A/N: This is part of a collection of vignettes that all take place in the same place, but at different times. You don't need to have read the others to read this one (the others being "They Were Friends" and "She Ate of Her Heart"). The only thing you need to know is that there is, somewhere out in space, a tiny little world the Master made where she and the Doctor can just exist. Unfortunately, neither 'just exist' very well in each other's presence.
"It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space." - "Mars is Heaven!" by Ray Bradbury
He's lonely, but it takes the Doctor several relative days to build up the nerve to phone the Master. He doesn't know her number, and she, in some bizarre sort of power play, refuses to call him so he can get it. But there are only two TARDISes in the universe. He's pretty sure if he just sends a coded message out into the aether, she'll pick it up.
He listens to static and modem-whir wheezing as his TARDIS tries to connect. His fingers drum restlessly as he mulls over the mistake he is about to make. The Doctor has worked himself into a fervor by the time the dying sounds are replaced with ringing, and the ringing goes on long enough that he about hangs up. Just as soon as he pulls the phone from his ear, he hears a click and a tinny voice over the line.
"Sorry, could you repeat that?" he asks, bringing the phone back to his ear.
"I said, 'hello, my dear Doctor,'" the Master dutifully repeats, slipping from her normal tone to the dangerous purr she must have used the first time. It loses some of its effect knowing this is the second time it's being uttered.
"Master." The Doctor can't think of what to say. The silence hangs between them, across eons and light years. "Master," he says again.
"I'm not busy, so take your time. And feel free to say my name some more while you do."
"You're in the vortex?"
"I am."
"Doing what?"
"Right now? I just got out of the shower. Didn't even have time to get dressed before you rang."
That would explain why she hadn't jumped at the first ring, as his ID would have shown on the console. The Doctor tries not to imagine her standing in her stark, intimidating console room in a towel, hair loose, one hand keeping her modest and the other cradling the phone to her ear. It's all too easy to imagine. She must be projecting that image to him. He's never seen her without her layers, never seen her with her hair down and wet in this body. The Doctor will have to figure out how shielding works, better late than never, before she moves onto projecting more lewd images. "Oh. Well, hm. I should let you go so you can do that."
"You sound embarrassed, Doctor. Why's that?"
"You know damn well why."
The silence on the other end does nothing to assure the Doctor he's right. "What?" she asks.
"Nevermind. I... I was wondering if we could meet up again, on that little planetoid of yours," he says instead, deflecting the question.
"That sounds like a wonderful idea. Just send the time to my ship, and I'll be there."
"Right. Bye."
"Goodbye, my dear."
She hangs up first, leaving the Doctor with a droning in his ear. He sets the phone down and punchs in a random date. Then he stands there and wonders what the hell is wrong with him.
Why isn't she here yet? The Doctor paces around the TARDIS, which has a venerable cloud of moths fluttering around its light. Fungus roots climb up her sides, and he bends to tear them away, a few flecks of blue paint going with them. It's been an hour already. Is the Master going to stand him up?
No, that doesn't sound like her at all. She is always the one to arrive first, leave last, visit him on Earth or sneak into his room at the acadamy. If anyone is going to stand anyone up, it's always be the Doctor.
At the sound of another TARDIS materializing, he stops picking morosely at the paint and leaps away, searching the field of mushrooms. It materializes in its umbrella shape, today, floating at about the same height as his own. As he watches the handle swings sideways and a ladder drops down. The Master slides down and lands heavily in a plume of dust. The ladder slips back up. She catches the umbrella as its anti-gravity field gives way and closes it with a snap.
"Doctor!" she says, pleased surprise evident in her voice. "You're early."
"No. You're late."
Her mouth twitches down at the corners, as though contemplating a frown, but the Master doesn't give in. "What," she says instead, in that same tone she'd used when he had obliquely accused her of sending dirty thoughts his way.
The Doctor ponders his statement. She has a point. That doesn't sound at all right. Not that he'll admit it, because who'd ever heard of a Time Lord who can't tell time? Except for the Doctor, whom everyone, especially the Master, knows has a history of exactly that.
"We're both here now," he says brusquely, and the Master politely doesn't comment further.
"Yes, we are," she says mildly. "Why, exactly?"
The Doctor sucks air between his teeth. "Done anything interesting as of late?"
"As in what are my devious plans?" The Master tuts at him. "You're getting lazy in your old age."
"No, not your plans. I didn't think you'd tell me them, at least not 'til you're ready to gloat. Just. Done anything interesting? Read any good books? Seen any nice things and not destroyed them?"
The Master walks forward with those quick, robotic steps she'd used when pretending to be an android, and doesn't stop until she's practically abreast of him, face tilted up. He's assumed that had been a part of her little charade, but she really does move like something unnatural, either too stiff or too loose. Robot or marionette. "You mean to tell me you just want to know how I've been doing?"
