Author's Note: This chapter... ugh. This chapter. I've had it finished for nearly a week and something about it just... I don't know. It bugs me. Maybe it's just the range of the Master's emotions, maybe it's just Sam's view of things but I've been tweaking. And tweaking. And tweaking. To the point that my muse is starting to get all huffy. So, to avoid having my creative genius flip me the bird and refuse to work with me on this project right now... here's the chapter.

In all of its... glory. Or lack there of.

I'm mostly happy with it. Mostly. So hopefully you will be too.

The best night of her life ended with the man behind her letting out a howl of what could only be described as pure pain, shocking her from the greatest, deepest sleep she could remember. She'd even been warm, toes included, and that hadn't happened in… ever. Her feet had been cold even as a baby. She knew because in every picture her parents had of her she had socks or booties on her feet – and her birthday was in June. The best explanation she'd ever received from the doctors was you have poor circulation. Well, no shit Sherlock.

But that wasn't important right now.

What was important was the fact that Matt had stiffened so sharply that the feeling of his flesh going hard – and not the good kind, her inner voice remarked cheekily – jolted her into consciousness a split second before the ragged, tormented cry ripped itself from his throat. It was like before, when he had shattered into a million pieces in her bathroom. Not the same though, not quite. This time was worse.

Worse because it wasn't just the cry of a man broken beyond repair, a man who could take no more but it was hurt and rage and sorrow – heartbreaking sorrow so thick that she was drowning in it even as she scrambled into consciousness. "Matt?" she called softly, turning to watch him scramble across the bed, those beautiful blue eyes wide with terror.

Terror that was directed at her.

He regrets this, was the first thought that flashed through her head, mind leaping to the most obvious conclusion. Christ on a god damn cracker, he asked me to put some clothes on and instead I shoved him over the edge. You're disgusting Sam. Absolutely despicable. He was trying to be a gentleman and… oh, god, what did I do to him?

"Matt?" she repeated gently as she drew the covers up to her waist. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have pressed you… I shouldn't have…" She trailed off, words dying as he stared at her.

"Not your fault," he whispered as he teetered on the very edge of the bed. Every muscle in his body jumped beneath his skin. It was obvious, at least to her, that he was torn between leaping off the bed and leaping at her. "I told you I was a monster. I told you that I'd destroy you."

Samantha froze. Okay, clearly she had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But this…? Apparently, he had formed an incorrect conclusion as well. "Don't you think that's a bit… overdramatic?" she finally asked, staring at him. "I mean it was just sex – a night of mind blowing, fantastic sex," she clarified. It was the truth, god help her. It was the absolute best sex that she'd ever had. With every slight twitch of her body she could feel it, feel how completely he had owned her. It was a delicious throbbing ache that, if she was lucky, she would be feeling for days. God, even her mace-toting persona was still lolling at the back of her mind, incapable of anything but a dazed smile and a muffled moan of pleasure.

Shut up, she told the indolent persona, you're not helping.

Despite the horrified look on his face, the corner of Matt's lips twitched in an upward direction, eyes flickering in a downward caress across the curve of her breasts. For a moment she thought it a turning point, a shift into a more normal realm of conversation because, at its base, it was the reaction of a man reacting to the praise of his sexual prowess. The typical male reaction gave her a brief moment of hope that he would calm, that he wouldn't teeter over that invisible edge and shatter. Half a second later that hope was dashed as he caught himself, eyes snapping back to her face and the ghost of the smile wiped from his face with a quickness and severity that made Sam doubt that it had ever been there.

"Just… sex…?" he repeated and the quietness of his voice scared her. He smiled again, and this time it wasn't reassuring. "That…" he scrubbed a hand through the short white-blonde spikes of his hair. "I told you – I told you – that I would destroy you! That I broke everything I touched! And you let me touch you! Why?" he screamed, face twisting as he tore at his own hair. "Why would you let me?"

Samantha moved instinctively, reacting to the raw pain in his voice. She reached for him. "Matt…"He flinched away from her, recoiling from her touch with enough force that he fell off the bed. He scrambled to his feet, shoving himself further away from her as soon as he hit the floor and Samantha let him go, watching him sadly as he began to pace back and forth across the small space between the foot of her bed and closet.

