?”
“Surielovnetchka. Of Oakden.” The boy in question muttered the last, appallingly obvious part with some sarcasm.
“Well Surielovnetchka, why are they so very eager to hide you away, and bind you to me in academic servitude?” He smirked at the boy’s blanch. Either he wasn’t a spy, or he was a better spy than someone so apparently young was likely to be. Perhaps Oakden wanted something else from this arrangement than simply to seed an informant.
So what could they really be after? The Master set himself to ripping open the child in from of him like a ripe pomegranate. He was content to destroy or discard much of him in pursuit of the little he wanted.
“You’ve done something humiliating, but not a large, terrible something. No. Something all Gallifrey could conceivably forget, given adequate time.”
A muscle in the boy’s cheek twitched. “If you assume that’s the case, I can’t see why you’d want me as an assistant,” he persevered, clearly hoping for a rally for his ‘pretend we never met’ plan.
“Scandals are always more interesting than unimpeachable reputations,” the Master countered with a smirk. “How old are you?”
The boy crossed his arms defensively over his chest instead of answering.
“Only as old as you look, then,” the Master concluded. “Why do you even need an academic patron? Surely a bright student from a good family hasn’t wandered around unattached in anticipation of my arrival?”
“Can we just—”
“Who was your superior, and why have you severed that connection?”
“Riatchbel,” the boy snapped curtly. “He died last week.”
The Master considered this. Riatchbel had been one of his more interesting university colleagues. Less suffocating boring than many of them, anyway. “Matrix theory, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. Now can I—”
“How did he manage to get himself killed, I wonder?”
“It was a lab accident, all right?”
The Master snorted derisively. “A lab accident? Riatchbel was primary a folklorist. Are you sure he didn’t lose himself in the Grand Archives and starve to death somewhere in the section on ancient urns?”
“I don’t find your levity about the accident clever,” the boy bristled. “Riatchbel had become interested in practical application. We were trying to build a working model of a black hole converter, after what research tells us about Rassilon’s original.”
“A black hole converter,” the Master breathed, suddenly much more interested. “Riatchbel was obviously far more ambitious than I gave him credit for.”
“We had a good theoretical model,” the boy insisted, now defending their work. Clearly he’d wanted to do so for some time, and hadn’t been afforded the opportunity. “The power flow—we had it under control, the accident analyst is mad. It’s the matter compression we were stuck on, that’s what caused the explosion that killed Riatchbel. And fair enough. No one’s managed true compression since the original.”
“Ah.” The Master flashed a quick, self-contented smile. “That’s not entirely correct.”
The boy started. “You’re joking.”
The Master sighed and decided against delivering yet again giving the ‘joking versus not joking’ lecture. “In an imperfect form that attaches exclusively to organic molecules and structures they’ve closely intermingled with enough to allow a transference of material, say, clothing: yes, I’ve achieved it. Quite neatly, if I do say so myself.” He did. Regularly.
“And the variable density compensation, as well,” the Master continued. “With some adjustment to its underlying principles, my TCE could be expanded into a full omni-material compression device, identical to the one that powers the arcane Eye of Harmony. If someone’s done the research to figure out how the initial developers dealt with the power flow issue.”
“That’s brilliant,” the boy enthused, then qualified his enthusiasm. “Well, if you’re not just exaggerating some lesser dimension-shift shrinkage effect and calling it matter compression, that’s brilliant. Can I see the device?”
“I’ll thank you not to insult me again. It’s not fairground chicanery. It is brilliant because I’m brilliant. And in due time, perhaps you may. If you’ll hand over Riatchbel’s notes and explain the lines of your work to me, we might be able to complete the project. Think of it,” he marveled to himself, pounding a fist on the desk, excited at the notion. “The power to create and maintain super-stable black holes, rediscovered!” He turned back to the boy. “I trust the House was displeased with you for having been involved in research efforts that failed so spectacularly?”
“They would have been fine if it had worked,” the boy groused. “They would have hailed us as intellectual luminaries. Theirs is a very outcome-based morality.” He fiddled with a glass sphere on the Master’s desk he probably thought was a paperweight. The Master made the politic decision not to tell him it was actually the egg sack of a giant spider composed of living rock that he’d encountered in his travels. He’d stolen the egg sack in the hopes of breeding an indestructible fighting force, but had never gotten around to springing it on the Doctor.
“That can’t have been the extent of your failure.” The Master knew the degrees of official Gallifreyan displeasure (intimately). Oakden had been Extremely Miffed, but Surielovnetchka's offense should only have merited a Put Out sort of dissatisfaction.
“Well no,” the boy admitted. “I went and got myself killed in the explosion too, along with Riatchbel, didn’t I? Only I had spare regenerations left.”
The Master blinked. “Surielovnetchka. You got yourself killed and had to regenerate in your first century? That must have looked like uncommon carelessness.”
“Mostly professors just call me Suri. And, er, I regenerated from a girl, as well.”
A high degree of regenerative morphism was looked on as bad form. The Doctor’s wild swings from body to disparate body showed poor breeding, but failures to maintain static gender were just beyond the pale. And House Oakden, which prided itself on its strict maintenance of controllable genetics and billed itself to prospective breeding contract partners accordingly, would not suffer this child’s failure to be widely publicized.
