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The Doctor and the Master were always two sides of the same coin. As long as one was alive, the other would find a way to make it back. They could try to make lives for themselves apart, as they did for nearly nine hundred years, but somehow they were always drawn together. It was a simple fact of life, one that not even Rassilon himself had been able to deny, one that the fall of Gallifrey and the Time Lords was unable to obliterate.
It took a long time for anyone to dare ask him why. Centuries after the time war, several regenerations he was never meant to have, and a series of companions from all over the universe. It was a young, brash man from Barcelona that asked, after the two of them had successfully thwarted another of the Master's mad schemes. Davis had been travelling with him for years, and had almost gotten killed in the process, so the Doctor couldn't help but feel he'd earned his answer.
The question still took him by surprise, pausing in the middle of another new control room and staring at him. He ran his fingers through his hair (ginger now, finally, and curlier than it had been since his fourth self).
"It's complicated." He started, turning away with something that felt remarkably like shame in the pit of his stomach.
Davis just raised one very expressive eyebrow. The Doctor sighed. What could he say to make him understand?
Should he tell him of endless days spent out in the endless fields of red grass so many years ago, just the two of them, happy and innocent? Of the stress and misery of being the odd ones out at the Academy, and of comforts shared in their room?
Of triumphs shared and pain spared? The impossibly large dreams of two young men with the universe at their disposal? Names, chosen to describe themselves, and instead causing a stir among their fellows? One man turning desperately to his lover to hold his fragile life together, the other turning outward in search of an escape?
How could he tell him of the years spent living and loving and searching for the one thing he never could quite find in their life? What, exactly, would this young man in front of him think of the terrified and desperate man who felt so trapped and afraid that all he could do was run as fast and hard as possible, leaving behind everything but a stolen ship and his granddaughter who was already far too much like him?
No, the Doctor decided, it was best never to tell that story. Instead, he smiled softly to himself and remembered all the good times. "Somewhere behind all that rage and fear is the man I fell in love with a millennium ago in the warm sunlight of Gallifrey." He answered carefully, not looking at his companion's expression. "We promised each other forever, and I owe it to him to try and save him until the day we die."
He dared a glance at the other man and was relieved to find only contemplation in his face. "And no matter how many times it goes wrong, in the end I'll always go back to him. We have forever, and I've never stopped being addicted to the feeling of being loved by him."