Chapter Text
I’m sorry, Clara…
Those were his last thoughts… the last thing his mind could hold onto. The rest had faded: sight, sound, memory…
Probably for the best, the Doctor thought. If he could see or hear or remember, then he would be spending his final moments thinking about whatever it was that had led to it.
And it would be better to not have to think about what he was leaving behind. All the things left undone, all the lonely people crying for help—
(Clara, crying beside him…)
Regret: he hadn’t done enough.
(A dream of a might-have-been: he lay in bed, surrounded by family, Joan at his side. “They’re all safe, aren’t they? Everyone’s safe?”)
Satisfaction: he’d done as much as he could. There just wasn’t enough time to do more.
(He closed his eyes. “Well, it’s time. Thank you.”)
There were some flickers of memory after all, but they were random misfires, stories from another time. Fragments of another life.
But he could spend his final moments pretending that’s how it went: comfortable, quiet, peacefully slipping away into the deepest slumber of them all…
The Doctor woke up.
That was a surprise.
He sat up and took stock: same clothes, although the bowtie was a bit askew (and quickly adjusted). After running his hands over his face and through his hair, he knew that he hadn’t regenerated—not that he could have, since he didn’t have any regenerations left.
He wasn’t injured, which was both a relief and a bit troubling. He’d been very certain that he was dying only moments before, which meant that something must have happened to his body. He couldn’t remember what had happened, though—his memory of the very end felt like a frayed piece of cloth: unraveled and full of loose threads.
So that was one very big mystery. The next mystery: where was he now?
He looked around and saw that he was sprawled beside a fountain in the center of a very ornate courtyard garden, which was peculiar enough that it took him a moment to notice the woman in the dark dress heading in his direction with an expression of absolute fury on her face.
And because he was still seated on the neatly-trimmed lawn, he didn’t have an opportunity to dodge the folded-up umbrella that she swung at his head.
“Ow!” the Doctor exclaimed, rubbing at the sore spot just above his right ear. “What was that for—”
“What in blazes are you doing here?” his mysterious attacker bellowed. “Of all the people to turn up—what did you even do that you—” She made a wordless scream of aggravation. “You’re not supposed to be here!”
Her Scottish accent was very well-suited for furious ranting, the Doctor thought to himself. Despite the shouting and the head trauma, it brought back pleasant memories of Amy Pond.
“Some sort of pointless self-sacrifice, I expect,” the woman continued, giving the edge of the fountain a good thwack! with her umbrella. “Some doe-eyed human with three-to-five distinguishing characteristics pouted and then you threw yourself into an inferno or slapped a Dalek or did something equally foolish! And even worse—” She pulled out a pocketwatch and glared at it before redirecting the glare back in his direction. “—it’s too early! I had at least another year to go before reaching a decent population threshold, and now it’s thrown into chaos because you keep blundering into things!”
The Doctor squinted up at her. “Have we met?” She really did seem to be taking this all rather personally—
“Ow!” This time, she raised the umbrella over her head before bringing it crashing down onto the top of his skull. “Why do you keep hitting me!?” he sputtered.
The woman stabbed the umbrella tip-first into the ground, which held it in place and sent a tiny divot of sod flying through the air. “Why didn’t you regenerate?” she demanded.
“I… what?” The Doctor tried to get a closer look at her face, but the woman had begun angrily pacing around the fountain.
“Was it another anaesthetic problem?” she asked. “That kept you out for at least a couple of hours the last time it happened.”
He blinked in surprise. That had happened lifetimes ago—back before the Time War. He racked his brains trying to figure out how he knew her, because there was something oddly familiar about her the more she ranted.
“But you still ended up here somehow,” she muttered, tucking the pocketwatch back into her jacket and pulling out a device that did not look like something normally found in their current environment. Of course, the Doctor wasn’t entirely sure what environment he was even in.
