AN: This came out a lot later than I hoped it would! Sorry for the wait and I hope everyone enjoys the dark conclusion to our three part miniseries! I'll admit, there is a two part epilogue to follow, but I'll get both pieces of that up tomorrow and they're both considerably shorter than the last couple of chapters. Thank you so much for all of your kind comments and reviews! I appreciate them so much.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, the River we have here is still the younger version of River who came and fetched the Doctor and Master for Christmas. The River who snagged the Master out of the Time-Lock is still waiting at Stormcage to be picked back up.

"Just regenerate already!" he snapped, staggering back to the TARDIS under River's dead weight.

"I can't," River gasped from his back, one arm wrapped around his neck as he carried her while the other tried to staunch the blood flowing from her side.

He rolled his eyes. The Doctor is gone, lost somewhere in the forest leading the Sontarians off with some sort of fool 'plan' he'd come up with. River being injured had not been part of that plan. Him, being forced to carry River back to the TARDIS had most certainly not been part of the plan either. River's blood was seeping into the back of his shirt, pooling and slowing starting to drip down his leg and he can't help but wonder how much blood she's lost already. He can smell the energy of the Void crackling beneath her skin as she struggles for breath. Why won't she just regenerate already?

"Don't be a fool," he growled. "At the rate you're losing blood you'll be dead before we can reach the TARDIS."

River murmmed something he wasn't able to catch.

"Look," he said with a sigh, not believing he was actually going to be forced to say this. "If you're worried, regeneration isn't as bad as you would expect. When it starts it feels like your body is being torn apart, atom by atom, but once it's all over you'll feel renewed and released."

He winced as River coughed. "It is a lovely feeling," she agreed. "I just don't have any lives left."

"What?" He jerked his head to the side to gape at her. That's impossible. He can see the youth in her eyes, the wonder and curiosity that dies with age and experience. "You're fourty-eight! How did you go through eleven regenerations in fourty-eight years?" he demanded.

"I'm a hundred and thirty-seven!" River protested weakly against him. "And I gave them up."

"That was foolish." Stopping for a moment he scanned the horizon around them. He still couldn't see the TARDIS. For that matter, he didn't even know if the TARDIS was still in the same place as where the Doctor had initially landed it near the Pict village. It could have been moved or stolen by the Sontarians or a hundred other different things that would make this effort entirely pointless.

But River's a Time Lord, part of his mind screams. Gallifrey's gone. It burned and died eons ago. So even though his every fiber tells him that this is the perfect time to flee, steal the TARDIS, and escape to the stars he also cannot stand the idea that he and the Doctor will be the last of the Time Lords again.

"Who did you give your lives to?" he asked as he started walking again, already knowing the answer. He needed to keep her talking.

"The Doctor," River muttered softly, head bumping against his shoulder. "He was dying. I had to save him and it was the only thing I could think of."

It's exactly what he had been expecting and yet her answer still shakes him to his core. He can't imagine it. Someone giving up their regenerations and future for another. Especially when the other was the Doctor. He sighed at her and shook his head. "What possessed you to go and do something stupid like that?"

"What can I say?" she said. She coughed harshly. "I love him."

He closed his eyes and counted to ten. "I hadn't realized that you were insane too." He can almost feel her smiling at him as he crested another hill and looked down to see the TARDIS sitting there below them. "Finally!" he growled, hurrying now that the end was in sight.

The TARDIS doors were locked.

He swore, loudly, and barely resisted the urge to stomp his feet. "Of course they're locked," he nearly shouted. He glanced behind them almost expecting to find the Doctor fleeing towards them, Sontarians at his back and found the hill behind them depressingly bare. At the rate River continued to bleed he didn't know if they could wait for the idiot to finally show up.

"Use the spare," River muttered into his neck.

"What spare?"

"He keeps a spare in a secret compartment above the door."

He stared at the TARDIS blankly. "You cannot be serious."

"It's in a cubby above the 'P.'"

He rolled his eyes, bending down to let River slide off his back. "If I had known that," he growled, reaching up to fumble along the TARDIS's trim, "breaking into this antique would have been so much easier."

River laughed at him weakly. "This is why the Doctor warned me not to tell you anything."

"Did he now?" His fingers closed around the key and he pulled it out, glaring at it darkly. "What else has he told you about me?"

"He said that you're a baaaaad man," River slurred. "And that you escaped a Time-Lock which isn't possible."

"I didn't escape it," he sighed, swinging both of the TARDIS' doors open wide. "You pulled me from it."

