Spoiled for Choice Chapter 4, Giving Alms to the Birds

[x_losfic]

Title: Spoiled for Choice: Giving Alms to the Birds
Author:x_los 


Rating: PG
Pairing(s): Fourth/Master
Chapter: 4/12
Summary: In the third year of the Master’s reign, he perfects Laz Labs technology. The Doctor as a box of chocolates.
Chapter Summary: The Master has one of his bad spells, and the Doctor is himself. Complete with an appropriation of John Berryman that would probably make the man want to jump off a bridge. Again.
Betas: The lovely draegonhawke  , for all your Not Terribly Slashy needs, and the divine blinkidybah   who comes for the H/c and stays for the smut.

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Chapter 4
Giving Alms to the Birds


“He scalped its head, removing the hair, and broke and removed the teeth. The vultures swarmed around and began eating its flesh. Squawking and shoving each other, the vultures completely consumed everything except for its skeleton. The man in white came back to the body and proceeded to shatter the skeleton into pieces. The vultures swarmed around, this time leaving nothing.”

paraphrased from Tibetan Sky Burial, by Rachel Laribee

    Before the Master can adjust the settings on his laser screwdriver to de-age the Doctor’s fourth body he is interrupted.

    “You’re not making me young for sex. Though you’d like to think so.” The Doctor’s voice is so deep and pleasant that the words lack the insolence of their content.

    “Don’t tell me what— as if you’d know.” The Master mumbles, though he can’t hear himself over the drums and isn’t sure whether he spoke aloud. He only knows how loud they are today and how he struggles his way through the simplest thoughts, and one of them is this one, this one will. This one will what? The Master is denied even the comfort of a verb that can define and contain and shield him from his need.

    The Master collapses on a high backed chair in one of the Valliant’s parlors. He prefers the TARDIS’s main library, but the drums are so overwhelming just now that he can’t take the additional psychic strain of the paradox machine on his senses without making himself sick. He wishes he could stop thinking but his mind whirls on with relentless clockwork precision.

    He feels like his brain physically splits along the fault line of every incomplete thought. The tendrils throb in insistent chorus, bits of him loudly screaming for attention and action. His brain is being picked apart by a multitude of carrion birds, he’s enduring a living sky burial. They’re lowering their maws in rhythm, tap tap tap TAPing their beaks into the flesh, and they cannot be controlled.

    Planning and ruminating, which usually give some order to his thoughts and quell the drums, or at least take in the madness and spit it back out as determination or rage, have become impossible. The Master can’t keep to any one stream of thought. His self is cracked, fractured— and he cannot become accustomed to this, is never resigned to it, every fucking time he is terrified.

    He is a slave to this and there is nothing he could ever hate more. He feels like he’s going to throw up again but he’s emptied his stomach and he knows dry heaving does nothing to make him feel better.

    He decides he wants to hear why he isn’t making the Doctor younger for his vanity and pleasure. The Doctor is a distraction (though he refuses to understand, to acknowledge his own drums or share his, to feel this with him as he should, as he would if he cared for him), better than anything else he’s known. Talking to him allows the Master’s mind to focus shakily on a single conversation, pin down the rudiments of a narrative. And his brain is so addled that he doesn’t know just now why he has a compulsion to press the button, and can’t remember whether he normally understands the desire.

    “You want me young, younger than I ever was in these forms, because you can’t bear the thought of my death. It’s always horrified you, and you had to control it, by killing me yourself, by making me older under your terms, and then by keeping me perpetually young. You do this so that you never have to stare at old skin and see what being alone looks like.” The Doctor speaks plainly because the he knows the Master won’t remember what was said specifically now, when the drums are high.

    The Master laughs raggedly because it’s absurd, and this is the version he killed, threw from a great height just to watch his angel try and fly and he laughed when the Doctor was revealed to have bones as brittle as anyone else’s, flapping clothes instead of wings. But the thought of the Doctor’s crumpled body returns to him like the sick throb of the paradox machine. Did he hear the Doctor’s spine break or only imagine it? He hisses at the Doctor.

    “Shut the fuck up. What would you know. Weren’t even there, weren’t even THERE.” At the fall of the Cruciform. When he’d run. When he’d had to slink into a human body and hide like a beaten dog. He’d been so scared. And earlier, before that, the first time the Doctor left him alone-- familiar and primary to the Master’s personal cosmology as original sin was to that of the humans he’d subjected.

    The Doctor’s large eyes are kind and the Master hates his kindness because this is the version that pities him most and he can’t abide the Doctor’s pity any more than the fucking paradox. God he hurts everywhere, god, how must he look, how must he look?

    “I’m sorry.” The Doctor says as if it can absolve the sin of his absence, his long absence, and of his own volition, as if he could un-choose, and the Master wonders if he could build a better paradox machine and let the Doctor start again. Where exactly did everything go wrong? Could he anatomize disaster, pinpoint an instant and restart from there? Why the fuck would the Doctor even deserve that chance when he ruined everything the first time and why would the Master give up the universe now he has it, has everything?