He scrambled to his feet and took another look at his surroundings. Just a pleasant garden, but something about the whole place was odd. Was it the smell of the flowers? The angle of the sunlight?
He picked up the umbrella, partly out of curiosity and partly because he would rather not get hit with it again.
Even the umbrella was strange, and just like everything else he didn’t know why.
“I wonder if I can just boot you out,” the woman muttered, still examining the device in her hand. “Maybe kickstart the regeneration somehow?”
“How do you know about regeneration?” the Doctor asked. She gave him a withering glare and went back to grumbling at the device in her hand. “How do you know me?”
She made a snort of derision. “You spend all this time going around proclaiming your ‘name’ to everyone—” The Doctor could hear the implied quotation marks around that particular word, “—and you’re actually surprised when people recognise you? The brilliant, all-powerful, sanctimonious saviour of all of space and time, adored by every little fly you deign to acknowledge with your holier-than-thou false modesty? Drop what you’re doing, everyone, because look who it is: the Doctor!”
Her icy blue eyes were full of a bitterness that seemed very familiar… but the Doctor didn’t have the opportunity to even try to identify it because there was something else that he did recognise when she said his name.
He had gotten used to the TARDIS translating everything in his head with near-perfect clarity, but after so many years away from home he had forgotten the almost-imperceptible lag compared to hearing the language of his birth.
There wasn’t a lag this time.
She called him ‘the Doctor’ in Gallifreyan.
So he repeated his earlier question, this time in that same tongue: “How do you know me?”
The woman froze ever-so-slightly, and a certain kind of wariness overtook her body language. Then she exhaled impatiently and began to recite while counting on her fingers: “Original, Pocket-Sized, Motorist Fop, Teeth and Curls, Dumb Blond with the Celery, Hideous Coat, Terrible Hat, the Pretty One, the Granddad No One Invites to Christmas Dinner, Leather Jacket, Specs and Sandshoes, and then you. You’ve still got one regeneration left. Why are you here?”
The Doctor wanted to point out that it would be a lot easier to explain why he was here if he had any idea where ‘here’ even was, but that was far from the most important thing on his mind at the moment, because if the person he was talking to knew how to speak Gallifreyan, knew about regeneration, and knew about all of his former regenerations—including the one from the Time War—she had to be another Time Lord.
Someone else had survived. Someone he knew.
She was obviously furious with him, but seeing as the Doctor was the one who used the Moment and destroyed every other Time Lord and (almost) every Dalek, the rage was certainly justified.
However, she had also spoken to him in a way that indicated that she definitely knew him personally and not just by reputation.
And seeing as she was apparently hard at work on a project that he had ruined just by showing up, he could make a pretty good guess as to who she was: “Rani?”
Even though he was holding the umbrella as a sort of defensive weapon, she was still faster—the woman slapped him across the face hard enough to nearly knock him over.
“Are you serious?” she shouted furiously as she yanked the umbrella out of his hand. “You think I’m the Rani?!”
The Doctor rubbed his cheek and hastened to get out of range. “Just a guess,” he muttered. He was going to have to be very sure on his next attempt, because she was holding that umbrella like a cricket bat and looking absolutely murderous—
Oh no.
He could have slapped himself, really—how did he miss such an obvious clue?
‘Was it another anaesthetic problem?’
That was San Francisco, back before the War. There was only one other Time Lord who would have known what happened there.
At least the sensation of horrified recognition in the pit of his stomach was familiar.
“Nice, er… hat?” the Doctor ventured. “Really suits you. A lot better than the usual beard thing.”
The Master rolled her eyes in annoyance.
“How did you escape Gallifrey?” he asked.
“My question first: why haven’t you regenerated?” she demanded yet again.
“Why is that important?”
“Because you’re not supposed to be here!”
“Where is here? Is this some sort of afterlife?”
“Yes!” she snapped. “It’s a long story, a very cunning plan, and none of your business right now! You’ve got one regeneration left—use it and scoot!”