He steps backwards before she can stick her tongue down his throat again, if this is meant to play out as before. "Yes."
She inhales sharply, connecting dots the Doctor would rather she not connect, then motions for the Doctor to approach her. Like the first time here, he does, but hesitantly, as though walking into a trap of his own design. "Closer, my dear. Let me show you how I've been. This is what you really want, isn't it? Contact?" He steps closer, and she takes his hands in her own, brings them so intimately to her temples. His hands are large and clumsy compared to the cut glass contours of her face. "You don't need to hide it. Hate me though you may, you'll always have me."
"I don't hate you," he murmurs, thumbs brushing her cheekbones. Her own fingers trail their way up his arms to mimic his hold. Her hands are cool with slight callouses from building plots and machinery. When she sinks down, he has to sink with her, and they both settle with their knees touching, legs folded beneath them.
"We'll see how honest you're being," she replied just as quietly, pulling his face toward her. They bump foreheads, and it reminded him of a cold, cold scrapyard and a man driven mad by drums. "Whenever you're ready."
The Doctor nods, swallows hard, then manages to choke out, "Contact."
He plunges into space. It snatches his breath, though he doesn't need to breath here, and a shock of panic shoots through him.
The Doctor hasn't connected in centuries with another like himself, forgets how it feels, the loss of sensation, the loss of self. Humans had such strong independent identities, but Gallifreyans were a collective. A piece cut from the whole would never be complete, and the contact reminds the Doctor just how little a piece he is. The world outside melts away, leaving only the void and thoughts like stars. The Doctor has never fallen into her before, not like this with no resistance and no barriers. Only crackling leylines betray where the boundaries had once been, and the Master is exposed, vivisected.
He can't ask what happened to her mind, barely has time to register the wrongness of this before he's in too deep. The void isn't silent, but it isn't full of someone else's drumming, either. It's screaming. A tempest of abstractions - thoughts, feelings, memories - raging in a vacuum. Here, not here, flickering and bright, something he has neither the experience nor aptitude to engage with. Her mere existence overwhelms the Doctor, and that terrifies him.
The Doctor has never brushed the Master's true being before, but knows this is it with more surety than he knows even himself. Every other contact in every other body had been tightly controlled, only letting the Doctor see what she wanted him to see, doling out the sublime like rare treasures, sparsely and jealously. All that control is gone, now, leaving the beast laid bare. And what a beast had grown when nobody was watching!
Gallifreyan telepaths frequently overlap with empaths by virtue of their ability, contact creating understanding, no such thing as a one-way street. The stronger the telepath the stronger the empath, and there's no telepath stronger than the Master, who managed to ensnare an entire world in her thrall. She kept her council close all her other lives, but now the walls were gone. Is this what her life is like? Daily, hourly, second by second? This constant bombardment of experiences her own yet not, absorbed into her mindscape? How can she deny the agonies of others when she feels them first-hand? Somewhere in this composite whirl of her own and others' lives, somewhere there lives a creature with the schism in its eyes and time between its teeth, tearing and gnashing and so full of pain that it knows nothing else. Except for him.
She is in his mind, too, picking delicately despite the wild lashing the Doctor sees of her. They nestle like TARDISes one inside the other inside the first, but the Doctor can't find the person he thought he knew so well in her mind, though he feels her familiar presence in his own. The Master's a juxtaposition of such unlike things, matter and anti-matter intermingled. The Doctor is pulled away, away from the ensuing explosions, yet not of his own accord. She's always careful with him, even when they play their deadly games, and he only ever reciprocates in the same way he connects - clumsily, without consideration, if it suits him. These don't sound wholly like his own thoughts.
Then he's free.
They break apart and the world resumes around them. Aside from his panting and the Master's blown-wide pupils, it's as though nothing has changed. The Doctor's time sense tells him hours had passed, repeated, passed again. He feels shellshocked, but coupled with a relaxation like all the tension of keeping his thoughts to himself had run out of the hourglass and into space.
The Master drops her hands first and leans back, face slack. She seems still caught up in their connection, likewise torn between trauma and afterglow. The starlight fades from her eyes, replaced by a wet sheen. Without the contact the Doctor becomes a ship lost at sea when trying to read her.
"Why are you sad?"
"I'm not sad! I'm angry," she snaps. Angry tears, here. Happy tears, when he told her to get out of the way. Desperate, when she begged him to be her friend again. Relieved, loving, upset - tears always on the verge of spilling over. The Master has always been more emotional and demonstrative of said emotions, especially among Time Lords who keep themselves coralled and contained. It made her stick out even when they'd been children, and that in turn made her more moody and emotional. And now the Doctor's made her cry. Again.
"What did I do?" He grabs her shoulder when she makes to walk away, spins her back around. "I don't know what I did."
