Author's Note: The more I thought about it, the more it bugs me that the Time Lords brought the Master back to be "the ultimate soldier," because - um, were they thinking of the same Master I was? Oh Time Lords.
Dark times ahead; this is the Time War, after all. Contains spoilers for End of Time Part 2.
He's not a soldier at heart.
He'd thought about mentioning that, when they first dragged him back into life and offered him thirteen new ones, but at the time it hadn't seemed that important. He hadn't thought it could be difficult; he's used to danger, after all, nearly in love with it (if not half so much as the Doctor), and anyway, he'd been sure that when the Council said "soldier" what they had meant was "general."
They hadn't. From the lee of an overturned and burnt-out TARDIS, the Master can see that clearly enough.
It's not his TARDIS, at least; that one's safe somewhere, he hopes, hidden on Earth where only he or the Doctor could find it, or locked away in the Citadel, or just - elsewhen. He doesn't know what happened to it when he died last, and the Council hasn't trusted him with a new one. He's sharing the shelter of this one with another soldier from another squad, some young Time Lord still in his first regeneration - not for much longer, though, the man's left arm is half off and dripping blood, and from the way he's breathing there's a lot more damage the Master can't see. Well, this is no good.
Less from compassion than self-preservation, the Master grabs the other man's right shoulder and says, "Listen to me - you must listen to me, I am the Master and you will obey me. Control your regeneration, don't let them see the energy - obey me! You will obey me!"
Too late; the injured Time Lord's gasping is growing worse, his heels drumming against the ground, and then golden energy explodes from him, a great glowing beacon for the Daleks.
The Master lets go, shielding his eyes, and he would curse if he could think of any words strong enough. He can already hear the Daleks - "TIME LORDS LO-CA-TED" - and he grabs the still-glowing arm of the other soldier and makes a dash for the hills. He hates this, constantly running from those who should be running from him. He's bargained with the Sea Devils, summoned a Daemon, dealt with Daleks - he'd tried to remind them of that, when the Council first threw him out here, but apparently the Daleks did not remember that episode quite so fondly. If his - and it burns his pride even to think the word - unit had not foolishly come to his rescue, he wouldn't be here now, running again with a useless newly-regenerated soldier, useless himself.
(Miss Grant could handle this, he finds himself thinking. Quite a bit brighter than she looked, that young woman, and very capable; she must be safe still, Earth has been kept well out of the war. She would know what to do...)
"EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!" He ducks to the ground and pulls the other Time Lord down with him as three rays converge over his head, blasting into the rocky hillside. No good, no good, no good.
"This way, this way," the other man is saying, waving his arm - oh, that's not quite right, the Master notes detachedly, her arm - at an outcrop to their right. He shakes his head; too little shelter, and too close to the Daleks, who are firing again, hitting the gravel between them. His head is throbbing in time with his hearts. No good at all. When the barrage stops for a moment he gets to his feet and runs again, keeping low; the new Time Lady follows him, and on the other side of the hill their combined weight is enough to split the ground beneath their feet, the thin surface of gravel and mud sagging and dumping them into a sinkhole.
It's not one of his better plans. The Master rolls until he fetches up against a rock with an unwilling "oof!", and the Time Lady digs in her heels and lands just a few feet beyond him. "Ouch! That's a ride I'd rather not take again," she says, trying and failing to brush some of the mud off her uniform.
"Keep quiet," he whispers, "do you want to tell every Dalek in the vicinity where we are? It's warm enough down here to throw their scanners off, but not if you make a bloody racket."
"Sorry, sir," she says, her voice much quieter, and she is blessedly silent for a few minutes as she inspects her new self. The Master is just beginning to hope that she'll stay silent until a relief ship appears when she opens her mouth and says, "Well, this is a bit of a shock... Not that it should be, I suppose, my mum does the same thing. First life male, second life female, regenerated male, regenerated somewhere in between, back to male, then female again - that's my mum, going through lives like nobody's business. Judging by her, this is going to be hell on my wardrobe, nothing I have is going to fit when I get home..."
The Master doesn't give a damn about her mum or her wardrobe; he's staring at his hands, thinking there should be rings on them. He's sure that he should have rings, although possibly they were Tremas's. Whatever he gains in a regeneration he seems to lose again with the next.
