New Gallifrey 1/2
Sep. 4th, 2007 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xanthefic
Title: New Gallifrey
Author: Xanthe
Fandom: Doctor Who Author’s Notes: This is my first Doctor/Master story and I really enjoyed writing it. I’ve made up some Time Lord/Gallifrey stuff because it’s where I wanted to go in the story but it might not be consistent with some of the earlier canon or what we know of Time Lord physiology/society. My apologies if I got anything glaringly wrong :-).
Pairing: Doctor/Master
Genre: Slash
Category: Angst, romance
Rating: R
Wordcount: 7000
Spoilers: "The Last of the Time Lords"
Many thanks to: The fabulous Bluespirit for a great beta
Summary: The Master can't decide whether the Doctor should live or die - but the Doctor just wants to settle down and take care of him. How did they reach that point?
New Gallifrey
By Xanthe
The sky is bright red, almost the exact same shade of crimson as the sky once was on his homeworld. The Master sits on the beach, gazing at the waves as they crash on the seashore. Silvery waves, reflecting the red of the darkening sky, turning the ocean into a rippling tide of foamy blood.
New Gallifrey the Doctor calls this world, but it’s nothing like the New Gallifrey the Master would have built if he’d had his way. For a start, it’s completely uninhabited save for the two of them, which makes it about the most boring place the Master has ever visited. There’s something familiar about it all the same; the Master wonders how long the Doctor searched for a planet so like the place where they grew up, that they could, if they wanted, pretend they were home.
Then again, the Doctor always was very good at pretending.
The weather is balmy, and this world is undeniably beautiful; lush vegetation, in a multitude of bright, vibrant colours, and a beach that stretches for mile upon mile of silvery pink sand. And there, far off in the distance, the little blue box that is home, perched on the sand just out of reach of the warm waves that bathe the shore. Yes, New Gallifrey is undoubtedly beautiful; beautiful, sad and lonely.
The Master’s white shirt billows restlessly in the breeze. Restless. Just like him. Just like the Doctor, however much he tries to hide it. How long will they stay here? He thinks the Doctor might mean for them to stay here forever. There was a time when the idea of the Doctor staying with him forever would have filled him with wild joy, but that time has long since passed. He thinks he should probably find some irony in the fact that he finally has the one thing he's always wanted his entire life - and it has to be like this.
He watches as a small figure exits the blue box, and walks slowly down the beach towards him. It’s been six months since they arrived; since the Doctor reanimated his living consciousness from the carefully designed ring where he’d been residing, and watched him take corporeal form again.
He was weak when he first reanimated – weak like a baby, because he hadn’t regenerated. With regeneration came that rush of life, the mad giddiness of existence, of being made all over again, and the joy of discovering all that your new body can do. Being reanimated was different. He was like a foal taking its first few, faltering steps, and the Doctor had birthed him, nudging him along, helping him remember.
The memories come back daily. The ring was an inexact instrument to hold his consciousness, designed only to be used in a moment of absolute crisis. The Master still isn’t sure of all the little details of what happened in the days leading up to his last “death” – those memories are still hazy - but he has little flashes of them every day.
The Doctor comes close, all big brown eyes and wide, flashing smile; the Master could close his eyes and still feel his Time Lord presence. The Doctor shines like a beacon, a shining bolt of psychic, temporal energy; bright, sparkling, and more dazzling than any Time Lord the Master has ever known. He wonders if the Doctor knows how blinding his soul is, but then snorts to himself. Of course he knows. Egotistical bastard that he is. Always was.
“Is it true, that I made you live like a dog underfoot for a year, and trained you to answer to a bell?” he asks the Doctor, when the other Time Lord reaches him. He does this every day, aiming to find some little thing that might upset or anger his nemesis.
The Doctor pauses for a moment to catch his breath, and then grins, and throws his arms up in the air. The Master sighs inwardly.
“It was enlightening. I’m much nicer to dogs now,” he replies, as if nothing the Master has ever done to him has ever upset him, which they both know isn’t true.
“There aren’t any dogs on New Gallifrey,” the Master comments sourly, surveying their new home. If only, just once, he could get under the Doctor’s skin and hurt him, the way he’s been hurt, over and over again throughout the years, until the Doctor’s very presence beside him is like a knife nestled icily between his two hearts.