“I don’t have any regenerations left!”
“Yes, you do!” she insisted. “I counted them off—so unless you’ve been very sneaky for the first time in your life, this isn’t your final one!”
“Yes, it is!” He had no idea why the Master was so hellbent on arguing with him about this, so he might as well tell her the truth. “There was a metacrisis thingy—I used up one of my regenerations in the process.”
She looked dumbfounded. “When did that happen?”
“Before this one,” he explained wearily. “You were busy being dead at the time. But the main point is this: I’m out of regenerations and I’ve apparently died—though I didn’t expect there would be anything after that.” He gave the garden another once-over. “Topiary, for example. Now it’s your turn to answer some questions.”
But the Master’s expression had morphed into one of complete horror—no, not just horror: panic. “No…” she breathed. “No no no… you’re not supposed to be dead. That’s not supposed to happen: you need to be alive, you can’t die!”
He blinked in surprise. “Why are you upset?”
“If you’re not alive, then you can’t do your little ‘saving the day’ shtick!” she protested. “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, you can’t just up and die on me!”
“I assumed you’d be happy about that!” the Doctor sputtered. “Isn’t that the thing you’re always complaining about? Isn’t that the reason why you’re always trying to kill me? Well, good news: I’m dead, so I can’t stop whatever plan you’ve concocted! What’s the downside for you?”
“Because you’re supposed to save me!” she shouted. “Remember our last encounter? When I jumped through that portal Rassilon had opened with the White Point Star—you’re welcome for that, by the way!”
“Oh…” He shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, er, thanks for the assist and all that.”
“Then I shoved about a hundred of those damned Stars down Rassilon’s throat—which was incredibly cathartic—but then realised that I had just thrown myself into the final day of the War with no way out! And then—as usual—the Doctor showed up to save the day! Not just the Doctor, in fact: every single one of you popped in out of nowhere to punt Gallifrey into a pocket universe and presumably let the Daleks blow themselves to bits. Escaping the end of the Time War? Difficult. Escaping a pocket dimension? I could do that in my sleep.” She stepped in closer and gave his nose a not-so-gentle boop. “And do you know how many Doctors there were? All thirteen. You do have another regeneration, so hop to it and go.”
“I can’t,” the Doctor insisted. “It’s too late. There’s no way for me to go back.” He decided to focus on the specific agony of that rather than the implication that he somehow found a way to undo the biggest mistake of his life. There was too much hope bound up in that—a very dangerous thing.
The Master’s upper lip twisted into a snarl. “Well, either you regenerate or we have a very bad paradox on our hands, one that will inevitably resolve by sending me back to the Worst Day Ever, and that is not how I intend to end things. So you can’t be dead.” She let out another growl of aggravation. “All right… not a disaster… this is fixable… I bet I could go back a few years, give the Cult of Saxon a few more instructions—” She frowned. “A ring would be the easiest way to forge that connection, but given your recent interpretation of the term ‘fashion,’ unless you’ve been secretly married this whole time you probably wouldn’t be wearing one—what?” Apparently his expression had changed somewhat, because she grabbed his hands and examined them. “No ring… what was that about?”
“Er… might have gotten married recently?” he said with a wince. Why did he feel so awkward about that?
Oh no… River was going to be crushed once she found out he had died. After everything she’d done to save him—including sacrificing her own life for his…
“Who?” the Master demanded. If the Doctor didn’t know better, he would have thought she was jealous.
“Doesn’t matter!” he said, hastily prying his fingers out of her grip. “Besides, if you’re going to meddle in the past anyway, I’m sure you could find a way to slip a ring into my pocket at some point. I barely keep track of what’s in there.”
She sighed. “I’ll have to get in close, which is always a risk but—” She froze. “Oh, damn it.”
“What?”
