Doctor Who, Special Series; Episode 5: The Memories of the End

A/N: Hello everyone! Is there a reason I got so few reviews last chapter? Please, let me know if I'm doing something wrong. I won't attack you, promise!

Once again, any Classic Who fans out there willing to help me with something?

OMG CHRISTMAS SPECIAL SOON PREVIEWS LOOK AMAZING *squee* Anyway...

Thanks to: Paul, FlyingLovegood123, Ptroxsora, LilyLunaPotter142, and WisdomChild15.

Breathing slowly, he unclenched one hand from his hair.

Wilfred gasped. "What?"

The Doctor ignored him, sitting up. Everything hurt. He swore that the ends of his hair hurt, except that, at this point, his pain centres were overloaded and on the point of shutting down. He almost wished they would, just to give him a break.

"Hello," Wilfred said timidly. No surprise there: there was no way a human could have survived that, not with the amount of radiation he had just taken.

Bracing himself against the floor, the Doctor looked out. "Hi."

"Still with us?"

The pain receding, the Doctor stood. "The system's dead." He wasn't going to answer that question. Five hundred thousand rads were still bouncing about his body. Just because he was alive now didn't mean he was going to make it another day. He didn't mention this though, holding on desperately to his last remaining option: that he could get to the TARDIS and expel it into a safe place. "I absorbed it all. Whole thing's kaput." Pressing lightly against the door, he watched it swing outward in disgust. "Oh. Now it opens, yeah." He stepped gingerly out, containing his winces. The brush of fabric against his skin hurt. Placing weight on his feet hurt. Hell, opening his eyes hurt.

Wilfred shifted his weight. "Well, 'ere we are then. Safe and sound."

The Doctor didn't bother correcting this misapprehension. If it all worked out, Wilfred would never have to know just how close he came to death – and if it didn't, it wouldn't matter anyway. He had to swallow heavily to keep from vomiting: one of the first symptoms of radiation poisoning was nausea. He just hoped he could get back to the TARDIS before the diarrhoea started.

"Mind you, you're in a hell of a state. You've got some battle scars there." Wilfred gestured at his face.

He groaned, wiping his hands over his face. Everything hurt so much he had forgotten about the damage the glass had done. Energy sparked and sizzled off his skin cells, sending spikes of pain racing through him – but as it went, it left new, unblemished skin in its wake. He couldn't tell if he was just healing faster than normal due to the radioactive energy currently playing havoc with his cells, or if he was actually on the verge of regenerating – either way, the process still hurt more than anything else, which was really saying something at that point.

Wilfred stared at him in shock. "But then… Your face – How did you do that?" This last came out in a whisper.

The Doctor looked at his hands, turning them over. Regeneration was itself a form of radiation, and sometimes – this time – it was hard to tell the difference. But maybe – He swore inwardly, staring at the delicate veins of gold underneath his skin. "It's started," he said hoarsely. Regeneration – burden and boon. If he could just – plans formed and changed and reformed behind his eyes, nothing of this frantic thought making it out to his face.

Gasping, Wilfred walked forward and hugged him, crying into his chest, unheeding of the radiation. He didn't need to worry, the Doctor thought absently, there wasn't any radiation left to affect humans. Just him.

He stumbled back to his TARDIS, calling her back into sync with the rest of the universe. They connected, ignoring Wilfred, and he began setting the coordinates to take the man back home. His TARDIS muttered in the back of his mind. She thought he should just regenerate and get it over with. He ignored that too. He had gone through ten regenerations in just over a thousand years when four regenerations should have lasted him a millennium or more. And when he ran out, when he finally reached the end, there would be no one left to protect the universe. His death would mean the end. He couldn't afford to regenerate, not if there was any hope, any way out.

He'd thought of such a way by the time he landed the TARDIS outside Donna's house – it would always be Donna's house to him, never Wilfred's. But it was dangerous and complex and he needed to be alone. Dropping off Wilfred, he ignored the man's protests.

