Timepiece

He knew what the Doctor wanted. He knew why. He saw it more clearly than the Doctor ever had or ever would, and understood that it was not merely the longing of a foolish old man but necessity.

From the end of creation, one can see the whole of it. Truth is a sky without possibility of stars seen from a rock that is the last rock that shall ever be: One stands there and knows, No matter what shape the universe chooses over time, it had this one all along. Here in Utopia, the universe was beginning to forget what meaning was, and pieces of the sense of the thing were coming loose by degrees and drifting off. Physical laws dissipated matter, energy, finally themselves.

And humanity was the witness. No wonder the Doctor wanted so badly to join them to himself, that he kept trying to make each species intelligible to the other. The Master understood now. Humanity, the inescapable timepiece of the universe, each life ticking out a second; Lucy's simple heartbeat ticking in his pocket, reminding him of the future that lay beneath every present… he understood.

He never could resist a ticking clock.

Neither could the Doctor, actually.

*

Angle of Incidence

He'd taken Lucy to Utopia. She'd been slipping away, her fair mayfly attention thinning, but Utopia had given her back to him.

He'd known it would.

The Doctor believed that they and the one TARDIS between them were the only pieces of Gallifrey left. He was wrong: The Untempered Schism persisted. It dwelt within him, the void of its truth beating inside his mind.

Once, the Doctor had told him what he'd seen. The Master remembered the intimate thrill of each other's given names, back before their names had been unwritten from time and space. Raw power, the Doctor had said. Majesty. And everywhere, like a dimension of its own…

What? Tell me.

Life. Such terrifying life.

His hearts had cried out to tell him what he'd seen there, but once again, his friend had confused him into silence. The Doctor had seen majesty, not as a quality but as a fact. The Master had seen—

"Dying," said Lucy, dear little doll, eyes wide and fractured. "Everything dying." That was what he had seen then. It was what he had seen in every atom since.

And he'd wanted Lucy to see it, too. A friend is a second self.