"Sorry, don't mean to interrupt your deep thoughts," she says, and he wishes irritably that she wouldn't, then, "but I don't think we were introduced - Sergeant Loran, third squad. You're one of the brass from first squad, aren't you?"
"First lieutenant," he says reluctantly, and forbears giving his name; "First Lieutenant the Master" just sounds awkward, and he's perfectly happy to let the nickname his squad had given him die with them.
"Well, not too brassy," says Loran, "but I do think that makes you the highest-ranking officer on this poor planet. Don't suppose you've got a plan to get off it, do you?"
He's covered in lukewarm mud and he has bruises on his bruises and his head is still aching and Daleks almost killed him and he wants to yell at her, Do I look like I've got a plan?
He's not just the Master, he's her superior officer, and he doesn't yell. He says, "I'm working on one." And she nods and, finally, shuts up.
He claws and talks his way up the ranks, desperate to get off the front lines. "I am wasted there," he tells a Commander. "I - I am a planner, a strategist! I would be of so much more use elsewhere in the war..."
"Mm-hmm," says the Commander, an odious man; he reminds the Master of one of the Doctor's more unpleasant regenerations. "You will serve Gallifrey as the Council sees fit."
The Council still doesn't see fit to give him his own TARDIS, but he gets a promotion and an assignment to a research facility, which suits his sensibilities far more than the battle lines. For a time there he's almost happy, sending new weapons out for the Time Lords every so often while subtly siphoning funds and his assistants' time for personal projects. Oh, the things he can come up with on a generous military budget! He wonders sometimes why he didn't think of doing this before; then there will be some snippy message from the Council or a not-very-subtle visitor arriving "to check on your progress" who has to be carefully guided around the Master's real work, and he remembers how irritating it is always to have their eyes on him, to know there's a collar around his neck that can be tightened on a whim. This is also not for him, but it's better than the front lines.
He watches acid fog in a tank drift and eddy without effect around a chunk of dalekanium. He destroyed a part of the universe, once. Military research is small stuff, unambitious, unworthy of him. Perhaps if he adds a touch of chlorine to the mixture...
When the wall behind him blows up he's already under the workbench, covering his head with his arms, and he realizes unhappily that not only will he never complete this particular experiment, but that he will never truly be off the front lines again.
At least he's well-prepared for the possibility of attack, and not just his reflexes. As the Daleks roll into the lab he shifts ever so quietly under the bench to a tile of a different color, presses one of many buttons on a band around his wrist, and disappears into a well-shielded little chamber below to listen to the facility destroy itself.
He wastes a bit of his time wondering if any of his assistants have survived. He rather doubts it; he laid the explosives throughout the facility, and the Daleks had likely killed them before they had gotten to his own laboratory. Not that he cares about what's happened to mere assistants, of course, but a few of them had been useful... All of his projects, they're ruined, too. He has the plans for the best memorized, but still, it's frustrating to lose all that progress, and he idles away more time updating and refining a few of his favorites. Now that he's thinking about it, this little hideout could do with a few improvements the next time he builds one: more than a step's worth of pacing room, to start with, and the short-range communicator takes up far too much of the cramped space. Different lighting, that would be good; he had simply pulled a spare light from one of the supply closets this time, and it's far too bright for such a small room and he doesn't remember where he'd put the switch. Yes, definitely more subdued lighting, with more obvious controls. Perhaps a few books to pass the time - he's been meaning to try those Christie mysteries the Doctor adored so... Oh, and a clock of some sort; time is getting more and more difficult to track in his head, thanks to the war, and it would be useful for calculating when it would be safe to come out, or when he could expect rescue. He could certainly use a clock about now...
That's when he looks up at the hatch and so very casually runs his hand over it and realizes that there are two important things to change in the design: first, the hatch should have a handle on the inside, and second, he really, really ought to have installed a long-range communicator.
He's in there too long.
Not long enough to die, fortunately, but long enough to scream until his voice dies twice and bite his fingers hard enough to draw blood, long enough to wear his feet raw pacing a single step over and over, long enough to give up. What had he been thinking when he designed this place? That after he had turned the facility into rubble (there must be a ton or more of debris and dead Daleks above him, oh Time) someone would just happen along to pull him out? He puts his hands behind his neck before he starts gnawing on them again and feels his shoulders trembling. He's hopeless. What does he think he's doing, anyway, playing at war? He's not a military mind, this isn't him - working for the Council, indeed! Look where it's got him! But the Doctor is out there in the war, too, somewhere; the Master's heard his assistants swapping stories on their breaks about his latest exploits. Half-fiction, most of them must be, but proof enough for the Master. The Doctor will know. Doesn't he always?
