Set before the ending of series 4. I hope you enjoy.
And the Master wants, no, thinks about telling him "I told you. I told you what was wrong and you aren't fixing it. You're not even trying. You can fix everything, everyone, everything I do is fixed by you, but I'm not." But that would be . . . not right. Not something the Master would ever say. Not something he could ever say.
Anyway, that's not how they play.
They play long and hard and never ending, because until Gallifrey fell there never was an "end" to anything for Time Lords. And then the Doctor talked Human to talk about the end and The Master didn't listen because a time lock isn't really an end, it's just something that got hidden. Nothing's over, it's just forgotten. And it's not "in the past" either, another human phrase the Doctor uses. No, not in the past, it's just there. Like an ornament on the mantelpiece you're not allowed to touch because it's so fragile.
And so the Master plays never ending, and is careful about the clues he drops, enough to keep the Doctor in the game but never enough for anyone to win. And he's almost playing at full capacity, but he's not because if he was, he would never let the Doctor in on the game. But playing by yourself always ends up being boring, and there are no other games in the box.
This time, though, the Doctor has a chance to change the rules. This might have seemed a stupid thing to offer your opponent, except that rules cannot be changed without the consent of all the players, so what the Master was really offering is the chance to get his consent. He is offering the Doctor a chance to change who the Master is, something the Doctor has always seemed to want. Something the Doctor has offered; such big, grand, noble gestures. The Master could never accept such a thing, but the Master could let himself offer it, and have the Doctor take up the idea again, under the guise of the Master's idea.
It was a soft idea, not something that would win him the game, but he wasn't playing to win, because if he won, what would he do next? He played to play.
The Master offers no dramatic outburst of pent up feelings, because that is the Doctor's role. He makes no noble gesture of peace, because that is the Doctor's role. He plays to continue playing, as is his role, the quiet moves hidden by dramatic speeches with no sustenance. It is a testament to his own skill as a deceiver that the Doctor does not notice where he "slipped up".
Yet it took, and here he thinks of the fourth dimensional way of saying it, a significant part of his own timeline to convince himself to make that move. And it led to nothing.
And he's not even sure he wanted/wants/would want the Doctor to succeed, because it's too hard to separate the part that just wants to game to continue, no matter the change of rules, and the part that might be
-the drums-
which wants the games to end, the Master victorious, and he treads a thin line, because
-the drums-
echo through all parts, shaking them, vibrating, and there's no way of telling what those parts will look like when they're not shaking, and there's a small part that just wants to let the Doctor decide which part wins, but if he let the Doctor decide then that part would win, and then there's the part that's looking at the rest of him, and it would be nice if that part could decide, but there's a vibrating part that this part observes, that doesn't want observation, just action, low instinct, based on how the universe feels at the time. Because the observation leads to revelations that some parts, – and he detachedly wonders if these parts could be other regenerations, because the Doctor always thought that the little people, personalities that came from his essence just melted back into the whole, but the Master thought that if such contradictory pieces were welded together the paradox his soul would create would collapse and kill, minimally, him, and, at maximum, at least a couple of galaxies, if not the universe, – some parts think that should not be revealed, because they showed weaknesses, the parts of him that would never belong fully to him. The parts that just wanted to keep playing, no matter the cost.
The only thing the parts agreed on as that he would not lose. Although, they all seemed to define losing differently, and some defined it as what others defined as winning, and there were a rare couple that thought that his current plan, to play, was losing, because he was preventing himself from winning.
He could win. He knew he could, because he had done it before, in a very shameful escapade that involved taking control of a planet of a race only slightly more intelligent than humans, then becoming bored, sending them to conquer their solar system (no other life forms) and eventually uniting half a galaxy under a fairly workable totalitarian regime. There may have been a couple of years of slave labour for the monuments (which, they would never know, spelt "the Master was/is/has been here" in pig Gallifreyan) and the space ships, but at the end, most of the subjects were happy, and the Doctor hadn't come, because he hadn't given him any clues, and because the Doctor was amazingly and unbelievably oblivious, there was no point in killing any of them, so he staged his death after appointing a new leader. They were/are/will be doing a good job in the cross-Galaxy economic market palce.
Which proved he could win, if he wanted. But it was so much more fun to play with two.
But he could win. If he wanted. But he didn't – he'd tried it once and it just wasn't fun.
Please review, it makes me happy.