And a second later I pressed the button, but it came at the same time as the walls exploded, spraying sparks everywhere. When I got to my feet I realized that no one had vanished. The vortex manipulator was glowing blue.

"What happened?" Martha said, her voice getting higher as she looked around. "Why aren't we...?"

"Delayed reaction!" I gasped. "Thirty or so seconds to transit. Don't worry about it, just stay put!" The ship was starting to collapse, to really collapse. How had it held together all this time, with the rifts growing around it? Inside it? And so, all around me, the structure was shaking, as I pulled the apparatus together and tried to hold on as I prepared to receive the response from the planet, as seven billion people suddenly heard the most unendurable, grating shriek filling their heads. I couldn't help but feel sorry for them, but there really hadn't been time to come up with a better plan.

Across the room, I saw the Master watching me from inside the light. Lucy was clinging to his arm, and he had pulled her close without realizing it, automatically trying to make sure she didn't fall out of the cramped space. It was the most... human thing I'd ever seen him do in a long time.

It wasn't fair, I thought, as the signal ricocheted off the transceiver, setting the whole thing aglow. It wasn't fair that after all the improbable good things that had happened right now, everything had to be undone. It wasn't fair that you couldn't give people second chances. I'd made that rule myself, and it wasn't fair. Time shouldn't be like that, always, eternally constant wherever it matters. Time isn't alive, I thought. It doesn't care what I do to it. It's not a person or a thing. It's just a causal dimension. But it owns me. It owns everyone.

Unless you're really, really clever.

I almost missed the tiny movement of his hand as the Master slid something off his finger and pressed it into Lucy's hand. He said a few words to her very quietly, something I couldn't hear, and then gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

And he stepped from the circle.

As the vortex manipulator fired up at last for the final transport, my mind seemed to take a picture of everyone standing there. Shock, surprise, confusion, fear, stoic acceptance. And Lucy Saxon, with an expression of disbelief, with the fingers of one hand touching her face, and those of the other curled around the Master's signet ring.

And then they all vanished, save the one.

"You," I said emphatically. "YOU."

"Am I stupid?" he laughed.

Wordlessly I nodded.

"Am I reckless and incautious?" I kept on nodding. "Am I insane?" He did a tiny dance of glee. "Yes, I am!"

"You," I tried one more time, steadied myself and took a deep breath. "Get over here." I pointed at the spot by my side. "You're on sound duty."

"Haha! Duty! Such a funny word!" It looked like, by staying, he'd surprised himself the most out of all of us. And it was doing odd things to his already odd mind. "Am I the disc jockey? DJ Saxon?"

"How about you put your brain back in your skull and help out a little?" I was trying to be a little angry, but there wasn't any anger in me. Not a drop. I had run dry. So had he.

"Help? Yes! Help! I do that now! I help!" The Master grinned, nearly unzipping his face in the process. He seemed to be exploding with adrenaline. "I help you!"

"Not now, you aren't!"

Still giggling, he leaped over the makeshift platform of electronics and spun around. "Helping the Doctor save the world..." he said wonderingly as his hand shot to his shirt pocket, then pulled out the laser screwdriver. "Well, why not! I don't want to destroy it, after all! I want to rule it!"

"Why do you want to rule it?" I asked before I could stop myself.

This only made him laugh harder. "I've forgotten!"

"What did you do, back there?" I demanded. "You gave Lucy something..."

"A kiss?"

"Besides that!"

He pushed his fingers through his hair, in a gesture I recognized well. He seemed to be debating whether or not to tell, like a small child with a very special secret. Then he beamed. "Something clever!" he declared. "A surprise. You'll see."

I raised an eyebrow. "Should I hope not to?" His surprises tended to be very deadly and unpleasant.

"No! You'll love it! Shiny!" The last exclamation was directed at wires all around us, which were, indeed, shining like glowworms on steroids from the built-up energy. But seriously? Shiny? How ADD could you get?

"Keep the signal feed going," I ordered loudly. "I'm targeting the rifts in the ship first, to buy us time!"

"I am, I am! Don't worry! I have this under control... I like controlling things..."

"You do realize we're going to die!" I yelled in the Master's ear. "Little things like that make a big difference sometimes!"

"Well, I thought I was going to die anyway! This way is more fun!"

God, that man. He was utterly impossible. "I never said you would die, you know."

"I surmised," he said smugly. "Look at your face... of course I died. You only look at people like that when you've seen them die."