River gasped in fake shock. "Naughty Master!" she scolded lightly. "That's spoilers."

"Well here's another one for you," he growled, turning back to her. Now that he's finally looking at her, she looks worse than he had imagined. The front of her shirt was saturated with blood and her face was ashen and grey from the blood loss. She looked up at him with dull eyes, waiting for him to continue and for a moment he struggled to swallow the lump that had appeared in his throat. "You're not going to die."

She smiled at him weakly. "Time can be rewritten."

"Parts of it shouldn't be," he snapped, bending down to pick her up. Kneeling, he grabbed her arm and hauled her up and over his shoulder, ignoring her loud gasp of pain as he moved her. "Besides, your saving me is a fixed point in time."

"How do you know?"

"Because I say so. Med-Bay!" he said, shouting the last words as he ascended the ridiculous stairway towards the central console. He knew without trying that the TARDIS would electrocute him rather than let him fly her and while he could probably work around that it would take him too long. Instead he wrenched open the first door he came across and was pleased to find it was now the Med-Bay instead of the shoe closet it had been previously. At least the TARDIS knew what to do during a medical emergency.

Unceremoniously, he dropped River onto the narrow examination table and immediately went to the cabinets, throwing them open and rummaging about inside. While the room itself looked like it was from Earth's 60s the equipment inside was at least partly modern. He grabbed a bottle of anesthetic from the cabinets and found the needles in a drawer next to the sink. Bandages and a suturing laser were by the door while the imaging pad and UV disinfector were tucked away behind a plastic model of a human brain. Putting all those things and anything else he could think of that would be useful onto a tray next to the table, he hauled a stool over to the examination table and sat.

"Pull up your shirt," he ordered, taking a needle and filling it with anesthetic.

River stared at him wearily. "Do you even know what you're doing?" she asked, hands shaking as she pulled her shirt up and away from the wound at her side.

He flicked the needle with his nails, forcing the air bubbles to the top and squeezed the plunger, forcing them out. "Of course I know what I'm doing," he said shortly. River's blood had congealed keeping the shirt stuck to her body so he grabbed a scalpel and cut the fabric away from her side instead. A fresh roll of blood welled up as he pulled the fabric away as River winced. "At the Academy I originally studied to become a doctor," he said as River continued to look worried. She needed a transfusion and somehow he doubted the TARDIS kept Time Lord plasma just sitting around waiting for an emergency. They were going to have to do without and hope for the best. Compression pads would temporarily stop the bleeding, and he carefully placed them over the wound making sure they properly fused to her skin before reaching for the imaging pad.

"You wanted to be a doctor?" River asked, smiling. "Why?"

"My mother was one. At the time I thought that it would be a suitable profession." He held the imaging pad above her body and flicked through the settings, ignoring the blood he was smearing all over its surface.

"What changed your mind?"

"My father pointed out that my skill set was better suited for engineering." The shot had gone straight through her and didn't seem to have nicked any of her major organs. A bit of luck at last. He tossed down the pad and rolled up his sleeves, grabbing up the needle. "Then the drums were put into my head and I saw no reason to become a doctor anymore."

River winced as the needle pierced her skin, biting her bottom lip. "So the Master wanted to be a doctor and the Doctor wanted to be superhero," she said shakily.

His lip twitched, remember long nights huddled under the blankets with Theta, a stack of human comic books stacked between them as his childhood friend enthused about the merits of one fictional hero versus another. "What he really wanted to be was human," he said softly, taking up the suturing laser and fiddling with it absently.

"Is being human really so bad?"

He looked at her flatly, daring her to challenge his unspoken answer, and her smile widened. "For him it was probably the best choice," he sighed, watching River's eyes glaze over as the anesthesia crept over her. "Time Lord society would have destroyed him. It's no wonder he went rogue and ran."

"Why didn't you go with him?" River asked sleepily, struggling against the power of the drugs that ran through her system.

He shrugged. "I was immersed in politics at the time. When I finally got to running the Doctor was long gone and would never have let me onto his TARDIS even if I had managed to catch up."

"Why? What happened?" She was almost gone now. Just a bit longer.

"I murdered my father."

River blinked at him and for a moment he thought she had gone under. "Did he deserve it?"

There was no hesitation to his answer. "Yes."

Licking her lips slowly, River frowned weakly. "You're being surprisingly honest," she slurred sleepily. "Why are you being so honest? Am I going to remember any of this when I wake up?"

