#she gets her hands on his watch at the end and theyre kinda like. stalemate but also we dont particularly care to resolve this one

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

Wait no you can’t just tag my post like that and leave, I didn’t think about this in my HDM AU headcanons.

Like the Doctor’s never had a daemon and that’s what makes her seem so alien to people and mysterious and unknowable. And we see other Time Lords and they don’t have them either. But actually that’s a Division thing, the cutting them and separating them, gone from an extreme rarely done thing to control their wayward Terminator, to now being standard practice for Tecteun’s intelligently designed Time Lords at loom.

But when we meet Martin!Doctor it’s not just that she doesn’t fit in 13’s timeline that freaks her, but maybe she has a daemon, even when she’s no longer ‘Ruth’ it’s still there and she’s acting like that’s normal.

And that’s what’s in the fobwatch, her daemon, and the Doctor knows it, but is too terrified to confront her own soul, and is trying to hide it away and be content that at least her soul is in her own hands now.

(But babyfaced!Dhawan!Master!doctor. He has a watch. Maybe the watch? Maybe opened. Does he return with a daemon? Or was it there the whole time flitting from shape to shape as he acts his different selves, hiding from the Doctor when necessary, because newsflash Doctor we were supposed to have souls the entire time, but the Master absolutely has no idea how to handle the fact that he has one.)

ohhhhh delicious. incredible. showstopping. spectacular. whatever other words lady gaga says. no but i love this!!

the division making their Specialest Little Weapon insane by erasing their memory over and over and over again and reaching for desperate measures to maybe hopefully stop it unravelling any further. and those desperate and horrific measures becoming standard practice bc why wouldnt they

the doctor with her soul locked in a little gilded cage the shape of a timepiece that keeps no time. like an ood with its brain removed to replace with a translator.

"and we both know i dont have one" the master says, soul flying frantic circles over his head while the doctor is trapped in that paralysis field entirely alone.

or how unsettling would it be to leave the master in the timeless children, also daemonless like her, and then meet him again but he has a daemon. him seeming even more out of reach and even more viscerally not the person she felt like she knew. the daemon an embodiment of him now also in some way having lived a life she wasnt part of, like he accused her of in the matrix.

or the master opening the doctor's watch and getting the doctor's daemon, making the choice to put another part of the doctor inside him after he didnt get the choice the first time. at the same time a self-annihilation for him on par with the doctor falls, as well as another violation for the doctor. something stolen from her that she didnt even know could be stolen. trying to make her hurt like he hurts.

"i offered! i gave you everything i had to give. my faith, my trust, my forgiveness, my mercy (he scoffs) my FRIENDSHIP; you didnt want it"

"i dont need your friendship anymore" the tiniest smirk as he realises and then he holds up the watch and sings "ive got you anyway"