Such petty-mindedness represented a politically incorrect opinion, certainly, but Oakden viewed current public opinion with detachment, and even with slight amusement. They thought it presumptuous that anyone else might imagine they could possibly have fathomed how things should be half as well as Oakden. Surielovnetchka was supposed to hide away in obscurity under the Master’s tutelage until everyone forgot he hadn’t been born a he. Surielovnetchka was sensibly very irritated with the century of stultifying inactivity such a proposal implied.
Gallifrey as an institution had made some entertainingly bad decisions lately. They had come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the Doctor was to give the Doctor giddy amounts of power over them, and then to marry him off to the Master when they might well have let that contract continue to molder undiscovered. The Master had his doubts as to the sanity of both choices. Likewise they seemed to think that giving the Master the use of an apparently gifted, obviously embittered assistant would result in both of them learning to play ball, rather than in him putting the child to work for his own benefit and ultimately encouraging his disobedience.
Other people, he considered almost pityingly, could be so very stupid.
“Surielovnetchka—”
“Suri.”
“Surielovnetchka,” the Master repeated, “I believe an alliance might actually be of some use to us both.”
***
Part II
Chapter: One : ?
Author:
x_losRating: R
Pairing/Characters: Five/Ainley!Master, Leela, Rodan
Summary: By the end of What Rassilon Hath Joined Together, the Doctor was the president of Gallifrey, and married. To the Master. Who was about to re-enter academia, and going to try not to kill anyone for ten minutes together. Clearly the presidency will be interesting.
Beta:
aralias, who is probably eating nice wedding cake right now, the jammy thing. Know what I have to eat? Pate and some bread. And I'm not even sure I like pate. Let No Man Put Asunder
The Master was having a hard time deciding which was more unacceptable: the atrocious décor of the Presidential suite, or its appalling security.
For its part, the décor included some truly inexcusable mauve-and-beige sponge painting.
“Mauve is the recognized intergalactic signal for danger,” Borusa’s deposed High Secretary had said in defense of his late, unlamented superior’s taste, having abandoned any attempt to defend his moral choices. “Danger—that’s rather, er, sexy, don’t you think?” His delivery suffered from his never having used ‘sexy’ as a descriptor before in his lives.
The Master did not think. Or rather he did, but not (if he could possibly help it) about the perilous allure of sponge painting.
The security, meanwhile, appeared to consist of the Palace Guard and good intentions. Having executed a president in this building before, the Master was not impressed with the defensive capabilities of either. He glared at the milling adjuncts as they loaded up the former President’s belongings for return to his House. No doubt they were mentally doing the same with their own possessions. Promoting a presidential support staff had degenerated into a purely political means of distributing favors some generations ago. Borusa’s band had no reason to expect to retain their prestigious attaché positions after a regime change. All the more reason then to want to covertly rid themselves of the former-renegade incumbent and his inconvenient husband.
Two days ago the Master would have sneered at the likelihood of such a scenario provoking a political assassination —Gallifreyans (excepting himself) were usually far too boring to consider anything of the kind. The day before yesterday, however, he couldn’t have imagined that he would turn out to be that inconvenient husband. Given his new position, he was taking the threat rather more seriously.
The Presidential Suite in the citadel was composed of both offices and living quarters. Borusa’s Guards defended both, but the Master severely doubted their reliability. Given the outrages to tradition and aesthetics the Master had witnessed since returning to Gallifrey—the deep corruption on both fronts in the very Council Chambers, for Rassilon’s sake—the Master could hardly call the place safe. It was even possible that the wallpaper of yet-to-be-revealed rooms in the Suite might have some sort of (and here the Master winced on behalf of offended taste) floral print. He and the Doctor simply couldn’t be expected to sleep here.
The Doctor—nursing a heavy hangover from the drugged marital aid—looked around the room with a bleary, uncomprehending unhappiness. The Master felt a stab of sympathy for him, having to endure all this on an already queasy stomach. The carpet was taupe with salmon spackles. The Doctor was absolutely right—power truly had driven Borusa to madness.
“My husband and I will retire to my personal accommodations for the night. Perhaps we’ll consider occupying these quarters when he’s in better health, and ready to deal with the staff.” The Master tsked at the enormous, moldering tapestry covering the whole of one wall, and absently offered his arm to his woozy husband. “And to give serious consideration to some fabric swatches,” he murmured darkly.
The Lord High Secretary boggled at them. “You must be joking.”
“No,” the Master corrected him, “I was stating facts. You need never question whether I’m joking. When I am it will be perfectly clear, because whatever I’ve just said will be terribly amusing. Given your last employer’s lamentable sense of humor, I can understand how you might be confused. Recollections of my own youth are mined with his puns. I avoid thinking of whole decades because I dimly recall an unhappy witticism of his from that time. If I examined the period too closely I would undoubtedly remember the remark in full.” The Master clapped the man on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate the distinction, in time. The Doctor and I will retire to my apartments until he’s rested. Tell Chancellor Flavia we’ll be in touch.”
“You can’t not take up residence in the Presidential Suites!” the Lord High Secretary sputtered. “It’s unheard of!”
The Master—busy tugging an insensate Doctor out of the room—paused. “And yet I just told you as much. Perhaps your confusion stems from a hearing issue, Lord High Secretary? I’d look into that, were I you, which fortunately I am not.”