“Well, if there were, I’d be nice to them.” The Doctor shrugs, and sits down beside him.
The Master hates the smell of him, the touch of his arm brushing his own, and the intrusion into his private thoughts.
“What you doing?” the Doctor asks.
The Master fantasises, as he has a thousand times, about holding the Doctor face down in the sand and smothering him to death. Sometimes, just for variety, he holds the Doctor face up, his hand around the other Time Lord’s neck, keeping him still, until the waves come in and drown him. In his fantasy the Doctor chokes and splutters and pleads for his life but he keeps him there, his own hand unwavering and strong, until the Doctor quietens and dies. In reality he thinks the Doctor wouldn’t plead at all, but instead would simply lie there, those big brown eyes staring up at him, forgiving him everything to the end.
Or at least until he regenerates.
The Master has considered this too. He’s thought of holding the Doctor under the water and watching him die over and over again. He wonders what that would feel like, to witness face after startled face coming and going beneath him, until he reaches the last, and the Doctor finally runs out of lives. Sometimes he even thinks he’ll do it. Last week for instance, when the moons were full and the Doctor was being even more insufferable than usual, staring at him with eyes so full of sympathy that the Master wanted to drag him out of the TARDIS there and then and hold him down in the water.
His fingers twitch slightly. He could do it. He might do it. One day.
“I’m just thinking,” he replies to the Doctor’s question, a smile hovering maliciously around his lips. “About the past.”
The Doctor stiffens, almost imperceptibly, and the Master thinks he’s probably wondering if he’ll mention the one thing they’ve very purposefully not mentioned in several hundred years.
“The moons were pretty on Gallifrey weren’t they?” the Master says, and the Doctor relaxes slightly, but only slightly, because they both remember what happened beneath the moons of Gallifrey one long, hot summer, many hundreds of years ago.
“Yeah,” the Doctor replies. “They were. It’s late.” He yawns and stretches, extravagantly, showing off as usual, always play acting just a little bit, and then he gets up.
The Master smiles again. He knows that the Doctor hates talking about Gallifrey. The Doctor loved the place, although fuck knows why. The Master always hated it, and the demise of the other Time Lords is no great loss to him, either. They were all a pack of hypocritical charlatans.
“Time to head back to the TARDIS,” the Doctor says.
The Master gets up, slowly, fighting back another wave of irritation. The Doctor is polite enough not to make it a command, but it is, all the same. He sleeps when the Doctor sleeps, and wakes when he wakes, eats when he eats. The Doctor wants to know where he is every hour of every day.
His captivity is one of sea breezes and walks across silver sands, and he is at liberty to wander the TARDIS, room to room, whenever he wants, but that doesn’t make his imprisonment any the less complete. He is the prisoner and the Doctor is his jailer, and this, he thinks, is probably the only way they were ever going to end up living together again.
They walk across the beach together, the sea wind caressing their hair. The Master wonders if his nemesis thinks that this is in any way companionable. He suspects that maybe the other Time Lord is deluded enough to think just that, judging by the way he allows his arm to touch the Master’s as they walk.
The Doctor's TARDIS is as it always was. The Doctor likes to pretend that its Chameleon Circuit is broken but the Master knows that’s bullshit. The Doctor could fix just about anything of Gallifreyan origin – the only Time Lord at the Academy with a better understanding of temporal engineering was himself – and he’s damn sure he could fix the circuit if it were broken. It isn’t. The Doctor just thinks the blue box is retro-cute, that it displays the quirkiness of his personality to best effect. It’s wasted on the Master. He knows the Doctor too well.
They were eight years’ old when they first met at the Academy, the Doctor quirky and self assured, the Master shy but brilliant. Both were the acknowledged geniuses of their generation, and they were fascinated by each other. Homesick and lonely, the Master struggled at first, but the Doctor took him under his wing and they formed an intense friendship. That was when the Master first found out what it was like to bask in the bright light of the Doctor’s shining essence, and, of course, once you had a little taste of it, you always wanted more. What had it been like for them, the Master wondered, all the poor saps who’d come after him, falling hopelessly in love with a man who could never love them back?