That just wasn't true. Or at least I wasn't willing to admit it if it was. "No, I don't. You made that up. You hardly know this face. And besides, I've seen you die loads of times before. Think about it." I couldn't help but bring this small point of interest up.

"I've spent a lot of my life dying," the Master agreed. He shrugged. "It's a habit. Maybe that's why I'm here."

"It's not why you're here. Why are you here? And what do you think will happen when the Valiant explodes? You think you'll be reset? You won't! It'll always be here, where you die, and you won't-"

"Go on to ravage the planet and imprison you for a year, neither of which I want to do anymore, and then die anyway and everything gets reset? What's the difference, in the end?"

"I'm different! Martha will be different! Her family, Jack..."

"Happier, I'm sure, without a year of me."

"But not necessarily better! Time doesn't work like that!"

"And it kills you, doesn't it?" The Master turned and looked up at me, and I felt like something long dead inside me had come back to life.

It was like he'd seen into me, seen what happened on Mars, all the awful terror and shame of it. But he hadn't, he just knew I was different. He'd seen the change before anyone else had, and just pretended not to, because there's no one you know better than your worst enemy. There's no other way of doing things. You can't survive unless you know them so well that you can repeat what they say before they say it, like that horrible creature on the Midnight. You have to think in their voice, you have to dream in their body, in their world, you have to know them better than you know yourself.

And then you have to destroy them. Or watch them destroy you first.

So he knew me better than Jack or Martha, and he knew the only way I'd find a way out of this was if I was doing it to save someone else. Not myself, no matter how much I feared dying. But another life - that was all it took. He knew I'd save his life.

But what for? More death? And why did this one have to die? Why the one that was different? The one who smiled and kissed his wife goodbye and really, truly meant it? The one who laughed at danger and stood at my side when no one else did? Why him, why now? Unfair.

"Yes." I swallowed. "It does."

"You looked like me," he said suddenly.

It took me a second to digest this. "What?"

"You asked why I stayed. It was because you looked like me."

All the while, by the way, the rifts were vanishing around us, closing up and vanishing into pure, clean air. But the ship was still shaking. Who knew what systems had been sliced open? How long we had left?

"I looked like you? What, when I shot the Toclafane? When?"

"No," he laughed. "Running around, no rules apply. Ordering people about, treating me like I was a bad little brother-"

Surprised, I said, "But I'm always like that!"

He didn't say anything for a moment. "Not around me, you aren't," he eventually responded. "Not with me, not anymore."

"Well, I'm sorry I don't accommodate." I rolled my eyes.

"You looked like me, like before... before everything. You remember, don't you? Crazy, bossy, keeping you out of trouble-"

"Trouble you started."

"Okay. Fair point. But you remember what I was like, it was always, 'Theta, do this. Theta, do that. Don't touch that, Theta. Don't tease the bogbeast, Theta-'"

"The bogbeast," I said through a haze of sudden pain, and I clamped my mouth shut. I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to be reminded. It hurt too much. Couldn't stop it though - remembered running, for possibly the first time, running for my life, straight off the top of the hill in panic, rolling down all the way, curling up and thinking I was going to be dead in seconds... Until I heard the feet running up behind me, saw the tall shape, with raven hair, wildly waving a genuine lightning rod from an armory or an unconscious guard or who knew where (I didn't want to ask, in case it was gotten through what I always called infringement in just that tone of voice) and then I was even more scared that a stray bolt would hit me, but then the snarling stopped and six heavy feet went galloping away and then I was pulled up by the arm by someone calling me imbecile and lackwit and stupid midget and dumbass and everything else he could think of, before laughing his head off and picking me up (because he was that much bigger than me then) and finally asking -

"Are you all right?"

I started. "What?"

"You look... sad..."

I reached up and touched my cheek and realized I was crying. Only a little. Not buckets, you know. Just... a bit moist. Nothing really disgusting or embarrassing. "Maybe I'm allergic to you," I said. "Yeah, that's probably it. You walking pollen, you."

"But that's why. You looked like me, and I remembered you. Little Theta."

"The shrimp," I said thickly. "I always said I'd be bigger'n you someday."

"Shrimpy little ginger Theta," he went on, watching my pain with half-enjoyment, half-sorrow, "with the stupid, stupid haircut..."

I closed my eyes. "Was this what you wanted? See me like this before I die?"

He slapped my arm. "Who says we're going to die? Look on the bright side of things, why don't you?"