“Muuh,” The Doctor whimpered. For a very attractive man, he looked like hell. Not even ‘hell warmed over’ so much as ‘hell very lightly toasted.’ He had started the day annoyingly fresh and chipper, as per usual, but, as it wore on, the aftereffects of the drug, staggered like its initial onset, had blossomed into pain, confusion and lassitude. And, for hours now, they had been dealing with a cavalcade of Ministers who didn’t give a fig for the Doctor’s slowly deteriorating state.
“Come along, Doctor.” The Master forcibly linked their arms to guide the Doctor’s incompliant limbs through the doorway.
***
The Presidential Shuttle was, thankfully, less gauche than the office. The Master, irritable after a day of the inconveniences that accompanied ruling the planet as an elected official rather than a conqueror (and not even that, merely assisting the Doctor’s regime), flipped on the com and growled his home address into the system.
Dematerialization travel on Gallifrey proper was limited, as it had to be delicately managed so as not to interfere with Gallifrey’s carefully maintained artificial positioning outside of time. Most transport planetside consisted of fast shuttles, flung hither and yon by traffic controllers. The controllers took a start location and a destination entered by passengers, and then mapped a course compatible with all other travel in the city. They used the same massive logistics computers that an older, more ruthlessly expansionist Gallifrey had once organized her battle fleets with.
“Do you think Borusa kept painkillers in here?” the Doctor asked, his voice thin and reedy with pain. The Master turned to look at him. His hair was matted to his temple, sweat-sticky. He smiled weakly at the Master. “You might have warned me the next day was going to be this awful.”
The Master chuckled, crossing to the Doctor. “When exactly in the course of last night do you think you might have been interested in hearing about the side effects? Besides, it isn’t so very terrible, usually.” His sneer was at odds with his softly chiding tone. His ungloved hand made a soft pass over the Doctor’s slick hair. “Only you drank so very much.”
The Doctor laughed with light bitterness at his mistake. “And I’m paying for it now.”
The Master raised an eyebrow. Now implied that the Doctor hadn’t found the drug’s earlier, aphrodisiac affects much of a torment. “You should have paid attention in Gallifreyan Sociohistory.”
“Gallifreyan Sociohistory,” the Doctor said, “had no business being before second sunrise. That alone should have signaled Borusa’s oncoming madness. Who deliberately schedules anything that early in the day? Oh, how could we have missed the signs?” The Doctor’s sardonic expression dissolved into a wince. “You have no idea where he might stow drugs?”
“There’s not so much as a glove compartment for them, no,” the Master said, glancing around and feeling useless. A big believer in gloves, the Master was also keen on compartments for the keeping of them. Borusa’s shuttle’s lack of same was yet another proof of the man’s inadequacy. He ran a tentative hand over the Doctor’s head again. “We’ll arrive soon enough.”
“Soon enough for you,” the Doctor sniped tiredly. “Not all of us found a convenient potted plant.”
Within a microspan the shuttle had delivered them to a private docking bay. The Master leaned forward to access the console and keyed in a security code. Then another. And another still.
“You’re paranoid,” the Doctor pointed out rather redundantly. He looked and sounded a little better to the Master, having evidently perked up in the absence of the unending barrage of government functionaries.
“Merely thorough,” the Master answered, distracted, as he entered a rotating modulation based on irrational numbers.
“No wonder you were so handy at Rassilon’s puzzles,” the Doctor observed. “Your own personal security is positively labyrinthine. Do you plan to tell me how these work at any point, or am I to remain trapped in here at your whim?” The Doctor would have tried arching an eyebrow, but he had a suspicion that would hurt.
“How very La Belle et la Bête of me,” the Master mused, leaning back and letting the shuttle slip in past the unfurling locks. “The majority of these are intended for when I’m off-planet, and won’t be activated during the course of our daily lives. If you give the government plenty of reason to break into your abode, and if you plan to be systems and centuries away at the time, you cannot be too careful.”
“Er,” said the Doctor, who hadn’t visited his own apartments since fleeing Gallifrey with Susan. His family still on the planet had let him know when agents of the state had invaded the unassuming rooms in which he’d raised his son and, briefly, his granddaughter. His abandoned possessions had been itemized, catalogued, and stored in a massive warehouse with the personal goods of others who’d fallen out of favor with Gallifrey.
This was done more out of spite than out of any need on the part of the state. Nothing brought to the CIA’s warehouse was ever thoroughly examined, utilized or auctioned off. Perhaps, now that he was president, he could, with just a simple signature, summon back all the things he’d had to leave behind. With a word he could reclaim the property in the hills that had been seized when his mother died, and the living trust she held it in lapsed. The beloved summerhouse hadn’t even been sold off to another family that might have had some use for it—no one but their family had been so unfashionable as to want to live outside the capitol. It had been left by to rot unused. The Doctor wondered if the old hermit K’Anpo had gone back to the mountains after the Doctor’s own third death.
“Expecting to be carried over the threshold, Doctor?” the Master teased, not unkindly, from a corridor that the shuttle doors hadn’t opened onto a second before. The Doctor blinked, startled out of the dreamy, half-drugged reverie. He stood, caught his balance, and walked to meet the Master slowly. The Master ushered him into a lift, and again entered a pass code before pressing the button for the top floor.
