Chapter Text
The waves crash against the shore with an echo that reminds her of the War. Her back straightens, like a soldier’s should, trying to hold onto the memory. Year 200–something, the fall of Arcadia. The ringing in her ears each time a bomb went off. That’s what the ocean reminds her of. The grating collision of water against the rocks and the gentle defeat of being pulled back by the tide; a contradiction ingrained into her bones, a battle never won.
An unstoppable force and an immovable object.
Instinctively, she thinks of the Master.
The Master is… with her. Or at least the Doctor thinks he is. His ghost has haunted her long enough to become recognizable. The last thing she can remember before the ground beneath her disintegrated into sand was his shadow looming in her peripheral vision.
The Master was with her. He was hurting her. (Well, isn’t he always?)
As much as she doesn’t want him to be here, his company would be better than having to face the coastline alone. The Doctor holds her hand out towards her right and hopes with all the strength she has left that he takes it.
Maybe she just imagined him.
Maybe she’s here all alone, alone—
“You could ask me,” the Master mocks, “I would really, really, really like you to ask me. Go on.”
“Hold my hand,” she says, too tired to tease him back. The words taste bitter on her tongue.
The Master’s breath audibly holds, a hiss escapes his teeth, disgust without words. She hears him shift next to her as his feet balance his weight. There’s an uneasiness to him now, a cat ready to jump.
“Beg,” he commands.
“Please. I can’t do this if you– please.”
This time, she notices that charcoal taste between her teeth isn’t from the air. Her words cut against the wind, vowels twisting into gravel in her mouth. She rasps through it, but she understands why the Master hissed when he heard her. She sounds wrong.
“Please,” she tries one last time, with her voice shattering their peace like cracked glass.
He holds her hand.
When the Master locks their fingers together, gentle, despite everything, the scars they dug into each other’s palms brush against each other. She hadn’t felt hers before, she hadn’t even remembered she had it, but as their blood intertwines into the same red, it seems impossible to ignore. It itches, bleeds, dries and cracks between her palm mines and how did they get there what were they doing where are they where are they where are they.
“Where are we?” the Doctor asks.
The Master brings her hand up to his lips and places a kiss to her knuckles. He smiles against her fingers, letting his teeth graze the skin. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”
She opens her eyes.
The tide looks back at the both of them, cold and unforgiving.
They’re on a beach.
The Doctor has never liked beaches. Between Bad Wolf Bay and breaking Yaz’s heart in 1807 China, she’s used to having her soul be ripped from her body with sand under her feet. There’s never been a good history between the ocean and her, and she has never stood on a beach without her hearts broken shortly after. If she listens close enough, she’s sure she can hear them slow down in anticipation. The body remembers what the mind foolishly forgets.
From the look of it, the Master doesn’t like beaches either. He’s shrunken into himself not unlike a child without an umbrella, trying to avoid the splashes at his feet. She wants to make fun of him for it, except the left side of his face is covered in blood, and he’s probably not in the mood.
“You look like a child,” she says anyway, because when has he ever cared about her feelings at a time like this?
He doesn’t laugh. His eyes scan the beach like a battlefield, shoulders tense; like a soldier would.
If the Master is also scared, then that means “We’re in a Confession Dial,” she tests, “aren’t we?”
The Master doesn’t answer. He simply squeezes her hand in approval and keeps staring at the horizon.
It would be comforting to know she’s trapped with him instead of because of him, but their history has ruined any sense of that now. The idea of being similar or different to the Master makes her skin crawl.We are two halves of the same whole and we couldn’t be more different from one another are two truths that shouldn’t exist in the same sentence except that they do simply because the Doctor and the Master exist. They create it when they choose to survive. Regeneration intertwines them into a paradox.
“Don’t recognize this memory,” the Doctor says, trying to fill the silence, she’s always been so bad at those, “must be yours, then?”
“It’s yours.”
“Can’t be, I don’t remember–”
“I don’t think we can trust what you remember, Doctor. What about you?”
The ‘you’ he uses changes mid-sentence. He speaks of her Thirteenth Regeneration, the blonde with suspenders in the present time, before switching to her universal being, ‘you’, speaking of all regenerations at once across her time stream.
And that’s when it hits her. Why all of her words sound wrong.
The Master is speaking Gallifreyan.
She tries to pull her hand away to stop him from– From– touching her, from using a language that is dead and gone and buried because of him, but he only grips her wrist. His fingers dig into her skin to keep her in place, except for his index, which begins tapping a beat of four as he measures her pulses.
“Caught up yet?” He asks in a language that only they can understand.
The sob she lets out shatters the glass and the beach breaks with it.
Gallifreyan translates in her mind like a parasite, digging through her brain, never quite full, and the Doctor screams the whole way through it. She can hear the language just fine, but having to understand it for the first time in billions of years rips her apart. She hears the words but the Circular structures make a broken tapestry behind her eyelids. She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t understand the language she was born with and she doesn’t understand the only person left that can speak it and she doesn’t understand–
“Stop it.” The Master whispers into her ear.
