Notes:
I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to update this. School and work-the usual suspects-got in the way.
This is the final chapter. Hope you enjoy!
Missy's footsteps echoed through the empty throne room. The Doctor stood at the window, looking down at the growing crowds in the square below. He could hear her growing closer, but he remained at his place at the window. Still and nonchalant, barely noticing her presence—at least he hoped that was the impression he was giving her.
The footsteps stopped halfway across the room. The Doctor's right arm twitched.
"Sorry, love. You lose at Statues." Her voice echoed slightly.
The Doctor turned around. The throne room appeared empty at first, its marble columns glistening in Earth's mid-morning sunlight, which filtered between the drapes on the main window. He glanced up and down the room, and his gaze finally settled on the throne. There she sat, up the marble steps on the raised dais. Her long black hair flowed down past her shoulders, shining in the sunlight.
The Doctor stared at her.
"I thought I'd give it a go," she said. "Lovely view from up here. Think I might keep it."
The Doctor continued to stare.
She rolled her eyes, and threw something at him. He jumped out of the way to see some sort of rod flying past him.
"Oh, you ruined it. You were supposed to catch that. What would I tell them if it broke?"
The Doctor finally found his voice. "You've changed."
"I let my hair down, love," she said. "Just a teensy change. You made less of a fuss last time I regenerated."
"Yes. Well." The Doctor looked down at the floor where the rod had landed. "Is that the Imperial Scepter?"
"Yes, and you mighta broke it."
"You shouldn't have that." The Doctor scowled at her.
"I shouldn't have it—yet. They won't miss it until the ceremony. By then I'll have slipped it back into its box."
The ceremony. The Doctor had been dreading it for a week now: the moment when they would stand in front of their people, officially instated as Emperor and Empress. All those people looking up to him—he didn't need that. Missy would soak it up, but he would sooner have been run off in the TARDIS and avoided the whole thing. He still might, in fact.
"You want to give it a go?" Missy shifted on the throne and patted the space beside her. "There's room for two."
There wasn't room for two. There might have been room if one of them sat on the other's lap. He leaned down and picked up the rod, then climbed the steps to the dais.
She held out her hand for the rod, but he tightened his grip. "This is going back where it belongs. You don't have to steal from your own empire."
"Well, I don't have to."
She stood up from the throne and curtsied to him.
He sat gingerly on the edge of the throne. This empire was his gift to her, not the other way around. She could enjoy sitting on the throne all she wanted. He didn't have to.
"Relax, love. It's not gonna bite you."
"It might. You never know what might be lurking on a throne. The royal family of Alger Baxooi glued themselves to their own thrones so they wouldn't be distracted from the task of ruling. I could be sitting down in a sticky mess of glue."
She put a hand on his chest, just as she had—it seemed so long ago now, but it couldn't have been more than a month—in 3W, and pushed him back onto the throne.
"There's room for two," she said, and promptly settled onto his lap.
She looked up into his eyes and smiled. "See? Not so bad."
"Well." The Doctor's brain seemed stuck. "Well, when you're here, it's not—"
"Oh, just admit it. You're happy too."
The Doctor sighed, and gingerly put his arms around her. "I'm happy too."
His old friend the Master was sitting in his lap in a throne room on Earth. How couldn't he be happy? Even becoming Emperor of a Thousand Galaxies seemed worth it just to breath in her scent, to feel her body against his.
A cracking noise echoed through the empty throne room, quiet at first, but growing louder until it sounded like the very air was ripping itself apart. Missy, without getting off the Doctor's lap, turned and looked about.
A scream reverberated through the air from outside. Then another. Another. Something had set the crowd into a panic. The Doctor struggled out from beneath Missy and ran down the steps of the dais.
"Always running towards the screams," Missy muttered behind him.
He ignored her and kept running. As he reached the heavy outer doors, the cracking noise and the scream cut off abruptly. The Doctor's ears rang in the silence. He slowly pulled open the door and peered out.
The square was empty. Empty. The Doctor ran from one end of the balcony to the other, his arms flailing about. Something had taken them, right from under his nose. His people. The people who trusted him to rule. Gone.
It was bad enough taking care of a companion. How was he supposed to find a whole square full of people who had suddenly vanished?
Missy appeared in the doorway.
"Oh, now that is beautiful. Can I keep it?" She was pointing towards the sky with her scepter.
The Doctor looked up. An enormous gash had appeared in the sky like a tear in a piece of fabric. A sinister blue fire issued from the crack, fizzling out into electric-looking bolts as it streamed towards the ground.
A bolt arced down from the gash and struck the magnolia in the center of the square. The outline of the tree burned a bright blue for a moment, and then it began to shrink. The Doctor could feel the time distortion twisting through space as the tree reduced to a sapling and then regrew into a new tree, this one twisted and knotted with no more than few leaves.
"Anarchitectural paradox," Missy observed, leaning against the door. "Best get inside before you get struck by lightning."
