a little quickens, but much extinguishes (PG, 13/Missy)

Title: a little quickens, but much extinguishes

Series: Doctor Who
Character/Pairing: Thirteen/Missy, cameos from the series 11 team
Genre: Angst, fluff
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 1747
Dedication: for the soulmate AU prompt given by zahnie “the one where you and your soulmate share an emotional link“ and completed for AceMcshane

Summary:

The Doctor and the Master are bound to feel each other's emotions. They've gone through periods of delighting in this connection and through periods of denying what they feel isn't their own.
After the colony ship, after regenerating, the Thirteenth Doctor struggles to relearn how to ignore the longing in her hearts.

It works until it doesn't.

previously published as an ask on tumblr, but now edited and available on AO3

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Once, their bond had made them inseparable. It had given them strength, the disapproving mutterings only driving them closer together, to the only other person who truly understood. Even the attempts to appeal to their pride as Time Lords in potentia and their duty to their Houses could not drive them apart.

No. They had driven each other away instead.

They eventually learned the ability to ignore the emotions that filtered through across time and space. It was easy to disregard the acrid resentment they shared, that mutual bitterness making it easier to believe that the emotion was their own. But it was harder to bury the desperate longing they each had, hide it deep enough they could pretend they didn't reciprocate the aching desire that drifted through the link between them like smoke.

Eventually they could even manage to disregard the blaze of emotion that flared into life when they stumbled across each other's paths. A task made easier if they each pretended the hurt and hope that flickered in the hearts of the other was their own.

Except it could never be easy for them to forget one another, to deny their connection to the only other person who could understand them. But they tried.

The bond between them had almost been doused on the shore of a lake, on a planet devoted to trial and execution. The light between them forever extinguished by her death, until she had offered up the tiniest spark of hope. A spark they hadn't been aware they both sheltered.

They had seventy glorious years, nurturing and fanning that glowing point of hope. Until it had grown out of control and consumed them both.

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