Inside her chest her heart lurched, grating painfully against her ribs. It hurt, his reaction hurt. Worse than a slap to the face. It was the type of blow that knocked the wind out of you, that stalled your lungs, that made your heart feel like it had been rolled in broken glass and then shoved back in your chest.

It shouldn't hurt, she scolded herself angrily, it was just sex. You've only known him for a week. Not even that, really, because he was gone for most of it. And he'll leave again. Reacting like this? Of course he was going to leave again.

"Why?" He cried, over and over. "Why? Samantha, why? I'm a monster. Why would you let me contaminate you…"

"Hold up right there," Sam snapped, pulling the sheets more tightly around her, huddling beneath the weight of that icy blue gaze. "You didn't 'contaminate' me," she retorted, air quotes and everything. Dear god, what was she? Twelve? "We had sex. Here on earth it's generally considered an action of affection, or at least attraction – and, god help me, but in case you haven't noticed you are really fucking attractive." He paused a little, starting at that. It was like he'd never actually thought that someone might find him attractive. Which was just ridiculous because she knew he'd seen himself in the mirror and she remembered the way he had held himself when confronting Rick: confident and self-assured; completely certain that he was the better man in every single way. She had thought that maybe, just maybe, some of that had been real.

Apparently not.

"And you're broken," Sam continued, pushing through the fog of the thoughts swirling through her scarcely awake brain. God, she should not be required to think this much before shower and chocolate, "and I know what it feels like to be broken," her voice quieted. "I know what it feels like to be all alone. Don't you get it, Matt?" she pleaded, watching as he stalked around the mess of her room liked a caged tiger. "I wanted to give you something. I wanted you. You're not worthless or broken or…"

"But I am!" he roared and it was her turn to flinch away. "I've got a damn noise in my head that will never stop! I'm one of the last of my kind because I assisted in the destruction of my own people and did so gladly because they made my life worthless!" He paused in the bedroom doorway, shoulders trembling ever so slightly as he stared out into the slightly larger space beyond and for a moment she thought he would go. For a brief, terrible moment she thought he would leave then and there but then he continued, "They put a noise in my head and drove me mad," his voice was rougher, deeper, but quieter, and the cultured accent had dipped into something thicker and harsher until it dripped from his tongue in long, smoky swirls of molasses. "There is nothing left to me but that noise. Do you know why I'm here?" He turned to look at her, the snarl of his voice softened by the utterly miserable look on his face. Samantha shook her head. "Of course not, you stupid ape. I'm here because for some reason you make it quiet. You and only you. I've spent almost two thousand years traveling all of space and time and you, Samantha, are the only fucking thing that makes it go away. You let me think. You give me silence. And now I've destroyed even that."

She stared at him, mouth opening and closing. "…What? How…?" she licked her lips and settled for the easiest question – or at least the first one that crowded forward and fell off her tongue. "How does sex destroy that?" she asked, proud of how calm she sounded despite the fact that her mind was racing: shifting, tumbling, sorting through the hysterical words he had screamed at her. She hadn't analyzed anything so closely since her British Lit professor had made them spend three fucking weeks on Beowulf. It was a great piece of literature, but three weeks? Seriously?

Shut up, Sam. You're rambling like an idiot.

Truth be told, she was having a hard time focusing on much past the nearly two thousand years statement. Jesus Christ, that had to be torture. To live that long when all you wanted to do was die? Sam shook her head softly, heart tightening in her chest. She hurt for him, hurt that he had spent so long wishing for such a thing. More than anything it hurt that in all of that time no one had bothered to try and show him something different.

Everyone was important, special with a uniqueness that could never be replicated or replaced. No one – it seemed – had ever tried to teach him that. Had ever appreciated him for who he was.

And now…

"I contaminated you. I… I'll leak over now. It'll spread, like a plague," he uttered, his voice in some strange place that was both a hoarse whisper and a twisted, angry scream. "It'll consume you too."

"What will?" See? Stick with the easy questions.