When the Master speaks, he uses the imperative mood of Gallifreyan Law, which in its structure, declares that he is taking respect and placing it on himself. It is the word sign that the Lord President would use to declare order in the Citadel, or the word sign that Borusa would use to shut them up in class.
The Master declares ‘if you understand that you are lesser, you shall do as I say’.
And because the Doctor knows how dangerous it is to deny him power right now, and she knows the symbol that’s carved into her palm, she stops.
She understands Gallifreyan after all.
“Took you long enough,” he says, and his usual Circular phrasing has disappeared for her sake. He’s translating English irony into Gallifreyan so that she has time to catch up.
“Why are you speaking it?” the Doctor asks, still in English. She’s too scared to cross that boundary. “You hate Time Lords. Why are you speaking it?”
He ignores her. “Although, maybe[1] I’m[2] wrong. You may not know what this memory is, but what about her?[3] How many of her existed, do you think? For all I know, we’re speaking of a skeleton so hidden in history that it would melt my brain to even think so far back. Is clone of a clone of a clone still the same as the original? Meanwhile you[4]–”
The Doctor scoffs and it traps the Master like a moth to a flame. His tapping stops at once, and before she can even consider what she’s done, she has his undivided attention. She wonders if he’s even blinking, or if he’s refusing to for the sake of committing every movement of hers to memory.
She can’t stop starring at the scars on the left side of his face, that wound that’s hot and angry against her wrist, the trails of blood drying against his skin.
She did that to him, didn’t she?
“Well?” he asks.
He’s not pushing for an answer. He couldn’t care less about whatever words come out of her mouth. It’s what language she responds with that matters.
English is what she’s been using for the last… too many years, considering the company she keeps, but it limits her train of thought. In this particular situation, her answer in English would come out as something plain and and unsophisticated such as ‘you’re ridiculous’ or ‘you’re exaggerating’.
Gallifreyan, on the other hand, has the proper terms to express how utterly insane the Master is being. She can speak of regeneration cycles with the terms invented for them. She could explain using Gallifreyan Law and anatomy how thousands of regenerations would be impossible. She could point out his narcissistic sentence structure: how he assumes that this face is the ignorant one when all of his faces have been.
She could speak the way she was meant to. The way she was taught to, curling her tongue to form accents that haven’t been uttered in centuries until the Master disrupted their death.
The Master sighs and drops her wrist. “Disappointing.”
She takes so long deciding what language to respond back with that she ends up not talking at all.
Without his fingers wrapped around her wrist counting and keeping track, her pulse loses all sense of rhythm and falters into a time signature she’s not familiar with. He delicately starts walking towards the island behind them, leaving her to bear her quickening double-pulse alone.
English, without even thinking, she has to say something. She can’t do this without him, she can’t do it, “Wait, wait, don’t do this. It’s just a language. What does it matter to you if I don’t speak it?”
“We’re getting uploaded to the Matrix as we speak,” he says in perfect Gallifreyan, “and you can’t even talk to me in our mother tongue. The last hour, Doctor. You’re dead. We are dying whether you like it or not. Why don’t you get some perspective and use your last time conscious wisely?”
“Where are you even going?” Still English, still a coward, “you can’t leave me.”
“I’ll do anything I please, dear Doctor, and if these are the last words you hear me speak, I hope you listen attentively. You[5] are dying an anomaly. You are a God with no religion and I am tired of being your acolyte. I’ll do as I like in my final hours, I’ll enjoy it, and you will die alone with sand in your eyes."
It’s practiced, fluent, words twisting and swirling and screeching at her ears like nails on chalkboard. Gallifreyan has never been an easy language to listen to, but it stabs into her now, leaving her with wounds that know no ailment.
The Master turns on his heels and leaves, disappearing behind trees that reach up to the sky. A bomb goes off in the distance. Or a wave crashes into the shore. She’s not sure she knows the difference anymore.
Here’s the facts: The Doctor and the Master are stuck in a Confession Dial. She doesn’t know how or why they’re here together, and she can barely utter a word. No sonic screwdriver, no companions, no TARDIS. Just a beach and a scar forming on her palm.
Here’s the question: How do they get out?
Footnotes:
1. - There is no Gallifreyan word for ‘maybe’ or any of its variations. A word that implies I don’t understand is an insult to Time Lords and their all-encompassing knowledge. The English approximation for the word the Master is using is along the lines of “I am beyond this understanding because of blissful ignorance. I am capable of this knowledge, I have simply decided not to seek it out. I am uninformed by choice.” The speaker, in their doubt, is made out to be arrogant and superior. It is why the Master loves the word so much.
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2. - The pronoun for a Thirteenth Regeneration, implying that the Doctor herself is something else.
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3. - The pronoun for a past regeneration of the Doctor’s, unnumbered. [return to text]
4. - The pronoun for a future generation in the present tense, more specifically, her One-thousand and thirty first. [return to text]
5. - The comprehensive pronoun for every version of the Doctor that ever has existed. The eternal ‘you’. The Doctor she cannot escape from being. [return to text]