Soul's Shadow (Doctor Who - SI)

Part IX (VII)

The Master keeps his new style, although he also experiments with some more casual clothes. Those earthen jeans are disgustingly comfortable to wear. He has to give them that. The wardrobe in the TARDIS offers him enough room to play around. Some things just don't go well with who he is and others don't fit with who he wants to be.

In the end it's all nothing but distraction.

He doesn't want to think. Not about what situation he is in, not about what the future might or might not hold, not about all the things in his past he can't shake off.

Had he really gone too far?

It wasn't about the lives he ended, not about the nuking of a whole country, not about having a fake wife, not about torturing the Doctor or the freak. In short, it wasn't the details that concerned him. It was the combination, the bundled up mess of rage and chaos, surging out of him without direction.

Move, move, move! Don't stand still. Don't run. Just move.

The drums, ever growing stronger, calling out to him in fury. They wouldn't let him rest...

...until he heard a shot reverberate through the air.

His ears rang, his mind snapped awake as pain shot through his body. Only in that moment did he realize how broken Lucy truly was. Only then did he really notice the other people in the room.

Too far? Maybe. It wasn't like him. Not this. There was always a logic and a reason behind his plans, no matter how complicated and strange they might have looked to outsiders. But the Valiant? The paradox? It was an abomination of everything he stood for as a Time Lord.

But the drums. The drums drowned it all. All the reason, all the logic, left nothing but a pounding and the agony of not being himself anymore and no one to share the pain with.

The Doctor won't listen. Each time the Master even remotely suggests it, he flinches away and keeps telling that it won't do anything. He is scared. Of what exactly the Master isn't sure. Maybe of having been wrong all those centuries.

It doesn't matter. In the end they might find the cause of the drums with one of the countless machines and tests the Doctor keeps finding. If they are real then something must be able to pick them up. In that the Doctor is right. For once.

They travel in a cautious agreement of facts.

One: There is nothing the Doctor can threaten the Master with. He would never go as far as using something like torture and he dutifully keeps his promise and doesn't introduce any new restraints.

Two: The Master is less a prisoner of the Doctor than he is of a lacking opportunity to move. Without a TARDIS of his own he can't go far. He can't risk getting stranded on some uninhabited planet. The one and only thing he wouldn't push past the Doctor to do.

It's not much, but the simplicity of both keeps them in a fragile companionship and also an almost friendly, albeit mischievous competition. The Master never gets tired of building new tools to fool around with. The Doctor never ceases to find a way to snatch those tools away and get rid of them.

There are casualties. People die. Of course they do. The ridiculous situations the Doctor manages to get them in, they scream for blood. And it's not always on the Master to shed it. It never has been. Their methods were just different.

In all this time the Master keeps searching. For ways to keep his sanity intact, for ways to escape the Doctor without being stranded somewhere in the process.

He finds a vortex manipulator.

The Master is so baffled by the thing, lying around in yet another of the countless messy rooms of the TARDIS, that he can't believe it's even real at first. He pokes it, then picks it up and observes the device from all sites. The straps are a bit brittle, the energy is as low as it gets and he suspects that more than one system isn't working correctly anymore.