Chapter 9
"He isn't like us," Rassilon said one day as the Master helped him plan a surgical strike against a Dalek outpost.
"He isn't like anyone," the Master said wryly, knowing immediately to whom Rassilon was referring. He'd had to pull up a chair to stand on in order to reach the middle of the map. One of the stranger challenges of fighting a Universal War while being under four feet tall.
"You and I," Rassilon continued gravely. "We're the same."
The Master had his own opinions about that... But they weren't in Rassilon's favor so he kept them to himself.
"Surely you must have realized that by now," Rassilon said. "How different you and I are from all the others. How far above their petty concerns we are."
"I realized that a long time ago, yes," the Master laughed, shifting one of the pieces into its optimal position. That was hardly a groundbreaking observation. "Everyone else is taking a while to catch up to that idea," he quipped. "But I'm confident they'll come around eventually."
"Did you never wonder about your own ancestry?" Rassilon asked.
The Master turned to look at the President, eyes narrowed. "Are you suggesting we're related?" He shrugged. "It's an interesting idea. Unfortunately, that information was lost in Time long ago."
The historical records of the Old Days of Gallifrey were spotty at best. Having gotten to know Rassilon, the Master now suspected that lack of detail was no accident.
"But our own biological code is not lost," Rassilon pointed out. "I had a comparison made. Biology cannot lie."
The Master smiled slowly. "So... I'm descended from you?"
"The lineage is direct," Rassilon informed him.
The Master thought about that, about the status that gave him among his fellow Time Lords. "Cool," he decided smugly.
That was going to be useful somehow, one of these days.
"The Doctor... Is not," Rassilon said, his tone sour. "He is a mere mongrel. Perhaps this explains his inability to see things for what they are."
The Master snickered at the thought of trying to explain the Doctor via simple genetics. "No, I don't think anything could explain him. He's one of the Universe's great mysteries." He said it sarcastically but he meant every word.
"Your obsession with the Doctor is weighing you down," Rassilon stated seriously. "You could achieve so much more on your own. Your full potential."
He started that strange, heavy drumming again. The Master's attention wandered, the map he was staring at becoming difficult to process. Complicated. Unimportant.
"You don't need him," Rassilon said.
The Master thought about that.
Did he really need the Doctor...?
Perhaps not.
But that had never been the point.
"He needs me though," the Master replied absently.
"If you persist in this futile alliance, you will always follow in his shadow," Rassilon told him. "Is that what you want, to limit yourself to his stunted vision of the future? To be second to the Doctor?"
It wouldn't be the first time.
Sometimes he followed the Doctor, sometimes the Doctor followed him.
It wasn't about primacy, about who was in charge, per se.
And often, being the first to run into the unknown was the most dangerous role.
That was what the Doctor did.
Someone needed to follow. To watch his back. To drag him out when he found, too late, that he'd rushed into too much danger, even for him.
Even the Doctor couldn't get out of every situation on his own.
"If I need to," the Master answered. Even those few words were difficult. His own voice sounded far away to himself as he spoke, drowned out by the immediacy of the drumming.
"But you were born to lead, just as I was," Rassilon coaxed, smooth like silk. "Once this War is won, the Universe will be begging for guidance. Our guidance."
"I've had the Universe," the Master smiled distantly, remembering. One of his better ideas, holding the entire Universe to ransom. Who could refuse him then? A wonderful pawn but not much of a trophy. Full of boring, small-minded people, insistently preoccupied with their mundane concerns. Too minuscule to appreciate how tiny they truly were. Owning the Universe had ended up being mostly about maintenance, as it turned out. "It's overrated," he concluded.
"Gallifrey could lead the Universe into a new age," Rassilon said. "You could be a part of that."
The Master frowned. Rassilon wasn't just talking about winning the War, defeating the Daleks. He was talking about conquest. Universal conquest.
The Master had a lot of experience with that particular concept.
And he knew from many, many frustrating arguments over the years that the Doctor would never go along with that plan...
This information took an indefinite amount of time for the Master to consider. His thoughts progressed at an unfamiliar pace, punctuated by the drumming. Held back. Regimented. Marching in time to the beat.
But if he knew anything, he knew this: the Doctor wouldn't like that.
At all.
The Doctor fought not because he wanted to but because he must. A War against the Daleks, with all of Time and Space hanging in the balance.
Turn that into a bid for power and the Doctor would vanish in the blink of an eye.
"You'll never win without the Doctor," the Master asserted. He knew he'd said it aloud but he could scarcely hear his own voice now over the noise in his head.
"He's your friend, I understand," Rassilon said, and his voice came through so clearly still. "I had a friend like that once. He tried to take what should have been mine... So I took it back."
The unintentional irony of Rassilon drawing comparisons between the Doctor and Omega was too absurd and the Master started laughing... Hard.
The drumming stopped.
"You don't know the Doctor at all, do you?" the Master said to Rassilon, grinning at the poor comparison.
Rassilon had known them both. How could he possibly consider them similar?
They couldn't be less alike. At least from the Master's experience.
The President was staring at him, brow furrowed, expression somewhere between anger and bewilderment.
The Master looked down at the object in his hand. For a moment, he felt that it was a game piece, that he and the President were playing chess with the Universe. But he couldn't discern if he held a pawn or a king.
"What were we talking about again?" the Master asked, realizing he'd lost the thread somewhere.
"The future," Rassilon said.
"Right, that," the Master nodded, businesslike.
A future which may or may not exist, depending on how the War went.
The Master looked again at the marker he was holding, realizing it wasn't a chess piece at all.
This wasn't a game and no one here was playing.
He set the marker down on the map, indicating the spot where an entire troop of soldiers would be sent to die so that others could gain entry to the Dalek base.
He felt a brief twinge of discomfort, thinking of the resources they'd lose in the process. Gallifrey hardly had an unlimited number of soldiers.
But War demanded sacrifice.
And, in the end, failing to utilize an available resource was far more of a waste.
Everyone had their part to play, after all.
Some to give the orders, the rest simply to obey.
It was unfortunate for those who found themselves in the latter category, certainly.
But it was all for the greater good.
Not everyone could lead.
So... For those of you who are currently up-to-date with the New Series, this reads a lot heavier with that in mind. I knew the issues I was addressing here, and I stand by it; I wrote this last year and haven't changed a word. But Rassilon's words are a lot uglier with the specifics in mind.
And another reference to Omega... We don't have a lot on him and Rassilon, but there's plenty of reason to believe that Rassilon betrayed Omega in order to rule Gallifrey. I like the echoes of duality, so this kept coming up.