The Doctor was currently unconscious, and The Master had dragged him out of the chair and onto the floor where he sat with the limp time-lord propped up against the console. He estimated that The Doctor would only last for perhaps another 10 minutes, 15 if he was lucky. Having tried everything he could think of to stabilize The Doctor and get both his hearts beating again without success, The Master resigned himself to sitting here, watching his old friend slowly fade away.

Out of nowhere The Master felt something prodding his mind. At first he flinched his mind away from the unexpected contact and threw up all his defenses, then after a moment he realized that the TARDIS was trying to communicate with him. Slowly lowering the barriers protecting his thoughts, he felt her try to speak with him again. After listening for a moment, he shot up from his seat on the floor, nearly knocking over The Doctor.

"Can you really help me to do that?" he asked the TARDIS in disbelief. A low groaning that he could somehow tell was confirmation of this echoed through the room. Not wasting another moment, The Master began messing with the few knobs and levers on the ship that still functioned properly, though some of them required a little "persuasion". He knew the TARDIS would get back at him for that, but at the moment he didn't care. There was still hope that The Doctor might live, and The Master didn't even think about backing out for a second, despite the great risk that it would just kill all three of them. In his mind, he had nothing to lose, and evidently the TARDIS felt the same way.

The first task would be to establish a symbiotic link, much like the one she had with The Doctor, between the TARDIS and The Master. Despite them both hating the prospect of it, it was necessary in order to save The Doctor's life. Both of them wanted their dear Doctor to live more than anything. Once the link was established, he could feel the TARDIS's decay and, to some extent through her, his sense of The Doctor's fading life-force was more pronounced. But that wasn't the point of it.

Shrugging it off and getting back to work, The Master went to another edge of the console and harassed the sticky controls over there, though now each time he struck them he couldn't help but wince. As he flipped one last switch, a light burst out of the console and hit him square in the chest. Doubling over in pain for a moment, he quickly gathered himself again and ran over to The Doctor, grabbing hold of him tight.

He willed the regeneration energy into The Doctor, and it was rejected as he knew it would be because they had different DNA. Still, the TARDIS had come up with something that just might fix that. Willing the regeneration energy into The Doctor took nearly all of his concentration, but he would have to focus even more to manage to make the other time-lord's body accept it. This was the second part of the process in which the TARDIS offered her assistance. Through the symbiotic link with the two she could help him to control his own life energies as well as get The Doctor's to mix. The two of them, groaning in effort, managed to tap into The Master's newly stabilized life-force and slice off just a little, transferring it through the stream of regeneration energy to The Doctor. This made The Master feel a little hollow, but he'd had it much worse.

Now if they were lucky, despite their differing genetic signatures, The Doctor's body would no longer reject the foreign regeneration energy. Concentrating for just a little longer, they made sure to distribute the regeneration energy in such a way that, if all went according to plan, both of them would heal but neither would completely change their forms. After what seemed an eternity to both TARDIS and time-lord, the two semi-regenerations were over and it seemed that everyone was alright. The Master sat for a moment, gasping for breath after unknowingly holding it for so long, thinking in near disbelief that they had done it. Finally, after so long waiting, watching, escaping, and tracking, there was finally a time when they could all relax. For the first time in centuries, the two enemy time-lords had an encounter in which everybody lived. It seemed almost ironic that when this finally occurred, The Doctor had hardly even lifted a finger trying to save lives.

Throughout all of this The Master had kept a death grip on the other man, but now that everything was done, his arms loosened as he found himself both exhausted and enormously relieved. This combination was such that it was merely seconds before he joined his enemy in blissful unconsciousness.


A/N - Yay! Everybody lives! I am going to continue this, that's why I couldn't kill anyone off . . . But my plans aren't set in stone, so suggestions would be great (but I may or may not use them). Reviews are like doggy treats, they're positive reinforcement for doing tricks, or in this case writing chapters!