“The laboratories are located on the lower levels, to minimize the chance of accidental damage to the living areas. There’s one I rarely use that might suit your needs, if properly outfitted.” The Master bit down the jibe that a dilettante like the Doctor might well be satisfied with a single working laboratory. He wouldn’t have meant it, and the Doctor was too ill to properly appreciate his insults and banter satisfactorily. “The vehicle hanger is below that.” The lift stopped with a light ping, and opened onto a much plusher, less industrial corridor. “Our apartments are straight on.”
Behind a thick, silver-wood door, ringed with lights that glowed a soft green at their arrival, lay an expansive room overlooking the city. The sunset, visible through the thick shield that distorted the light, shaded from burnt sienna into aubergine. The Doctor caught a glimpse of a real kitchen—something of an oddity on a planet where food replication was commonplace.
Though he’d never known Koschei to cook, he could easily see him enjoying the intricate process of it all: the carefully planned recipes with their subtle deviations, the emphasis on a lot of big, shiny, very sharp knives. It didn’t seem quite fair that in addition to growing more morally reprehensible as time went on, the Master had also developed in pleasant, interesting ways as he’d aged—that because of the Master’s stupid ambition, the Doctor had been cheated out that growth and the company of his best friend.
A long table of the same silver wood as the door and the wainscoting stretched out in the middle of the dining room. It was massive, gray and as severe as a sacrificial altar, though its legs were elegantly carved. It was too long for one man, or even one family, to reasonably dine at. The entire aesthetic of the place was all very Master. It was all very not-this-Master.
“Who’s your decorator?” the Doctor teased tiredly.
“My twelfth self,” the Master said shortly, “I apologize for the bookshelves.” They were rather too groovy for the rest of the room, in a teak, circular sort of way.
The Doctor blinked in surprise. “You were back as late as that?”
“I used this as a base of operations for some time, and quite successfully.” The Master smirked at his own daring. “The materialization corridor I designed allowed me to enter and exit Gallifrey undetected by the authorities.” The Master’s smug smile settled on the Doctor. “Didn’t you wonder how I learned of your exile? Or from where I obtained access to the heart of the Matrix?”
“Well yes, but I never expected you to have the gall to set up shop in your own quarters.”
“The only location in which I could be sure of the security, Doctor.” The Master rapped the cream and silver papered wall with his knuckles. “I may modify it, since I expect our stay will be of some duration.”
The Doctor felt oddly uncomfortable at the suggestion. It was so obviously that Master’s home, now that he knew to look for it. A book lay open on the table, face-up. The Doctor walked over, tracing his finger over a line of text, recognizing Wells. The perfect temporal stasis field that kept house in the Master’s absence meant that dust hadn’t dared settle in the intervening centuries. He might have left a moment ago, for how fresh the room looked.
A box of components had been left out on the dining table, because a younger Master had taken the one he’d been hunting and immediately gone out, never to return. The Doctor felt an odd surge of compassion for the man who’d left this place in what had evidently been a hurry. Had he headed to Earth? Or to the black hole that had claimed that body before the next Doctor met the shriveled shell of him, blackened and miserable.
The Doctor could still hear the sound of the Master’s skin cracking, his burnt muscles pulling as he moved. The anguish the Master must have suffered defied imagination. So many people had died to make him whole again, but when the Master had last left this place, none of that had come to pass. All that suffering might still have been avoided with a little more care. The Doctor suspected he might have handled things—handled him—better.
“Leave it,” the Doctor muttered. He allowed himself a small, nostalgic fondness for the deep carpet. For the long couches, and for the man who’d lain on them and read a human book, and no doubt thought of him. “I like it.”
“It’s outmoded, Doctor. I can certainly do better.” The Master spared a look of disdain for the heavy navy draperies. He seemed disgusted, as if he wished to eradicate all the earlier things he’d done and been. Briskly the Master swept down a corridor to the right of these main rooms, and through another wooden door, revealing his private suite: a bedroom, and a study.
“It’s lovely,” the Doctor held firm, trailing after him. “I wish you’d leave it.”
“Bathroom,” the Master ignored him, pushing open another door off the bedroom, showing the Doctor in. He headed back into the main rooms, mentioning something about updating the security codes.
“Perfect,” the Doctor sighed appreciatively, unsurprised but pleased to note that the Master had forgone the quick sonic shower in favor of a more decadent, old-fashioned water basin. It was the quaint type in which water cascaded down in sheets from the walls at adjustable pressures. As the user desired, it either drained like a shower or pooled deep enough to swim in, depending on the settings chosen.
The Doctor—who was tired and who ached from rather a lot of physical exercise with muscles he was unaccustomed to using—opted to soak until he couldn’t feel his thighs at all, let alone the pain in them.
When he’d finished he grabbed a charcoal grey dressing gown off the hook and tied it around his waist, nothing with subdued amusement that it was much too short for him: it hung several inches above his ankles. He walked out into the bedroom.
The Master looked up from his data entry pad. He blinked at the Doctor, who stood there in his own former self’s clothing, looking as if he weren’t really sure what to do next. The lights behind him in the bathroom automatically shut off.
“Shall I take the couch tonight?” the Doctor asked, caution in his tone.
The Master started. If the little bastard wanted the couch, couldn’t bear to share his husband’s bed, he could damn well—
The Doctor shifted his weight awkwardly to his other hip, and the Master realized he was simply asking because he had no idea if the Master wanted to fuck him, but not sleep with him. The Doctor wasn’t quite naïve enough to presume that their continued marriage was necessarily anything more than a contract for his body, the use of which he would be expected to occasionally exchange for the Master’s good behavior.
