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[kuroshokora.livejournal.com]

Title: As The Driven Snow
Author: Kuroshokora
Summary: In Harrods, on the Winter Wonderland display, the Master takes his own christmas present.
Rating: R
Warning: Blood, character death, a little slash but nothing explicit
Notes: Set in an indeterminate time frame. I don't own... the Doctor, the Master or Harrods. Happy Christmas!

***

The Doctor blinked rapidly as the blindfold was torn from his eyes and he found himself on his back, in only his boxers, in a pile of fake and ostentatiously glittery snow. A mechanical polar bear was frozen in mid-growl above him, and the only lights were a string of multi-coloured fairy lights strung about a small wooden house decorated with plastic gingerbread shapes and capering elves with their cheery faces set in rictus grins. A tinny, muffled tune was playing somewhere; it took the Doctor a few minutes to recognise it as 'Winter Wonderland'.

He couldn't have got up to explore if he'd wanted to; his wrists were lashed above his head to the polar bear's back paws with something that looked like tinsel, but he suspected actually contained some heavy duty wiring from the way it was cutting into his skin. However, when he twisted his head up to the side, he spotted the green-and-gold sign proclaiming that he was in Harrods, Knightsbridge. London, Earth.

It didn't matter where he was. He knew the game, because they'd played it before. This was the... he'd actually lost count of the number of Christmas displays they'd visited. Different department stores, different countries, different years. Always on Christmas Eve, always Earth, and he didn't even have to look at the clock overhead to know that it was twenty minutes before midnight. As always. The Master liked to have a plan, but this level of control made the Doctor suspect that there was some sort of message he was supposed to be reading into this and was somehow completely missing. If he had to guess, he could almost imagine that the Master was trying to poison him against Earth, and he was starting with Christmas. The happiest day of the year, supposedly. The Doctor hadn't told the Master that most of his Christmases had been far from merry.

The Master himself was slouched against the side of the display, where a wooden sign was protruding diagonally from the bed of snow. Somebody, the Doctor suspected the Master himself, had rearranged the stick-on vinyl letters to read 'Satan stops here'. The Master was wearing a pair of glittery reindeer antlers wedged on his head. He held a candy cane between his teeth like a cigar, and he was smirking in a way that the Doctor didn't like one bit.

"I've always wanted to go to Harrods at Christmas. It's usually packed." the Doctor said, because he couldn't lie there in silence any longer.

"Better displays than Henrik's, I'll grant you."

They'd been to Henrik's last night. The Doctor had almost expected Rose to dodge past the festively adorned mannequins, hair swinging from pure life and vitality, hand in hand with the ghost of a one-time Doctor. That had given him strength, in a way, but had also made it worse. What would Rose say if she saw him now?

The Master stood, and then knelt back down in one long, graceful movement, landing on his knees in the fake snow between the Doctor's spread legs. Their eyes met; the Doctor's wide with confusion, the Master's narrowed with intent. There had been a time when the Doctor could have read the Master's eyes like an open book, but now all he saw was a darkness that he still, somehow, couldn't turn away from. When the Master moved his face closer, the Doctor couldn't do anything but tilt his own face in parallel, up to meet the Master's, almost begging for a kiss because he knew that it wasn't coming. The Master would never kiss him when they were playing this game, not until afterwards, and he longed to break that regime just to see why the Master insisted on it. What was the point? There was always a point, and the Doctor was waiting for the punchline, however long it took.

The Master almost looked disappointed when he eventually pulled his head back to regard the Doctor, as though they were back in school and the Doctor hadn't quite managed to decipher an equation in mechanics adequately, and the Doctor was hit by the need to rationalise before he got caught up in the Master's insane line of thought.

"Are you going to tell me what's going on, or are you going to stare at me forever? If you're trying to hypnotise me, you're doing a terrible job."

That earned him a stinging slap around the face, his head snapping to the side and wiping all thoughts from his mind for a few seconds, but somehow making him feel more satisfied, that there was still somebody left in there who he could maybe reach out to. He wasn't going to offer to help, he knew he'd be wasting his breath because Rassilon knew, he'd pleaded enough. But if he didn't even know what the Master wanted, how could he do anything at all? He'd thought that the Master had wanted him dead, yet he was still here. The Master wasn't even attempting to continue to claim the universe.

"Quiet. Hold your tongue, or I'll cut it off." the Master warned, and the Doctor nodded slowly.

Not that he was complaining, of course. He would rather the Master kept on with this for centuries if it kept Earth safe; if it kept all those people safe, then it was worth his sacrifice. He honestly believed that. He just had to think of all those people who deserved a full happy life, of Martha, Sarah, all his friends, all of those strangers who he was certain deserved to be saved.

The Master glanced from side to side, the candy cane clicking against his teeth as he rolled it from one corner of his mouth to the other. Wrapping his tongue around the curved end still poking out from between his lips, he pulled it into his mouth and crunched it up. The Doctor watched, reading nothing from the Master's face. The Master was gazing off into the distance as though he was hardly even there, not looking at the Doctor, not looking at anything.

