Author's Note: I would just like to take a moment to thank RandomW, who pointed out that I had mixed up the Untempered Schism with the Eye of Harmony - I have gone back and corrected this (I hope I found all mentions of it). So thank you for letting me know! :) Hope you're all continuing to enjoy the story - as usual, I enjoy reading your reviews; they keep me going. So here is the next chapter!

36. Tying up loose ends.

"Oh," the Master said. "Hello."

The Doctor laughed. "It worked!"

The Master winced. "Blimey you're loud. Keep it down, would you? I have a headache."

"I'm not surprised," the Doctor said, turning serious. "How do you feel?"

"Like I had my soul nearly bled dry to bring a snake back from the dead."

"Well, his mind is certainly safe," River muttered.

The Master looked up at the Doctor. "Relax, I'm not dying, you can put me down now."

The Doctor reluctantly untangled himself from the Master, lying him down gently, before moving to stand at the bedside again.

The Master frowned. "How did you save me?"

"Er…" The Doctor floundered awkwardly. Telling the Master that they had ignored his wish to die was bad enough, but telling him that they'd broken into his mind when he wasn't looking… That would most definitely be a disaster.

"Spoilers."

The Master snorted. "I'm bursting with confusion. Honestly, it's not obvious what you did at all." He looked the Doctor dead in the eyes. "You can't just keep me."

"Better than letting you die," the Doctor replied. "Would you rather be dead?"

"I'll be a prisoner for the rest of my lives, just rotting away in that box of yours while you go gallivanting around the universe."

"You can play outside if you're good," River shot back.

The Master raised an eyebrow. "Will you be there?"

"I come and go."

The Master sniffed. "Pity. It could be bearable if I had someone around who can give me a decent argument. He's a one man track – 'I can save you', 'just listen' and, my personal favourite, all that apologising." He looked the Doctor up and down. "Or at least the Converse Regeneration was. Not so sure about this one."

"He just saved your life," River said, when the Doctor snuck a glance at his shoes. "You could be a bit more grateful."

"Well I suppose I could fall whimpering at his feet and smother him with roses, but I think we'd all find that very embarrassing."

The Master, having apparently tired of lying around while everyone stared at him, tried to push himself up into a sitting position and failed, flopping weakly back onto the bed, rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath.

"You will take a while to recover," Snape said, gathering up the potions equipment, ready to leave. "Let me know if there are any side effects."

The Master watched him go, amused. "How cheery."

"It was an experimental potion," the Doctor explained.

"I take it you were desperate," the Master taunted.

"You were dying," the Doctor said, unwilling to elaborate further.

"Oh please."

The Doctor scoffed. "You had no plans, no followers, no minions – nothing could have brought you back. You would have died. Forever. So stop pretending it was so unimportant."

The Master sniffed. "So what happens now? Do we go skipping off into the sunset?"

"Now, you rest. We'll go back when you're strong enough to travel."

The Master grumbled wordlessly. After putting charms on the room to let them know if the Master's condition changed or he escaped, they left him in peace.

River scowled as she closed the door behind him. "That was just rude."

The Doctor shrugged. "He's alive and stable. I can help him now."

"Has it occurred to you that you might not be able to?"

"I owe it to him to try. Besides, the drums are gone now. Once his mind has had a rest from them, he might become more reasonable."

River sighed. "I know how important this is to you," she said gently. "You're the last two left, and you were friends once, but he's too far gone. He's lived with this madness for regenerations. You can't just fix him."

The Doctor's jaw tightened. "It's worth trying."

River doubted it, but kept any further protests to herself. The Doctor wasn't himself right now, that much was obvious, and she needed to help him, not attack him. Not for the first time, she wondered if she had made the right decision; what happened if the Doctor was wrong, if he failed, and the Master escaped to wreak havoc on the universe again? Could either of them live with the fact that they'd had the choice to end it, and had decided instead to prolong it?

Aloud, she said; "Speaking of rest…"

She dragged him to his room and magically tied him to the bed, the Doctor fighting all the way, protesting that they still needed to help with rebuilding the wizarding world. As she left to see if there was anything she could do to help, she didn't notice Harry Potter sneaking past.

oOo

The Doctor struggled violently against his invisible bonds and tried his best to squash the panic that was settling in. They had bound him before, in his cell…

He shoved the memory to the back of his mind, lumping it in with the others. He knew it was unhealthy, but he just couldn't deal with sorting through it all now, not when there was so much else going on. He needed to be able to focus, and while it was certainly true that he was not firing on all cylinders at the moment, he would be even worse when dealing with the memories, if he was coherent at all.

"River!" He bellowed. He wriggled some more.

The door creaked open slowly.

"River, so help me, if you don't untie me…" he trailed off, noticing that it was in fact Harry Potter standing in the doorway. "Ignore that."

He thought about it.

"Actually, don't ignore that, forget I said that. Ignore the ignoring bit. Can you untie me, Harry?"

Harry ventured further into the room, shutting the door behind him. "Why are you tied up?"

"River thinks I'll escape."

"Escape?"

"Not important. If you would do the honours?" He became free with a simple flick of Harry's wand. "Ahhh, that's the stuff," he exclaimed, stretching and manoeuvring himself into a sitting position. "Now, what can I do for you, Harry?"

"I came by to thank you," Harry said awkwardly. "If you hadn't mentioned that… gadget, I'd be dead."

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably. "I'm just sorry it going wrong didn't come up on my scans."

"It still saved me," Harry said. "Dumbledore didn't know it existed." He swallowed. "I think he was planning to kill me."

