There had been a moment—a very long overdue moment. His chest felt heavy, his throat felt dry, and his vision was blurred by the bizarre presence of tears.

He felt sad. Why should he feel sad? He was frustrated, yes. Angry. The pounding in his ears that had plagued him for centuries had been placed there intentionally. His intelligence had been insulted by labelling him a simple pawn of Rassilon. He was furious, of course!

But why was he sad?

Why was he not fishing through his internal bag of tricks for a way out? Why was he not taking this silence as an opportunity to persuade the Doctor again? Why was it that all he could do was stare down the barrel of the gun, into the brown eyes behind it, and do nothing?

When the Doctor first pointed the gun at him, he was only mildly surprised. He argued, blamed Rassilon, followed the Doctor's thinking and tried to manipulate it. He thought he had won when the gun's barrel suddenly swung back the other way. They both knew, deep down, that the Doctor would never kill him.

But when he found the gun pointing at himself again, it felt as though he simply deflated. The Doctor's eyes were full of fear and emotion, which told him that maybe the moment had come. Maybe he had finally done enough to push the Doctor over the edge and make him pull the trigger.

It was in that moment—in a singular second—when a sudden rush of memory came to him. He supposed it was exactly what the Doctor had tried to bring out in him so long ago, when he was dying.

"You and me, all the things we've done..."

Once upon a time, they had been like brothers. Long before all of this, when life was so much simpler, they had loved each other. Even once they had gone their separate ways and chosen their own paths, there had laid a small but lingering connection. The Master had always viewed it all as a game, and the Doctor was always prepared to give him another chance.

Despite everything, he had never thought that the Doctor would ever choose to kill him.

It was an odd feeling for him. When his own wife shot him dead in his past life, he had felt nothing more than surprised amusement in regard to her actions. But here, now, the Doctor's finger set firmly on the trigger, he felt what he could only imagine was heartbreak. The Doctor had no love left for him anymore.

"Get out of the way."

It took a moment for the idea to take hold in the state of confusion he was in. He had been waiting for the familiar bang and thump to the chest. But the sense of it crept through after a moment, and he couldn't help but smile. If there was anything he could trust the Doctor to do, it was to find a way to avoid bloodshed. He would usually call him a coward, as he had moments before when he first faced the gun, but the sense of relief washing over him was simply too powerful to care.

With a blinding light, the white-point star was shattered. He was unable to get back to his feet right away; his head was suddenly empty. The drumming had stopped! For a long moment, his world was nothing but a beautiful silence—a mere moment of the purest peace he'd ever known.

He was still gathering himself when he heard Rassilon scream, "You'll die with me, Doctor!"

"I know."

And the Doctor stood there, simply waiting for death as though that was exactly what he has been expecting all along. If there was anything else you could trust him to do, it was to unnecessarily sacrifice himself.

There were too many unfamiliar sensations for him to sort anything out. He had no time to think or plan. His mind was too distracted searching for the missing sound to help him now. All he knew was that he couldn't let the Doctor die now, and all he could do was act.

"Get out of the way."

He saw the shock on the Doctor's face, but this was not the time to tease him. Rassilon didn't even put up a decent fight. The electricity coursed through his body without resistance, while the Master felt his own body beginning to fail. The link was beginning to fade with its hosts, the portal beginning to shrink. He kept attacking, trying to finish the job, but he felt the power of the collapsing portal trying to drag him in.

The light was blinding, the pull of the gravity immense. He watched Rassilon fall and grabbed desperately at the pieces of furniture nearest him, trying to fight the pull. The first desk he grabbed was too light, and simply shot towards the portal, losing him precious space. He quickly sought another anchor and grasping at one of the enormous computers, holding on so tightly he thought his fingers might break.

Time seemed to slow then. He watched his fingers turning white with strain, watched how the sleeves of his shirt whipped violently about, trying to reach the portal. He didn't want to look at it, didn't want to know how close he was to being pulled in. He turned instead to the Doctor, and was surprised to see him standing perfectly fine—apparently the portal didn't want to take him with it. He was trying to protect his eyes from the light, obviously blinded by it.

What would happen to them now?

The pull suddenly increased ten-fold and his fingers were ripped free. He hurled through the air towards the closing portal, stretching out all his limbs, hoping to catch on to something. His leg struck another computer, twisting with a distinct snapping sound and slamming him into the side of the machine. He had no time to be shocked or to feel the pain, he simply held on.

The air whistled as it tried to rush through the shrinking gap, and then suddenly it was closed and a shockwave rang through the room as the environment stabilized. The blast sent him crashing back to the floor, and a tumbling sound off to the side told him that the Doctor had been thrown off his feet.

As he laid on the floor, trying to figure out which way was up, he thought that the drumming had returned. He listened to the furious thumping in disappointment until he noticed that the beat was beginning to slow, and realized that it was simply his own heartbeat reacting to all the commotion.

Glass scraped on the floor and a whisper floated across the room. "I'm alive."