“Come to bed,” the Master snapped. It might have been for the sake of convenience, or out of consideration for the other man, but truthfully, he wanted the Doctor in his bed. He had a host of accompanying fantasies featuring the Doctor over all sorts of surfaces, but ‘in his bed’ was chief among them, and the need was as old and persistent as superstition. For longer than the Master could remember, he’d wanted the Doctor to belong to him enough to sleep beside him. Wanted it so hard he’d thought he’d break.
The Doctor padded over. He slid his long, damp legs neatly under the covers. They brushed against the Master slightly, and the Master shivered.
“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured. He paused a moment “Do you want—”
He was using that cautious tone again, letting the sentence hang, deliberately unfinished. Did the Master want something from him? Did the Master want to use him in accordance with their bargain? Did he require of that of the Doctor, who was sick with exhaustion and obviously just wanted to sleep,?
“I don’t need you to offer because you feel obligated, Doctor,” the Master said, tone harsh, setting down his data pad and pulling out the light by its chain.
In the dark of the room, to which their eyes had yet to adjust, the Master slid a hand under the cool sheet, through the front panel of his old robe, and laid a palm on the Doctor’s stomach. The Master felt the sharp rise and fall of the Doctor’s startled breath. He savored the silky, damp skin like a luxury, unspeakably soft against the calluses on his fingers. They were a tell that the body hadn’t always been his own. Would a Time Lord ever engage in enough physical labor to alter his body in such a fashion? The Master let his lids drop closed, savoring the clench of the muscles under his palm.
“When I want something from you, I’ll take it. Show initiative as it pleases you.” It would certainly please him. He grinned to himself, imagining the Doctor pressing tentatively up against him in their dark bedroom, wanting. He slid his hand down the Doctor’s thigh and out of the robe’s confines, settling it on the bed between them. “But don’t offer me what’s mine.” Like a patronizing, disinterested paid whore.
“Understood,” the Doctor murmured, suddenly surprising the Master by rolling over, perching over him, and lightly kissing him on the lips. Oh how very human of him, that gesture—so unexpected and yet entirely Doctor-esque. “Goodnight, Master.”
Before he could lie back down and resume his original position, the Master caught the Doctor with a hand at the small of his back. He didn’t say anything, but the Doctor could see his eyes now, below him. Bright and expectant.
He dipped his head to the Master’s, touching his lips to his, so the Master felt him just whisper ‘husband,’ as if anyone but the Master might overhear. He ran his tongue over the Master’s lower lip with a surgical delicacy and kissed him properly, slowly sliding deeper into the Master’s mouth with a kind of wary authority. The Master pulled back after a long moment.
“Better,” he said, still feeling slightly bereft when the Doctor climbed off and turned to face the wall.
***
The Master awoke to a note where the Doctor should have been. It read ‘work, sorry.’ The modifiers that indicated the circular sentence’s time of composition showed it to be not yet an hour old. The Master groaned with frustration. He’d had such plans for this morning.
In his closet, the Master pulled out a disused box from behind more recent acquisitions. Sliding back the top revealed the neatly stacked robes of a Prydonian Chair. He winced with self-indulgent exaggeration. Of all the many things he did not want to do today, ‘re-enter the clutches of academia’ was down at the bottom of the list with ‘ask the Doctor all about his thoughts on modern English cricket’ and ‘go back for lovely catch-up chat with Chronos.’
At the front reception desk of the administrative offices, the Master was, to his surprise, waved through before he’d even attempted to hypnotize anyone. The High Chancellor of the college looked up from his data pads when the Master entered his office.
“Ah,” he stood, “you’ll be wanting your office then, won’t you?” He removed a key from the top drawer of his desk.
“Certainly,” the Master said silkily, giving the man a suspicious look. Inwardly he was floundering. He’d come in prepared to threaten, and to insinuate that, via his connection to the president, there would be the Direst Consequences if he wasn’t reinstated. “But I might ask why you’re being so very obliging.”
“Think nothing of it.” The College Chancellor smiled brightly at him. “In point of fact, the rooms haven’t been disturbed at all since you left. You’ll find your materials in good order,” he dropped his voice to mutter, “presuming you left them in any.”
The Chancellor had a rather low opinion of the Master’s neatness. Once he’d walked in to have a word with his latest acquisition, only to find a young, freshly appointed version of the professor before him standing, hair askew and face coated in grit, over the smoldering remains of a time experiment. The Master had hastily tried to explain—something about an interfering friend’s idea of a joke—but without listening the Chancellor had swept off with a raised eyebrow, shaking his head at this Master’s idea of professionalism.
The Master braced both hands on the College Chancellor’s desk, leaned down to fix his superior with a hard look, and smiled toothily. “That’s terribly kind of you, but I’d still like an answer. A real one, if it wouldn’t inconvenience you. Not that I don’t appreciate flattery, but I do so enjoy being in possession of all the facts.”
The College Chancellor arched an eyebrow. “It’s only a matter of time before our—shall we call it ‘aggressively capable?’—government returns its more useful lost lambs to the fold. I anticipated that eventually, after you’d got,” here a euphemistic hand gesture served to convey ‘several centuries of variously successful schemes and an undeniably impressive body count,’ “out of your system, you’d resume your position.” The Chancellor organized the data pads on his table, suddenly enthralled with stacking. “And that you’d appreciate finding things as you left them.”