Anarchitectural paradox. A paradox that took individual objects, reduced them to the beginning of their timelines, and then rebuilt them according to a different possible timeline. Not always a better possible timeline, he thought, looking out at the twisted version of the tree now in front of him.
The Doctor retreated to the shelter of the doorway as another bolt struck the balcony, which reduced and rebuilt before their eyes into a set of half-formed steps leading up to nothing. The Doctor staggered and grabbed the doorknob for support, reeling with the force of the temporal waves.
By the time he had righted himself, Missy was halfway down the throne room, rubbing her head as if she had a headache—which she probably did. Temporal distortions could do that.
The Doctor ran after her. "We've got to get to the TARDIS!" he shouted.
Missy stopped rubbing her head and watched him run past. "Oh, but it's beautiful. The perfect chaos."
The Doctor stopped and faced her. "Beautiful? You think that is beautiful? A hundred people, sucked up in that vortex. Dead, reassigned to different lives, some never even born! You think that's beautiful?"
Missy shrugged innocently.
The Doctor glared at her. "Every time I try to believe that you can be something more than this, you disappoint me." He shook his head. "Fine. You don't care about the people out there? What about your own life? This paradox will spread until timelines cease to exist. The Anarchitectural paradox will eat and eat until nothing is left but random temporal events, and then even those will fall away to the void when there are no more possibilities left to come into being."
He spun on his heel and continued on towards the TARDIS.
Missy caught up to his side, her smile somewhat faded. "I hadn't forgotten, but there's no harm in enjoying a little destruction."
The Doctor didn't grace that with a response.
She rolled her eyes. "Yes, love, you're right. Such a universe would be impossible to live in. But what can be done about it?"
The Doctor stepped through the TARDIS doors. His old girl instantly touched his mind, as if trying to warn him of the paradox. He dragged a scanner over towards him and assessed the damage. If he could find an origin point, it might be possible to—
Missy, who had entered behind him, saw him drop, his head in his hands, leaning against the TARDIS console.
"Is there a problem?" she said.
"It's our paradox."
"Oh, you're too kind. I didn't think you'd truly let me keep it."
The Doctor very deliberately shut his eyes and reopened them. He forced himself to keep his voice steady. "We broke a fixed point in time. This is the consequence."
He'd only seen the effects of a broken fixed point once before, at Lake Silencio, but that had been so much simpler. With all of Earth's history condensed into one day, it had been simple to find River and reverse the paradox. Well, not simple. Weddings were never simple.
But one person remaining alive at a fixed point was nothing compared with a whole galaxy. And with random timelines sprouting up everywhere, there was no chance of finding General Lin and re-destroying the Tiberian Galaxy.
They couldn't fix it.
This was how the universe was going to end.
The bleak look must have shown on his face, because Missy reached over and touched his shoulder. "Don't look so disappointed. There's still you and me. Oh, the fun we could have before the universe ends."
The Doctor very nearly asked her what she had in mind. How far had he fallen that he even considered giving up on the universe? Was this what she had made him into? Someone who simply let the universe fall apart around him because as long as he had her, he was happy?
But this time, there really was no solution. He checked over the temporal maps pouring over the screen. The Tiberian Galaxy hadn't even existed anymore at this point. Earth was slowly being eaten away at. Soon, the human race would never have existed. How long before that extended to the Time Lords? Before he and Missy began to fade?
No time the waste, then. "What did you have in mind?"
Missy grinned wickedly, opened her mouth to reply, and collapsed.
The Doctor ran to her side, and she clutched at his jacket. "My other selves," she whispered. "They're—"
Her voice trailed off. They're fading away. Their timelines were corrupted. Even as Time Lords, they couldn't survive this.
Even as…
"Time Lords," he said. "The Time Lords."
"Boring old politicians in funny hats," Missy wheezed. "Not how I'd spend the end of the universe."
"They could fix this. The Eye of Harmony, the proper one on Gallifrey, it could restore the balance—stop this from happening."
Missy looked away.
The Doctor leaned closer to her. "Time Lords. Tell me how to reach the Time Lords."
Missy struggled to sit up. "You'll leave me."
The Doctor stared at her. "This isn't the time to—"
"You only ever wanted Gallifrey, love. Once you have that, you don't need me anymore. Why would I ever give you that?"
"Because you'll die otherwise."
"Didn't stop me last time."
That, the Doctor reflected, was true. "We have to save the universe."
"You always have to save the universe. I'm thinking about us."
The Doctor turned away, and yelled in frustration. "I won't leave you. I'd never leave you. I've given up everything I ever was, all because you asked for it. I took your army. I gave you your throne. I made this paradox for you. What more proof do you want that I love you?"
Silence followed his words. Missy's eyes widened.
The Doctor could feel his face burning. He'd been on the verge of saying it for so long, but now that he had said it, he wished he could suck the information back in.
