[fic][dw] Coil

[magibrain]

Title: Coil
Author: magistrate (draegonhawke)
Rating: R, M, 18, etc.
Words: ~1900
Pairing: 9th Doctor/Master (AU, obviously)
Spoilers: ...ye gods, you would ask me that, wouldn't you? It's pretty far AU. Watching through Season 3 might help, but if you know the Master from Classic Who and have some info about the Time War, you'll probably be fine. Well, fine with the spoilering aspect.
Warnings: Graphic. Bloodplay, brokenness, a TARDIS with prehensile wiring. AU. Not for external application. The cake is a lie.
Summary: The end of the Time War left two Time Lords alive. Alive, but not unbroken.
Disclaimer: It's crap like this that ensures I'll never own Doctor Who. (Also, no can has beta.)
Dedication: To x_los, who didn't think me capable of writing slash. This is for you, babes. •muah•



It's evening – well, it's always evening somewhere – when the Master steps into the Cloister Room to find the Doctor in a bed of bare wires, ozone and singed leather in the air around him. The pursuit is nothing new; the Doctor's been working since the end of the War, trying to put the TARDIS back together again. Replace the fuses and the burnt-out bits, scrub the soot of his holocaust from the walls. His quiescence, on the other hand, is unusual.

The Master moves with light steps, careful not to disturb his keeper's rest. Time was, such a scene would have been an open invitation to murder.

The TARDIS creaks as he moves, half-awake and always angry. The Doctor shifts, just enough of a gesture to let the Master know that he's aware. The way he moves tells him something else: he's in pain, and now would be a bad time to try his patience. The Doctor these days has a vicious temper.

He kneels. It's like an infection, this need to do good. He could allow the Doctor to lie there, doubtless with a headache the size of observed space, but something should be done and the Doctor won't do anything. At times he misses the simpler life, when instinct and desire were the only things to rule him. "Let me."

The Doctor opens one eye, slits it open like a lizard. On his back, hands folded over his stomach, he looks more like he's pondering the burning of Rome than suffering. "Really."

The Master creeps up, taking in everything. Sparks from half-repaired machinery. The sound of the Doctor's taut breathing. "You know that I can help you," he says, not letting his hand rise, waiting for the Doctor to approve him. "Allow me."

The Doctor's open eye rolls up, lids sealing over a sliver of white. He grunts. Fine.

And the Master gives in to a small smile. Smiling is still acceptable, after all, especially with the eyes of his keeper closed. It's imperceptible as he crawls up beside him, lays his hands on his face, close as he can get to the mind, and pushes himself inside.

And o – what a cacophony; the Doctor's mind is raging. And leave it to him, a man who knows the madness, to find the tangled chords and smooth them out, carefully as he'd arrange the limbs of a dead man. The tension in the Doctor begins to fade away, but not the edge to him – and it never will, will it? The Doctor was snapped apart and thrown back together in the fires of War, when the flames made him molten, and nothing can ever scar him so deeply or set him so sternly again.

In the Doctor is something irreparable. The scars will never fade. The Master, with a thought, touches each one: here the scream of Time as its twisted, here the snap of the TARDIS beneath his fingers, here the fires that rose within her whose heat could not be quenched until flames had consumed two species. Here is his own regeneration.

(The Master remembered that day, and it might be truly said that none of them survived. The endgame was unleashed and there had been the fire, and he'd burned, for so long he'd burned – and a hand heavier than the one that he knew had come down on him, pulling him free of one flame and holding him still through the other. It had been solace – and he'd always scorned solace, and as he'd learn later this new Doctor did, too – but he took it then, let it imprint itself on his shifting cells, because it hurt so much and yet he wouldn't die.)

The Master pulls away. The Doctor's eyes are open again, looking into his own. It's a shallow echo of the contact he's just broken, the intimacy of mind-to-mind.

He motions to the cables on which the Doctor had lain. They pull back, intertwining like idle fingers. "You shouldn't put yourself at her mercy."

The Doctor tilts his head. "She was put at mine."

"She won't judge you kindly," the Master said, and gestured to his jacket. "Let me see."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

The Master echoed the motion, a half-unconscious parody. "I am your pet," he said, and spread his hands. "You may assume that I realise this as well as you. I have no intention of biting the hand that feeds me."