"The drums!" he roared, wheeling about to face her. "One! Two! Three! Four!" he cried, slamming the flat of his palm into the door frame to emphasize the beat. Something about it sounded familiar but she couldn't place it as she was distracted by the angry red blush she could see blooming across his palm from the force of his strikes.

"How?"

Matt through his hands up in the air and roared, "Because I married you!"

Because he… what now?

"Come again?" she asked hoarsely, staring at him. She had to have misheard him, right? Right? Even the mace-toting one was sitting up and silenced, eyes wide as she watched the alien before her.

He'd fallen silent, every ounce of blood draining from his face as what he had said sunk into the room. It left him ashen and sickly, his skin suddenly lighter and colder than the white-gold of his hair. Jesus. He wasn't even breathing, shoulders and chest absolutely still.

Damn it. He was delicious even when he looked ill. Which was just wrong. More on her part than his because given their discussion she shouldn't even be thinking that way. She had no right.

Except she'd held him, touched him, and not just for comfort. She'd never be able to forget that, forget the way he felt, the way he responded. Not even if she was trying.

When he didn't reply Sam shut her eyes, raising her hands to rub her temples and the ache that was forming there. "Matt…?" she ventured again after a long pause during which she didn't even dare look at him. "Did you… did you just say that you married me?"

Bonus points, Sam. Bonus points for not sounding hysterical. You can make yourself a pan of brownies later. You don't even have to cook the damn things, you can just eat the batter with a spoon. Like soup.

Another long space of silence stretched after her question; the soft, slightly too fast sound of her own breathing the only thing interrupting the oppressive weight of the silence stretched over the room.

"Yes," he finally acknowledged.

Sam inhaled sharply, realizing that she had been holding her breath in response to his lack of breathing as air flooded into burning lungs. "What?" she exhaled once she found her voice, except that was the wrong question. "How?" she corrected. "Is sex like some kind of a marriage vow for your people?" It seemed silly even as she said it but it was the only thing she could think of. She'd remember if they'd exchanged vows of some sort, wouldn't she? It seemed like she would, that something like that would have stood out from the pleasure.

Instead, there was nothing.

Well, nothing that in anyway resembled something she would associate with getting married. Except for the sex, her mother's voice sniffed disprovingly.

"No, not that," he replied with a little shake of his head.

"Then…?"

Matt scrubbed at his face and wheeled back around, striding from one side of the room to the other, barely twisting in time to avoid collusion with the painted cinderblock walls. Caged, caged and antsy like one of the big cats at a zoo in a too small cage, racing and pacing around the confines of its enclosure until it had worn down a path inches below the ground's surface. Even the look in his eyes was the same – desperate for escape and yet with a dim finality that stated all to clearly that he knew there would be no such thing. Not for him.

"I gave you my name," he finally growled.

Sam tilted her head. "But I already know your name," she told him, baffled. Whatever she had been subconsciously expecting him to say, it hadn't been that. "You told it to me last Saturday, Matt."

He jerked his hand, slashing through the air to the side of his bare hip and cutting off the carefully emphasized name. "That's not my name," he muttered and for the first time since she had dragged him in more frozen than not from where he had collapsed in front of her door she was unable to read the tone of his voice. He was angry, and yet not. He was frustrated, and yet not. Pleased, perhaps, just a little. Afraid, most definitely. Every emotion was fleeting, while at the same time constant. Tangled up one with another, knotted in endless disarray that left her no certainty as to what he was feeling or how much of it was directed at her.

Sam had never been fantastic at reading people. She could admit that. She'd always been better with books, with words and pictures. When it came to most people she relied on her gut, but with Matt she had always been so sure. Well, given that she'd known him only a week 'always' was a term used rather lightly. She looked at him and somehow she just knew. It was disconcerting to look at his face, at the handsome lines, the pale skin flushed, and be at a loss to pinpoint – no, to understand – what was crossing his mind.

Christ, a week ago she had been able to pluck the idea that he wanted to rest his head in her lap straight from his head. Now she couldn't even tell if he was angry or sad.

"I can understand that," Sam said slowly, picking her words with care as she watched him, hoping that they would clear a path through the chaos ranging across his features. "You didn't know. Don't know me, I guess. It's probably smart to not hand out your name to random strangers."

