#despite that i kind of want all of them brought back into nuwho and done properly

[dailyclassicwho]

classic who watchers all have one story that nearly made them stop watching or actually made them stop and take a break. which one was yours?

[momentofmemory]

fictober - day twenty-eight

Prompt #28: “Enough! I’ve heard enough.”

Fandom: BBC’s Doctor Who (NuWho)

Rating: PG

Characters: The Twelfth Doctor & Missy

Words: 1972

Author’s Note: set in the vague vicinity of s10, but before Bill is a main fixture in the Doctor’s life.

>>Right Enough

Missy’s been lying indisposed on her blue suede couch for one hundred and twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and seventeen seconds when the Doctor finally decides to grace her with his presence. Normally, she doesn’t mind his absence—her couch is deliciously extravagant, after all.

Normally, however, the Doctor doesn’t wait an entire month between visits.

“Where’ve you been,” she asks, feet still propped up on the arm of the loveseat and eyes pointedly closed.

He putters about in the background, probably checking to make sure she hasn’t gotten into any mischief (why he bothers, she’ll never know—it’s not like there are any alive things in here. If she really wanted trouble, she’d just walk out of this laughably secure vault of his, kill a city or so of humans, and be back before tea).

“Why?” HIs voice echoes from across the room. “Jealous?”

“No.”

She probably said that too quickly, but he doesn’t call her out on it.

“Oh good; we wouldn’t want that,” he says, instead. “Come make yourself useful and help me move this furniture out of the way.”

Missy pries her eyes open and rises from her reclined position, as languidly as possible to make up for her earlier transgression. “Have we decided dining tables are a symbol of oppression now, too?”

The Doctor doesn’t take the bait, which is a tragedy because Missy had an entire monologue at the ready if he had. She drops her heels to the ground and stretches, spine cracking in response, and then takes out a contact mirror to inspect her hair. It’s a perfect disaster: loose ends flying every which way, fuzz clinging to the hairs along her scalp, and a tangled mess near the top. In all, it’s exactly the way she likes it.

She pokes randomly at a few curls anyway, mostly as a delay tactic to annoy the Doctor. Also, because if it looks like she’s looking at herself, it won’t look like she’s looking at him. She would never be caught doing something as caring as that.

The Doctor’s currently up on the platform in the middle of the room, hoisting chairs off of it with the kind of manic energy Missy’s only ever seen in three-year-olds (and, perhaps, herself). Something about the emotion seems wrong this time, though—a bit frayed around the edges, a weariness and desperation in his eyes.

She snaps the contact shut and strolls over to the dais. “You look tired.”

She’s made sure to infuse her words with as much derision as she can manage, but the Doctor grins anyway.

“You know, I once brought down an entire administration with that line.” He scurries behind the oak table and grabs hold, gesturing for Missy to do the same on the opposite side. “Well, sort of. In essence. Technically the full thing was ‘don’t you think she looks tired,’ but the sentiment was there.”

“Manipulating political structures for your own ends, were you?” Missy grabs hold of the lip of the table despite herself, and they start to carry it off to the side of the room. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to flirt with me.”

“You would be so lucky.” They set the table down, missing the Doctor’s toes by inches, to Missy’s disappointment.

He grins that maddening grin of his again. “Come. I’ve brought you a present.”

He all but leaps back up onto the now empty platform, nearly losing his balance in the process in what Missy’s fairly certain is evidence of a limp. She eyes him suspiciously.

“You’re deflecting.”

“I know, and I’m doing it wonderfully.” He pulls a small blue box out of his coat pocket. “Here. This is for you.”

Missy eyes him with even more suspicion. She can’t imagine liking something that’s making the Doctor this pleased, but despite her better judgment she steps over to him, accepting the proffered box.

“I hope you know if that’s not a key to that door of yours, or at least someone’s severed head, I’m going to be incredibly disappointed.”

“Well. We wouldn’t want that.” The Doctor slides his hands into his tattered coat. “You might want to stand back when you open it. Bigger on the inside, you see.”

Missy starts, wondering what could possibly be so important that the Doctor would risk giving her access to dimension collapsing technology, even if he was planning on taking it right back. She pulls at the silver ribbon holding the box together, and, once freed, lifts the lid.

“Turn it over,” the Doctor says.

“Really, Doctor.” Missy starts tipping the box over. “If you wanted me at your mercy we could’ve arranged something more—dear Gallifrey!”

Three polished, glossy-finished black legs and a pedal rack slide out of the rim of the box, and after it the large wooden frame they’re attached to. Before Missy can fully catalogue what’s happening, an entire grand piano has fallen out and landed with surprising softness on the floor.

Missy stares at the instrument with something between anger and allurement, and runs her hand along the open lid. “Why have you brought me this?”

The Doctor shrugs, wincing a bit at the movement. “I can’t just bring gifts for an old friend?”

Missy catches his pained expression and in a fit of rage, heaves the piano’s lid off its post and then slams it down to cover the strings. “No, no, you most certainly can not. Not when you’ve been who knows where for who knows how long and then saunter back in here with—with this.”

“Is that concern I detect?”