The surprise in the Doctor's voice amused him to no end. Why was it that his plans never seemed to involve getting out in one piece? If there were humans involved then the humans must be saved, obviously, but the Doctor's own survival always seemed to be optional to him. Some would call it heroic, but the Master simply called it stupid.

"I'm alive!"

The Doctor's strange whimpering laughter seemed to echo through the air. It was so quiet. He could hear his own lungs slowly breathing in and out. If he listened hard enough, he was certain he could hear the blood travelling through his body.

He opened his mouth to say something—some cocky remark to annoy the Doctor in a clearly vulnerable moment—but a dreadful sound stopped him. Four knocks. Slow and precise. It was not in his head, of that he was certain, and one glance at the Doctor confirmed it.

He watched the Doctor's face set in a look of grim defeat as he slowly pulled himself to his feet, still unaware of the Master's presence, and turned to face the source of the sound. Some old man was stood in the radiation chamber, smiling awkwardly and gently knocking on the glass.

The two conversed briefly and the Master only half listened. Time seemed to distort as the pain in his leg was starting to make itself known, along with some other injuries he wasn't even aware that he had obtained. He focused on trying to stand while the Doctor threw some kind of temper tantrum on the other side of the room, knocking things over and shouting. Always so dramatic.

He knew exactly what he was thinking, and knew that the Doctor was once again going to fling himself into the arms of death for no reason other than that he thought he should. He'd gone quiet now. He couldn't see the Doctor's face, but could see that the old man's was a bizarre concoction of tear-soaked horror.

"No, don't! Please!" The old man cried as the Doctor stepped towards the radiation chamber and reached for the door handle.

"Wilfred, it would be my honour."

If he was going to save the fool, he had best do it now.

"You know," he called out, just as the Doctor's foot passed through the doorway. "You could always use the failsafe."

The Doctor's head whipped around so fast, it was surprising that he didn't break his neck, and then very hurriedly wiped his eyes. The Master chuckled, quite pleased with the reaction, and tried to steady himself on his feet. The leg was definitely broken. It throbbed painfully as he moved and hung at a slight angle once he was upright. He decided to clench his jaw, hold onto the computer console for balance, and try his best to look respectable. He fully intended to mock the Doctor for his shows of the weakness today, and he certainly didn't want to give him any ammunition to return.

"I don't know much about these machines, Doctor, but a failsafe sounds like a much better plan to me." The old man shuffled his weight from one foot to the other nervously.

"What do you mean, a failsafe?" The Doctor demanded, immediate suspicion obvious in his voice.

"My plan was to make a world full of me. Why would I leave a precious person, such as myself, hopelessly trapped in a radiation chamber? Do you really think I would leave me in there without a failsafe? Of course I added one."

"That makes sense, doesn't it?" The old man said hopefully.

But the Doctor's eyes, still a little red from his earlier outburst, pierced him with distrust and he asked very simply: "Why?"

The Master couldn't blame him. It had been a rather unusual day for the both of them, and the Master had managed to stir up quite a bit of trouble. He was, in fact, telling the truth, but he couldn't expect the Doctor to take his word on something quite so important as this.

"You and me," he answered quietly, choosing this moment to make his injury known by making a tiny movement forward, allowing the Doctor to see him wince and favour his good leg. "We're the only ones left." Blood on his leg would make it look better. Was there blood? He stole a quick glance downward to check and saw that there wasn't, but there was blood on his shirt so he must have been bleeding somewhere. The Doctor couldn't ignore a wounded man.

The Doctor's eyes scanned him quickly, his mouth slightly open as he thought. "We just made sure of that," he murmured. "What's the goal here, Master?"

He staggered forward a couple of steps, emphasizing his broken leg. "If you go in there you will, at the very least, need to regenerate which will incapacitate you for several hours, maybe even days. And..." he glanced down at his leg again and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, which then came away covered in blood. Excellent. "It would seem I need a doctor."

"Right..."

The old man looked back and forth between the two of them, clearly growing more stressed. "I'm the one in the box, and I say we listen to him, Doctor."

"Wilfred—"

"No. If it goes wrong, then I'm gone, won't hurt the world as much as losing you," the old man (Wilfred, apparently) persisted. "And if it works, then everyone walks away happy. So I'm making the choice, and I'm choosing to try for the best. Now, please sir, tell me what I need to do . . . and if it's not too much trouble, with everyone alive at the end, yeah?"

The Master smiled and did a bow with a little flourish, just barely managing to maintain his balance for a moment of showing off. The process was simple enough—a few buttons followed by the code that routed through a separate system—and the door of the empty chamber pulled shut and sealed. The other door opened, producing a perfectly alive and healthy Wilfred, and the empty chamber flooded harmlessly with radiation. If the Doctor had had a little more control over himself, instead being in such an obviously over-emotional state, he might have figured that out on his own.

