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„I was a hologram once, for three weeks. The gossip I picked up!”
“Okay,” the Doctor grumbled, “let’s try this again. This time a bit more serious, yeah? I need you to activate the hologram program, so I can…”
His eyes widened.
“No, no, no, not like that, what are you do-”
Everything went black. The Doctor blinked, once, twice and was suddenly…
Well, this wasn’t his TARDIS. Was it? Well, it must have been, every other TARDIS in the universe had been destroyed together with Gallifrey. It didn’t look like his TARDIS though. Seemed, he had redecorated again - He didn’t like it.
The lights were dimmed to a gloomy purple, seeping into the control room through the round things. It was a relief he still had the round things, though. No idea what they did, but it wouldn’t be his TARDIS without them.
And it was his TARDIS, wasn’t it?
He looked around curiously. Stairs led to a platform above the controls, where the railing had been diligently decorated with leaf garlands wrapped around the cold metal.
Puzzled, the Doctor attempted to take some of the stairs and watched half of his leg just stepping through it.
“Oh,” he said, in lack of more adequate words.
“Oh indeed,” a voice behind him pronounced in a dramatic manner. “Now, your choice, are you going to tell me why there’s a hologram in my TARDIS and spare us the embarrassment or have me track the source to kill you immediately?”
He turned around speechlessly, looking into the face of a quite impressive woman. Fitting to the dimmed TARDIS lights, she was all dressed in purple Victorian dresses, her perfectly manicured hands resting on the handle of a very classy looking umbrella. Her pale face was framed by dark hair, and blue, sharp eyes were boring right through him (which was easier than usual, considering he was… well… a hologram).
Definitely not his TARDIS then.
“Aw sorry,” he answered with his brightest fake smile. “I can guarantee you, I wasn’t looking for a meeting with her majesty the Ice Queen when I started my hologram program. My bad, really.”
The woman merely raised an eyebrow.
“Do you have a death wish, dear?”
The Doctor shrugged.
“People ask me that all the time, if you must know. Really don’t know why. Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to be off. Was trying to record a message for my friend in case I die and…” He stopped with a sheepish smile. “I can see what you’re getting at.”
He activated the button to stop the hologram program, relieved to finally stand alone in his own TARDIS again, took a deep breath and… flickered?
Oh, no, this wasn’t good, this wasn’t good at all.
With an embarrassed grin he plopped back up right in front of the woman he had just left.
“Turns out my, uhm, my hologram program is, uh… stuck.”
She looked at him unimpressed, but the Doctor noticed that now both her eyebrows had risen. He wondered how much further up they would be able to go when he was done here. People gave him raised eyebrows a lot.
“Great,” she finally said after a little moment of silence and he could hear the sarcasm drop from her voice. “I’ve always wanted a pet.”
She stepped towards her controls, looking at the screens intensely for a few moments, then started setting in coordinates. The Doctor followed her like an extremely stupid grinning shadow and looked over her shoulder.
“Oh look, it’s Earth,” he remarked. “Earth’s great! What you’re looking for on Earth?”
“Help for you, obviously,” the woman replied with a predatory smile that would have made him shiver if he still had a body to do so. “Care to give me your phone number?”
“My… what? What for?”
“TARDIS repair service. They can determine your location by tracking your phone number, didn’t you know? Now?”
Well, what had he to lose, honestly? The future seemed to hold all kind of wonders. A second TARDIS in the universe. TARDIS repair service. What had he gotten himself into here?
With a confused frown, he dictated her his TARDIS’ phone number and watched her write it down with delicate lines and bows.
She stepped to the door, waved the piece of paper in front of his face and winked.
“Will be right back, dearest.”
When it finally occurred to the Doctor that he had never mentioned he actually owned a TARDIS, she had already been gone for ten minutes.
“You know, I have a few questions,” he announced the second she had re-entered her TARDIS.
She shut the door behind her with a roll of her eyes.
“Don’t you always have?”
He glared at her. “Ah. So you do know who I am.”