“Don’t change the subject,” she snaps, fingers drumming on the piano’s surface. “My only concern is that you’re jeopardizing the deal that’s keeping me alive.”

The Doctor holds her gaze for an uncomfortably long time, perhaps searching for that thing he keeps calling ‘hope.’ She glares back with just as much fervor, because she’s not about to give him any of that tonight. Not when he’s just spoiled her favourite dining spot for something so paltry as an apology.

Eventually, the Doctor just sighs. “Someone needed help, Missy. That’s all.”

“Must have been an awful lot of someones if it’s left you this desperate,” Missy scoffs, and she’s pleased at how mean that is. “I mean, a piano? Really?”

“A piano,” he agrees, picking the empty box up off the floor and tucking it back into his pocket. “I thought perhaps you would enjoy a more constructive outlet for your… creative tendencies, shall we say.”

Something snaps, and she finds herself climbing over the piano so she can get into his space.

“You can’t lie, Doctor,” she says. “Not to me. This is just your overblown way of trying to convince yourself you didn’t break your stupid oath by leaving me.”

“What was I supposed to do?” To her delight, something of that pain she knows all too well breaks through his eyes. “Just let them to die?”

“For Rassilon’s sake, Doctor! I don’t know how you haven’t noticed this yet, but someone’s always dying!”

The Doctor pales and takes a step back. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try to—”

“Would you like us to look up whoever it is you saved?” Missy cocks her head, then glides off the dais towards her couch. “We can do it so easily, you know. Any database in the universe, and we’ll find their cause of death instantaneously. That’s what they are, Doctor. Pre-packaged, instantaneous death.”

“Missy—”

“Are you really that thick?” She doesn’t understand how a being that smart can be that willfully naïve. “No matter what you do, nobody lives in the end. I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to realize you’ve done enough for those silly, ungrateful, walking meat sacks you call friends.”

“Enough?”

Missy freezes mid-tirade and glances up at him, baffled by why out of all the words she’d said to them, he’d chosen that one to fixate on. She swallows, suddenly unsure of herself even though she’s not quite sure why. “I’ve heard enough from you. Yes.”

The Doctor comes down the steps, wearily: one slow assent to gravity at a time.

“Enough,” he repeats, shaking his head. “You don’t think I’ve heard enough, too? After all these years of travelling, these… these faces, these bodies. Scars.”

“I like this game where you make all my points for me. Makes things so much simpler than our usual give and take.”

“You don’t understand,” the Doctor says, and it’s said so sadly and kindly and so unlike anything Missy would ever say. “That’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to. Not yet.”

“Then make me.”

She’s spoken too quickly again, and this time the Doctor picks up on it. He looks at her with an expression she doesn’t recognize, and eases himself down into the chair across from her.

“I know I’ve done enough, Missy,” he says eventually. “How could I not? I’ve heard enough, I’ve seen enough, I’ve felt enough. Lost enough, even. More than enough enoughs for any one person.”

He clasps his hands in front of him and stares at his gnarled fingers. “You see, what you don’t understand is that it’s not about how much I’ve done, or haven’t done. It’s not even about atonement. It’s about how much there’s still left to do.”

Missy shifts on the couch. “Has anyone ever told you there are other people in the universe that could do these things instead?”

He chuckles under his breath, and it’s without mirth, but not without life. “Do you see that instrument up there?”

“You’ve not left me with many other options,” Missy says, and she’s not sure that he isn’t just changing the subject again, but she follows his gaze.

She doesn’t know much about human design—why would she?—but it doesn’t take an expert to know time was spent in the piano’s craft. The soundboard is a mixture of mahogany and rock maple, the white keys are cast in their original ivory, and the black cut from ebony wood. The strings are steel in the treble and copper in the base, and each hammer is delicately covered in red felt.

It’s beautiful.

“Music,” he says quietly, “is not something that needed to exist. A piano, even more so—what with its complicated strings, and its hammers, and its pedals, and all its nonsense. It couldn’t even have the decency to decide what kind of instrument it wanted to be.”

“But these humans…” He smiles. “They can’t help themselves. There was something in them that told them it was important, even though it wouldn’t feed them, or clothe them, or shelter them. It wouldn’t give them anything they needed. But they knew they had to do it, anyway.”

He stands and straightens his coat, and starts making his way towards the door. “That’s what it’s like, Missy. When you do something to help others, even though you get nothing in return, because deep down, you know it’s right. That’s all—just right.”

Missy regards him for a long moment, then shakes her head. “You are the strangest man I’ve ever known.”

The Doctor laughs. “And yet, you know me.”

She waves her hand dismissively over the edge of the couch, and he disengages the lock with his screwdriver—then he’s back in the world and out of hers. She sighs. He’ll be back eventually, with more of his strange ideas, she supposes. But for now, she is alone.

Missy stares at the ceiling and resumes her counting, and it’s peaceful, and familiar, and safe.

She reaches second two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six before she trades off running her fingers across suede to cautiously tracing the ivory keys. She’s never played the piano before, or really any instrument. Missy thinks she’ll be able to learn, though.

It feels right.