Something between a howl and a sob stuttered in his throat. "That's not what I meant," he growled. "Matt Yana is as good a name as any. I've gone by something similar before. I couldn't give you my name because… because…" he waved his hands wildly. "Because my true name is too dangerous and the name my people knew me by…" Matt-who-was-not-Matt shook his head slowly and finished in a whisper, "I do not wish to be associated with that name. I do not want to remember what I am, what they made me."

"Dangerous? How can a name be dangerous?"

He laughed. He tipped back his head and laughed until it bubbled into hysteria and then he kept going. Hysteria and disbelief and sorrow and frustration poured out of him until the sound rang hoarse. "How?" he repeated between the last remnants of his laughter. "How? A name is the most dangerous thing in existence. Use it in the right place, at the right time, with the right knowledge and you could topple entire civilizations. I am a Time Lord of Gallifrey," he announced, straightening: a soldier reporting for duty, "and my true name could unravel time and space itself if uttered at the wrong moment."

Sam stared, lips moving in silent question.

"My people? We were guardians and historians of all of time and space. Everything that ever has been, is, or will be. We traveled through it all: observing, recording, and occasionally interfering. My true name hides my entire life – even the parts that I have not lived yet – within its syllables. It tells where I've been, what I've done, where I'm going. Can you imagine the type of power that holds? Two thousand – or more- years of knowledge?" He leveled that deep blue gaze, like the shadows that moved in the deep of the ocean, at her, fixing her to the bed with the terrible intensity contained therein.

"Sounds frightening," she murmured after a moment, aware that he wished some sort of response. "And long," she added after beat. That ghost of a smile, the type that she wasn't even sure wasn't just a figment of her imagination, flickered at the corners of his lips and then was gone. "Wait – do I…? Do I know that name?"

He jerked his head, turning away again. "Yes."

"How?" She would have remembered being told something that long. Of course, she had thought that she would remember getting married but clearly she didn… oh. Her head snapped up, leveling her gaze at the mussed tufts of his hair. Her fingers flexed unconsciously, remembering the way it had felt grasped between her fingers. "Is that…? Is that how you married me?"

His head jerked again.

Breathe, Sam, she reminded herself as she felt the constricting weight tightening around her chest. It's not the end of the world. Just breathe, you idiot.

"Among the Time Lords giving your true name to someone was the sign of ultimate trust and it bound you," he explains: short and numb with clinical precision. The greatest amount of explanation crammed into the fewest words possible. No emotion necessary. "Sharing your name created a… psychic link between minds."

"So you can read my mind?" she squeaked, finally feeling a surge of panic.

"If I wished to."

"Well, break it! Break the link. Divorce me or…whatever."

He laughed again: a brief, hopeless snort. "I would if I could, but I can't. A link, once formed, can only be broken by death."

"… death?"

He glanced up quickly, glaring. "That's what I said, isn't it?"

"Yes… but… how? Why?"

"I don't know!" The anguished cry echoed around the room, startling Spartacus into wakefulness, fuzzy ears flickering back and form as he rises, blinking from the depths of the tangled comforter. "I don't even remember doing it but I can hear it there, in your head, and now I have destroyed you."

"Oh for the love of god, marriage isn't destruction! It's inconvenient and…"

"You don't understand!"

"Then explain it to me!" she shouted back, finally snapping.

He stared at her, chest heaving, blood draining from his face like color from a painting left out in the rain. "My people were dying," he said finally. Short. Clipped. Confused as she was even she couldn't miss the loathing in his voice. Loathing for them. Loathing for himself. It was so thick she could taste it sliding down the back of her throat and sitting like lead in her gut. It hurt. That much hate just flat out hurt. "They were fighting a war, an endless war against our greatest foe, and they were losing. Officially it was a stalemate, but we were losing. I stayed out of it, for the most part. I'm not stupid. Not that it mattered. I was caught up in it, even if I didn't know." He gave her a sad, broken smile – if that mangled configuration of his lips could be called a smile.

