ofrunning:
The Master laughs (?), and then he lies, and (!) the Doctor gets the joke.
All those nasty pieces of Academy gossip about their eccentric neighbors, all the basic test flights where TT Capsule pilots were required to avoid it, and the whole history of mad Morbius–there’s no way the Master is serious. Or has he merely spent less time archiving such things in the back of his mind? Maybe he is so much older, enough that the little details and even the bigger ones have stopped mattering to him. Something very cold writhes briefly in the Doctor’s guts at the idea. Whether he’s upset for the Master’s sake or his own, he can’t fathom.
He hasn’t kept track, in the flowing seconds, of exactly when the sight of the TARDIS’s edge became a security line for him, but now there’s no doubt. He can’t look back.
And then he does.
The fingers that are running down his sleeve. The way the Master has lied. He looks back and sees this whole encounter as if he has just now walked in on it from stage left.
“The Flame,” he says, the words tumbling out like he’s finally shaken them loose. “I relocated it for the Sisterhood before the fighting ended. Old Karn is just an uninhabited shell now.”
They owed me a favor goes unspoken. They made me new again, as well, but it is explained nonetheless, between the lines the Doctor’s fingers make as he trails them down the back of the Master’s hand. A warm touch, one that’s slow and bad at pretending to be a swatting gesture.
“Can’t imagine what it looks like where you’re from.” When his eyes trail up the Master’s face, they are carefully pondering different questions. Stirrings of inclination that might lose their luster if put into words. “Can’t imagine how I’d not think to do a thing like that.”
The smile he gets in returns pulls up tight lines around the edges of his eyes, the perfect mapping of a tension headache laid out for all the world to read if they only know the language it's set down in.
"Balance, perhaps. One of us had to die, after all." (and there, there, only for a second but there nonetheless - the years all between them, time where there should be none at all around his shoulders like a fur coat, like a noose.) "You're quite the exemption to the rule, as far as I've gathered."
The light makes his eyes look golden, as though the unused regeneration is pushing its way out through any crack it can find. The homesickness rattles through him - unexpected and unwelcome, a ghost of a feeling he'd carefully cut out rearing its head for the first time in absolute centuries. He'd stood under twin souls and waited for it to hit him a thousand times over and then once again; and he'd felt nothing, or less than.
Here, though, now? Well. With exhaustion sitting in his chest like a rattling clock he's not even the energy to deny it, to push it to the back of his mind and press on. Here, in the last leg of his journey out, so far from the brightest point of all the timelines, where the echoes of the parasite drag still ripple through reality - here, he finds it. Of course he does.
It's worth it, though, worth the dry-mouthed dread just to have them on the same page of the book again for a few moments. He moves as if to turn away, drag the distance back between them - and catches his hand where he has left it, the implication of punctuation anchoring him now into the cuff of the Doctor's shirt.
"Do not go gently into that good night, indeed," he murmurs, almost absently.
