It was like drowning. It felt like she was drowning. And every time her head was brought back down under the water another memory faded. Another face got fuzzy. Another name didn't sound so right to her anymore. The Doctor was terrified. It hurt.
She kept repeating her friends' names. Desperate to keep them close. To not let them escape her crashing memory.
Ian Chesterton. Barbra Wright. Vicki. Steven Taylor. Katarina. Dodo Chaplet. Ben Jackson. Polly. Jamie McCrimmin. Victoria Waterfield. Zoe Herriot. Liz Shaw. Jo Grant. Sarah Jane Smith. Harry Sullivan. Leela. Romana. Adric. Nyssa. Tegan Jovanka. Vislor Turlough. Kamelion. Peri Brown. Mel Bush. Ace. Charley Pollard. C'rizz. Lucie Miller. Rose Tyler. Martha Jones. Donna Noble. Captain Jack Harkness. Amy Pond. Rory Williams. Clara Oswald. Bill Potts. Yasmin Khan. Ryan Sinclair. Graham O'Brian.
Ian Chesterton. Barbra Wright. Vicki. Steven Taylor. Katarina. Dodo Chaplet. Ben Jackson. Polly. Jamie McCrimmin….
The next name drifted out into the depths of the sea and she began to panic more. She could still see the girl's face. Thank the gods. But her name escaped her. She continued her list. Terrified as more names began to escape her, floating out into the waters she was drowning in. Lost to the sea. The more she tried to hold on the more it hurt but she continued to fight, terrified of what it meant if it stopped hurting.
Suddenly the pain surged. Memories slipped away faster, the pain rushing into the spots they'd occupied like water through cracks and her panic doubled down, hearts going into a matching overdrive with each other. She could hear a distant beeping starting up and she couldn't even spare a thought to it, too overcome with panic for her own mind and memories.
Then it stopped.
There was a dull ache that replaced it. The kind one got when the initial big pain was gone but you knew there was lasting damage there regardless. She was panting for breath, her throat hoarse from the screams. Her head hung forward. It took a moment before she could look up in confusion over why he'd stopped. She was thankful, but she knew him better than to think that he was showing mercy or changing his mind. He spoke up, his voice casual and mockingly positive.
"Need to take little pauses in between. Go too fast and apparently, I'll completely fry your brain. For once, I don't want you dead. So, I'm following the instructions." He grinned at her, flipping through the pages of a withered and aged looking notebook. She was still struggling to catch her breath, force her way back to full consciousness as she loosened her grip around the arms of the chair. They creaked from the relaxation of pressure, her knuckles aching from their constant gripping before. Her eyes were on the notebook though, her voice croaky when she spoke up.
"What is that?"
"Oh," his words were distracted, his focus on the book as he responded, almost absently, "found it when I found the chair. Instruction manual so to say. It seems they had a lot of failed attempts and close calls until they finally got it right. I'm following it to a T." he smirked up at her, face contorting in a mock concern, "how are you feeling?"
"How do you think?" she deadpanned as sarcastically as she could manage.
"What's missing? Hm?" he got up, stepping towards the glass between them, "anything started to slip away yet?" she just glared at him and he beamed in triumph, as though he'd won already, "anything you want to say to me, Doctor, before everything gets wiped away?"
"What did I do to make you hate me like this?"
"You just had to be you. Saviour of the universe who destroys it more often than not." He rolled his eyes, "so important that-"
"I'm not important." She cut him off, "I just travel and try to help and-"
"Stop it!" the Master snarled at her, a fist slamming against the glass, his temperament changing like a switch had been flipped, "I hate this. This insistence that you're nothing. That you aren't anything special, when you are! You always have been. Even way back at the Academy, it was obvious. And you ran from it. You always ran. Intentionally doing bad at tests, falling behind on work, sleeping through classes, when we all knew that you could have been at the top of the class without even trying! You put in more effort in trying to not put in effort! It's infuriating. You actively sabotage yourself at every turn, you always have. And now with this! You run away again, like always. You learn that you are the very origin of our species and you decide that you'd rather bury your head in the sand!"
"I haven't-"
"Have you even told your little friends about it? About everything that I told you?" He took her silence as the answer that it was and scowled. "You'd rather forget it ever happened. I know you. And now, I'm giving you what you want." His hand moved back to the lever, "When you try and run from this Doctor, when you left, you decided that this was no more important than anything else you've ever run from, when this is the most important. You made it unimportant. And by that right it made me unimportant. It made all the deaths on Gallifrey unimportant. You stand at the very foundation of this species and you'd rather turn your back on them. You always have."
