A/N: A fic for my ultimate OTP. Finally! This story is set after, 'The Husbands Of River Song'. Title taken from Book 38 of The Adventures of the Eighth Doctor from BBC Books. Do try to read it sometime soon!
DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN DOCTOR WHO but one day I time travelled and saw myself as a writer fleshing out the seventeenth Doctor...
Please notify me if you spot any grammatical or punctuation errors.
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Casualties Of War
He is standing in the sand strewn outside the closed Earthworld Amusement Park on New Jupiter. The whole place is deserted and it gives out an eery, haunting and strangely chilling feeling. He doesn't know why the TARDIS brought him here or why the mere thought of those homicidal triplet princesses that reigned on this planet when he last came here with Fitz and Anji in his eighth incarnation still makes a slight chill run down his spine.
He walks the large boundary wall and continues doing so until he spots something so horrifying that every grotesque thing that he has ever encountered in his eventful two thousand years old life amounts almost next to nothing compared to what he is seeing right now in front of him.
There, lying on the cold, pebble and sand covered ground lies the Mistress. Her eyes are closed and her already too pale, alabaster skin is much more paler since he last saw her on Skaro. Her arms are spread around and her hands seem lifeless. Her hair is splayed around her face, its usual intricately coiffed up style gone and her coat is nowhere in sight. The skirt she is wearing is torn in all the wrong places; its edges are all frayed and tattered and the colour is faded. He remembers the time when it had been ankle length and coloured a rich, deep purple. Her immaculate white shirt is almost in a similar condition with the upper two buttons missing and her shoes are nowhere to be seen.
But these are not the only things he sees. He sees the angry red scar running along the length of her forehead and it looks like it is not going to heal any time soon until and unless he uses his regeneration energy. He sees similar ferocious scars scattered along the length of her delicate, lean arms and legs. He sees the cauterised wounds present nearly everywhere, spread in between the scars, but the thing that disturbs him the most is that she isn't opening her icy blue eyes and he is too scared to know if she is gone forever. Before he can stop himself, he is bending down and laying his hands on top of where her hearts should be.
His mind tells him he could have just checked her pulse but he ignores it at the moment. His callused hands gently skim upon her chest and he finds that one of her hearts has stopped beating due to which she is breathing very shallowly. He can clearly fathom that she is too injured to regenerate on her own. There is blood everywhere too, so much blood that it sickens him. In her current condition, he thinks, it would take her a day to die, but he cannot let her die at any cost because she is his only link to the red grasses in which they ran together under the glorious, orange sky...
She is whispering something; maybe she is dreaming, so he bends down some more to place his ear a little above her lips.
"Please don't do this to me. Not again. I said I don't know what the Hybrid is or where it is. I just don't know. Please... just let me go. I don't know any of that. Why are you doing this to me? Let me go!"
Who is she talking about? It would most likely be the newly returned Time Lords, he presumes. What have they done to her to reduce her to her current condition? Maybe they put her inside a closed energy loop too, like they had done with him. Most of all, the fact that startles him is that she is begging in her raspy whispers. In all his life, he has never heard the Master beg, and least of all to him. The only time he has heard this woman begging had been back at the Academy, to Ushas for notes on Stasis Cube Art when they all had been brilliant, young Prydonians. But then, back then she had been a precocious, little loomling called Koschei, not the Master.
Without thinking further, he gathers her carefully in his arms and lifts her gently off the ground. She feels light in his arms, too light and it is abnormal. Her body is so weak, so delicate and he fears that a single careless touch might shatter it. She whimpers slightly and cracks open her eyes to see him hovering over her. As soon as she does this, her eyes widen and she begins beating his chest with her fragile hands. The Doctor is so shocked by this sudden chain of events that his mouth doesn't open even though he wants it to.
"You!" Missy screams, "You again! Just let me go. I cannot tell you anything and I know I have told you this at least five billion times by now," She is struggling against his tight hold now. The blood from her endless wounds is dripping onto his clothes but he does not pay any attention to that fact since he is hellbent on getting her into his TARDIS first.
"I did get out of there, didn't I? After five billion years," she yells, still struggling against him. "Then why are you all still after me. Why are you all taunting me with this mirage? Let me go!" she adds quietly after delivering a quite nasty punch.
"What are you talking about?" he speaks after some silence and some more rough shoves from her.