"All right. The rifts are closing up. The world might not be ending... the ship's going to blow up, taking us with it. Very bright, I'm sure. And loud. Those things tend to be loud." I frowned. "You don't mind, do you? Blowing up the ship?"

"Well, it's pretty much mine," he said. "Prime minister's privilege. Belongs to the people, so I get it. That's politics, see?"

"So you're fine and dandy about that, me blowing up your ship?" It was really a rhetorical question. Of course he was.

"Ha! I didn't like it much anyway. It was too boring. And this is fun!"

"Yeah, I got that."

"No, really, I've got a problem with you blowing up my Doctor," the Master said, and then as the floor buffeted us backwards, he slipped and dove for a handhold, i.e., me. "Whoops!" he laughed.

I looked down. "I thought we went over this already."

"What?" he asked, giggling. He was literally clinging to my waist. The man had no respect for personal space, no matter what face he was wearing.

"NO! GRABBING! ME! EVER!" I bellowed. "OFF!"

Point of historical interest: We actually did have that agreement, along with a few others, and they were like the Geneva Conventions of archrivalry, in that they were always being broken. The first of them was that we would never restrain, tie up, or otherwise affix one another to an object with straps of some sort. This was because I had to have this operation once when I was really little, and they strapped me to the table while these robots cut me open and so basically I used to go berserk whenever anything like that happened. Sometimes I actually threw up (the most well-kept secret in the universe, by the way). So rule one was no getting tied up, because that was rubbish. Also, rule one: broken, all the time.

Rule two was the no sudden physical contact one, and that held for a while. But as of now: broken. I could never remember rule three (partly because it was a rule specifically applying to me, and mostly because it was hell-ass long, like a 5-paragraph essay or something), but I think rule four was no eight-legged, multi-eyed, hairy companions with spinnerets, because the Master had arachnophobia. Or he used to. I forget. But I wasn't really a spider person either, so that one lasted. The fifth was about no armed combat (esp. with special swordy weapons) because everyone knew that what happened in those was that the bad guy fell off a convenient high place. Rule five: broken by me, but that wasn't fair because the Master used a shimmer and I didn't know it was him (but I creamed him, anyway, so that was cool). So those were the Five and a Half Pillars of Death, which was all we could think of to call them at the time.

So you understand why he at least chose to break rule two and not rule one. Unfortunately, I had a feeling this incarnation would be more inclined to break rule one, and if that ever happened (if by some rotten chance he stayed neither dead nor nice) I would have to just control my stomach. Although being (in essence) hugged around the middle was almost as potentially nauseating, though. Especially if the hugger is very clingy (and villainously vile) and the huggee has just eaten.

"Remember..." I lowered my voice. "The rules." Rule Five and a Half: never talk about the rules by name where people can potentially hear you. Never mind that we were alone on a crashing ship with the whole planet deafened by the scream of a sonic screwdriver. You never know what rare improbable thing will happen.

"I tripped, okay? It was a reflex."

"It most certainly was not. Get off."

The Master started to straighten up, but another tremor hit the ship before he was fully balanced.

"GET OFF OF ME-!"

"I fell!" he protested. "It wasn't on purpose!"

Breathing hard, I extricated myself. "All right," I said dangerously. "We get off this ship now. Because it's all falling to bits and is about to explode and you can't keep your hands to yourself!"

"I wasn't trying..." And then the other wall blew out, the one right behind us. I had the presence of mind to cover my face and dive out of the way. Think, I thought as I leapt up once more, pushing my brain to the utter limit. Damn it! THINK! You always have a way out! What do you do? What would the Doctor do in this situation? Something clever, not like what he's doing now! Argh!

Then I heard the Master whimper, "It hurts..." He was still curled up into a tight ball, and I saw his clothing and, in some cases, skin, in tatters where it had been scored by the searing sparks.

And then I remembered again, what he'd said about me before, and about the bogbeast, and instead I thought, if he were me and I were him so long ago, what would Koschei do?

What would ... of course.

I ran over and hauled the Master to his feet, brandished my sonic screwdriver, faced the window. "ABANDON SHIP!" I screamed, and as the next tremor hurled us towards the glass, I flicked the stetting of the screwdriver to high C sharp, and the window exploded into crystal, an explosion we flew through into the open air.

Now, this was about where we were: Eight hundred meters above the surface of the Earth. Falling. Behind us, the Valiant exploded.

AN: REVIEW please... :) If someone writes a critique that's really detailed I'll be oh so happy.