“I forgot the other part of it: I had to burn up a regeneration to resurrect, which is something that you don’t have because that’s what started this whole mess to begin with.” She started pacing around the fountain again. “If there was a way to get you to Gallifrey, we could probably get you topped up with a new cycle, but with the growing paradox we might be locked out…”
The Doctor was still a bit bewildered at the very new experience of the Master actually trying to help him for once, which is why it took him a few seconds to ask the right question: “I must have found a way back to Gallifrey somehow if I was able to save it. How did that happen?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I was a bit preoccupied at the time with the possibility of dying in the cataclysm I thought you were about to unleash.”
“Maybe I’ve already done it?” he suggested. “Interactions with past regenerations can tamper with memories—my supposed-next regeneration would be the one to retain any of them.”
The Master shook her head. “It’s still the same problem: with you dead now, he won’t exist to be there on Gallifrey. Which means that…” She suddenly got a nauseous expression on her face.
“What—” But then the answer occurred to him as well. “Oh no,” the Doctor said, just as appalled as the Master seemed to be about the idea. “You’d never be able to keep it up.”
“Why not?” she demanded, sounding a bit offended. “I’ve spent far longer undercover for far pettier reasons than this. Besides,” she sniffed, “I know you better than anyone, even that mysterious new spouse of yours. I’ll pretend to be your next regeneration and play along with your little do-gooder role until that event occurs—on Gallifrey—at which point I’ll boot you back to normal and we can go our separate ways.”
“Will you really?” the Doctor asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “Once you’ve saved your own skin by saving Gallifrey, there’d be no point in bringing me back to life.”
She tapped her chin with a finger as a wicked smile appeared on her face. “That’s a very compelling point, you know…” The smile vanished. “But since the original version of events involves your next regeneration, it’s best to keep that part intact. Besides, I have a vested interest in staying on your good side since I’m going to need your help convincing everyone that I’m you.”
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that, seeing as I’m here?” the Doctor demanded impatiently. “I can’t exactly follow you around like a ghost.”
The wicked grin was back. “Ah, but you can.” She gestured at their surroundings. “This is merely a repository of consciousness—think of it as a miniature version of the Matrix on Gallifrey. I can upload your consciousness into a portable telepathic device and take you along like one of your little pets.” The Doctor felt himself bristle at her use of that word, which quickly became a spike of anxiety when the Master continued: “Speaking of which, there is the matter of Miss Oswald…”
“You’re not going anywhere near her,” the Doctor snapped.
“Well, that’s very rude,” she replied grumpily. “Especially since I’m the one who introduced you to begin with.” She adopted a different accent: “‘Computer helpline, love. That’s the one. Best helpline in the universe.’”
His jaw dropped. “You’re the one who gave Clara my number?”
“And she’s been driving you mad ever since, hasn’t she?” the Master asked. “The control freak and the man who hates being controlled. But you can’t seem to drop her, can you? Too many secrets around her, too many mysteries, too many things you can’t figure out, driving you to distraction… You’re too busy thinking of her as a puzzle to think of her as a person.”
“That’s not true!”
“Yes, it is!” she retorted. “That’s why I put you together: she’s like methadone for your pesky human addiction. And once you’ve finally kicked it, you can move on and stop using Earth as a perpetual plot device for the Thrilling Adventures of the Doctor, Saviour of All the Little People.” Her eyes flashed. “You always acted like you were different, like you were special. Well, you’re not. You’re no different from me.” She straightened her posture and planted the tip of her umbrella back into the ground beside her. “And now, I have a chance to prove it. I’ll show you what the Doctor can really do.”
“Good luck,” he replied, trying not to shake with anger. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”
She laughed in his face. “What, to be adored? A couple of well-placed falsehoods, a few mental tricks, and then basking in the glow of your own self-importance. Being hated, on the other hand… that takes work. That’s one hell of a burden to bear. Even if you had destroyed Gallifrey at the end of the War, you got off easy: there was no one left to despise you.”