"What do you want from me?" she snapped finally, fists clenching once more as she pulled at her restraints again, wrestling uselessly against the metal, "None of this was my fault. I was a child, back then. A lost child who was taken advantage of and used! And all those deaths on Gallifrey was on your head, don't you dare put it on mine."
"Of course it's your fault! What I did was a mercy! A whole species stemming from the DNA of the Doctor. They should all have been culled from the start! No wonder as a species we've always been so defective."
"Don't pin your actions on me. Don't use me as your excuse."
"You killed them first."
"And then I saved them! I carried that guilt with me for centuries! You speak as though you're not one of them! If you truly believed what you said, you'd have killed yourself along with them. But you're too much of a coward to really do that. What you did was unforgivable, and you have the gall to stand there, with me tied to this chair and you wiping my mind, and say that it was my fault? All those people who knew nothing. All those children, not even old enough to join the Academy, and you murdered them! This is on you."
"So be it."
The silence between them stretched on, the Master's hands clearly itching to reach back over to the lever. As her heartbeats began to slow the Doctor realised that antagonising him while she was in this situation wasn't the smartest of choices, but their millennia of friendship meant they knew exactly how to push one another's buttons. Her eyes left him, drifting passed him to her past self who was still trapped in the paralysis coils of the Matrix, his face stuck in an expression of pain. She could just about make out the tear treads down his cheeks and she wondered what the Master was showing him. He had thousands of years to work with. He'd had more than enough time to look through and cherry pick the best moments.
"Do you think you'll ever regret it?" her voice went soft as a thought occurred to her, softer than it should have been considering the circumstances and it caught him off guard, his hand pausing on the lever. He blinked, hand coming to sit on his lap once more as he deliberated over his answer, sinking back into his seat.
"Never." Her shoulders slumped and the two of them stared at one another. Her head thumped back against the wall behind her, her hearts sinking in her chest, but she tried one last time. Her words a near whisper and as desperate as her pride and wounded brain would allow.
"Do you regret our friendship?" she was offering an olive branch. His face went expressionless, she watched it intently, waiting for what he had to say. Finally, his eyes began to water slightly, flickering back to hers and he seemed to take a great delight in snapping that branch in two as he leaned towards her.
"Every day of my life." His words were slow, drawn out to try and create the optimum amount of hurt from them. He took the two parts of the olive branch and stamped them into smithereens as he continued, a grin on his face, "I wish I'd never met you, Doctor. But we can't change history, we both know that. The most I can do is shape the future as I want. My past has been shaped by you. Now I shall shape your future, it's only fair."
He watched her face, waiting with a sick glee for the hurt to spread. For the first twitch of her jaw as she would try to hold back tears at his words. For the watering of her eyes and the quiver in her cheeks. None of that came. Instead a dark blankness overcame her face as she stared back at him. Her eyes glazing over into something he couldn't name but recognised intimately from all the time he'd spent around the Doctor and, for all he'd done in the past, it had never been directed at him. He couldn't help the way his hearts gave a sudden twinge in fear. It was an expression that he'd heard could make entire armies turn and run. An expression that made unfeeling creatures like the Daleks think twice. An expression he'd always thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, perhaps never existed because he'd never seen it head on, and this was the Doctor. His idiot best friend from childhood. The same boy who cried when the Master had stepped on a beetle. The same one who had frolicked through red grass fields with him. Suddenly, with that look directed at him, he understood. He understood the fear that the Doctor's mere name could inspire across the universe. He also understood that with his last words he may have destroyed any final lingering hopes she may have had of salvaging what they once were. The bond finally broken.
He was glad to have her secured to that chair.
To be doing what he was. He didn't know what he might do if she escaped. He knew that there was nowhere in the universe he could go to hide from her now. To escape her wrath now he'd finally earned it.
She didn't scream the next time he pulled the lever. A squeak left her, a sound muffled by her gritted teeth as she kept her eyes on his, near unblinking in that same glazed over way. That just made it all the scarier.
A beeping went off to his left and he took his eyes off of her in order to look down at the screens further back on the control unit he was sat at. He looked to the cameras in time to see a door swing open in a cloud of dust, and he scowled. They may have found the tunnels, but they stretched on for miles and miles. He still had time. And with everything he'd left in their way, he was confident he would have all the time in the universe to get this finished.