Her grin was all teeth. Something about it was highly unsettling but also familiar. He couldn’t quite place it. In fact, he couldn’t even tell whether he liked it or not. Her whole beauty, while undeniable, had something so dangerous it made him nervous. And he wasn’t usually nervous.
“I always know who you are, my dear Doctor.”
He frowned, trying to place the feeling of overwhelming familiarity that had suddenly overcome him. It wasn’t easy with the usual telepathic recognition gone, that usually came from meeting another Time Lord. He wasn’t really there, all he felt was his dusty old TARDIS floating lonely through space.
“Gallifrey has been time-locked, so how… how is there even another Time Lord alive? And who exactly are you?”
She cocked her head with an amused smile.
“See, I can’t really answer any of this, it’s all a little bit spoiler-y and I do have some plans. Let’s just say I survived your little stunt. Rather spectacularly, too. And do call me Missy.”
“Missy,” he repeated, stunned from the feeling of it not ringing any bells, while his whole mind screamed warnings at the same time. Something was off, but he still couldn’t place it. “Okay.”
His thoughts were racing, and he could see her roll her eyes while she once again changed the coordinates. It was right there, at the tip of his tongue. Her considered her again, her elegant choice of clothes, her dry remarks, her sharp, intelligent eyes, the danger radiating from her, the way she spoke…
There were thoughts rising up in his head, dangerous thoughts that slowly began transforming into hopes he would normally never allow himself to have, but right now, it seemed everything was possible. There was a Time Lord, right in front of his hologram eyes, alive, breathing, currently regarding him with an annoyed glare that he knew better than he wanted to admit.
So, if there was a Time Lord who allegedly survived the Time War and his use of The Moment and somehow even seemed to have escaped the Time Lock he had set up… Then why couldn’t it be the Master?
“I’d really rather you wouldn’t figure it out,” Missy commented with a little pout while starting the dematerialisation process. “I have such nice things planned for you and you knowing who I am would really destroy most of them.”
He watched her quietly for a few seconds, a slight smile on his face.
“Only you would survive falling into an Eye of Harmony.”
Missy turned her back to the controls, looking at him with a sigh.
“I didn’t, actually. Dead as a stone. But the High Council decided to bring me back for the Time War. Thought I could help them.”
“That must have worked out well for them.” The Doctor remarked dryly. “They should’ve told me, I could’ve told them this wasn’t going to… Why didn’t anyone tell me. I needed…”
He shut up when he saw the look on her face. He had grown quite used to the Master rejecting him in the last few centuries. And after being rejected one last time, he had grown quite used to the Master being dead.
The last time he had seen the Master looking at him with genuine compassion in their eyes must have been ages ago. He gulped.
“They needed you with nothing to lose,” she explained, and he noticed that all the pretence she usually spoke with had left her voice. “And they seemed under the impression that I was someone you would care about.”
“Funny that, isn’t it?” the Doctor remarked with a shrug.
One second later, he regretted it, looking into Missy’s eyes and seeing the same old hurt look, Koschei wore so well. It seemed, some things just wouldn’t change.
He smiled, hoping to give an impression of a particular indifferent hologram. “Maybe they didn’t get it all wrong.”
Missy rolled her eyes. “Of course. Well, as charming as this little chat was, I have things to do.”
And with a little bow, she marched towards the exit.
“Hey,” the Doctor called even while she was already out the door. “Are you just going to lea…”
He stopped when she closed the door behind her.
“Fair enough,” the Doctor sighed. “Still don’t like jokes on your expense, I see.”
Missy stayed out the whole night. The Doctor passed his time roaming through her TARDIS, looking at everything he could reach, curious to learn what she was up to. He found a book, lying next to the console, half read and cautiously marked with a bookmark
“Don’t leave your books lying open like this, it’ll damage the cover, Theta!”
He smirked. It was typical for his old friend to condemn everything that human culture had created only to use her time alone in her TARDIS to secretly have a read of Little Women.
He tried to open the book and read a few pages, but as was to be expected his hands gripped right through it. With a sigh, he kept on wandering.