“You claim to know me better than anyone else,” the Doctor said, feeling his voice tremble. “That doesn’t mean you understand me.”
“Yes, I do,” she replied airily. “I was there for all of it, wasn’t I? Every face, before and after the War. Who else can say that?”
“Clara.” The Doctor’s eyes widened as the name escaped his mouth.
The Master frowned in confusion. “What?”
Even as a disembodied consciousness, his hearts could apparently beat like mad. “I remember how I died.”
The TARDIS, decayed and ruined by time and damage, had grown to an immense size as it fulfilled its final role: the tomb of the Doctor.
He didn’t leave a body. He’d had lots of bodies, as he explained to Clara and the others. What was left instead resembled a wound in time: the thumbprint he’d left on time and space, from his origins on Gallifrey to his final moments here on Trenzalore.
An open wound was vulnerable: not just to additional damage, but to infection as well, which was exactly what the Great Intelligence intended.
Its latest form, which called itself Dr Simeon, stepped right into the gap. It would die, but would get its revenge in the process: attacking and killing the Doctor in every moment of his timeline. Every victory transformed into a defeat. Every rescued life condemned to death. Every saved world doomed to oblivion.
Impossible to prevent. Impossible to stop.
Only an Impossible Girl could put it right again.
“If this works,” Clara said, “get out of here as fast as you can… and spare me a thought now and then.”
She’d be scattered along his timeline like confetti.
“No, Clara…” he tried to protest, but there was so little of him left.
“In fact,” she said, as though he hadn’t spoken. “You know what? Run.” She squared her shoulders and approached the wound in time. “Run, you clever boy—”
“Clara!”
“—and remember me.”
And then she was gone—gone to sacrifice herself over and over at countless points in the Doctor’s life.
He couldn’t just sit by and let that happen. He did the saving, he didn’t let others do it for him if there was any way he could stop it.
Which was why, in spite of Vastra, Jenny, Strax, and even River—one more person who had sacrificed herself to save him, whose death he couldn’t stop, a failure that he didn’t intend to repeat ever again—pleading with him to not throw his life away, he did it anyway: flung himself into his own time stream.
Everything after that was a blur: his whole life, fragments upon fragments, even days he’d never lived yet—he could see things he didn’t recognise, things he wasn’t meant to know…
His future was a haze… indistinct, thrown into doubt entirely… even Clara couldn’t go that far ahead.
To his surprise, there was a similar haze at the other end of his lifetime. For a moment, he looked closer and saw even smaller fragments: a tower, a cliff, a laboratory, a lighthouse and broken glass—
No, this wasn’t the time. He had to find Clara—the real one. The Impossible Girl.
And it worked: he found her, took her in his arms, pulled them both back towards the real world—
But in the very last moment before they escaped, one final face appeared: Dr Simeon, both hands outstretched.
One for each of the Doctor’s hearts.
Clara couldn’t save him from that.
Strax couldn’t repair that kind of damage.
Vastra and Jenny had no plan for that outcome.
And River was long dead.
All any of them could do was activate the TARDIS’s fast return protocols.
The Doctor was killed on Trenzalore, but he died on Earth.
“So where is Clara now?” the Master demanded after the Doctor relayed the basics of the story.
“London, 2013,” he said, sitting down heavily on the edge of the fountain. At least he’d died saving her. That was some consolation.
“Then that’s where we’re heading.” The Master had spent most of the Doctor’s explanation sitting on the edge of the fountain, working on something technical, and finished up at around the same time he’d concluded his recollection. “There we go,” she said, holding up a bracelet and slipping it on her wrist. “Now you’re conveniently travel-sized. And—”
She snapped her fingers and they were abruptly in what appeared to be the sitting room of an old manor house. The Master rose from the oversized armchair she had been seated in and went to examine the phonograph on a nearby table. After adjusting the needle, the entire table transformed into a TARDIS console.