In a room in the TARDIS is a display of images of all the people the Doctor has ever travelled with. The Master found it one day, when he was bored. He went back there, day after day, for weeks, spent hours studying each and every single one of them. Some he knew, and some he didn't, but he recognised each of them as his successors.
The pictures were little moments, snapshots of the Doctor’s favourite memory of each, images he’d literally fished out of his own mind and encapsulated forever in holographic form. The boy Adric, smiling that pathetically gormless smile of his; the elfin girl – Jo – peeping at the Doctor from big, admiring eyes – oh, how the Doctor must have loved her! He always did enjoy a bit of slavish adoration. There was Ace, and there Teegan. The Master was more interested in Turlough though, scowling as usual, hiding a surprisingly loyal heart behind his many betrayals. The Master stayed gazing at him for a very long time.
There were others, many, many others, but a few leapt out at the Master, and he knew why. He recognised the fellow travellers – those who had fallen in love with the Doctor, drawn to his brilliance like moth to flame, just as he once was. He saw the expression of hope in their stupid, adoring faces, and the light of their unrequited love dancing in their eyes. He knew their names as well – all he had to do was run his hand over the image and each name rose in his memory, clear and vivid. Jamie, Sarah Jane, Rose, Martha, Jack….
Jack. He had gazed at the handsome Time Agent for awhile, smiling to himself, enjoying the insouciant stare, and the bright, crisp sound of the name in his head. Jack. A memory returned when he saw that picture; he’d enjoyed Jack himself. Oh yes, he'd once strung up the handsome Captain and fucked him nightly for weeks on end – and the thing about Jack was, you couldn’t be entirely sure that he hadn’t enjoyed it.
Fucking Jack had felt good because Jack couldn’t die, no matter how many times you killed him – and the Master went through a phase of killing the good Captain every time he brought the immortal freak to climax. It was so much fun, teasing that climax out of Jack, watching him try and hold back, desperate not to surrender to the skilful way the Master’s tongue skimmed his hard cock, or the Master’s fingertips dipped in and out of his anus, exciting his prostate with each inward thrust. Jack would hold off, time and time again, drawing it out, hoping to delay the inevitable, but each time he’d fail – and the Master would laugh as he slit the Captain's throat and watched the blood and come mingle together before Jack reanimated a few minutes later, still sweaty from his climax, the blood staining his beautiful pale skin.
“You enjoy doing that, Big Fella?” Jack would drawl, stone cold anger burning behind the flirtatious blue eyes.
And for a while he had, because hurting the people the Doctor cared about was the next best thing to hurting the Doctor himself. Besides, he felt they should know the true pain of loving the Doctor, just as he did. It was educational for them, and he hoped they appreciated the time and trouble he spent on teaching them what it really meant to love the Doctor - because he’d had to learn the hard way. There had been nobody to teach him.
The TARDIS door is open and they step inside. It’s an artfully eccentric mess within – the Doctor has no sense of order, or at least he pretends that’s the case – the Master suspects that might be more of the same irritating whimsy that the Doctor has always liked to indulge in.
The TARDIS is empty though, without essence – the Doctor has taken her heart and hidden it somewhere – somewhere the Master will never find it. The Doctor doesn’t trust that the Master won’t kill him in his sleep and steal off with the TARDIS one dark night so he’s put her out of reach. The Doctor is right not to trust him; that is exactly what the Master would do if he had the chance.
Sometimes he thinks about stringing the Doctor up, as he once did with Jack, and torturing him until the Doctor tells him where he’s buried the TARDIS’s heart. He’d do it too, if there was any point, but they both know the Doctor would never tell him, not even if he tortured and killed him down to his last regeneration. No, the Doctor would take that secret to his final death. At least with the Doctor still alive there is a chance that the Master might one day escape, and be free of his nemesis at last.
The Doctor locks the TARDIS door behind them, with an apologetic look in his eyes. Sometimes, when the Master has allowed himself to forget, it’s these little touches that remind him what they are to each other now. He gives a bitter, self-contained smile, and the Doctor winces.
“Nightcap?” he suggests, waving his hand at the bottle and two glasses that rest on the darkened central console. The Master gazes at him impassively. He wonders what the Doctor gets from this pretence at normality.
“If you wish,” he says, inclining his head. He takes a seat, and watches the Doctor pour the drink.