It dawned on the Master that—wry, detached façade or not—the Chancellor had been simply terrified that the Master would come back to find a paperweight absconded with, and kill them all. This shifted the workplace dynamic to something the Master found rather amenable.
“Of course, I’ll want my research grants back.” The Master ever so casually rapped his fingers on something hard in a pocket of his robe. It was actually just a book he’d brought along for his anticipated hours of purgatorial boredom in the waiting room, but it might well have been a hard-bound doomsday weapon. The Chancellor swallowed.
“Surely the standard allotments for a staff-member will suffice.”
“Oh, surely not,” the Master countered smoothly, well aware that he hadn’t even justified himself by presenting the outlines of any of his latest projects—although he was getting a little excited by the prospect of pursuing some of them in the college’s exquisitely appointed laboratories, with a variety of not untalented upper-level students to pawn the boring bits off on.
“You must understand those funds have all been reallocated,” the Chancellor tried. “Assigned to those staff members who, er, didn’t take leaves of absence—”
“I’ve been on an academic sojourn,” the Master corrected. “A practical research term, if you will. And isn’t it interesting how fluid funds are?” He picked up and pocketed the office key on the desk. “First given over to my use, the reassigned, then—who knows?” He quirked an eyebrow at the man. “Though one hopes such confusions may be resolved by the next departmental meeting, which is?”
“In two days, half past second sunrise.”
“On the dot,” the Master promised, intending to arrive a quarter of an hour late at the least, the better to establish his new relationship with the department right off the bat. It wouldn’t do for anyone to assume he could be induced to participate in sickeningly earnest discussions of ‘the direction out department is going in’ twice monthly. He’d hate for anyone to think that he could possibly care about office politics, or faculty vs. student sporting matches of any kind.
He strode off, taking the stairs to his office at a jaunty pace, humming obnoxiously.
***
The Doctor was not hiding in his Presidential office while Borusa’s remaining staff squabbled like animals over who got to take what office supplies. He was not disconsolately sipping his tea, nor was he sullenly wishing everyone would just go away. He was regrouping, really.
He’d showed up early, determined to do something, only to find that the first order of business was just to wait whilst this horde of sulky bureaucrats seeped out of power like water from leaky pipe.
There was no hastening them. There was no helping. There was only enduring the endless bickering. He could still hear it, drifting under the door.
“Well, if you think you’ve some claim on the sonic paper-sorter, then far be it for me to—”
“What exactly are you suggesting, Tammishalondreill?”
“Nothing, nothing at all, just that perhaps the sonic paper-sorter more properly belongs to the government, or to me, who always used it. But of course you know best, dear…”
The Doctor had tried to rally them to give him situation briefings, but all of them had been busily abandoning ship. They’d only barely been respectful enough to not tell him to fuck off when he suggested anyone report to him on anything.
“What a disaster!”
The Doctor briefly wondered why his internal monologue had suddenly become shrill, external, and female, but upon looking up he quickly put down his teacup.
“Rodan!” He grinned weakly. He was actually happy to see a Time Lord for the first time since he’d arrived at the Presidential Suite. “Delightful to run into you again. What brings you here?”
“You, obviously,” she snorted, “Fine mess you’re in. Again.”
“Well,” he smiled weakly. “Not really by choice, this time.”
“That’s no excuse.” Rodan seated herself primly in the seat on the other side of his desk. “None of them have briefed you, or so I understand from the incredibly rude reception I got outside. Anyone could walk in here right now, by the way. I certainly had no trouble. I took the liberty of asking Leela to drop by and do something about the security. She does so enjoy hitting people.” Rodan pulled out a stack of data cards from a box she set on the table. “Anyway, here’s the latest departmental memos.”
“How did you manage to get a hold of these?” the Doctor asked as he leafed through the cabinet reports. He pulled out his wire golden spectacles and began to peruse them in earnest. “I was under the impression that they were highly classified.”
“Access to the traffic matrix entitles one to the exercise a little prurient curiosity,” she shrugged. “It’s an awfully boring job.”
“One for which you seem startlingly over-qualified.”
“Well,” Rodan rolled her eyes, “I’ve often mentioned to Leela that I think she could come in for me and no one would notice.” Rodan clearly didn’t think this expression (the equivalent of ‘a monkey could do it’) was at all unkind. For a very clever woman, she often didn’t think. Gentle prodding towards civility slid off her like rain hitting a thick, cheerful oil slick. Fortunately, Leela, used to the Doctor’s parade of high-handed behavior, just shook her head at the many social inadequacies of Time Lords and let it pass.
The Doctor leaned back in his chair, properly thinking now. “Leela’s just who I need, excellent idea—and I’d like Andred as well, if you’d be so kind as to call him too. Send them in to me when they arrive.”
The Doctor, braced by tea and an exceptionally efficient friendly face, began to compose a staff manifest in earnest. “Incidentally, how do you feel about being my new High Secretary, Rodan?”
Rodan considered it. “Can I start by telling everyone in the antechamber to stop shrieking at each other, clear out, and leave our paper-sorters?”
“I’d expect nothing less.” He offered her his hand.
“Right then, sir.” Rodan shook it firmly. She got up, flung open the door, and began screaming. By the time the door hit the frame behind her, largely blocking out the noise, the Doctor felt quite recovered.