“A shame you’re not corporeal,” she remarked with a glance at the Doctor. “I’d send you to make me a cuppa if you were.”
“We don’t have to take Clara,” he pointed out. As a test, he tried giving the armchair a nudge; his hand passed right through it.
“We need to pick up your TARDIS anyway, so we might as well fetch your pet while we’re at it. The Doctor always has someone tagging along.”
“She’ll know right away that you’re not me.”
“I can explain it away as post-regeneration eccentricity,” the Master remarked. “Besides, has she ever witnessed any of your prior regenerations?”
“She’s seen all of my past faces,” he reminded her.
“But she missed all the bright lights and significant costume changes, correct?”
He sighed. “Correct.”
“And she’s from the late-20th/early-21st century, yes?”
“Shouldn’t you know that, since you introduced us?”
“I’m trying to make a rhetorical point,” she replied irritably. “And she identifies as the same gender she was assigned at birth?”
“As far as I know.” He hadn’t asked, admittedly.
“Is she friends with any transgender people?”
“I’m not even sure she has friends.” That was a bit troubling, he realised. Did he not care enough to find out—no, those were the Master’s words from earlier still rattling around in his head. He knew Clara. She wasn’t just a mystery to be solved.
“Then yes,” the Master concluded, “the Suddenly a Time Lady thing is probably going to throw her for a little bit. I’ll have wormed my way into her good graces long before she really internalises it.”
“Why can’t you just find someone new?” He really didn’t want to think about what the Master considered to be ‘worming her way into Clara’s good graces.’
She entered a few commands on the TARDIS console, then turned to face him. “Tell me the truth,” she asked. “If you hadn’t died, would you have gone back for her or would you have decided to move on with someone else?”
He sighed again. “I would have gone back for her—but that doesn’t mean that you have to!”
“Yes, it does,” she countered. “The fewer variables I introduce, the better, which unfortunately means sticking to your usual antics.” She made a face of disgust.
“If Clara’s been through my timeline, she’s probably witnessed a few of your past selves wreaking havoc. How do you think she’s going to react once she figures out you’re really the Master?”
“Missy,” she corrected him.
“What?”
“It’s short for Mistress—I couldn’t keep calling myself the Master, could I?”
“Yes, you could.”
“Well, I prefer it this way,” she replied, annoyed. “I’d try changing your name for this adventure, but you’ve been so bloody insistent about your name being a threat—”
“A promise,” he interrupted.
“It’s a threat and you know it,” Missy scoffed. “So my attempt to change it would just be another unnecessary variable.” She gave a dramatic sigh. “A shame: it would be so much fun running around calling myself the Valeyard.”
The Doctor shuddered in spite of himself.
“Oh, not a fan of that one?” she taunted him. “How about a fresh one: you’re so obsessed with winning, what about calling yourself the Victor? It even sounds a bit like your current name, doesn’t it? You’d get used to it in no time.”
Something about that resonated along with an old memory: The Time Lord Victorious… He tried not to shudder again.
Missy must have noticed his discomfort anyway. “And wouldn’t that be fun?” she asked, the teasing look on her face slightly different from what it was before.
“What about all those variables?” the Doctor asked, trying to sound irritated instead of uneasy.
“You’ll see,” she said breezily, reaching for the part of the console that still looked a bit like a phonograph. “By the time this is over, you might be ready for a change of pace.” She lifted the arm with the needle and dropped it gently onto the turntable. The Doctor felt the faint rumble of the TARDIS engines, and when it stopped he followed Missy out the front door.
He was surprised to see that they were in a graveyard.
Well, considering the circumstances, he wasn’t entirely surprised.
“Now that’s odd,” she murmured, looking around. “Either your wreck of a Type 40 actually managed to blend in for once, something’s gone wrong with the sensors, or…” She waved around the device she had taken out of her pocket, and then looked annoyed. “Or it’s buried.”
As he followed her around, the Doctor realised that they weren’t in just any graveyard: they were in the one where the Brigadier was buried.
