The Time Lord shivered despite himself. He was surprised at how easily she'd believed his deflecting excuse. Humans. He shook his head. Tease them the right way and they'd believe anything. He'd spent three hundred years back on lost Gallifrey studying them, and the next seven hundred travelling at least with one of them, Hell, he'd lived amongst them for a few years when the Time Lords wiped his memory of time travel!
Still, just thinking of that conversation made him nervous. It made him remember things best left forgotten. He could think of them without fear of discovery now, what with the Matrix destroyed (along with everything else, he thought bitterly), but it still felt – unnatural – remembering the sable-haired classmate of his youth. Phaeldrin, he had been then, and had sighed as Rasuelin's blond silky hair had frothed up between his fingers.
Time Lords were not the most fecund of beings, even then. It had chafed them bitterly that despite their almost godlike status when it came to technology, they could barely produce their own young naturally. Oh, they could make other species easily enough, and grow the occasional Time Tot in the special laboratories built for that purpose, but there was something that had evolved inside their bodies that seemed to kill off the embryos before their term was finished, their regenerative abilities mysteriously quenched. More often than not the parent would die along with them. It did not seem to matter whether the childbearer was a Time Lord or Lady; the rate of successful natural birth was just as low. In the labs, the bone marrow of the prospective parents that was being used to make the new Time Tot mutated. The gene pool was shrinking all the time. So they invented massive banks of possible DNA variations, testing which were feasible and which were not. Every now and again, a successful strand was formed and a new set of genes was entered into the pool via a parentless Time Tot.
Even so, the Time Lord society did not revert to the 'survival is prime' mentality when it came to sexuality. Free love, man! the Time Lord thought miserably, remembering the phrase from that period of upheaval on Earth. Free love, just so long as you gave a Tot to the society. And so it was that he and Phaeldrin had teamed up, heart, mind, and soul, the two brightest Time Teens in their year. Phaeldrin had always been the brighter when it came to paper examinations. His concentration and ability to think along several possible paths and trains of thought at once earned him high grades. Rasuelin, on the other hand, had always been the hands of the pair. Very good at practical things, Phaeldrin had always said, not caring if they were in public or not. It had always made Rasuelin's face go fiery.
They'd been one for one hundred and three years before the murmurings of their teachers finally grew to a roar. They'd been talking closely on their way to class one day at the academy, just days after passing their final exams (Phaeldrin with flying colours of course) when all of a sudden their many teachers were steering them to separate rooms. Rasuelin found himself moved to a different chamber and inelegantly being kept as an extremely pampered prisoner of the President. Many days later, he wriggled out of the security and found himself – in an outbuilding in the Wastes? He had hiked over to where his hermit tutor lived, in his little cave overlooking the Citadel, He'd plucked a little flower on his way there, the agreed fee as always for his tuition, and has asked the hermit why. His tutor always seemed to know everything before even the President did. Even before the Chancellor did, perhaps, a feat indeed. He shook as his tutor had quietly told him that one of the Councillors had invaded the privacy laws of the Matrix and had found the birth records.
The birth records detailed who had given birth and to whom, so that Councillors could check every now and again that the often-frowned-upon curse of incest did not happen. This in turned promised a more mentally stable and wide gene pool, something very important in a civilisation so advanced as that of the Time Lords. Advanced, and small. Yet these records could only be looked at with the permission of those involved. People couldn't just – swan on in – to the Matrix any old time they pleased. All information was stored there. Biodata on all Time Lords, secrets on Rasselon's Eye, quite literally everything was stored there.
And so this stray Councillor had stumbled across the details of one Time Lady Fenetrailkanothisetk, who had died giving birth to two fraternal twins. She was given full posthumous honours in the Panopticon for the achievement of not just keeping one baby for the full term but keeping both. These two Time Tots had been fostered into the Academy from a very young age and had proceeded to much please their teachers.
They were named Phaeldrin and Rasuelin, by their dying parent's last breath.
And so it was that the youngest councillor, Councillor Flavia, barely having been granted that title, found it her duty to call upon the young Rasuelin and Phaeldrin and tell them the bad news. Phaeldrin first, she thought, knowing the once-brown-haired boy's intelligence. And then Rasuelin.