"Oh don't feign ignorance. It's been like that since the bloody first time, I remember," she says and coughs a little, causing blood to spurt forth from her lips. "You're not real. You feel real, for Gallifrey's sake, you even smell real but you aren't. It always starts with me being bruised. You will be kind to me in the beginning and then slowly, when I think that you so good for me, that's when you will unveil you true side. You're with them, those Time Lords on the High Counsel who want to know everything about the Hybrid. Well, let me tell you love, I ain't falling for it this time. I should have known from the very beginning when I didn't spot your Clara with you. I should have known from the beginning. I should have known better, known better than to trust you. So know this— the Doctor's secret does not leave my mouth. And he may consider me his as his archenemy but I only consider him my best friend. So kill me, maim me, chain me, do whatever you want but that secret will never leave these lips."
The Doctor looks at her incredulously. Here she is, on the brink of death and she is still trying to keep his deepest secrets intact?
"I'm real," he says earnestly. She rolls her eyes slowly. Leave it to the Mistress to be sarcastic in her last moments. The gears in his mind are whirring too fast and he thinks he knows what she has undergone. The Time Lords captured her and put her in her own confession dial. They gave her the worst nightmare of her life: him, the Doctor injuring her relentlessly. He cannot believe she sustained it all without breaking down. Just for him
"Oh please, just drop me down and let me die,"
"But I am real, Missy. You escaped for real and now you're on an abandoned, forsaken planet. They did leave you to die,"
"Prove it to me," she whispers so quietly that he has to strain his ears to hear it. "Prove it to me that you're the real Doctor,"
His mind is telling him to carry her to the TARDIS so that she can see it for herself, but there's is this wild, reckless part of him that is telling him to do something else, something unpredictable. By now her blood has soaked the bottom half of his shirt but he does not pay any attention to it. Instead he gently lowers her down to the ground and sits beside her.
"You want a proof?"
She barely manages to nod.
"You did so much for me. It's only necessary that I do something for you,"
He pries open her lips with his fingers and then cups her pale cheeks. Before she can fathom what is happening, he is bending down, a rarely seen, teensy, awkward blush flaming on his cheeks and then his lips are on top of hers, doing nothing, just touching. Her eyes are open, trying to gauge what he will do next, while his are closed in concentration. Suddenly, she feels a huge surge of powerful energy leaving his mouth and entering hers. Broad, translucent, golden tendrils of regeneration energy surrounds the pair of them in a ghostly envelope of sparkling light. Suddenly, she feels the decay of the fires of her wounds and the soothing wind of a cool rush spread over her entire being. He is kissing her now. His left hand slowly moves down to rest on the small of her back and then he proceeds to lift her into a sitting position. Her eyes have closed on their own accord and now her hands are wandering towards him.
Her fingers grip the lapels of his coat very strongly and pull him closer to her. His hand moves up and down her waist possessively as he finally thrusts his tongue inside her warm mouth. She complies with equal ferocity on her part and is now gripping his shoulders. When he pulls back after what feels like an eternity, he bends forward again and kisses away the scar marring her forehead. After that, he lays his forehead against hers and their noses touch as they peer at each other with heaving breaths leaving their mouths. The sphere of energy is still present around them in a faint, luminous glow. Her wounds have all gone and her flesh has healed completely.
He wonders how long will it take to heal her mind and to remove those psychological scars from her mind. And his. She and him, they are casualties of war, after all. A war which never seems to stop.
She says something she has not said to anyone in a long, long time and has not meant it in an even longer time.
"Thank you,"
He smiles, tentatively, but it does not take much time to break it into a full-fledged, brilliant grin as he gets up and offers her his hand. She takes it.
"You're welcome, always."
And this time, it is her turn to smile. She looks beautiful, he notes, even with her tattered clothes and wild hair.
"So..." he says, the uncertainty high in his voice.
"So, what?" she finishes for him.
"Where to now? What's next?"
"Finding my TARDIS, first of all. Second, killing all of the High Council and that stupid Lord President of ours and—"
"I probably did that for you."
"You? Oh my, my... Doctor, getting like me are you?"
"Perhaps. A little Missy-ness doesn't hurt anyone, I suppose," He winks.
"Except the High Council," She winks back.
"And Rassilion," he adds.
They laugh, just like the good, old times, back in those scarlet fields where they used to race to the useless, metallic scarecrow which was shaped like a Dalek. Now that he thinks more, it probably had been a real Dalek casing, savaged from any one of the wars that dotted Time Lord history.
"Race to the TARDIS?" he asks.
"Sure"
.. ... .
And so that's it. The end. Fin.
If anyone's curious, the story being referenced to in the first paragraph is 'Earthworld' (Another adventure of the wild eighth Doctor)
Please review!
K