A/N: Written for dark_fest - Doctor/Master, instead of aging the Doctor, the Master rapes him.
Drum Beats, Hoof Beats
Time is a funny thing when you're a Time Lord. The Doctor couldn't have explained it to someone if he had tried, and in this case, he didn't really want to try. If they got through it, this latest, so much more horrific disaster, there was no way he'd discuss it with Martha, despite what her medical books would probably counsel her to do.
He knew that it happened, of course – he would be fooling himself if he tried to think otherwise. He could remember whispers of it back in Gallifrey, hushed murmurs because they didn't say the word aloud.
The power of being a Time Lord was harnessed in that ability to reconfigure time, rewire it, avert disaster, but some points were fixed and this was one of them. Even if he wiped this moment off of the face of the Earth, this would always exist, in his mind. Like watching all the Gallifreyans massacred, being the last of the…
Maybe it would be better to be the last of the Time Lords.
There was a knee in his back, and he was vaguely aware of the fact that this was being broadcast to Martha, whatever happened next – he knew what happened next.
He'd been here, already, in his mind, could see far enough ahead to wish he didn't know. Fear was better than knowing, was better than –
There was a sound in his ear, amplified, cloth ripping.
The Master had a reputation for this kind of thing, always had, but he couldn't help but hold out that foolish, ridiculous optimism that since they were the only two left of their kind that he could be treated as something less than a plaything.
There was a tapping against his shoulder-blade.
A drumbeat.
And the sound of a voice in his ear, a voice he'd heard so many times before, but in so many different forms.
He isn't evil, the Doctor told himself. He had always known that. He's chaos.
That was his last thought before it began. Two hearts were beating, right by his head – his assailant, the other last-of-his-kind, his nemesis if he believed in so stark a differentiation. His own were beating in his own chest, trying desperately to drown out the realization that he was being pried at, pried apart, with no care.
Care isn't how he does things. You ought to know that by now, don't you?
They'd been around and around each other more times than he could count, with the whole universe between them, the Master eyeing it as if it were a snow globe that could be shattered open with no consequences other than a pesky mess on the carpet.
Not evil, just insane.
The prying stopped and the pushing began, more curious than brutal. Like a student dissecting frogs in a human biology class.
Let's see inside you. You've seen inside him.
And he had. The Doctor could have told him it all, exactly, knew his history better than he knew it himself. But he hadn't known that he had survived, how could he have? There should have been some sign, besides what the Face of Boe said. Some kind of flashing lights, homing lights. How could I not have known?
The train of thought was cut off by a rush of pain, and a feeling of pressure against his back. He was surprised at how detached he felt; he had a sense as if he was watching this from his TARDIS and commenting to Martha about how awful it was, how cruel creatures could be to one another.
No, I'm definitely here. Talking to myself in my head.
I should have known.
Flashes of light purple and white shot around his eyes. It reminded him of some vortex, some universe he'd stared into once, but he couldn't quite place it. Maybe Martha could, had he been with Martha? Rose, the elusive Rose? Or maybe it had been before? Sarah Jane, if it had been her – she'd know, she'd have sketched it down on one of her notepads and been able to recite it back to him like it'd happened yesterday, and perhaps on some plane of existence, it had.
Martha had to come through for him. He couldn't fight the pang of guilt that traveled down his spine and ricocheted, somewhere, towards both his hearts – she loved him, he knew it as well as she did, but he didn't love her. And now she had to watch him, watch him be decimated into little pieces before her eyes, helpless to stop it.
Like the times he'd been on other sides of doors where Rose had been being chased by Daleks or Cybermen. Or by her own demons; when she'd been forced to watch her father's death. Maybe it was like that.
He didn't know what it was like.
It was like falling through space, forever, and being unable to get the air in his lungs to be able to scream.
It was like dying for good.
They had said, the humans had, that the end of the world would be rung in by four horsemen. He could believe that, now, because in the sound of the four hearts beating together as one – as a paradox machine, as a twisted, cruel thing – he could hear hoofbeats. And drumbeats.
The same sound of drums that had driven the Master insane.