    He wants to sneer but his face feels disconnected and dead like the rotting body of that American in San Francisco. The Doctor is saying something patiently, repeatedly, and the rhythm is good and soothing. He closes his eyes to appreciate it and he has an idea of what he wants. His will is a blessing, and it comes to guide him out of the horror of noise and pressure and terror.

    “Come read to me.” He commands, his eyes still shut. He modifies his demand. “Come over here, and read to me.”

    “What would you like?” The Doctor’s voice is gentle. The Master chuckles.

    “Does it matter?” You always do as you like anyway. He knows better than to say. The Doctor hunts a book from the shelves, stocked from the TARDIS’s overflowing shelves, and the Master feels his head being lifted and his torso shifted, so he’s positioned in with his head in the Doctor’s lap like a child. He feels insulted but too incapacitated to lash out.

    The Doctor’s pleasing voice reads him something he pays no attention to. He concentrates on learning this new rhythm, on the Doctor’s heartsbeat, on breathing in and out, and the drums lessen. He is a Time Lord, and even crazed and delusional he knows it takes hours like he knows he must still be breathing. But his ability to sense timelines has begun to consume itself: horrible things are happening right now have happened will happen again. He has witnessed them is doing them is planning them, glorying dreading regretting.

    The Doctor doesn’t falter or stop reading. The Master realizes one long hand is rubbing at his temples, not to pick away at his distracted mind, which would anyway be unfathomable right now to the outside observer, but to ease the incredible tension. He’s just noticed that his skull aches as if it’s being smashed in and the exposed axons and dendrites flayed and burned. For a human his temperature would be feverish. For a Time Lord he is immolating.

    “How are you? Feeling better?” The Doctor asks, and the Master knows it would hurt to nod so he pats the thigh he’s resting on softly, arhythmically, just to show he can. He slides into his proper relation with time like water in a glass being tilted and dumped out. He feels his jaw being worked open by long, insistent fingers, and something soft and gummy and pleasant being placed in his mouth. He sucks it until it dissolves, and accepts another and another. The sugar makes him feel less gutted and detached.

    “Where did you even get those?” He cracks as if unused to his voice, after eating what must have been half the bag.

    “You had some in your coat pocket. I lifted them a few weeks back.”

    “Oh.” He’s not even bothered by the theft of his property, though probably he’ll be annoyed later. He knows the Doctor must have been hoarding them as a treat for himself, filched carefully and highly prized. He must have been rationing them, unsure whether he’d ever see more. His favorite. Half the bag gone. “A proper doctor.” The Master comments, with something like the gratitude he can’t lower himself to express. He’s already so disgustingly humbled by his treacherous body.

    Neither can he ask or tell the Doctor to continue, but he tugs at the arm holding the book like little boys do when they want something, and the Doctor resumes.

    “forgiveness time--” the Master chuckles harshly at the first words he’s heard and understood of the book. It’s strange to recognize that the Doctor’s reading something in English after months of speaking and hearing exclusively Gallifreyan and the Toclafane’s language, so different from that of the Earth he conquered as to be unrecognizable as its heir. All he’s heard that meant anything to him were his own capitoline accent and the Doctor’s voice, peppered with hints of the somewhat old-fashioned Lungbarrow tones of his childhood.

    New bodies bring new intonations, which are rendered into different accents by TARDIS translation. A Time Lord speaker typically, in many cases automatically, adopts new ways of relating to foreign languages they know well, switching the manner of their speech to mark the change in their basic personhood. But a native Gallifreyan accent can only evolve over time, and is never naturally renewed by regeneration.

    The Doctor still sounds like Theta, if slightly less provincial, and, comfortingly, he always will. Theirs are the only accents that remain. Only the Doctor and the Master can now distinguish that they speak the same language slightly differently. Hearing English makes him remember that lost complexity, those dead, silent tongues and still minds. He’s surprised to find it feels like swallowing a stone (like birds do to digest) that settles in his stomach and aches.

    Later he will slip back into this room, maddened by not knowing exactly how long he spent there when time is normally the aspect of the world most familiar to his senses. He will realize the poem was from a late page in a complete anthology, and the Doctor had read to him for a length of time he cannot pass off as insignificant.

    “I touch now his despair,/ he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower/ but he did not swim out with me or my brother/ as he had threatened—”
Today was a Bad Day, but it was the best Bad Day the Master could remember. And he knew the Doctor hadn’t had to do this, and had done it for him.

    “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong/ &so undone. I’ve always tried. I- I’m/ trying to forgive/”

    And the drums seemed to recede, to come from somewhere farther away.



* “Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong” #145 of John Berryman’s Dream Songs

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