A half drunken bottle of wine stood underneath the console and the Doctor rolled his eyes, hoping that Missy wasn’t one who drank and drove. Really nothing quite as irresponsible as… It was then he remembered who he was thinking about. Of course she was.
It was weird. With every little piece he found, every little trace of her personality assembled in this room that so clearly wore her handwriting, he felt closer to his old friend in a way he had thought he’d never feel again.
She really lived here. She lived. She was a real, breathing person, right now, wherever she had gone to cause trouble. Oh, he just knew she was, and wasn’t that a wonderful feeling all on its own? To have someone in this universe he knew?
He grew bored very quickly, when Missy didn’t return, running the always same circles in the Time Lord’s TARDIS as well as his thoughts. What had happened that she was able to return? Did she know what he had done, would she ever be able to… But surely, she wouldn’t. Surely no one ever would.
The Doctor shrieked out of his own dark circle of thoughts when he heard Missy’s TARDIS door click behind her. He turned around quickly, an innocent grin on his face and his hands folded behind his back.
She saw through it right away.
“Oh dear, had I known in what depressing company I would’ve found myself in, I would have left you the telly on.”
“Best not,” he gave back with an amused grin. “Not a big fan of the Clangers.”
“Ouch,” Missy remarked dryly while playfully holding her chest. “You have me mortally wounded. No need to lash out just because you are a frustrated hologram. Have you found a way back, by any chance?” she added sweetly.
“Can’t exactly do much while I’m stuck in this form, can I now?” the Doctor grumbled.
Missy just threw him a little smile and he could see disbelief glinting in her eyes.
“Sure.”
The Doctor tried to shrug this look away. Having someone in the universe who actually knew him had been fun until he realized that it meant that all his lies were being looked through.
“So what have you been up to?” he asked as casually as he managed.
Missy smirked.
“Oh well, it seems I just got you a puppy.”
“Is it a puppy with toxic teeth? A bark that can kill me? Laser eyes?”
Missy smiled in a predatory manner.
“I assure you, Clara’s perfectly well behaved. Not lethal at all.”
He had a hard time believing that.
Missy had done several time jumps in the next few days, always checking up on – Well, he wasn’t quite sure, if he was being honest. Whenever he asked about it, she got very cryptic and smiled with a lot of teeth, so the Doctor assumed it had something to do with him.
It usually had.
She worked quite a lot, too. More than once he caught her working on her console, on something so complex, he couldn’t quite figure out what it was yet. He was also fairly sure she had laid out false clues for him to follow, so he’d have more trouble to get behind her plans. It was either that or she was a better engineer. Which, really, couldn’t be it. At all.
So, naturally, he made it his life goal to distract her.
“You know, I once met Genghis Khan. What a man, I’m telling you.”
He was leaning right behind her, glancing over her shoulder on the complicated circuity she was currently outlining.
“That’s lovely dear. I’m sure.”
He sulked a bit at her obvious ignorance, then crossed his arms, deciding to provoke her a bit. It was always easy to provoke the Master. And this once - perks of being a hologram - it was barely even dangerous.
“Proper evil man. Really, I believe I met your match.”
Her blue eyes rushed up to him with a dark glare. The Doctor grinned triumphantly.
“Don’t you have anywhere to be?” Missy hissed, and his grin only grew wider at this.
“You won’t help me fix my hologram program!”
“I told you, I’m busy!”
“So you’re just going to keep me here?”
Missy smiled sweetly back at him, in a way that signalled the Doctor almost immediately that he was in trouble. Despite being transparent, he hid behind her console.
“Why don’t you ask Genghis Khan for help, love?”
“He’s not my biggest fan right now…,” he replied cautiously, and Missy snorted.
“Well, he’s not the only one.”
Her tone was icy as she leant over her work once again, trying to block him out. But he wasn’t going to have any of it. He was the Doctor after all – Annoying people was his most trained character trait.
