oh my days okay so the ceiling is a ceremony is actually a fic I've wanted to finish for aaaaaages, and I have a plan for it written out on the back of till receipts from work! But I came up with it after writing Disarmed, if I remember right - which, as you know, is a fic where I play around with the master's timesense being out of whack. I wanted to push that even further - and so this fic is actually told non-chronologically in terms of normal time, but in chronological order of how the master actually experiences it. So it's a scattered of scenes around the same incident, where the doctor experiences it in linear time, but the master does not. And the fun thing about it is that it centres around a spaceship crash, which the master causes by sabotaging, but then later realises that he does NOT want the ship to crash, and starts attempting to undo his previous work (but, of course, he can't prevent what he's already started...because he already knows where it leads). Eventually, the Doctor realises that he's not been experiencing things in the right order. She tries to ask him why he tried to stop the ship from crashing, but when she asks him he doesn't actually know why yet, so he says 'ask me later. or earlier'
He has no idea how he got here or what came before this – but that’s how it seems to go, this time around.
All he knows – all he can cling to – is the Doctor, stood next to him, blood weeping from a cut at her hairline, trembling with utter fury.
“You’re right,” she says, her voice splintering with betrayal and grief. “I don’t understand.”
She turns to face him, eyes hollow with horror and grief – for him or for someone else, he doesn’t know.
“Why did you do this?” she breathes.
The Master, of course, has no idea what he’s done – but if a lack of context was ever going to stop him, he’d have curled up and hidden in the Zero Room of his TARDIS back when he first regenerated, desperately coaxing his time sense into something that worked, something that made sense, something that didn’t hurt. There are, after all, slight consequences of regeneration as a result of a personal paradox – the crossing of timelines, for the sole purpose of stabbing himself in the back. Murder-suicide, going both ways. And that, of course, might not have been so bad if it hadn’t all happened on a colony ship heading straight for the event horizon of a black hole, which had naturally caused the extensive time-warping relativistic effects that had made the whole sorry thing come about in the first place.
(It had been glorious, and it had been awful, and it had been all he’d ever wanted and everything she’d tried not to become, and the Doctor had reached out his hand and she’d –)
He takes that thought by the throat and snaps its neck.
He’s not Missy anymore.
Because he’s better than that. Fueled by a fury and determination that were burning him from the inside out, but it was that and that alone that had given him the strength he needed to keep going, despite his new…condition, regarding his inability to experience time in a chronological order. His time sense, scrambled and raw, would have sent any other self-respecting Time Lord to their knees from the sheer disorientation, let alone the constant pain and general inability to keep everything in order. They’d probably have had themselves killed just to bring on the next regeneration faster and fix the problem. But the Master – he’s not like them. He’s not weak, he’s not pathetic, and he’s always been able to make the best out of a bad hand. Or the worst, perhaps. And so, he stares right back at the Doctor, stepping closer, utterly contextless, and he grins.
“Sorry, love,” he says, knowing it’ll only raise her hackles further – and, oh, it’s things like this that he lives for. These moments where she stares at him, baring her teeth like the wild creature of the universe that she truly is. “I don’t think I caught that.” Another step closer, right into her space, eyes locked with hers. “Speak up, dear.”