"Not a bit of it," he said with his last bit of honestly, putting on imaging glasses and flicking the suturing laser on. He leaned forward as River's eyes slid shut, pulling back the first compression pad. It was slow work, coaxing blood vessels back together and suturing them back together. He had to stop several times, hands trembling from the stress of making such tiny movements.

He was barely halfway done when he heard the TARDIS doors slam open then shut. Gritting his teeth, he mentally cursed the Doctor for being so late. If he'd made it back earlier they would be at a hospital better equipped for dealing with this rather than coping with substandard materials.

There was dead silence from the main TARDIS and for a moment the Master thought he must have imagined the sound of the TARDIS doors opening. "River?" the Doctor's voice called shakily from the main console room. "Master?"

"In here!" he shouted, not even bothering to glance over his shoulder. He tweaked the imaging glasses, re-zooming them to a particularly large vessel still oozing blood.

Almost instantly the Doctor was in the doorway, face ashen as he hurried inside. "What happened?" he demanded running over to River's side. "There was blood all the way down the hill and on the door and up the stairs and – Oh, River what happened to you?"

"She was shot," he snapped slapping the Doctor's hands away from touching her. "Don't move her. I'm working."

"You're not a doctor!" the Doctor protested, jumping back a step.

"Neither are you. Besides, it's the same principle as soldering."

Before the Doctor could protest once more the entire TARDIS lurched. Cursing, both Time Lords reached for River, stopping her from rolling off the table and another impact shook the TARDIS.

"The Sontarians found us!"

"Get us out of here you idiot!" he shouted as the Doctor ran from the room. Another lurch and the TARDIS began to shake as they entered the Void. "Stabilizers on, parking break off!" he bellowed down the stairs. He sighed with annoyance as the TARDIS stilled, flipping the suturing laser back on as he went back to work.

"She should be in a hospital. Why haven't you taken her to a hospital?" the Doctor fretted, bursting back into the room.

"If I could fly your ridiculous hunk of space junk I would have left you behind and she would be," he growled in reply. "Now stop bothering me! I have to concentrate."

He was surprised when the Doctor listened. More surprised when the Doctor silently took a seat on River's other side, gently holding her hand and occasionally stoking back her hair without saying another word. With no further interruptions the work went quickly and his shoulders sagged as he placed a compression pad over the closed wound.

"Help me roll her over," he said shortly and the Doctor did, not saying a word as he helped turn River over so he could reach the other side of the bullet hole. He'd managed to reach most of the severed blood vessels from the front so it took much less until the wound was closed with another compression pad fused to her skin. "Get her sitting up," he ordered, hands trembling as he reached for the bandages.

"What more can we do?" the Doctor asked softly as together they wrapped the bandages around her, making sure the compression pads stayed in place.

"Do you have plasma sitting around we can use on her?"

The Doctor looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking his head. "No. I don't even know what would work for River. Her parents are human but-"

"But human blood would kill a Time Lord," he finished, closing his eyes with exhaustion. "No hospital this side of the Time-Lock would have the right plasma either."

"Then what do we do?"

He sighed deeply. "We force her to rest and give her protein and fluids whenever she wakes and hope that she didn't lose enough blood to kill her," he said, taking off the imaging glasses and tossing them carelessly onto the medical tray. His hands were trembling like leaves he realized absently, forcing them down onto his knees to stop their shaking. "Do you think you can handle that much on your own?"

The Doctor was looking at him strangely. There was a look in his eyes that he didn't recognize as the other Time Lord held River's hand, stroking it absently. "I can."

"Then I'm going to go change and wash up," he said, standing abruptly. His legs were trembling too, he noticed, annoyed with his own failings. Stiffly, so the Doctor wouldn't notice his shaking limbs, he walked to the door.

"Master," the Doctor said as he reached the doorway.

He hesitated. "What?"

"Thank you. For saving River. You didn't have to do it."

"Of course I did," he said before he could stop himself then mentally cursed as the Doctor's face lit up with a smile. "If she died, living with you would become even more unbearable," he snapped poisonously and left before the Doctor could come up with any more fool ideas.

His door had moved to be across the hall, a fact he was profoundly grateful for, and it swung open invitingly as he staggered towards it. The fire was roaring even hotter and higher than usual in the fireplace, warming the room pleasantly as he slowly kicked off his shoes. Not even bothering to strip off his blood soaked clothing he collapsed onto his bed, falling asleep as soon as his head hit his pillow.