I.

As humans, it becomes simple: physical.

The Doctor rents a flat for them and says, you don't destroy, I don't save, and the Master says, "Okay." They get a reputation, that couple next door, always screaming at each other, or sometimes just screaming. The Doctor makes things and the Master helps, and then the Master breaks them, since some habits you don't just break, and one night the Doctor joins him and they both end up with cuts from jagged ends but it's almost like healing.

They watch TV, and the Master mocks the humans parading on the screen, and the Doctor defends them. Then they switch, because it's about who is best, who thinks fastest. "They're imperfect," he says, and the Master, says, "They're perfect." "How can they be if we aren't?" "Doctor, that's what I've always asked you."

Okay, and the Master's good at making Italian, who would have thought. A dog wanders in and the Doctor mends its paw and later the Master smashes its skull with a pan. "Why," he asks and the Master looks like he's forgotten which answer he's supposed to give. Gallifrey is taboo until it isn't – the Master hisses, the Doctor paces, they come together a mess of limbs: a planetary system collapsing, destroyed orbit. It's about the body, brutal and tender, it doesn't solve anything. "We're not humans, Doctor," "Then let's do this like Time Lords."

II.

They resolve to speak only in formal Gallifreyan and they do not touch, except at the contact points: inside of the wrist, the temples. The Doctor cannot speak of human things, because there are no words for them. When he calls the Master monster, he says, paradox. When they say Gallifrey, they use the tense of once but never. The Doctor thinks the structure, the ceaselessness of it, would drive him mad, if he weren't mad already. But he is.

They recite the rules and, as an intellectual exercise, do not question them. They call each other only by what they are, what defines them, binds them. "I propose that Doctor and Master are things once but never," says the one once but never called Master. He was always the one to make the most dangerous leaps. "I agree," the once but never Doctor says, "once and forever."

III.

"You know, we'll need names."

"I'll be April, you be May."

"Showers and flowers. Really?"

They've never existed until this moment, and nothing is as good as it is now.