The Master taps his fingers against the hatch, du-du-du-dum, du-du-du-dum, a meaningless repetitive activity to keep him from thinking, du-du-du-dum, du-du-du- "-one there? I repeat, Facility Three, are you there? Anyone? For God's sake, someone answer!"
He throws himself at the comm controls, pounding desperately at the buttons to get through and screaming, "I'm here, I'm here, it's me - get me out of here, please, for the love of anything you like -"
"Don't worry," the voice on the comm promises, "we'll get you out as soon as we can," its owner's image flickering into being on the screen, and feeling foolish the Master realizes just now that it's not the Doctor, but an older woman with a vaguely familiar face. "We're just going to need a little information first," she says, "our scanners are a bit glitchy at the moment - do you have your approximate coordinates?"
He does, and rattles them off; midway through, as he watches her repeat the numbers, he recognizes her. She's grown quite a bit, but he's cursed to recognize her anyway.
"Thank you," she says when he's finished. "We'll have a team down right away to get you out, just hang on a bit longer. And, young man - what's your name?"
He'd forgotten that he looks young now. He doesn't want to answer her, but she's asked so sincerely, with such compassion in her eyes... "The Master," he says.
Her eyebrows shoot up, but she remains remarkably calm otherwise, and presumably bites back whatever words of sympathy she'd meant to share. "I know you," she says. "I voted against your being resurrected, actually - Grandfather's told me a few stories."
"Nothing too good, then, I trust," he says, forcing a semblance of a smile to his face.
"Bit of a mixed bag, really," Susan says with a hint of a grin. "Honestly, I couldn't ever tell what he really thought about you..."
"Please, don't," he says, catches himself in time to keep his knuckles out of his mouth.
"Don't what?"
"Don't," the Master says, hating every word, "don't leave me in here - don't, I've served the Council well, don't leave me here -"
"I won't - I would never," says Susan, and he believes her; she was a silly child, like all of the Doctor's descendants, but she has that much of the Doctor in her. She's not going to leave him to die. "I promise," she says, "we've got a lock on you now - my, you are buried! - and we'll have you out shortly."
"One more little thing, if you'd be so kind," the Master says, unable to keep a touch of brittleness from his voice, and she tilts her head a bit, curious. "Don't let the Doctor know of this minor - misadventure, would you? It would be so embarrassing..."
Susan's expression changes to something he can't read over the light static in the connection and the crack in the screen, and she says, "Grandfather doesn't know you're back. The Council ordered it kept from him, so he wouldn't be distracted..."
"Ah," he says. "I see."
"The team's on the ground now," she says after a quick glance off-screen, "you should hear them any moment - Master, are you all right?"
He could have died in this stinking tiny hole and the Doctor would never even have known he had been alive again. "Just fine," the Master says.
The Council sends him to another research center, but it doesn't work out. Research Facility Twenty-Three is buried in an asteroid of no considerable size, and as kindly as the Council may have meant the assignment (put him off somewhere out of the way, quiet, can't make trouble there), they chose the worst possible place. It's too small, all of it; the Master takes one look at the cramped quarters they offer him and elects to sleep in the laboratory, where he can't get any proper sleep either, for different reasons. The halls are terrifyingly narrow and the lights too bright, giving him awful pounding headaches all the time.
The staff and other scientists do what they can to accomodate him - dimming the lights, giving him room, letting him have every break-time he can humble himself to ask for - but their sincere generosity isn't enough to compensate for the entire facility's architecture. He's a mess. He completes one brilliant design, a corrosive bomb with absolutely no effect on living tissue, and then he sits on top of a lab table with the lights off and won't move until he's reassigned.
It doesn't surprise the Master that he's reassigned right back out to the front lines, but it does disappoint him. He's been hoping the Time Lords would have better sense than to put him back where he so obviously doesn't belong, but then, he thinks, absently patting his bag of stolen equipment, they never have known what to do with me.