“Here you go.” The Doctor hands him a glass.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he says pointedly. He knows the Doctor has trouble addressing him by his title, and sometimes he enjoys making him say it, or shaming him into it.
Only those Time Lords who performed a particularly noteworthy act were allowed titles of their own choosing – the rest had to make do with their given names. The Master had longed for a title of his own for years, but, needless to say, the Doctor, Gallifrey's shining golden child, beat him to it.
He can still remember the Doctor returning triumphantly from the Medusa Cascade after healing a deep rift in the space-time continuum. He was the only one who could have done it – or so everyone said. The Master knows that he took the title “Doctor” because he thinks of himself as a healer of time, travelling across the aeons in search of rifts to heal, broken timelines to mend, and lost souls to find. It’s sickening.
The Master earned the right to a title himself, some years later, after wiping out an entire colony of humans in a bid to save a small ship of Time Lords. The Doctor never forgave him for that. Neither did some of the other Time Lords - there was even a faction that fought against allowing him the honour of taking a title. He'd killed them for that of course, several years' later, when everyone had long since forgotten the original insult. He never forgot.
The Doctor sits down opposite him, holding his drink gingerly in his hands. He never was a great drinker. He’s lost in thought, and the Master can guess what he’s thinking about; he’s known him for nine hundred years after all.
“We could go back there you know,” the Master says, softly. “Gallifrey. We could go back in time, visit her, just once.”
The Doctor stares at him, appalled. What the Master is suggesting is against the very ethos of what it means to be a Time Lord. Then again, the Master never did have much interest in the tedious rules and regulations the Time Lords invented for themselves. Yes, there would be consequences, but so what? What's the point of being a Time Lord if you can't screw with the universe a little every so often?
“You know we can’t do that,” the Doctor murmurs.
“I don’t see why not. You could tell them about the Time War, warn them. We could change history, bring them all back so we wouldn't have to be alone.”
A speculative look seeps into the Doctor’s eyes, and the Master knows he’s tempted. He likes doing this. It always was fun seducing the Doctor’s dark side. That was what nobody ever understood – the Doctor has a dark side as beautiful and full of shadows as his own – he just keeps it tightly controlled, instead of giving into it. Fraud.
His own darkness was always more obvious. The Time Lords had seen it from the beginning, and shaped him to be their warrior. If they’d helped him, he could have mastered the darkness, but they had wanted it for their own ends and thought to master him instead, to keep him tame and tethered, their obedient weapon to be unleashed on their command. His title, when he finally claimed it, had been his own sense of a warped joke. He suspected that nobody ever got the joke – not even the Doctor.
The Doctor was different. Even as a child his brilliance had shone brightly, overshadowing everyone else, including the Master's undeniable genius. The Doctor was going to be Gallifrey's ambassador for the future, the leader of his generation. Only he had proved too much the maverick, his own creativity and quirkiness putting a serious crimp in the Time Lords’ plans. That’s another thing they had in common.
“We could walk on the Promenade, watch the real Gallifreyan moons rise, not these pale imitations,” the Master whispers. He loves how expressive the Doctor’s face is. No matter what body he wears, his eyes always dance and his features are always animated.
“Yes,” the Doctor says softly. “We could go back. See the places we loved. See ourselves maybe? Watch ourselves, as we once were, knowing how we’ll end up?” There’s a sharp glint in his eyes. He hasn’t been tempted at all – he’s been playing with the Master, one step ahead the whole time.
The Master inclines his head, regretfully, acknowledging that he’s been defeated.
“Oh well. I never liked the place anyway. Even at its best, Gallifrey was almost as dull as this shithole.”
He loves watching the little spike of hurt rise in the Doctor’s eyes. He doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of that sight. He puts down his untouched drink on the console, and gets up.
“It's late,” he says. “Time for bed.”
“Good night then!” the Doctor says, with a cheery wave of his hand. “Um…Master.” He always looks embarrassed saying it.
“Good night, Doctor.”
The Master gives a little half bow, and retires to his room. It’s big, beautifully furnished, and he keeps it scrupulously tidy, not as a reaction to the Doctor’s clutter and disorder but because that’s just the way he is. It’s another reason why they always find living together so hard. One of many.