The old man shook his hand happily and thanked him, while the Doctor continued to look at him with a mixture of distrust and confusion. He couldn't imagine why he was still looking at him that way, given that he had just saved his life twice now in about ten minutes. But there wasn't much time to wonder; his body was failing again and a fierce dizziness overtook him. With his injured leg unable to compensate for any wobble, he slid rather ungracefully to the floor.

He heard the old man exclaim "oh dear!" and suddenly felt the Doctor's hand on his forehead—a Time Lord's hands are a comfortingly cool temperature when you're not feeling well.

"Look at me, look at me," the Doctor's voice sounded odd and distant. "Do you know why the resurrection wasn't completed? What happened?"

So many questions all the time, his old friend and enemy never knew how to simply relax. Who wanted to talk about science when it was so obviously the perfect time to sleep? Sleep sounded wonderful. His head rolled to one side and he spotted the old man staring down at him with his brows knitted together.

"Hello, Wilfred," he chirped, smiling. "I'm Harry Saxon. Did you vote for me?"

"I don't think I should've," he answered with a nervous chuckle.

A sharp slap to the face brought him rudely back to himself.

"What happened during the ritual?" the Doctor barked.

"A chemical counteragent!" he shouted back angrily, but the shout wasted any energy he had suddenly regained and his head flopped back onto the floor. "It was Lucy. My sweet Lucy."

As the darkness enveloped him, he remembered that Lucy had loved him once. Lucy was dead.

When he woke, the Doctor was still working on him. He was unsure of whether he was inside the TARDIS or not, the room was unfamiliar to him, but was a clean surgical white with plenty of lighting. No windows. Only one door. And oh, so strangely silent.

He glanced down, trying to move as little as possible so that the Doctor didn't know he was awake yet. A small metal bowl sat next to him with a humble amount of blood and a few shards of glass in it. The Doctor worked intently, his glasses up on his forehead, stitching up a gash in the Master's thigh. Of course he was using stitches, and of course there was a cast on his leg—the Doctor was using the old-fashioned stuff instead of the quick fixes. Slowing the healing process, keeping the Master in a weak position for as long as possible. The Doctor intended to keep him.

It was then that he noticed the heart monitor. The Doctor had placed it carefully just opposite where he sat, a place where he could always see it in some part of his vision. He had turned the sound off on the machine, which would make more of a bother to keep track of as his eyes had to flick up every few seconds to check it. What a strange thing to do.

Another look showed him that the Doctor had not yet tended to himself. The wounds on his face had been wiped clean but were still exposed to the air, a good bruise had grown on one cheek, and his lip was swollen to an impressive size. He looked tired.

Next his eyes travelled to his arm. Three separate drips had been attached to his left arm in different places—one was a clear fluid, presumably a simple saline solution, one was a slight yellow tint, and the third was a watery pink. His right forearm had been bandaged in some places and a butterfly needle had been left in, carefully taped down.

Before he knew what he was doing, his dry lips parted and spoke. "Can you hear them?"

The Doctor's eyes shot to him, then to the heart monitor, and back again. "No. I can't."

"Neither can I."

The Doctor stared at him for a very long moment, his eyes unreadable and his mind clearly at work. "I'm happy for you," he said quietly. His eyes turned back to his work and he continued, staying silent for several minutes before uttering, "Does that mean you can stop now?"

"If I say yes, will you fix me properly?"

"Not a chance." There was no humour in his voice.

"Where's your friend?"

"I took him home."

"Are we in the TARDIS then?"

"Stop talking," the Doctor refused to look up at him. "I'm trying to work."

"Why didn't you think of a failsafe?"

"I said stop talking."

"And when Rassilon was going to kill you—why didn't you, I don't know, step out of the way? Shoot him maybe? You had a gun."

"Do you want to do this yourself?" the Doctor barked angrily. "You're still bleeding, you know."

"Only because you're using primitive methods instead of some proper medical equipment."

"Maybe I would use some proper equipment if I could trust you for five seconds!"

Fair enough.

"I suppose you've had a rough day." he sighed, and earned a smile in return. A rather grim looking smile, but a smile none the less, accompanied with a quiet scoff.

"More like a rough two months."

The Doctor was a tough nut to crack but not impossible. "What did you do two months ago, fail to get yourself killed again?"

"Yes, actually," The Doctor shook his head and finished the last stitch. "I got shot by a Dalek."

"Shot by a Dalek and didn't regenerate?"

"Look, would you just shut it?"

"I just want to know how you managed it." He really was curious about that—Dalek weapons were no joke.

"It's none of your business," the Doctor snipped the thread and forcefully tossed his tools aside. "Look, we are not friends," he growled, slapping a bandage over the stitches and taping it down. "Not now. Right now, you are my patient and that's as far as it goes."

The Master narrowed his eyes, trying to steal a glance into the Doctor's mind. "And when I'm healed?"

The Doctor finished applying the bandage and stood up. "Don't pull your IVs out again, don't touch your stitches, and don't try to get up." And with that, he left the room.