Throwing the TARDIS back into the Time Vortex, he reached a conclusion. He had to act like he was going to die. If the plan worked, all would be well. If it didn't – the radiation would rebound on him and the odds of survival, in any form, dropped to near zero.

So – what did he have left to do before he died? Somehow the answer was easier than he'd thought. He saved Martha and Mickey from an insane Sontaran. Pulled Luke out of the way of a car – he couldn't bear to talk with Sarah Jane, it would hurt too much. Set Jack up on a date – it wouldn't last, it never lasted, but it was the least he could do. He saw everyone: Jo Grant, and the Brigadier, and the great-granddaughter of Joan Redfern, and Ian and Barbara of course. And then Donna's wedding, finally, and if it didn't hurt so much he would have smiled at that: Donna finally getting her wedding.

And because he could, he went and saw Rose when she was younger. She didn't know him, she wouldn't ever recognize him, but to see her one last time – if he never saw her again – and it hurt, everything hurt so bloody much he barely made it through the conversation without appearing anything more than drunk.

By that point it wouldn't have mattered if she'd seen him. For him, it had been three days – but that much radiation was enough to kill a cockroach instantly, and it had been, physically, the three worst days of his life. Anything he ate or drank came straight back up, and his body was burning itself up in an effort to control the radiation. He looked like he'd been through a concentration camp, and at this point, he wasn't entirely sure that he wouldn't prefer to have been. He'd had a pounding headache since the moment he'd stepped out of the booth, although the flushed skin had died down after the first day. The fever had gotten steadily worse – his core body temperature had increased seven degrees Celsius already, and it was still rising. He was about three away from brain damage. He didn't think he'd have to worry about that though: the radiation would get there first. And through it all, he had to hold off the regeneration, even as he knew that for all the pain it would cause, it would make the rest go away.

Then it took him, suddenly. He hunched over, hands crossed over his stomach, trying not to vomit. The pain escalated, past even where it had been before. He stumbled towards the TARDIS, unable to hold the emotions back any more, and fell down half way there. Shuddering, he knelt in the centre of the snow covered street, trying to pluck up the energy to get all the way into his TARDIS. Waves of pain rolled through him as his central nervous system rebelled – had he been human he would have cried out from the agony, but had he been human he would have been dead three days before.

The crunch of shoes in snow caught his attention, pulling his head up. Even in the middle of holding back another spasm, he rolled his eyes. "Aren't I done with you yet?"

"Nope!" The Master grinned, popping the p. His face flickered into the skull again. "You're never going to be rid of me, Doctor." He crouched down in front of the other Time Lord.

Doing his very best to ignore the pain, the Doctor shoved himself into a sitting position. "It's lasting longer now," he said, meaning the skull face.

The Master shrugged. "Entertaining to show to people."

"You're dying," the Doctor told him bluntly.

Laughing, the Master shoved him over, into the snow. "So are you."

He let himself fall. His skin was burning, he knew that consciously, but he shivered uncontrollably at the press of snow against him. What he couldn't figure out was why. The Master hated having other people see him weak. So why, then, would he come now, when he was so dangerously weak and close to regenerating? Breathing shakily, he remained there, in the snow, prone at the feet of his polar opposite.

They both remained silent for a minute, both trying to regain control of their bodies. Finally the Master's face returned to normal. "We're both about to regenerate."

"Maybe," the Doctor replied, with just a hint of his normal defiance and energy.

The Master took a step forward, nudging at the Doctor with the toe of one boot. "I thought I taught you never to lie to me."

He couldn't help himself, he flinched at that tone of voice. He still wouldn't respond, he could deny the other that much. The radiation had no care for his pride though. He seized up again, retching. The one blessing was that there was nothing left to come out, and the dry heaving turned into seizures fairly quickly.

The Master laughed, using his boot to flip the Doctor's body over. "I think you are weaker than me."

Crying out, the Doctor arched off the ground. Any attempt to control the radiation at this point was doomed to failure. "Piss off," he hissed from between clenched teeth, too much in pain to bother being polite.

"I don't think –" It was the Master's turn to pause as his face flashed into a skull and stayed that way. Rolling his shoulders to accustom himself to the new feel, he glared down at the Doctor. "I don't think I will, thanks," he said finally.

