Title: box, timelord & bracelet
Rating: R, for sex and a touch of necrophiliac leanings (nothing overly graphic)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Doctor/Master
Warnings: Insane!Doctor. Sex (not too graphic). Necrophiliac undertone. Also, unbetaed...
Summary: The box is black and eight-four inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, twenty-three inches high...
A/N: Please note warnings.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly
wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
For my enemy is dead-a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin-I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

-Reconciliation, Walt Whitman

box, timelord & bracelet


i. we are born with cobwebs in our mouths bleeding with prophecies

The box is black and eighty-four inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, twenty-three inches high; and there's a dead man inside.

The interior smells like flowers, a strong damp scent of mingling sweetness and decay. On a whim, the Doctor had placed a bouquet on the dead man's chest, clasped between motionless fingers. But he'd removed it the next day with a sense of guilt; for he knew if the man was the alive, he'd be treated with derisive laughter.

He thinks he hates this room. Time is so very still here; it's like an icebox where you stuck in your leftovers to preserve. But like an icebox, there's a strangeness to the room - it's not an ordinary, room-temperature chamber, after all.

A bracelet jangles on the Doctor's wrist as he involuntarily moves his arm. The metal glints in the warm-orange lights, but as it catches the beams, it flashes a blue hue. "Love it when it does that," he says to himself with a grin, but it's not much of a grin at all.

It's funny that it's just a bracelet - simple piece of technology, really - is all that prevents this room's time-stasis from immobilizing him completely.

The Doctor whistles cheerily to himself. And, like every day, he reaches over to do a number of stupid, insignificant things: straightening the Master's wrinkle-free suit over and over again, tucking the collar against a pulse-less neck, and again and again and again.

He notes, bitterly amused, that the Master's laser screwdriver, buried in the trouser pockets, can trigger death at setting #42.

ii. and pluck gems from graves

Touching the hand of a dead man can be very strange.

It's a hand timeless, lifeless, soulless, and heat-less. Rigor mortis has already gone and past, and the body is easy to manipulate. No stiffness. No resistance.

The Doctor's curls his hands around the cold ones; he thinks, You kept me in a cage you locked me in a little house you taunted me and mocked me while you danced and smiled - and my god you were beautiful...

The other man is the last of his kind, of a race so proud and powerful and legendary. Koschei never believed in myths or fairy tales, earth or otherwise, but there might have been fairy dust in the air when crowds flocked together to whisper, I believe in the Doctor.

They believed him. They truly did. Come vanquish the villain, oh mighty hero. Slay him with a sword, rescue the princess, and free the kingdom from distress.

It's never that easy. The Doctor believes in forgiveness more than revenge, and more than forgiveness he believes in the little boy he used to hold hands with under a red, red sky.

Maybe he's delusional and maybe he's just being hopeful and wants to see the good in people; but the universe doesn't work that way and the greatest men are the mad ones.

The Doctor tightens his grip around the Master's cold, cold ones. I'm not crazy. Just...broken, I think. Just broken.

iii. each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

He can be charming whenever he wants to, and that night, he sleeps with a beautiful woman.

He tells her, "Stay still. I want to try something."

The Doctor parts the curtains and pushes the windows open, and lets the winter breeze chill her skin. Snowflakes flutter from outside, cold kisses that touches her shivering arms and paint a dusty blue across her pale cheeks.

He whispers, "Stay still-" and presses against her, into her, feeling a warmth spread through his body even as the coldness touches him. He grips at her wrist, at her pulse, and tries to pretend the one-two, one-two really adds up to four.

Something surges within him, and he comes all over her, specks of white splattering onto the scatted snowflakes.

In the morning, he weaves lilies into her hair, and smiles like he's enamoured.

iv. to dwell in the presence of immortal youth, and all i was in ashes

The next night, the Doctor sits by the Master's casket, idly naming the stars of the solar system they're currently traveling in.

"I miss you," says the Doctor suddenly, as if he's never thought about it before.

And it sounds stupid. The words of a smitten lover - Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra and Marc Anthony, Hamlet and Ophelia - that mean nothing, in the end.

He flushes, and he feels himself hating his heat compared to the Master's still and silent and beautiful cold.

The Doctor twirls the bracelet around his wrist, shimmering blue and silver in the light.

His fingers steal down to his trousers, like the feather of a bird tickling you softly. There's a warmth, comfortable and easy; he runs his fingers across his cock, remembering the brush of snowflakes, the Master's purring voice, and oh, oh, everything...

He thinks he hears the Master saying, "Oh, my precious Doctor."

And, "Say my name."

The Doctor whimpers, "Master, Master, Master..."

And he rubs the bracelet against raw and red skin, feeling the tear and the hurt and the burn. At the moment before his climax, he slips his hand away. He curls around the dying pleasure like a drowning man clinging to oxygen, but it's just a single fleeting moment, and the Doctor remembers the snowflakes melting on his fingertips no matter how fast he runs away from the sun.

v. all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death

The safe word this evening is black-and-blue.

The hickeys he leaves on the woman are a bright cherry red; but he wears the bracelet, even though there's no need for it, and patterns bruises on her thighs.

Black&blue, black&blue.

vi. come to dust

The box is blue, a Type 40 TARDIS - abbreviated for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, capable of traveling in time and space; and there's two dead men inside.

The Doctor examines the bracelet, rolling it around his palm. The clasp is broken, but he twines string around both ends of the bracelet to hold them together.

He catches a whiff of wilting flowers, and thinks he hates this room.


A/N: Ohgodohgodohgod. I wrote something over pg-13. Why. Well, anyways, the poems featured in this story are: Walt Whitman'sReconciliation, Roberta Hill's Dreams of Rebirth, Etheridge Knight's Haiku, Wilfred Owen's Anthem for a Doomed Youth, Lord Tennyson's Tithonus(which I think I might want to quote again for a Doctor and companion fic I might want to write in the future), and Shakespeare's Macbeth andCymbeline. This fic draws inspiration from Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, and Apples, a short story rendition on Snow White.

I apologize for the rampant OOC-ness and the overall weirdness; just wanted to try to write something creepy. I would post this in a kink meme, but the only active LJ one I've found is only for Eleven. :(