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She’s got him against the wall, and he’d be lying if he didn’t love it.
It’s always like that though, isn’t it? A touch of anger, a hint of murderous intent. She’s got him against the wall, sure, but there’s a knife to his Adam’s apple, and she says she doesn’t use weapons but they both know she’s a hypocrite. He’s always hated that about her.
“You won’t do it, love,” he says, drawing out the syllables, relishing in the rage that flares in her eyes. “You never do.”
“Oh, really?” She quirks an eyebrow, and the knife tip digs just a little deeper. It’s rusty, old. Last option. He shouldn’t have left her any—he knows better.
Well, everybody slips up sometimes.
“You mean like I didn’t blow up your cyber warriors?” she continues, her voice mocking, head tilted just a bit. Fury quivers in her jaw, twitches her lip. His eyes fall to it, and linger.
“Cyber masters ,” he growls, then, with more force than she expects—he’s been working his hands free this whole time—pushes her off him, sending her back with such force that she nearly falls, and the knife goes flying. She curses, hits the ground hard, and scrabbles for it, but he simply raises his wrist, and presses a button. Immediately, the neuro-chip he’d slipped onto her wrist activates, and she writhes in pain.
It hurts, he can tell, but it hurts him too. It’s the good kind of hurt though, petty and angry. You try to hurt me, I’ll hurt you back. Step and step again, twirl and complete the dance. It’s hand in hand, the violence between them. It’s all they have left at this point.
“Get—this—thing—off me,” she hisses between gasped breaths, and he doesn’t immediately. Instead he lets it roll on, watch her curl in on herself, shuddering against convulsions of pain, and something drops in his stomach, but he ignores it. She deserves it, he reminds himself.
“No, I don’t think so.” He steps over her and settles aching bones on a crumbling stone bench, the last thing standing in the ruined church they’ve taken refuge in. Outside, the world is drowning, engulfed in a blaze of destruction, and it’s all because of him. He can’t help it.
There was a girl here. A girl, past tense, because the Master killed her, and then wiped out her entire world. She wasn’t much, he’s pretty sure, only she made the mistake of catching the Doctor’s eye, and some things the Master simply won’t abide.
“You’re—a monster,” she gasps, and he simply laughs, loud enough that the rumble of destruction from outside doesn’t drown it out.
“Me?” he exclaims mid-chuckle. “A monster? Doctor, give me some credit. I’m more than that.”
And then he leans down, close enough to be right in her face, close enough that he can see the flecks of gold in her eyes. “I am death, Doctor. Yours, specifically.”
She doesn’t break his gaze. She stares at him, anger crinkling in the lines around her eyes, nostrils flared, and then her lips wick into a smile.
“Thought I couldn’t die.”
His hearts plummet like stones. He stares, and jealousy surges up at him, white hot and raging, and without even thinking he jams the button on the neuro-chip control.
It doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t work rather explosively, sending a shock of electricity through his wrist. He jerks back with a howl, and in a flash the Doctor is on her feet, wrestling the control off his wrist and dangling it briefly in front of his face before snatching it away.
“Thought you’d never get close enough.” She turns her back to him as he clutches at his wrist, ignoring the burn that cuts twice as deep because it’s that wrist, the one he stares at half the time and ignores the other half. It throbs, hot beneath his fingers, but he massages it furiously and bites back the pain.
It always hurts, much as he tries to ignore it, but the shock doesn’t help.
“Unnecessary,” he mutters, petulant despite himself, and she only laughs harshly, then turns around, the control dangling between her fingers.
“Really?” There’s no mirth in her tone, despite the smile on her lips. In honesty; it couldn’t be called a smile. It’s warped and crooked and leaking pain, and he hates it because he knows it’s all secondhand. It comes from empathy for the little ants he’s stomped out, and it burns him, it burns him, because of all that empathy for them, she spares none for him.
“Alright, alright,” he grumbles, and shifts on the bench, all the fight seeping out of him. What he would kill for a conversation right now. Death threats and torture are all well and good, but sometimes he misses the moments in-between, where the what could have been hangs in the air and they can both pretend for a moment that it’s what was.
“So I made a bit of a mess.” He rolls his eyes and leans back, dropping his hands to prop against the bench. Distantly, he can feel her eyes boring into him, and relishes it.
Attention. Finally, just for a moment, those eyes are all for him. He revels in it, if only because she’s so easily distracted.
“You destroyed an entire planet.” Her voice is cold as stone, no room for forgiveness. “You committed genocide.”
“Oh, please.” He grins at her, roguish, and loves how it looks in this body, though he’s not sure it’s working. Once, he would have been coquettish, and he thinks she might have liked that better. She always was a sucker for a pretty girl. “That’s our Whatsapp.”
Her face shutters at the reminder, and her gaze goes utterly flat. The control slips from her fingers, and he thinks for half a second that it’s an accident, until the heel of her boot slams down, crushing it to bits. He wrinkles his nose, disappointed.
“You know, that doubled as my teleport.”
“Don’t care.” She kicks the pieces, scattering them across the ground, then turns on her heel and goes for the door. She’s almost through it before he catches her.
“Wait!” He snags her suspender and she reacts instantaneously, spinning around and shoving him back, but he’s too fast. He makes a grab for her wrist, catches it, and holds her tight despite the fury sparking off of her. This time, he doesn’t twist, or dig his nails deep. He just clasps her hands in her own, and keeps her there.
“Get off me,” she growls, her eyes roaming over his face. There’s not a hint of give there, not a hint of what they once were, and normally it makes him angry, but today it just hurts. His wrist aches, and not because of the shock of electricity she sent through them.