"Because despite the good face the bureaucrats tried to put on things they knew the truth and they knew, at the very end, that the Doctor had decided to destroy them all. Time Lords and Daleks alike, wiped out of existence. Destroying all of us before our fight consumed the entire breadth of space and time. And politicians are the same the universe over," he joked bitterly, "They just don't know how to die. So they remembered me: brilliant, capable, and always just a little mad, and they remembered that as a child I had complained of a noise in my head, a beat that plagued me ever since I had looked into the Untempered Schism. They reached back through time and put the noise in my head. A drumming. The same four beats over and over and over. At first it didn't bother me, it was just the strange noise in my head," he explained, pausing next to the small window and staring out at something she would never be able to see.

Except she could.

She could see it, unfolding before her gaze like a child's pop-up book. Two little boys, laughing and running through waist-high grass that was a bright and shining crimson as silver leafed trees shimmered in the distance, dancing in the wind. A little boy standing solemn and nervous before… something. Something that she had no name for. With his sharp, pale eyes and carefully combed black hair he looked nothing like the man standing in her room but she knew, somehow, that it was him. Whether it was the tilt of his head or the tightness around his jaw or something else – inexplicable and inescapable – she knew.

And then she heard it: a quiet, repetitive beat of four. It was just there one moment, with no explanation, no warning. The boy stumbled, eyes going wide as he pressed his hand to his head. "The drums? Do you hear them?" he asked the red robed figure beside him, but he received no answer.

"But they never went away," Matt continued, images and sensations flashing through her mind: snapshots of places that she recognized as earth and scenes of places wild and fantastic and clearly not on earth. Monsters, men, dinosaurs, animals, plants, and beings that she had no name for – that she couldn't even begin to describe. Things that looked like a bastardized R2-D2 with the added bonus of whisks and plungers – cooks, perhaps? Metal men with metal circuits arching over their head, walking stiffly in squadrons that stretched from horizon to horizon. Jungles, deserts, mountains, moons, the spiral of galaxies turning out into the emptiness of space, and stars – so many stars: blue and yellow and red – forming, burning, exploding.

There was a man through it all, she could see him. He looked nothing like the boy or nothing like the man here with her, but he was the same. It didn't matter how he appeared – old, young, handsome, not so handsome… it was always him. Always. A dozen different faces but beneath the stretch of skin and changing hair and eyes he remained the same.

And the noise in the back of his head was always there.

"Waking or sleeping," he continued lethargically, echoing her own realization. "It never went away and the torture of living with it day in and day out drove me mad. It broke me and remade me into… nothing."

"Why?" she whispered, still lost in the cascading flurry of memories, of a dozen lengthy lifetimes lived and defined by the repetition of those beats. "Why would they do such a thing?"

"Because they were cowards," he spat. "They turned me into a beacon," he added, the vehemence leaving his voice as quickly as it had come. "No matter where or when I went they ensured that they'd always be able to find me so that at the last moment, before the Doctor destroyed everyone, they could eject themselves from the Time Lock and pull themselves to me. What's one man when it means escaping the grave they'd dug for themselves?" he asked bitterly as another scene unfolded inside of her head.

It was another face, though he looked enough like his current form that they could have easily passed for brothers. Disheveled and dirty and distraught – a pain hit her square in the heart as she recognized the black hoody and sweatpants that covered his form – he stood facing two men. One of them was in brown pinstriped suit and brown coat, his face bloodied, and a gun clenched tightly in his hand…

He wouldn't shoot me. Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world.

He felt vaguely familiar.

Doctor, Matt's voice seemed to whisper in her head even as she realized: the boy. He was the other boy. They were friends, once.

Beyond the armed man was a tall figure in red and gold, flanked by similarly attired attendees who stood with their hands held over their faces. Faintly, over their heads, she could see a giant orb of burnt orange and red bursting into the atmosphere, consuming the sky as it moved through some form of gate.

"Get out of the way," it was Matt's voice, if a little higher pitched.

She watched as he pushed past his once-friend and went for the other man, energy firing from the palms of his hands.

Rassilon, his voice whispered as the him-but-not-him version went to his knees at the side of the man clothed in red. She could feel it and hear it as it all came tumbling down, could feel the connection break, the sudden loss of its pull making her stumble.