But then, life flooded back into his eyes like it had never been away, leaving the Doctor to almost think that he'd imagined its absence, and the Master turned to wrench a plastic candy cane from the display, holding it triumphantly aloft with an expression that suggested he'd just pulled the sword from the stone. The candy cane was red and white as a barber's pole, with a vicious looking spike where it had been hammered into the ground on the display, and the Master twirled it like a baton. The reindeer antlers on his head flopped forwards into his eyes and he shook his head impatiently to send them cascading to the ground.

"If you love these filthy humans so much." the Master announced "I'll gouge out one of your hearts and you can become one."

He held the cane over the Doctor's right heart, the tip pressing into the skin between his ribs, and their eyes met again. They both knew he wouldn't do it. It was another part of the game, a threat on his life, his wellbeing, his friends, and although the Doctor was certain this wouldn't be the exception, he still felt as he always did, as they both did if only for a moment, that maybe this time, this time, he would follow it through.

"Then do it." the Doctor challenged and then because he was feeling rebellious "I once pledged you my hearts, do you remember?"

His face contorting into a hideous grimace, the Master raised the spike and stabbed it viciously down, and the Doctor gasped from the pain, unsure if his skin had been broken, just that it hurt enough to make his eyes water. He glanced down and saw blood pooling around the white tip of the cane, and with a jolt, wondered how much it would take for the Master to actually do it.

Pressing both his palms to the curve of the cane, the Master leaned his weight on it and the Doctor's back arched involuntarily, straining against the tinsel bonds as the pain became almost unbearable, his wrists bending outwards unnaturally, and he wondered if he'd broken one of them because his body wasn't supposed to be twisted like this, and he was being impaled on a candy cane and would this actually kill him if he only had one heart?

"I loved you, Koschei!" he gasped through the white haze of pain with his last shred of defiance, and the Master twisted the cane and laughed bitterly.

His own voice sounded so distorted, so far away that the Doctor couldn't tell if the emphasis had fallen on love as he'd intended or love-d to show the Master that it was firmly in the past, and gone, and never coming back. And because there's always been some sort of symbiosis between them, the Master looked him firmly in the eye and informed him

"I'm not Koschei, so that is very much past tense. Practically pluperfect--" and he laughed again "-- you had loved Koschei, Koschei did love you, but there's nothing now..."

He pulled the cane back, and the Doctor gazed dizzily at his own blood dripping from the slippery spike and his mouth was half open in a protest when the Master stabbed back down again and the Doctor screamed, white hot, incandescent, oh it hurt, it hurt! His head was swimming, his hearts still pounding, so he was sure his organ hadn't yet been punctured because he could hear it pounding in his ears, loud and unbearable and was this what the Master felt like?

"Look at me, Doctor!"

The Master's voice was high, fast and loud and elated and his eyes were shining like a child with an exciting new toy on Christmas morning and... oh. The Doctor's eyes flicked up to the clock and the wall and realised that it was.

"Merry Christmas." he mumbled faintly "Merry Christmas, Master."

He met the Master's eyes, his own pupils dilated and the Master's eyes wide and dark, and for a moment there was something between them, connecting them, some sense of kinship or joined emotion that the Doctor couldn't explain or define but he longed to hold onto, to grasp it with both hands and hold it there, whatever it meant and whatever it was because it felt right and his face was wet with tears and his chest was wet with blood and it was a good thing that he wasn't wearing a shirt because blood was so hard to get out, and he loved that shirt, and... wasn't this supposed to hurt, or something? He was sure he remembered it hurting. The Master was looking at him as though he could see right into his soul and maybe he could, maybe the Master was the only one who ever could.

They stared steadily, unblinkingly, at each other, frozen in position as though they were frozen in time, and the Doctor was just about to open his mouth to talk, just to see if he could, half afraid of breaking the feeling that they were joined together by something, their minds swimming and converging pleasantly together, when the plastic candy cane snapped between them and the moment was lost.

The Master stared, mouth half open in surprise at the broken candy cane, the end fragmented into an ugly stump, and then they both looked down at the Doctor's chest where six inches of sharp plastic was embedded diagonally, and a thick stream of blood still trickled down onto the fake snow, spreading and absorbing.

"Oh." the Doctor mumbled blearily "That's not good."

The Master smiled, and kissed him so hard that the Doctor felt he was suffocating, and he probably was because he'd forgotten how to breathe. If there was such thing as a kiss of death, he mused drowsily, this was it, but it felt nice and everything felt nice and he tried to kiss the Master back but he couldn't. It was too cold, and he couldn't move. All around them, everything was red, and the Doctor was surprised at how much blood had come out of his body.

"Master, I---" he stammered, and the Master kissed him again, firmly, insistently, drowning him, until slowly, slowly, everything faded to black.

"Don't say it." the Master said, pulling back eventually and meeting the Doctor's eyes gravely. "Don't ever say it."

The Doctor stared, eyes glassy, seeing nothing, and the Master smiled, shifting close to curl around the prone body and resting his head on the Doctor's chest, closing his eyes to listen to his remaining heart as it slowed, as it slowed as it.

Stopped.

And there was finally silence.

~End~