"I said I was going to see if you hated me," she muttered, stiff in his grasp.
"I don't."
"You don't."
The Doctor rolls back his memories to their contact. He'd been so lost in her mind that he'd not even focused on what she was doing in his. He just knows she'd been there, poking, prodding. Looking.
The Master hadn't found hatred. She'd found indifference, pity, fear, all mixed with his instinct to fix. Such paltry, pallid emotions compared to her own for him. Everything he'd felt in her is threaded through with thoughts of him, and the Doctor doesn't even think on the Master most days, not until he wants her to relieve some of the loneliness, or she makes him remember her existence.
He lets her go, and she storms away. The horizon is deceptive, and she sooner than he expects dips under it like a setting moon.
The Doctor can't just leave the Master. He realizes this with his hand on the door of his TARDIS. Some of that notion might have even been the ship's idea, always looking after him even if he doesn't want her to. He's certainly left the Master plenty of times before, and one more time would make very little difference to the Doctor. Just to be sure, he tries the door. It won't open.
"I thought you'd hate her, for what she did to you." But even as the Doctor says it, he realizes how silly the idea is. TARDISes aren't people, with petty grudges and angry memories. They're beings for whom causality doesn't exist, for whom reasons to hate don't exist, because hatred is so ephemeral, and they are eternal. The Doctor needs another Gallifreyan's contact, in particular the one stewing half-way around the world and just on the edge of his mind, so she gives him no other option but to go. Even trying to get away, the Master hasn't thought to cut off her link to their collective subconscious. She relies on it more than he does, especially with the silence threatening just beyond the ad hoc system they've woven together. and the screaming buried deep within.
The Doctor goes to her. He's never been on the far side of the planetoid, but the cloud cover, trapped in its looping thundery moment, gives way to a night sky of iridescent rainbow slicks and inky blackness. The Master sits beside a pool, the only water source feeding the tiny rock. It has only the faintest of ripples and the clarity of a mirror. When the Doctor looks past their wobbling reflections, he sees it plunge down, down and something embedded in the rock of its walls glitters. There are no stars here, on the edge of nowhere. They've all been trapped in the wellspring.
Dried tear trails are barely visible on the Master's face. Her makeup has suffered a little from rubbing, but hasn't run. She doesn't look too out of sorts, which relieves the Doctor. A Master who lets her carefully cultivated exterior drop is a Master already too far gone.
"I wish you had fallen in love with someone else. For your own sake."
"I could have picked worse. Like Braxiatal," she says flippantly, as though the earlier incident had never occured.
The Doctor sits with an ache to his joints. "You need someone who can connect with you. Properly. Maybe Brax would have been better. He was good with telepathy. Not like me, all fumbling and awkward. I do more damage than good."
"I'm sorry."
"I - what." The Doctor's thoughts stall. That's his deal, not hers. 'Sorry's forever 'til he is blue in the face, especially in a stringbean body with a different Master. The Master, meanwhile, never admits she's wrong much less apologizes for anything. "For what?"
"I just seem to have more trouble keeping myself in check, nowadays." She shrugs as though she can't fathom why that is.
The Doctor huffs. "Well no wonder, given how your mind looks. It's a mess."
"It's always been a mess. I've just kept it hidden from guests."
He fumbles, like he always does. "Always?" the Doctor asks finally. "Even without the drums?" She nods.
"They're gone now, naught but echoes. It's strange. They used to not be there at all, I don't think. It's all a bit muddled." That it's muddled because she threw herself back into hell for him goes unsaid. Rassilon was already mad, and the Master was the reason everything went to pot. The Doctor doubts he'd been kind.
"We need to find you someone who can deal with that."
"A doctor, you mean?" she asks, a wry twist to her mouth.
"Yes, but not me. I've already done enough."
The Master looks away, trails her fingers over the water, lightly enough to just break surface tension. "You help. Even if you don't mean to or want to, you do. Just by being here."
They sit in silence, just being here. No longer touching, barely acknowledging the thread of thoughts between them. As soon as they leave, she'll cut herself off again, let everything build and boil in her own mind. She'll keep her secrets at the expense of her sanity.
Eventually the Master stands and the Doctor follows suit.
"Well, dear, I've got worlds to conquer."
"And I've got worlds to save."
The Master's pale gaze flickers up, then she steps forward and, before the Doctor can respond, places her hands on his chest, stands on her tip-toes, and gives him a small kiss.
She retreats and pops open her umbrella. The handle slides, the ladder drops, and the Master latches on. It rises up, taking her with it. Suddenly, her head pokes out of the hole, hanging upside down. "Let's do this again," she says, blowing him another kiss. "But not too soon."
The Doctor gives a faint noise of agreement, and she's gone. He trudges back to his TARDIS, reflexively licking away the tingle of her lips on his. He tastes salt.