Matt caught her.

She hadn't even realized that she'd gotten up.

And even after the link was broken the noise remained: thumping away around the edges of his skull.

"Sorry," he sobbed quietly as he lowered her to the bed. "So sorry, Sam. I'm so sorry I did this to you."

She touched his face, confused. What did he do to her? What could possibly make this man cry for her? He was so lonely, so lost and broken, shattered before he ever had a chance to exist. Nearly two thousand years with all of time and space stretched before him and he'd never even had a chance to live. "Don't…" she whispered. "That noise…" there was something about it, something that had bugged her since he had beaten it out against the door frame.

Tears burned at the corner of her eyes at the look that crossed his face. "Already?" he asked. "I'm sorry," he gasped again, not waiting for her to respond as he buried his head in her lap. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Matt?" she asked, weaving her fingers through the short strands of his hair. It wasn't his real name but it was the best that she had. When he didn't respond she twisted his hair a little, using it as gently as she could to force him to look up into her face. "Matt?" He blinked, red rimmed eyes standing out against the paleness of his skin. "That sound, that beat…" she tapped it out against his skin to make sure that she had it right. He flinched and it broke her heart. "It's your heartbeat," she finally whispered. "That night, when I pulled you in out of the cold, I wasn't sure you were alive. I checked for a pulse. I've always been complete shit at gauging someone's pulse by their wrist," she hurried on, "so I… listened to your chest." She hummed the beat out this time, nodding her head in time. "And that's the sound of your heartbeat."

"No."

He scrambled out of her lap, slamming into the wall behind him.

"No."

"Matt," she reached for him but he batted her hand away, scrambling down the line of the bedroom on unsteady legs.

"No."

She bit her lip and watched him fall, hand scrambling among the mess of clothes lining the floor.

"No," he whispered again, wiggling his way into the wrinkled slacks. "No! No! No! No!" he shouted again, slamming his hands into the door. "I have to… I have to get out. I have to…" he looked at her and there was regret on his face, and sorrow. So much sorrow and hurt that it made her heart stop.

He nearly tripped over Spartacus, purring and curling around his feet, and swooped mid-stumble to pick up the cat and deposit him in a safer location. "I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't," he mumbled and lurched from her sight.

Sam let him go and a moment later she heard the front door slam.

Once again, he was gone and she was alone.

She was married, married to an alien who was nearly two thousand years old. Who had worn at least a dozen different faces. Who hadn't proposed or even dated her. Who had, apparently, just married her irrevocably in the heat of the moment. Who was, by his own admission, mad, broken, nothing, a monster, and a killer. Who was all those things because someone had seen fit to force something upon him that he had neither agreed to or been prepared for and it had destroyed him. Who was trapped inside of his own head with no escape. Who couldn't die and who was driven even further into madness with every strange beat of his heart.

She should go after him, if for no other reason that he was wearing nothing but dress pants.

She should run. Go, somewhere. Anywhere. Away from this. Away from him.

She laughed, every last bit of her, broken and hollow as soon as that thought crossed her mind. The laughter, once started, didn't stop.

About the time Spartacus hopped back up on the bed and nudged her in the face, demanding his breakfast, the laughter broke into sobs. An indignant squeak broke the feline's mouth as she grabbed the cat, clinging to him and burying her face in his fur as she cried. Despite Spartacus' mewl of disproval Sam only held on tighter, soaking his fur with her tears.

She had to focus on the cat. If she didn't all she would be able to smell was him. The scent of a breaking storm and deep winter cold clinging to her bed. To her. All she would be able to feel was him: the press of his lips against the nape of her neck, the dig of his fingers as they clung to her hips, the weight of his head pressed in her lap, the sting of his tears against her skin. All she would be able to see was him: to the sight of him stretched out beneath her; the shattered, broken man sobbing on her bathroom floor; the red-rimmed face that had stared, so heartbroken, at her and then had fled.

She focused on the cat because she could not escape the weight of the numbness bearing down on her chest, eating her from the heart on out.

Outside, through the thin single paned windows, she could hear him screaming.