A coincidence? Or merely fitting, for his final resting place to be near an old friend?
“Here it is,” Missy concluded, making her way over to a blank headstone. “Tsk tsk, they didn’t even bother to write anything down.” She examined the lump of granite and sighed. “They really just made a hole and chucked the thing in, didn’t they? Well, that’s inconvenient.”
“I’d love to help you dig it up,” the Doctor said with a smirk, “but I seem to be unable to hold a shovel at the moment.”
She glared daggers at him and then stomped over to what appeared to be a groundskeeper’s office. “Yoo hoo!” she called through the door. “Can you spare a moment? I’ve just got a quick question.”
The man who answered the door gave her a look of suspicion. “You one of them Goths?” he asked. “No seances allowed here, I’ve warned your lot before.”
“Oh no, dearie, we’re merely graverobbing,” Missy said cheerfully. “Ooo, now here’s something I’ve really missed doing.” She got extremely close to the man’s face and stared at him without blinking. “Now, who is your mistress?”
“You are,” the man said, dazed.
“Well done,” she purred. “Pick up that shovel and follow me—you’ve got some digging to do.”
“There’s a JCB parked out back,” he offered. “It’ll be faster than a shovel.”
“Oh my, you’re being a very good boy,” Missy said, clapping her hands together in delight. “What was your name?”
“Albert.”
“Well, allons-y, Albert—let’s get to work!” She sat down on a nearby headstone.
“I do not approve of this!” the Doctor hissed at her.
“What, you’d have dug it up yourself?” she asked, then called over to Albert and gestured at the grave. “Yes, this one right here!”
“I might have!” the Doctor said, not enjoying how uncertain he sounded.
“Exactly,” she said. “You’d have befriended him and then tricked him into digging it up anyway. I just streamlined things to save us some time.”
“If you’re going to pretend to be me, you can’t keep doing things like that!”
“How is this any different from that psychic paper thing you’ve got?” she insisted. “At least I admit what I’m doing.”
“You’re taking away his free will!”
“And you don’t?” Missy asked with a snort. “Humans only have free will when it’s convenient for you. The rest of the time, you’re just doing whatever you want and claiming it’s for their own good.”
“That is not what I’m doing!” He tried to kick a nearby headstone in frustration, but his leg passed right through it.
“Ooo, still have that temper, I see,” she remarked, pretending to sound disappointed in him. “I would have thought you’d outgrown that after being Sandshoes.” She smiled fondly. “I did love the way he brooded, though.”
“Why do you always want to see the worst in me?”
“Because I know you too well,” Missy replied. “How’s it going?” she asked Albert, who had paused the backhoe and was squinting down into the hole in confusion.
“There’s a blue box in here,” he called back, scratching his head.
“Fantastic!” she exclaimed. “Go ahead and haul it up, there’s a good boy.”
He nodded obediently. “Yes, Mistress.”
“Wonderful. I’ll bring the lorry around.” She stood up and beckoned to the Doctor. “Come on.”
“Do you think he’s going to try and lift it out with his bare hands?” the Doctor asked, suddenly worried.
“If he does, I’ll be sure to tip him extra,” she remarked, then grinned as they approached a large truck that the Doctor was fairly sure hadn’t been there when they arrived. “You’re really missing out by not having a working chameleon circuit.” She snapped her fingers and the back door of the truck rolled up and a sturdy ramp descended to the ground. “There. Once we have your TARDIS, we can be on our way.”
“You’re still locked out of the isomorphic controls,” he pointed out.
“I know, which is why I’m just going to tuck it away in a closet inside my TARDIS. Anyone who tries scanning for your ship will pick up the signal and assume that mine is the one they’re looking for.”
“Well, then how are you going to—” The Doctor froze in horror. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes,” Missy confirmed with a wide grin. “Not every TARDIS has a broken chameleon circuit, you know.”