Biting down on his lip hard enough to feel the all-too familiar taste of blood and artron energy wash over his tongue, the Doctor glared up at the other Time Lord. "What do you want?" It took far too much energy to get even that out, leaving him drained and shaking on the ground.

The Master's face flickered back into normalcy and then into a skull. "Your pain. I –" He paused, fighting down pain of his own. "I want your pain."

"You got it," the Doctor replied dryly, forcing himself over onto his side and spitting blood out of his mouth. The only good thing he could say about the seizures was that they were short. They were also unbearably painful, debilitating, and frequent.

Kneeling down himself, face twisted from his own oncoming regeneration, the Master shook his head, losing his grasp on the carefully formed persona. "No – no. Your pain. As I destroy your world." He reached into the pocket of his hoodie, pulling out a depressingly familiar square of electronics.

Depression washed over the Doctor, leaving him too out of control to hold it back from his face. "The Osterhagen Key."

"Yes," the Master hissed, mixed pleasure and pain. The skull disappeared again, making a crackling noise as it went. "Your Martha Jones – didn't do a very good job, did she?" His breath whistled as he gasped it in and out rapidly. "It's – hell – it's been reprogrammed. This – in one computer – destroy the Earth."

And he'd thought this couldn't get any worse. The Doctor stared up, ignoring the Master, ignoring the snow landing on his cheeks, ignoring everything except for what he would have to give up this time to save the Earth. The shuddering from the cold merged with the shuddering from the pain, leaving him a wreck, too weak to stand. "Wha' – what do you want?"

The Master looked down at him, face flickering in and out too fast to tell which one it was. It finally settled on the blue-white skull. "Leave the Earth. Don't return. Give – give me a chase. You're always findin' me. 'S my turn."

Leaving the Earth, never to return, with a psychopathic Time Lord on his heels until one of them died for real. If the Master's version of hell was stuck on the TARDIS with just the Doctor, then this was his. "No."

A wave of pain shook the Master. He still managed to grin, though – cocky bastard. "Then we all die. Someone round here's got to have a computer I can use."

"No," the Doctor said again, quieter. "Please." His voice broke on the last word. He told himself the tears were from the pain. He knew that was a lie. "Please. Anything. What – anything."

Bracing himself with one hand on the Doctor's shoulder, the Master scowled at him. "I told you what I want. Leave. Don't return. I'll follow. What don't you get?"

He shook, from pain and cold and the death that he was so desperately avoiding. "How – how are you gonna follow? No TARDIS."

The Master pulled back the sleeve on his hoodie, revealing a leather wrist strap.

"No," the Doctor said, breath hissing out between his teeth. "Jack?"

Shaking his head, the Master managed to look disappointed. An irrelevant part of the Doctor's mind pointed out that this was quite a feat, considering he was currently skull-shaped. "Pretty boy was gone. Left this behind, though. Hijacked someone else's signal to find you. Don't know where they got to. Going to latch it on to your TARDIS."

Oh, Jack, you moron, you were supposed to destroy the others!

The Doctor made it a point to keep an eye on Torchwood; he knew that other Time Agents had been through and that more than one of them had left a vortex manipulator behind. He'd sent instructions to Jack to destroy all but one of them. Apparently that hadn't worked out.

The Master arched his back, jaw clenched to hold in a scream. His face reappeared. "So," he gasped out. "Run? Or die?"

There wasn't really a choice. He wasn't sure where he drew the energy from, but somehow he found the strength to stand, tremors wracking his body.

"Ooh, good choice," the Master said, still kneeling. "Just got something to take care of. Catch up later." He gasped, crossing both arms over his chest as another flash of artron energy tore through him.

Staggering, the Doctor made his way to the TARDIS. He fumbled the key out, shoving it in the lock. His coordination was going - everything was going, at this point. Taking one last look at the Master – every time another burst of energy occurred, more of his body switched between flesh and bone – he shut the door. There was only one lever he had to pull, and the TARDIS was off, fading into the Time Vortex.