"Ah," the Doctor floundered, "see-"

"That's why I was in the forest," Harry interrupted with a dead voice. "If it hadn't worked, they were going to kill me right there."

"Harry, you have to understand, Dumbledore loves you. He didn't want any of this. He was looking for alternatives the entire time."

"He lied to me from the beginning."

"I don't know about that. It took him years to work it out, and then he had to decide what to do with the information. If he didn't tell you, it's because he didn't want to hurt you. I'm not saying he was right," he added quickly, "but that's probably how he felt."

"What happened in your universe?" Harry asked suddenly. "Did you save me there or did he kill me?"

The Doctor shifted awkwardly. "It's a long story."

"Everybody always says that."

"Dumbledore was already dead," the Doctor said, relenting. The important bits were over now, anyway, so it wasn't like there were spoilers. He hoped. "But he ended up in control of death – that really is a long story, too long to tell you – and that obviously made things easier. You-Know-Who killed you, and collapsed as you died. You, dead, had a conversation with Dumbledore, also dead – again, complicated – who convinced you to go back to the land of the living. You woke up – which I suppose means it was an out of body experience? What do you think, Harry?"

Harry's eyes were wide. "Er…"

The Doctor nodded. "Quite right. Difficult philosophical stuff. Also, in the face of it, not that important to you, since it never happened…" He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Er… Anyway, you woke up, to Voldemort's shock, and killed him in a duel, which I suspect also shocked him."

Harry stared at him. "That's a bit hard to believe."

"No," the Doctor countered, "this world is hard to believe. I mean, really, 'Harry Potter and the Soul Separator' would have been a rubbish title."

Harry pondered that for a moment. "I killed Voldemort?"

The Doctor flinched. "Yes."

"I'm glad I didn't have to here."

The Doctor nodded. "Yes, well… killing is always difficult. Even for a boy who has been through as much as you have. Especially then, perhaps."

For a moment, Harry looked as though he was going to ask how the Doctor knew that killing was difficult, before seeming to decide against it. Instead, he asked, "Did more people survive?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Most students fought."

"And Hermione's parents?"

"I don't know," he said regretfully. "I hope so. You have to remember, Harry, that I don't know your future, only what already happened in my universe. There are differences."

Harry nodded. "He's really gone?"

The Doctor smiled, trying to look reassuring. "Yes – we got to Crouch before he brought him back. Hopefully he won't be back again. At least, I really hope so. I have been wrong."

Harry was starting to look worried now. "He could come back?"

The Doctor scrambled for the right words, aware that he had perhaps said too much in an attempt to not be so comforting that it looked transparently false, and had somehow ended up going to the other end of the spectrum – that is to say, so badly comforting that it didn't look comforting at all. He really was bad at this.

"He shouldn't do, no."

"And you're sure?"

"Course I'm sure," the Doctor said automatically. "I'm just unbelievably bad at this."

"It's not like this happens every day," Harry pointed out.

"It does for me. Not the magic bit – that's new, I have to admit. Though it did happen once, but that was magic through words, and not as amazing as this. Although," he rambled, "it did almost bring an army through to one of Shakespeare's – you know of Shakespeare? Good – almost brought them through to one of his plays. But then Martha said 'Expelliarmus' and defeated them."

Harry stared at him, slightly confused. "How did 'Expelliarmus' stop an army?"

"It was a special 'Expelliarmus'."

There was a brief pause, as Harry evidently scrambled for a comment on a sentence which, from his point of view, would have seemed completely nonsensical.

"Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?"

"Are you going back? To your own universe, I mean? And what happened to that other Time King?"

"Lord," the Doctor corrected. "We didn't have kings."

"Right," Harry replied slightly impatiently. "But… what happens now?"

"Peace. Well, not straight away – there are still a lot of his supporters out there – but it will come. You'll have to work hard to achieve it, of course. And the press will be all over you, wanting to know what happened – so watch out for that Rita Skeeter. She'll probably end up telling the world that you defeated You-Know-Who with a giant stink bomb or something."

"There were stink bombs," Harry pointed out.

"Which is exactly why she'll claim it."

Harry snorted. "I hope not."

"And then there'll be adult life – exciting stuff. Bills, taxes, insurance… Clearly they're not the fun bits, but you need to think about them."

"I think I'll worry about the more important things first," Harry said wryly.

"Yes, quite right."

Harry, sensing that the conversation was winding down and that the Doctor was getting tired, stood up to leave, smiling slightly. "Thank you," he said again.

The Doctor grinned back. "You don't need to thank me – you were in good hands before I came."

Harry's smile slipped. "Yeah."

"You were," he repeated. "Dumbledore's a good man. He was just doing what he thought was best, and he was scared."

"Dumbledore never gets scared."

The Doctor shook his head. "Everyone gets scared."

Harry said nothing, but his nod showed that he was at least beginning to consider what the Doctor had been telling him. "Will we see you before you all go back?"

"I hope so," the Doctor said, grinning again.

Harry nodded and awkwardly took his leave, shutting the door softly behind him. The Doctor laid back on his pillows, staring at the door and contemplating, not for the first time, the world that he had found himself in.

He had always pictured himself coming to this universe, but in his imagination the walls between universes were either not broken down, or he did something amazingly clever to get through. It was always on his own terms. The idea that a wizard – albeit an insanely powerful one – had managed to simply punch a hole between universes and pluck him from the TARDIS was a worrying one. He levered himself slowly and carefully out of bed and set off in search of Snape, intent on asking the man how the Death Eaters had found him, and how they had brought him through.

It wouldn't do for another powerful wizard to get the same idea.