***
The Master hadn’t yet finished sorting through the papers on his desk when there came a polite knock on his door. This was followed by an impolite ‘just opening it despite his pointed lack of response.’
“Ah,” a woman in Oakden House robes entered, gave him a flinty smile and seated herself in a chair without being invited, “the Master in his latest, I presume. Well done with the reappointment. That was quicker than we’d expected.”
“Thank you.” The Master set down a file and didn’t verbalize that it was quicker than he’d expected as well. “What can I do for you?”
“For your House, actually,” the thin woman pulled out a dossier, and set it down on the desk between them. “We’d like you to take on an assistant.”
The Master rolled his eyes. “It may have escaped your notice, but I’ve been living without any reference to the wishes of my House for some time. I’m not taking one of your castoffs under my wing simply because they might be able to claim some distant relationship with me. I plan to engage in work of some importance. Your underling, no doubt a better spy for Oakden interests than a scientist, could only inhibit my progress.”
“When Oakden says ‘we’d like,’ that’s not precisely what we mean, is it?” The woman leaned back and folded her hands in her lap. “We’re quite pleased to have erased the black mark of your exile and gained the prestige of counting the husband of the President among our number—but my, it’s a delicate situation, isn’t it?” she mused. “Why, without the patronage and support of your various kin in the high courts, for example, your husbands’ position remains somewhat precarious. As, by extension, does yours.”
“You wouldn’t threaten us in earnest, not when some opponent of yours might replace the Doctor.” The Master leaned back in his chair, giving her a critical, evaluative look.
“Oh, who can say?” She examined her nails, flicking a spec of grit from underneath one. “As you’ve been abroad some considerable time, let me assure you that Oakden, of all the Houses, still produces the finest lawyers. Your marriage contract has been published, incidentally. Given the complexity of some of those archaic marriage rites, it just might be read that the Doctor’s responsibility as outlined in that contract extends beyond your person. In the event of your unfortunate demise, he might find himself bound to another member of House Oakden. We’d let him choose from a pool of suitable applicants. He does seem to like fresh little things, doesn’t he? Those alien companions you see him with on the holonews are all rather of a type.
“Just think - a lovely young wife—one who knows her duty to her family. A girl of that sort could make him happy enough, couldn’t she? Perhaps more easily than an old, bitter enemy might.”
She looked up at him for the first time in the course of the interview, and the Master was startled to note that she was a new regeneration of someone he dimly recognized—a cousin of his mother’s, with similar eyes to hers. Having emphasized how replaceable he was, she clucked her tongue almost sympathetically and leaned in, taking the prerogative of an elder family member towards her junior.
“Oh Koschei. You’re clever, experienced—you have the potential to be quite an asset to us, and to do very well for yourself. You’ve been away long enough to forget how these things work. We hate to loose talented people over little misunderstandings like this.”
With a tight smile, she stood. “Learn to play ball, hm?” She arched a brow at him, disinterested and vicious as a knife. She opened the door, and snapped her fingers. With an expression of concealed irritation, a young man, awkward in his own body, shifted in.
“Surielovnetchka, this is the Master. This is an unparalleled opportunity for you, child, to work with a,” her expression fluttered nastily, “unique intellect. Do make good use of it, won’t you?” She pinched the boy’s cheek hard. “I’ll leave you to it then. I’m sure you’ll get along splendidly.”
She swept out, her elegant, inky robe trailing behind her like a lingering cloud. The boy sullenly kicked at its tail as she passed.
“Look,” the boy began as soon as the sound-proof door slid shut, “if you’d wanted an assistant she wouldn’t have spent that long talking to you. She’s not exactly large on pleasantries. We’ll just tell them it’s going splendidly. Occasionally we can write individual progress reports on something so boring they won’t bother to read them. I’ll go back to my research projects, and you’ll do,” he frowned anxiously, making it clear that someone had failed to properly brief him on his new employer, “whatever it is that you do, unmolested. And that’ll be that. All right?” He wavered slightly against the severity of the Master’s raised eyebrow, and felt compelled to add, “Sir?”
The Master leaned back and gestured to a chair. “Be seated.”
The boy sagged into it. ‘Be seated’ was the prelude to a longer discussion than he’d really wanted to have about all this. “What was that name again?”
“Surielovnetchka. Of Oakden.” The boy in question muttered the last, appallingly obvious part with some sarcasm.
“Well Surielovnetchka, why are they so very eager to hide you away, and bind you to me in academic servitude?” He smirked at the boy’s blanch. Either he wasn’t a spy, or he was a better spy than someone so apparently young was likely to be. Perhaps Oakden wanted something else from this arrangement than simply to seed an informant.
So what could they really be after? The Master set himself to ripping open the child in from of him like a ripe pomegranate. He was content to destroy or discard much of him in pursuit of the little he wanted.
“You’ve done something humiliating, but not a large, terrible something. No. Something all Gallifrey could conceivably forget, given adequate time.”
A muscle in the boy’s cheek twitched. “If you assume that’s the case, I can’t see why you’d want me as an assistant,” he persevered, clearly hoping for a rally for his ‘pretend we never met’ plan.
“Scandals are always more interesting than unimpeachable reputations,” the Master countered with a smirk. “How old are you?”
The boy crossed his arms defensively over his chest instead of answering.