For all of the clever gadgets and old technologies the Master's discovered, the war is much worse when he returns to it: whole star systems decimated by the Daleks, battles slipping in and out of history. He'd thought he was done being shocked by the war, but he can't find words for all of its new and horrible turns. Possibly the worst is the time he realizes he's shouting orders at fog and can't tell if he's snapped, or if there had really been other soldiers there at some point. It's not a good feeling.
He's no soldier but he tries anyway; he carries on, and maybe it's because he wants to impress the Council and maybe it's because he hopes the Doctor will hear he's alive and really it's because he's still stuck in the midst of the action and hasn't found the right place to use the device he smuggled out of Facility Twenty-Three. The Master has a plan, and this time it's a good one, he can feel it. He's in control, he knows what he's doing. He just has to endure (Time Lord blood and Dalek ichor all over him, ground into his skin, he doesn't mind the death but he can't stand how unclean he feels), hold on a bit longer (nineteen hours on a broken-down SIDRAT with an entire platoon squashed in with him, sweating and swearing at the blasted controls, who designed these things anyway?), and as soon as he gets sent somewhere sufficiently out of the way, he'll give them all the slip, Council and Daleks alike. He can do it, and he won't need anyone coming along and fixing it for him, Doctor.
He can't do it. Everything is out of control, he's running as time devours itself behind him and Daleks scream and the soldiers he's supposed to be commanding are trying to contain the snapping rift and he can't, he can't even look back. He holds on tight to his bag of equipment and throws himself into a TARDIS and dances around the controls, getting out, he has to get out; he should feel guilty for leaving behind his soldiers, that's what you do in war, isn't it - you bond over shared horror and rescue each other and run away together but no, not the Master, he doesn't work that way and he doesn't feel a damn thing as the TARDIS rockets away, going anywhen.
He sets up the equipment with shaking hands, shaking arms, shaking everything. He's getting out at last but it doesn't feel like an escape; there's still a dreadful fear in him, all-encompassing and impossible to express. He's not a soldier but he's a fighter, and he struggles against it; "I'm done with it all," he tells the machine, "they can't catch me now, none of them. This is going to work - it's already working!"
The machine clanks back, its loose bits rattling with turbulunce from the TARDIS's flight. It doesn't sound convinced. The Master isn't, either, but damned if he's going to give up now when he's survived this long, when the Doctor is still out there. He tightens a last few screws, slots in the final piece of gadgetry and sets the controls, pauses.
"I'm not sorry," he says, his voice absurdly uneven. "I won't let the Council waste my life; I should have done this long ago." He feels there's something else he could say, but he doesn't know what and so he says, "That's all. Farewell."
He straps himself into the Chameleon Arch as the stolen TARDIS crashes to a halt and for the Master, everything fades.
When he awakens he's lying on the coast of the Silver Devastation, and he stares at his unfamiliar child's hands, wondering why his head is beating like a drum.
Billions of years earlier he can remember that moment and he knows that that's when it really started, that's really when they did it - not when they took him to the Vortex as a child, but then, on that dead and glittering beach. He knows because there were no drums in the war, there were no drums but then there were, echoing back from the Silver Devastation all along his lives, and with the Council's guilty faces in front of him the Master can remember everything. He remembers who he was without them, the man he can't be anymore, damn them, damn them, they've taken his self away for their glorious plan and now he's become this devouring thing that even the Doctor can't save, wouldn't save anyway, not after everything. They made him and he isn't who he should be. That person never would have been a soldier; that Master would have taken the regenerations the Council offered him and laughed in their faces and left them to their war before it could ever touch him.
But now - now he's lived two lives, two and a half, maybe all of them with his heartbeats in the wrong place; the Time Lords couldn't make him a soldier but they've turned him into their monster, and he gathers in his hands the energy of all the lives he should have lived and screams, "You did this to me!"
The time lock is taking them back and that's not good enough, he's not done with them yet; he leaps after Rassilon's smug face, ready to pound it into the ground, he's past caring what happens to him. White light shading to stained red swallows him, and behind him he can hear the Doctor shouting something he can't make out, not that it matters, the Doctor is always saying the same thing.
He won't hear it, but the Master replies anyway, mouthing the words into the light: Don't worry. I'll be back - I always am.
And we'll pick up just where we left off...
... my dear Doctor.