The look in the Doctor's eyes is wholly unrelated to the smile which stretches his lips. The Master too is intrigued; it had been his voice, certainly, but not his words. In his memories are all the men he had been, who would have damned themselves before submitting. They sleep uneasily beneath the surface of his thoughts.

He smiles. A mirror of the Doctor's, it doesn't make it to his eyes.

The Doctor exhales sharply, turns, and sheds his jacket. The jumper comes off next, low sscrape of rough fabric against skin unusually loud against the TARDIS's hum. And, contrary to expectations, it seems she has been gentle today – or, at the least, the psychic attack was the greater of the assaults. There are no new welts, nothing red to accent the flesh-and-bruise tones. The Master wonders how his own body must look, by now; which of them, so far, has been scarred more thoroughly. He has his suspicions.

The Doctor's back is a map of injuries as complex as a language. The Master reaches out to trace the line of his vertebrae, naming and numbering each one. Third cervical, fourth, fifth... first interscapular, second. He stops on the first fused thoracic, where the Doctor's body loses what little pliancy it had and becomes rigid. One thumb explores the ridges and valleys of skin, imprints of cords like lash marks, the scars where the TARDIS has repaid him for what he's done to her.

"Why?" he asks.

The Doctor exhales, sharp and short through his nostrils. He never suffers fools well. "Why what?"

"Why didn't you let us die?" the Master wonders. "Why not let us be damned? Us two? The last of our kind?"

Beneath his hands the Doctor moves, twisting like a cat and throwing him off. He feels his body – and what was it, really, that body? An easy vantage point, to be sure – land amongst the wires, which hiss and draw away from him like snakes. He wonders at the lines on the Doctor's face, and which are frown lines, and which are the coils trying to blind him while he sleeps.

The Doctor crouches, wrists limp on his knees, watching him as if wondering the same thing, wondering to remedy that now. And he could, the Master realises; if he chooses to end them both then no one, not even the Master himself, will stand in his way.

"What do you want from me?" the Doctor asks, and crucifies the Master on his gaze. The Master rolls to his knees, and slowly lifts his palms from the floor.

"Would you kill me?" he asked. "Under what circumstances? You, who once wept for humans and dogs."

"If I had to." The Doctor's eyes are cold. In their time together the Master has seen him use: a gun, a knife, grenades, a noose, a stone. The Doctor enjoyed none of the deaths, but neither did he cry.

The Doctor stands, and the Master remains on his knees. He listens to his footsteps, a counterpoint to drums, until the Doctor's hand twines through his hair. He reaches up a hand and smooths lines from the corner of the Doctor's eyes, and looks beyond them into the silence of the man himself.

The Doctor's mind is a still blade, edged and absolute. It is ready to cut him open. The Master is ready to let it. He stands.

He is the one who undresses them, laying each article aside as though they'll be stored for better days. He pushes the Doctor back to his unfinished console, guiding each step with the soles of his feet, and they sink among the cords and the bits of gaping metal.

The TARDIS, covetous and cruel, reaches up to surround them, weird energies moving in her wires. The sharp ends dance across them, finding fragile skin where once they had been armoured. It digs against them until blood and sweat mingle, until pain and pleasure mingle, until with the blood and current and the minds entering each other they may be three or one or no bodies at all.

This is what they have: hurting each other because it's the closest they can be, because they are fragments of shattered things moving against each other in the darkness. They hate each other, for none can make the others whole. Nor can they break the others apart, though by hands and lips and hearts they're trying.

Voices raised in agony sound similar to theirs. And to look on, one might think they writhed in pain. The Doctor presses blood from cuts across the Master's skin, the Master steals breath from the chalice of his lips and around them, above them, a fractured bell tolls. The Master thinks, perhaps indulgently, that somewhere in space and time an empire falls. Here it is only them.

They still, at length, inside each other, and make no further sound. The Master surveills his Doctor, and notices: the veins beneath the skin. The space between the ribs. The strong pulse running through the neck, the wrists, the thighs. Any of these could be used to kill him.

The Doctor rolls away and steps to his clothing. He pulls on his jumper, lithe as a predator and born for war. The Master lies unmoving, feeling restless coils move against his spine.

His eyes never leave the Doctor. He ponders compassion and the ways of slitting his neck, and wonders if maybe, in the glow of one more fire, he can return him to who he was meant to be.

And maybe in that ruthlessness, there would be salvation for him as well.