“Only as old as you look, then,” the Master concluded. “Why do you even need an academic patron? Surely a bright student from a good family hasn’t wandered around unattached in anticipation of my arrival?”
“Can we just—”
“Who was your superior, and why have you severed that connection?”
“Riatchbel,” the boy snapped curtly. “He died last week.”
The Master considered this. Riatchbel had been one of his more interesting university colleagues. Less suffocating boring than many of them, anyway. “Matrix theory, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. Now can I—”
“How did he manage to get himself killed, I wonder?”
“It was a lab accident, all right?”
The Master snorted derisively. “A lab accident? Riatchbel was primary a folklorist. Are you sure he didn’t lose himself in the Grand Archives and starve to death somewhere in the section on ancient urns?”
“I don’t find your levity about the accident clever,” the boy bristled. “Riatchbel had become interested in practical application. We were trying to build a working model of a black hole converter, after what research tells us about Rassilon’s original.”
“A black hole converter,” the Master breathed, suddenly much more interested. “Riatchbel was obviously far more ambitious than I gave him credit for.”
“We had a good theoretical model,” the boy insisted, now defending their work. Clearly he’d wanted to do so for some time, and hadn’t been afforded the opportunity. “The power flow—we had it under control, the accident analyst is mad. It’s the matter compression we were stuck on, that’s what caused the explosion that killed Riatchbel. And fair enough. No one’s managed true compression since the original.”
“Ah.” The Master flashed a quick, self-contented smile. “That’s not entirely correct.”
The boy started. “You’re joking.”
The Master sighed and decided against delivering yet again giving the ‘joking versus not joking’ lecture. “In an imperfect form that attaches exclusively to organic molecules and structures they’ve closely intermingled with enough to allow a transference of material, say, clothing: yes, I’ve achieved it. Quite neatly, if I do say so myself.” He did. Regularly.
“And the variable density compensation, as well,” the Master continued. “With some adjustment to its underlying principles, my TCE could be expanded into a full omni-material compression device, identical to the one that powers the arcane Eye of Harmony. If someone’s done the research to figure out how the initial developers dealt with the power flow issue.”
“That’s brilliant,” the boy enthused, then qualified his enthusiasm. “Well, if you’re not just exaggerating some lesser dimension-shift shrinkage effect and calling it matter compression, that’s brilliant. Can I see the device?”
“I’ll thank you not to insult me again. It’s not fairground chicanery. It is brilliant because I’m brilliant. And in due time, perhaps you may. If you’ll hand over Riatchbel’s notes and explain the lines of your work to me, we might be able to complete the project. Think of it,” he marveled to himself, pounding a fist on the desk, excited at the notion. “The power to create and maintain super-stable black holes, rediscovered!” He turned back to the boy. “I trust the House was displeased with you for having been involved in research efforts that failed so spectacularly?”
“They would have been fine if it had worked,” the boy groused. “They would have hailed us as intellectual luminaries. Theirs is a very outcome-based morality.” He fiddled with a glass sphere on the Master’s desk he probably thought was a paperweight. The Master made the politic decision not to tell him it was actually the egg sack of a giant spider composed of living rock that he’d encountered in his travels. He’d stolen the egg sack in the hopes of breeding an indestructible fighting force, but had never gotten around to springing it on the Doctor.
“That can’t have been the extent of your failure.” The Master knew the degrees of official Gallifreyan displeasure (intimately). Oakden had been Extremely Miffed, but Surielovnetchka's offense should only have merited a Put Out sort of dissatisfaction.
“Well no,” the boy admitted. “I went and got myself killed in the explosion too, along with Riatchbel, didn’t I? Only I had spare regenerations left.”
The Master blinked. “Surielovnetchka. You got yourself killed and had to regenerate in your first century? That must have looked like uncommon carelessness.”
“Mostly professors just call me Suri. And, er, I regenerated from a girl, as well.”
A high degree of regenerative morphism was looked on as bad form. The Doctor’s wild swings from body to disparate body showed poor breeding, but failures to maintain static gender were just beyond the pale. And House Oakden, which prided itself on its strict maintenance of controllable genetics and billed itself to prospective breeding contract partners accordingly, would not suffer this child’s failure to be widely publicized.
Such petty-mindedness represented a politically incorrect opinion, certainly, but Oakden viewed current public opinion with detachment, and even with slight amusement. They thought it presumptuous that anyone else might imagine they could possibly have fathomed how things should be half as well as Oakden. Surielovnetchka was supposed to hide away in obscurity under the Master’s tutelage until everyone forgot he hadn’t been born a he. Surielovnetchka was sensibly very irritated with the century of stultifying inactivity such a proposal implied.
Gallifrey as an institution had made some entertainingly bad decisions lately. They had come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the Doctor was to give the Doctor giddy amounts of power over them, and then to marry him off to the Master when they might well have let that contract continue to molder undiscovered. The Master had his doubts as to the sanity of both choices. Likewise they seemed to think that giving the Master the use of an apparently gifted, obviously embittered assistant would result in both of them learning to play ball, rather than in him putting the child to work for his own benefit and ultimately encouraging his disobedience.
Other people, he considered almost pityingly, could be so very stupid.
“Surielovnetchka—”
“Suri.”
“Surielovnetchka,” the Master repeated, “I believe an alliance might actually be of some use to us both.”
***
Part II
