Title: Insanity
Word Count: ~1,300
Warnings: none
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: 10th Doctor/Simm!Master
Summary: Spoilers for Last of the Time Lords and The End of Time. The Master travels through time, space, and nothingness before the Doctor can find a way to bring him back. Not exactly meant to be 100% understandable.
For one harsh, painful moment, the Master really believes he's won. With his next breath, he's regretting his words, the painful twist in his stomach, not entirely caused by the bullet wound, playing up the ironic tragedy of this scene, almost out of a teen romance novel, or perhaps a Shakespearean play.
When he next opens his eyes, he can't think, can't hear for the pounding inside his head, the never-ending drum beat that threatens to envelop not only him, but all of Earth, all of the universe, all of reality.
He knows it could, too. How far along this path has he been driven, at the drums' insistence? The sound of a Time Lord's heart… well, it couldn't be his, could it, he had heard the sound even while he was the professor. That leaves a rather bleak option, but he can accept it as truth at this late hour.
He can still survive, he's sure of it, he has enough intelligence to scrape together some kind of cure for this dying body before it's too late, the Doctor would even help him, if it came down to it, but somehow it feels like everything is coming to an end.
And then he finds out what Rassilon did to him, and in that moment, the drums could destroy the universe with the rage he feels. This madness is not innate, it was planted, it made him the way he is today, it stopped him from ever being satisfied, from ever being happy, even when the thing he wanted most in the world was his.
He had enough residual sanity to know that he is completely insane, yet the mad part of him is regards it as positive. In that last second, though, when Rassilon would have otherwise killed the Doctor, he has a sudden burst of sanity, some spare scrap that has been salvaged, perhaps for this very purpose.
For even if he is not an ally of the Doctor's, he's certainly no ally of the Time Lords, not anymore, not since he was eight years old, when they planted the drums in his mind. The last bit of his mind is dredged up from deep within some abyss, perhaps his own Untempered Schism within his mind, and whispers to him in the Doctor's voice.
In that brief moment of clarity, he sees the universe as it was meant to be, as it would have were it not Rassilon. He would have run, run far farther than the Doctor could have ever dreamed, had he not been struck down by the drums in that second. The madness and the inspiration that plague him are not his, they are the possession of nothing more than a simple homing signal, he does not deserve what little good he got out of life, but at the same time, he deserves so much more.
He can't ever know what type of person he would have been, for his entire existence has been invalidated, his entire being has been disenfranchised. He can only cling to the faint, sad hope that perhaps he can begin to earn some sort of forgiveness by saving the Doctor's life, because as he once put it, the Doctor is his world.
He sees the anger, shock, pain, betrayal on the Doctor's face as he slowly moves out of focus, and the next second he's spinning wildly, travelling through space and time, and this journey should take him seconds, but it stretches on for years. Somewhere in the gap between realities, he begins to be pulled in the opposite direction, but he no longer has the consciousness to wonder at it.
His life within this vortex, this space in which there exists simply… nothing, where the entire universe ceases to exist, changes his mind, twists it, in a matter of seconds, to adapt to the torture within. He may not be in pain, but he sees, for the first time, nothing, absolutely nothing and it's the exact opposite, and therefore the exact remedy to counteract the Schism all those years ago, where he saw everything.
When he next closes his eyes, he does so for the last time within the void, for when they are reopened, he sees his savior, the one man who has always been a constant in his life, the one man who can turn him into what he should have been. He tests his mind, gathering his strength. There's none to be had in his muscles, so he acts with sheer obstinate willpower instead.
He reaches to grab the Doctor's suit tightly and pulls him down to tangle their mouths in a searing kiss that makes up for its sloppiness in the sheer, unadulterated happiness that courses within the Master's body in a burst that he fears may never repeat itself.
The Doctor, perhaps too used to being pulled into kisses unwillingly, responds with the kind of enthusiasm that makes the Master wish the strength of his desire in his mind could translate into his weakened body. He doesn't question his reappearance on what he knows indubitably to be Earth, he merely loses himself, his identity, his hearts, in the Doctor's embrace and clutches at his shoulders as though he were a dying man.
And this is what they were meant to have from the beginning of time itself, because they are the last two Time Lords in existence, and dear God, he loves the Doctor with an intensity that chokes him, and the Doctor is making a sound that mirrors the Master's thoughts, a sound so raw, so passionate, that tears almost spring to the Master's eyes, though he holds them back with surprising difficulty.
When they finally pull apart, the Doctor only moves far enough to lean his forehead against the Master's, panting for breath, eight separate heartbeats thudding into the otherwise silent room. The Doctor leans down and kisses the Master softly on the lips once, twice, as though he simply can't help himself, and the truth is, he really can't.
Neither of them speaks, unwilling to ruin the sanctity of the moment, until the Doctor moves his lips to rest by the Master's ear, saying only one word in Gallifreyan- his name. The Master closes his eyes and tries to even his breathing, tries to calm his thudding hearts when he hears, for the first time, silence.
He turns his face to the Doctor in shock, the Doctor is watching him with a look of almost sickening happiness. The Master feels his own expression soften into something doubtlessly vomit-inducing, and whispers, "They're gone."
The Doctor doesn't need to ask to know what the Master means, and while he doesn't look surprised, he murmurs, "How about that," low enough the Master just barely hears it. He hears a slight tremor in the voice, and the suppressed emotion that both of them are struggling to keep in check threatens to spill out, overwhelm them, and the Master, despite his physical weakness, feels a bone-deep contentment in response to the Doctor's heat so close to his own body.
There are a million questions to be asked and answered, a billion more conversations that need to happen, a trillion more paths that lie ahead of them, but they are happy to just lay together peacefully until the time that these obstacles will have to be faced.
The Doctor isn't perfect, the Master is far from even close to perfect, and both of them are still potentially on opposite sides of a battle that was long over, but for right now, at this very moment, it simply doesn't matter.