best_enemies | Better With Two- FIC (Reply)

Alright...first fic post here...
It is sad, and not at all cracky, but I hope youu guys like it anyway!~

Title: Better with Two
Summary: After the Time War, the Doctor wakes up
Pairing: Sort of Doctor/Master. I think its obvious, but as they don’t actually meet…
Rating: PG-13, I think?

When he wakes up, he looks around, expecting to see a corpse. Or more optimistically, an alive man, standing in front of the Doctor wearing a new smile and clothes that don’t fit him anymore.
But he’s alone, lying on the new floor of his TARDIS, metal grating pressing hard into the exposed, still tender new skin of this regeneration. He stands up unsteadily, and wobbles over to the console, tripping over his own feet-which wear shoes that no longer fit- and leaning on it heavily.
She whines, and a pale hand-that almost looks translucent blue, that colour English people go when they spend too long in front of a computer- is put to work stroking through the controls, formatted differently now but still familiar, flicking switches and checking the interior of the TARDIS. For any sign.

There’s nothing, so the New Doctor kicks off the shoes that don’t fit, and the shirt that’s strangling his new neck, and heads for the wardrobe room, still numb from regeneration.

Once he’s dressed, and had a cup of tea to help with psychic fall out, and possibly had a small mental breakdown at the loss of his species, he’ll look again.

Everywhere. And the Doctor will find him. He’ll search everywhere, every time, every place that his friend could have fallen-and isn’t that interesting, he’s a friend again, not an enemy, in this mind. He realizes, as he pulls on the closest clothes to hand-no need to think, they’re just clothes, he doesn’t care…And that is a strange feeling- a dark jumper and blue jeans, that this is the sort of man he is now. He’s determined.

Or perhaps a better word would be obsessed.

The Doctor is back in business. Dressed and recovered-it took a week, screaming and screaming for a reply against the ringing in his head, and the emptiness he feels, because his family doesn’t fill that void inside anymore, and he had yelled and shouted and raged and cried: he’s here, he’s alive, where are they? Don’t leave him alone…please, don’t leave him alone-he sits on a large red brocade chair in his favourite library-not the Doctor’s favourite library, his- and breathes deep.

The TARDIS is repairing herself, he’s dealt with the worst of it, as usual, but these new hands want to tinker-he’s sure that circuit under the console could be just a little bit more compact, and if he can link the thermo-buffers up to Yrasmic conductor he picked up in the forty-fifth century, perhaps he could speed up materialization by about fourteen seconds!- and it’s hard to let her deal with it on her own. But she needs time to lick her wounds, and curl up tight in her own consciousness and get to work repairing the holes Romana’s weapon made in her sleek psychic self. This new body thinks of her differently, she’s not just his ship, the trusty old girl that he used to see in his psychic plane, but instead she is almost a giant blue-black-silver ferret crackling with energy and thoughts. She’s real to him, a thinking feeling being now, not a bicycle that can handily read his mind and travel through time.

He frowns. He didn’t think like that. Why does he feel like he thought like that?
And he has another realization.

He hates himself.

The Doctor has searched, everywhere, like he’d said, every when as well, looking for the Master. He’d been on the TARDIS, took shelter right next to him, pressed hip-to-shoulder, the black velvet coat rubbing against his white shirt, as they grinned at each other-oh so clever, just like at the Academy, look what I can do, isn’t it good, Theta? Isn’t it?- and flipped the switch.

But the Doctor had woken up alone.

He keeps looking, stretches out tendrils of psychic energy-where are you? Can you hear me? Master? Where are you Master?- but he cannot find him. He thought he had caught a hint when he’d found the Nestene Consciousness in London, but all he’d found was a stupid excuse for a pit of living plastic, a girl-another one, just like the rest, this one was, perhaps, a little more fiery then recent companions, but hardly the brightest crayon in the box- who wouldn’t travel with him, and absolutely no hint of the Master. He’d tried asking the Consciousness, but all he got was a garbled excuse about the Time War, and how horrible it was –yes, he knows, of course he knows, he was in it, and he’s reminded everyday by the aching loneliness that is life without the Time Lords. Oh, he’d thought he hated them, but this (new) mind, this side of him had such heavy nostalgia, and he wondered that perhaps if he had worn this body earlier in his long life, things might not have turned out the way they did.
Eventually he tires of it, and returns to skulking around Earth, hoping to catch hints of the Master by keeping his ear to the ground-and no comments about the size of them, thank you very much- when he remembers the girl.

So sad, she had such potential, but so much time had passed since he’d asked her to come with him…
The TARDIS purred, and another one of his new, manic grins crossed his face.
However, he did own a time machine.

Better with Two, she says to him.

Rose & the Doctor She thinks.

He agrees. It's much better with two.

But they aren’t thinking of the same two.