“Banged against my door for hours, trying to break it in. It was funny. “‘Gen’, I said, ‘I can call you Gen, right? I’ll make you a proposition, Gen.’ That’s about when he started shouting about how I should never, ever call him Gen. What a rude man. Anyway, I -“
“I’m going to turn generations of dead humans into an army of Cybermen by changing their whole concept of an afterlife, just to annoy you.”
The Doctor stared at her, holographic mouth still hanging open.
Well. So much for his most trained character trait.
Missy won this round.
He wasn’t sure what other dangers Missy’s plan had entailed, actually the whole thing didn’t seem all that dangerous at all, but when she returned, she was all roughed up, angrily peeling herself out of the burnt rests of her once beautiful purple dress, stamping on the shreds that fell to her feet.
She didn’t seem to mind the Doctor watching at all. Which, if he was quite honest, would’ve been ridiculous after everything they did together.
He didn’t exactly mind watching either.
“Hello honey,” he greeted her with badly veiled amusement, trying not to let her beauty get to him – Because, Rassilon, she was beautiful. “So glad you’re home. How was your day?”
“Oh, don’t you start.” Her voice was almost a growl, causing one of his eyebrows to rise ever so slightly.
“Trouble in paradise?”
“I got shot,” she answered with a roll of her eyes, taking rushed steps up and disappeared into one of the aisles he couldn’t follow her to.
“Great,” he called after her. “I’m just gonna wait here then, thinking of the details all by myself.”
When Missy returned, she was wearing another perfect, purple dress, had remade her hair and he believed to even notice a change in her make up. She had regained her composure, but he could still feel anger radiating from her in waves. It reminded him of how Koschei had been when he had been angry, turning it all into cold rage, patiently eating away at him, until he freed it all in a blazing thunderstorm that had had weeks and months of building.
The Doctor had soon learned to trigger the outburst as soon as possible, if only to save his old friend the pain.
Recognizing the same patterns in Missy, he crossed his arms behind his back in an amused pose as soon as she re-entered the console room, beaming at her.
“Just in time. I think I got it. So the puppy found your old TCE and when she hopped around your feet and trying to get some love, you kicked her, because that’s what you do, kicking puppies, and so you accidently-“
“Go to hell, Doctor.”
Ah. He was beginning to realize who did the shooting bit.
“Want to… talk about it?” he tried with a nervous smile and Missy threw another glare at him, voice sugar sweet when she talked.
“Yes, since you seem to be basic equipment to my TARDIS by now, please make a note to always check whether the Brigadier is around or not before I create a Cybermen army.”
The question whether he had punched her in the face again got almost stuck inside his transparent throat.
Almost.
Rassilon, could that woman rage.
“I would never have shot.”
“Yes, you would! She asked you too.”
“So what! Some girl asks me to shoot a person, and I just do it? Doesn’t sound much like me, does it?”
“Well, you don’t know you yet. Or her.”
“No, but I know you.”
He knew he would never shoot her. He wouldn’t, would he? Be a nuisance, try to blow at the pages of the book she had left lying around open, until the page actually turned, shouting random numbers when she was trying to count something, maybe, but actually shooting her?
He had gone a bit too far quite a lot of times the last few years after the war, had felt his skin constantly tingling in rage, had felt bloodlust cursing through his body, had felt so lost, so broken, so far gone that it hadn’t mattered to him to take even more lives for a cause that hadn’t been pure anymore for a long time. But Rose had fixed it, hadn’t she? She had made him better.
And Missy? The Master? His Koschei? After all the long hours sitting alone after the war, searching for another Time Lord mind, wishing the miracle of the Master coming back to life would happen only once again… He could never…? Could he?
The truth was, after what had happened to Gallifrey, he believed he was capable of everything.
He didn’t always like to face the truth.
“You didn’t even believe me,” Missy said after a little while, tearing the Doctor out of his dark thoughts.
“Believe what?”
“Maybe I did it wrong. Did I do it wrong?”
“Did what wrong?”
“Is there a chance you’ll ever believe me? Does it even matter what I do?”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Believe you what, Missy?”
“I just want my friend back.” She looked at him almost pleadingly, and he frowned in confusion.
“You have friends? Other than me? Who?”