“I know it hurts,” he tells her, and for just a second, just a moment , her eyes go wide. Then it’s gone, and faux innocence takes its place.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she spits, and this time, anger does rear up in him. It flashes cold in front of his eyes, and without thinking he yanks her arm forward, forces her white sleeve up, and shoves her own wrist in her face.
“Naivety isn’t a good look on you, love,” he says, and he can feel it burning within him again, an ache that throbs through his wrist and sits in his chest, eager and angry and desperate for some sign that he’s not going crazy. Maybe he is going crazy, actually, or maybe he already has, but sometimes he thinks he could claw back to—to something normal if it weren’t for her.
He’ll destroy an entire world just to watch the flames flash in her eyes. He’ll kill her friends just to wipe away the tears she spills, and maybe he’s beyond forgiveness, but it scarcely matters anymore. For as long as they’re connected—and they are, and will be, and have been—he’ll be at her heels like a dog at a bone, tearing flesh to pieces until there’s nothing left.
Her eyes remain on his face for a long moment and then, slowly, they move to her wrist, pale in the shadows of the church. He knows exactly what he’s looking at, can even catch the edge of the mark at this angle. His own name, written in Gallifreyan, the skin underneath angry and red for lack of contact. Her entire wrist is circled in inflammation, though he knows the longer they touch, the more it will fade.
His own drives him crazy. A pulsing, throbbing burn, like a hot poker pressed to his flash, and he knows she feels the same way, but she’ll never admit it. She’d let it burn right through, body after body, wrist after wrist, before she goes back to him.
He wonders who was the first to throw the other away. Sometimes, he thinks it’s him. Sometimes, he doesn’t care.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she tells him, and his own grin twitches unbidden to his face. A laugh bubbles in his throat, but he doesn’t release it.
“It means everything,” he growls, and shoves her wrist away. Let it burn , he thinks savagely, and almost turns away, but knows if he does then in a moment she’ll be gone.
And is this how it is between them? he wonders in a moment of agony. The chaser and the chased, forever condemned? Rassilon, he’s sick of it. He can’t even end it, because she stops him there too.
“It doesn’t,” she retorts, and turns to go, but he catches her by the shoulder, and this time she stops of her own accord. Pauses, and then turns back to face him, her eyes softening, this time into pity.
“It’s driving you mad, isn’t it?” she tells him, and it’s funny, but all the air rushes right out of his chest with those six words. His shoulders sag, and he’d sink right to the ground if not for his pride.
“You are,” he mumbles, and he meant to put bite into it, but can’t seem to summon any. “You’re maddening, you know that? A bloody mess.”
Her mouth twists, her eyes tightening, but she doesn’t rise to the bait, and for a second he feels a stab of regret. Even when he’s not trying to, he hurts her.
But then, he thinks bitterly, he won’t be the one to end the dance.
“If I’m a mess, you’re a disaster,” she replies, and he scoffs, turns his head. Half-remembered memories rise to the surface, of chess and piano and tears for people he never would have cried for. Of a second chance, one he never got the chance to use.
But she abandoned him too, he reminds himself. And maybe that’s the dance after all. Bound together, in sickness rather than in health. They’ll never be there when the other needs them, but he can stick like a craw in her side, and she in his, until they tear each other apart.
Til death do they part, except, he thinks with a hint of ironic regret, even that’s not true anymore.
“I hate you,” he tells her, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and then he sucks in a breath, nostrils flaring, and lets his eyes flutter shut. Outside, the planet crackles and burns, and all he can think is I did all this for you, and you don’t even want it .
“I can’t stand you,” she says, only he’s not looking, but he hears the softness in her voice and the shift of her boots in the dust, and when she leans forward to kiss him, the lightest brush against his lips, all he can taste is the ash in the air. Then she draws back, and her hand brushes against his, but she doesn’t take it.
He opens his eyes, and she’s watching him, something unreadable in her gaze.
“You—” he starts, but she shakes her head, her lips pressed together.
“I can’t forgive you,” she says, and her eyes are large and incredibly sad. Looking back at them, he feels like he’s just a boy again, and she too, and they’re standing in the red fields of their own planet. “Because if I did, I wouldn’t be the person you loved.”
“But—” he protests, and his hearts are thumping and his head is crowing it’s not fair, it’s not fair , and jealousy flashes up in him, but before he can even think about doing something, anything, she shoves her hand in her pocket, and thumbs something he can’t see.
Immediately, pain shoots through his wrists, dragging them together, as well as his feet, and before he knows it he hits the ground with a thump, all the air knocking out of him.
“Oof!” It hurts, and he hisses in pain, even as a part of him rages, furiously, uselessly. The hand touch. Micromagnets placed upon his skin, burrowed into his wrist. Spreading, immobilizing. Abandoning him here to die with this planet, until he finds a way out of it.
Because that’s what she does, isn’t it? She’ll never have the guts to put him out of his misery, because she can’t resist a second chance he’ll never make good on.
“The police are on their way,” she says, and he nearly laughs, because that’s just too good. He’ll kill them, probably, just because he’s definitely going to be in a mood by the time they come ‘round. “You’re immobilized, and I stole your Tissue Compression Eliminator. I’d suggest you play nice, or—”
“You’ll kill me?” he asks, and she falls silent. He doesn’t look up, but he can feel her eyes boring into him, steady and piercing.
“I wish,” she says quietly, and he doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t. In the silence between them, he can hear the spark and crackle of a world fallen to ruin and then, more closely, he hears the quiet scuff-scuff of her boots in the dust as she turns to leave. She doesn’t say anything as she goes, and by the time he looks up, nearly a minute later, there’s nothing left but footprints.
And even those blow over eventually, buried in a rain of ash and soot. He doesn’t mind. He was never much the sentimental type, anyway.