When she reached Rasuelin, however, she was to find the blond youth sobbing into his mattress, a most unsuitable position for his species, but perhaps understandable if someone had told him before she arrived. Quietly she sat on the bed next to him. Placing an arm around his trembling shoulders, she asked softly, "You know what must be done?"
A small and tear-streaked nod was her reply.
Rasuelin clung to this lady who was not his mother or his lover, but was the closest he would ever get again.
A few days later, as was protocol, the security on both of their rooms was relaxed, and the two were allowed to wander, assiduously guarded so that they did not try to meet again. They should know, Rasuelin had thought dryly at the time, that all the guards in the universe can't stop the Academy's two finest pupils meeting up if they wanted to. Soon he had ducked into a privy with two doors, one secret. Sure enough, soon arrived a rather dusty Phaeldrin.
"You know, of course, what we must do?"
The old glint of madness had returned into Phaeldrin's eye. Some ran from their initiation into the Academy. Some died. And some, like Phaeldrin, went slightly – insane. It was never truly obvious, but arose sometimes to terrorise them and others.
"Yes, Phaeldrin. We must – "
Phaeldrin broke in. "Rasuelin, know that whatever happens, I – " Rasuelin placed a finger on his lips. "And I you." He sighed.
Abruptly Phaeldrin seemed to come to a decision. He roughly embraced Rasuelin and Rasuelin was left watching the secret door close silently.
The Saran'Tai cluster was a popular spot for newly graduated Time Lordlings, but the man once called Rasuelin was in no mood to celebrate with his classmates. It had been a month since that last encounter in the privy, and just as long since the Time Lordling Phaeldrin had vanished, along with one of the newest travelling capsules. The uproar of this theft and vanishing had quickly erased any suspicious looks that his guards had given him as he had emerged from the privy. He'd walked out across the Waste to his tutor, and they'd talked until both suns had set and the orange sky had turned back to purple. His tutor had counselled him to go on this trip, to heal his spirits a little, if not just simply to keep up appearances.
Rasuelin clenched deeper into his bedclothes. At first, the tears had flowed freely, with little thought for proper Time Lord dignity. Rasselon's beard, he'd hate to know what Phaeldrin would have done by now. Phaeldrin was always emotional at the best of times, despite that smug exterior, and was quite capable of blowing up a few high-mass stars to relieve himself.
It was while he was thinking this that the building next to his imploded.
A primitive thing of mere steel, it had only left behind silvery dust and a bad burnt flesh smell. Half his classmates had been in that building! Rasuelin arose just as the body of his guard came flying neatly through the door. The walls collapsed around them as Phaeldrin stepped closer, the weak matter-gun in hand.
"Phaeldrin, no – " Rasuelin got no further as Phaeldrin lifted him up by the throat.
"Not Phaeldrin. Never again." The madness in his eyes was fully fledged now and terrifying to see. "That man is dead. He died with our destinies."
"Phaeldrin, we cannot fix the past, but – "
"But what?" He laughed mirthlessly. "You and your constant talk of fixing and making things better. You did better than me in the Paradoxes practical. You know this cannot be fixed without losing everything."
"Ph-"
"No. You and your fixing. What have you chosen as your graduation name? The Doctor of All or some pretentious crap like that?"
Rasuelin could only stand shocked at the rejection, tears streaming down his face.
"You fix. I order my fate. Remember that Earth book? The Master of destiny – "
" – by Destiny mastered. I know it. But he died, Phaeldrin." He staggered back from the slap.
"Not after sharing a happy life with his sister. He never truly died, 'Doctor of All'."
With that the insane creature raised its gun to the roof shimmering above them. It descended upon the one known as Rasuelin. Onlookers carried away only a mention of confrontation between the one they heard as "the Master" and the other 'the Doctor". They did not see how tenderly "the Master" kissed the regenerating "Doctor", nor did they see the small phial of his bone marrow he pushed into "the Doctor"'s hand.
Later, perhaps, they might wonder at the Time Tot that trotted a few years later at his heels, its dark hair floating behind him. When the Doctor went missing from society a few decades later, as well as a dusty old antique being repaired at a workshop, the Time Tot Parecis was already well settled in the Academy. Noone seemed to notice the unusually close eye one Councillor Flavia kept on the Tot. There was much loud tittering amongst the more sophisticated when the Time Teen Parecis chose for her graduation name the very earthy name of Susan.