Missy looked at the ground. "Send them a message. Coordinates 10-0-11-00:02. Turn the dimensional compensators to 5.3 and it'll land in the right place."
"Message." The Doctor ran to a bookcase and began rummaging through it, tossing books onto the floor here and there. He finally pulled out six squares wedged between War and Peace and The Definitive Works of Blinovitch. Raced back down the steps to Missy, threw them onto the floor, and dived down next to them.
A hand touched his as he reached for the first piece. Missy took the piece from him. "We'll make it together."
"You'll help."
She touched his hand gently. "You stick with me, I'll stick with you."
They assembled the white cube within seconds. Missy placed her hand on one side, and the Doctor put his hand on the other.
"We'll be arrested for what we've done," the Doctor murmured. "Maybe forced to regenerate."
"Well, that won't be a first for either of us."
He grinned at her, and she giggled. The Doctor closed his eyes and concentrated. The white cube would send a psychic message through the Time Vortex to the Time Lords, if Missy had her location correctly. They'd never failed to answer a call for help on this scale. They'd also never failed to punish those who meddled with time so destructively.
His mind connected with the cube and within seconds, he could feel Missy's mind beside his. It was so familiar, and yet, without the persistent echo of the drums that had always coursed through it, it felt incomplete.
Missy seemed to have read his thoughts—she probably had. "It's a wonder to have some peace."
The message was short, just a call for help from the Time Lords, but it seemed to take forever to create. Missy's mind so close to his, just a reach away. The mind of a Time Lord was something that would never have a replacement in all the universe. It had driven him mad when he was the last, to feel no other minds beside his.
When the message had finished recording, it floated away from their fingertips and swept out of the TARDIS doors into the vortex.
The Doctor barely noticed. Missy's hands were still on his. He reached a hand up to her temple, and she did the same.
And her mind was open to him. She was turmoil swirling around in a sea of madness. The visions of the Untempered Schism, the drumbeat, absent but not forgotten, a million thoughts of him. Her thoughts flowed through his mind, and his mind through hers.
He could see a man in a suit with a slightly demonic face, and another burned to a crisp, and another, goatee and laughing, and on and on. Trying to kill him, saving him. Always trying to catch his attention. The Keller Machine, the Matrix, the Death Zone. Skaro, San Francisco, London, The Valliant.
Of course, the Valliant. The Year that Never Was. How could either of them forget? He wondered how he could ever have forgiven her, and yet he couldn't bring himself to consider doing anything else. For what she had done to Jack, to Martha and her family, to him—it was evil.
He could forgive her because he believed in redemption. He always had.
His mind was as open to her as hers was to him, and she could see the restlessness and horror that had sent him running from Gallifrey. She could see his unwillingness to let go of his old friend the Master, the endless quest to stop him from harming the universe, to make him into something better than what he had become. And she could see the Time War, the memories that he hid even from himself. How close he had come to destroying all of them, the guilt he had lived with. His thousand year penance on Trenzalore, standing beside the crack just to be with his people. And yet, he had thrown all of it away for her. He had given up the universe itself, every timeline that ever existed, for her.
To save her soul. But who would save his?
"We're not so different," Missy murmured.
The Doctor opened his eyes. Their foreheads were pressed together. He didn't break the connection just yet, leaving his hands on the sides of her face.
"Not anymore," he said. "I was going to make you better. That's what I am. The man who makes people better. Look where I am now."
The wheezing sound of the TARDIS dematerializing echoed in his ears. He still didn't look up. He didn't need to, to feel what was happening. The Time Lords had found them. They were going home.
They might be going to their deaths. They might never be the same again. It didn't matter, the Doctor decided. Because whatever happened—
"You're with me," Missy finished.
She finally broke the connection, and he instantly felt the loss. The TARDIS console room had never seemed so empty. Nothing in the universe had ever felt so empty as when he didn't have her.
He looked into her eyes. "Whatever happens, I'll never run off without you again."
She reached for his hand. The TARDIS fell silent. He looked over at the double doors. Outside those doors was home. The home he had been dreaming of for a thousand years. All he had to do was walk outside.
He looked at Missy. He had left Gallifrey because there was no good to be done there. They were a stagnant people. Because there was so much more to the universe than what they had to offer. The Master had been left behind in his quest to make the universe better.
Now, he was the man who had damaged the universe in a way he couldn't fix. He had left the universe worse off than he when he had started it.
What good was a Doctor if he couldn't heal?
He stood, as if in a trance, and reached for the TARDIS door. The familiar spires of the Citadel of the Time Lords stretched to the sky in front of him. He looked out at the red sky, and understood. There was no one to save his soul.
There was only Missy, and the path he had chosen to take for her sake. She had made him like her. And that was how it would be.
Missy stood beside him. She was everything he had left. She was home.
And back on Gallifrey, there was time for a new beginning.
"With nothing left, he would have to cling to that which had robbed him, as people will." –William Faulkner