For a few seconds, no one said a word, then Missy smiled, got up and announced she’d go to bed. Was it him or had she looked relieved? Why would she look relieved, he hadn’t even started getting into the pep talks he was so famous fo… - Oh.
“What you want me back for?” he called to the closed door. “You’re only letting me sit alone in your console room after all!”
After that, Missy seemed to drift through space rather aimlessly, never interested in anything enough to actually stop, never wanting to determine a direction. They talked a lot these days, and he learned quite a lot about his future self.
Apparently, he had become a grumpy old man that sent mixed signals to women by kissing them on a graveyard and then threaten to shoot them.
Actually, that was all he learned about his future and all Missy seemed to want to talk about.
Until one day, she stormed through the control room, visibly worried.
“What’s wrong, did I go kiss someone again? Was it Clara?”
She stopped in her tracks for only a second, throwing him a dark glare. “You don’t kiss her. She’s not for kissing. I did not give her to you for kissing!”
He looked at her with fake indignity that got totally lost on her, as she had resumed pacing through the console room.
“But I kiss all my companions! Didn’t you know that?”
“Spare me your silly jokes, this is serious.”
“Oh no,” he replied with a careless grin. “Am I in trouble? Did you check my hologram program? It might be that. I heard it eats people and then spits them out into their arch enemy’s ship.”
She stepped closer to him crossly, her arm stretched out with something that looked like… Oh no.
The Doctor’s hearts sunk, but he forced himself to an unconcerned smile. “Oh no. It’s a plate.”
“Stop pretending, dear. This is a confession dial and you know it. Your confession dial, to be precise. Delivered to your closest friend.”
He looked at it with a sense of dread. He knew he’d be unable to even touch it, but he backed away a few steps anyway. He didn’t like where this was going, not at all. The thought of actually creating a confession dial and being able to send it to her, as wonderful as it was, was also scary, oh so scary. So many secrets, so many unspoken words, and she was holding them all in her hands.
“I don’t want it,” she stated, like reading his thoughts. “I don’t want this, Doctor. Where the hell have you disappeared to?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the dial. “But if someone can find me, it’s you.”
Because no matter how many secrets I hide from this universe, you’re the one who knows the most of them.
“Just once,” Missy gave back, and she sounded so tired it made him want to lay an arm around her and hold her until the sun went up again. “Just once in my life I don’t want to have to chase after you.”
He had spent the whole day pacing around her TARDIS relentlessly, completely unable to stop. He didn’t like feeling helpless. He hated being stuck, he hated having to watch while the world fell apart, he hated every second of not being the one in charge, the one in the battle, the one messing up and building it up again.
But when Missy got back – thank Rassilon, she did get back – it only got worse. She didn’t speak a word. There was shock showing on her pale face, her eyes constantly wandering through the console room and he noticed they never really looked at him.
“What’s wrong, what happened?” he shot at her, realizing that what ever had made her fall silent must’ve had something to do with him.
She took a deep breath, then calmly walked over to the console and started typing in coordinates. From her frantic movements, the Doctor recognized a “Anywhere but here” pattern he had quite perfected himself.
“What happened?” he repeated in a gentler tone.
“Daleks,” she explained shortly. “Davros. Skaro.”
“Sounds like a full day.” A little silence emerged. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to. “So, Skaro is back too?”
“Oh, they made sure of that,” she growled.
“Are you alright?” he noticed that her dress was burnt up again, really, she seemed to burn through dresses everytime she met him, what was he this time around, an arsonist? But it wasn’t exactly what worried him. Before he could say another word, she had clenched her hands to fists and there were tears in her eyes.
“Why did you ever have to leave?” she asked, trying to take on a cold tone, betrayed by the tears running down her cheeks. “To protect whom? Them? Yourself? Tell me who was important enough to leave me out in the cold! Who even cares about a silly hybrid prophecy!"
The Doctor looked at her in shock, his eyes wide, mouth hanging open. “W…what?”
“I said you should leave,” Missy replied bitterly. “I’m tired of you being here.”