It had not been a clean break. It had not been a break at all. Keeping up appearances of hating your own heart and coparent of your child was difficult, but it had to be done. At any time, despite their renegade status, another Councillor may "accidentally" check up on their minds to see whether they were keeping to the law. Their meetings were frequent and bloody, but always they stopped short of hurting or killing each other. Always. For despite the Master's insanity, even he knew that they were still bonded, and one could not live without the other.
Then came the war, and the Master's turn to run. For so long the Doctor had feared him dead, burned in that almighty explosion. The Doctor cauterises, Phaeldrin would have said. Yet he knew that the moment his heart died, he would too, so he clung to that hope.
Even so, he did not know whether to be happy or said when Martha, his little pet Martha, had accidentally deciphered Boe's message to him. He longed for that conflict just as he feared what he had done to the Master in that explosion. How insane, how wounded would he be now?
He was more insane, but he had run from the War. The Doctor had not hurt him. He did not even know about the final destruction of their home, even the death of their child. And yet they both laughed at their new faces. They had always been opposites. As Time Tots, Phaeldrin was dark and Rasuelin fair. Now the Master was air and the Doctor the skinny dark geeky fellow.
In a way, the destruction of Gallifrey was good, the Master had pointed out to the chair-ridden Doctor. No more Matrix to expose their past or their current thoughts, he had stated in his usual morbid way. His acting had fallen apart up there, and he'd almost shown the old Phaeldrin, teasing, teasing, but always belied by a light touch. His lover.
His brother.
Only another since Gallifrey had ever guessed at that long hidden secret. In the middle of an attack by Cyberman-controlled Ogrons, Jonathan Turner, briefest of companions, had pinned him to the wall and demanded the answer to that question. Barely a day later he had packed himself off to Earth, saying something about a new commission by the BBC.
And then Martha had popped that really odd question. Seems like Jonathan had not kept the knowledge out of his works if the idea was that popular on Earth's television networks. He'd explained the Master away as an 'old friend' from school, but, given that most of Jack's 'old friends' were lovers, he did not know how this excuse had stood up. He shivered again.
At the very last however, he'd seen his Phaeldrin muster up his strength. During the year that never was, the Master had pestered the Doctor to come back to him, as the Matrix had been destroyed. "Even if it were rebuilt, they wouldn't bother with a little detail like us," he'd said.
Rebuilt? And who, pray, would rebuild the Matrix? Unless… no. The destruction had been complete, and after all, the Doctor would know, wouldn't he…
When that year was up, the Master had again asked, and the Doctor had bluntly refused for the last time, but. And later, hearing the Doctor's forgiveness, and knowing that they would never be able to reveal their love again, he'd taken the bullet. The Doctor had broken. He'd begged Phaeldrin to come with him. A prisoner? The Master would perhaps be a prisoner, but never his Phaeldrin. At least they'd be near each other, if not able to properly be a unit again. He saw his Phaeldrin rally in those stunning eyes before he finally vanished. "No," he'd gasped. "I refuse." He refused that they would be that close forever, as in that closeness, they would have to always act far apart. "I win." He was right. He had mastered his doom – to love the Doctor forever – and yet had been mastered by doom by refusing to drift apart from his Rasuelin by being so close to the Doctor.
And then he had died in his arms.
Rasuelin's heart had broken. The Doctor's heart had broken. It had left them both as stone, emotions so strong that they were invisible. He had burned his love's body, as was tradition, and had watched the smoke rise as tears fell. Lonely after that first separation, and lonelier now. Even his Martha and Jack had notice something different, and left him to his mourning. Jack. The Doctor snorted. Jack, sensitive…
It was but a few days later that he felt his old heart start flickering with life again. His life was out there somewhere, was his first thought, swiftly squashed. No, he was simply healing. He put his old ring that Phaeldrin had given him back on, the one with the black stone, but when he went to find the one he gave to Phaeldrin, it was not in his lover's ashes. Odd, he thought. They must have lied when they said it was dwarf-star steel. It must have melted.