This wasn't what she had said at all and he was fairly sure his ears were still working just fine, but he didn’t comment on it. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore, he got it. He wasn’t exactly keen on the topic either.
“You know there’s nothing I’d rather do than lea-“
“Oh, isn’t there?” she hissed back at him. “Don’t give me your thin lies, Doctor. I know where you’re going back to. I know you’re like a scared little child, clinging to me. I know you’re too arrogant to even admit you need me, sitting here, pretending you can’t fix a simple hologram malfunction.”
“Well, aren’t you in a chipper mood,” he remarked dryly. “Care to elaborate what I did to you this time?”
“Nothing, I…” She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I know how to be your friend anymore.”
That made him laugh, he couldn’t help it. “Missy. You’re my friend no matter what, you’ve always been.”
“So, leaving me to get killed by the Daleks is friendship?”
“I don’t know,” he replied cautiously. “Would you say attempting to choke me with a phone cable is?”
“I did that once!”
They looked at each other for the fraction of a moment, then started laughing. It was a rare, warm sound filling Missy’s TARDIS and maybe, he thought, maybe she’d remember the sound of it when he was gone, whenever she needed a reminder of what friendship felt like.
It hadn’t felt like three weeks when he finally left. He made sure to say goodbye this time, Missy’s words, her tears, still crystal clear in his mind.
It wasn’t that hard to fix the hologram program after all.
It turned out it was much harder to leave her.
“Will you be alright?” he asked to distract from the fact that he wasn’t.
She smiled sadly. “I’ll have to… change things. Trap less of your friends in Daleks. Trap fewer dead friends of yours in Cybermen. It’s gonna be tough.”
She looked up at him with a little, wry smile.
“What about you?”
The Doctor shrugged, unsure how to tell her that no, he didn’t know where to go from here. He had Rose by his side and it was good. Not being alone, he had underestimated how much it helped him. But this… This had been different. This had been a look into a future he desperately needed.
“Come over for tea, will you?” he asked with breaking voice.
Missy regarded him with a sad look, then shrugged.
“Sure.”
He nodded, took a deep breath and concentrated on his own TARDIS. He could feel his sonic screwdriver in his fingers, his actual fingers, ready to take him back.
“No plans, Missy. No life or death situations, no universal dominance, no back-stabbing. I promise you, there’s nothing I’d- We can get this right.”
“How about a little bit of back-stabbing?”
“Missy.”
“I always do carry a knife with me. It’s a nice one, do you want to see it?”
“Missy.”
“Stainless steel.”
“Only idiots carry knives.”
“Well, at least we have something in common then,” she replied with a wink and he laughed.
“Now don’t make this more dramatic than it has to be, dear. Off, off, back into your TARDIS, a lady needs her privacy.”
He nodded. “Yes. Alright. I’ll see you soon.”
It wasn’t fair that she’d look this sad. That was his part. He closed his eyes, as he pressed the button, feeling the pull as he finally found his mind back inside his actual body.
He didn’t open them for a long time.
When he finally did, he stood inside his empty TARDIS, unsure why he had expected anything else, unsure why he felt so sad, unsure what had even happened. All he had done was recording a hologram for Rose, in case of emergency, why was his head spinning like this? He looked around confused, until he found a clock. Three hours had passed. With a shake of his head, he left the TARDIS, looking for Rose, who was right now probably drowning in Jackie’s never-ending stream of complaints – and tea.
God, he could use a cup of tea.
Missy still stood in her TARDIS, staring at the spot where the Doctor had finally left, feeling weirdly sad for where she had sent him to. She remembered running from the war he had fought, she remembered having tried to help and having it all fall apart over her head, so scary, so final, that she had ran to hide as something she hated.
She remembered a light-hearted, cheerful Doctor, and she remembered a broken puppy, begging her to regenerate, and she knew things would never be like they used to.
“Sorry dear,” she said into her empty TARDIS, too used to his presence by now. “But you’d agree it was necessary if you remembered any of this.”
Missy smiled while turning around, off to her next plan.
A little bit of back-stabbing always worked.