Shared Life Energy

In fiction, Death Is Cheap is often in effect. However, so too is cheating death.

When a character is mortally wounded and there is no time for life-saving medical procedures, or those procedures won't work, another character, either by supernatural means or by Magic from Technology, is able to spare the first person by sharing their life energy with them. Can be facilitated by Liquid Assets. Will often incorporate Cast from Hit Points. In Video Games, this may be represented with a Shared Life-Meter.

Fantastic equivalent to the more mundane Blood Transfusion Plot and various forms of organ transplant tropes.

These two characters will now be bound for life, and as such, it might be considered a form of Rescue Romance, as a relationship between the characters often follows.

Contrast with I Hate You, Vampire Dad for situations where a character probably didn't want or ask to be transformed by these sorts of means.

Compare the Sacrificial Revival Spell, which resurrects someone at the cost of the spellcaster's death.

It can be related to Synchronization, but not necessarily, as the characters who do this need not feel one another's physical ailments or injuries.

As this is a death trope, spoilers will be unmarked.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Z: After Frieza accidentally slices himself in half in an attempt to kill Super Saiyan Son Goku, he begs for help. While disgusted, Goku transfers a portion of his energy to him, enough for him to theoretically flee the planet Namek and get proper medical attention. When Frieza instead attacks him in a final spiteful attempt to take him down, Goku blasts him again, though he even survived that long enough to be rebuilt.
• Engaged to the Unidentified: Kobeni was saved when Hakuya gave her half of his life energy. It culminates in a Perfectly Arranged Marriage.
• A variation occurs in Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. Hazumu is crushed by an alien spaceship and resurrected as a girl. The story goes on to say that as a male, Hazumu had run out his "fate gene" and would have died at that time of some cause or another, and that restoring him as a girl gave him a little more time. Hazumu could extend her new life by finding a "donor", basically, falling in love and linking her destiny with someone else, in this case Tomari.
• Tenchi Muyo!: A non-romantic example. A kitten that lived around Masaki Shrine was gravely wounded, and Ryoko lent it life energy to spare it, because Tenchi was fond of it. After Tenchi broke the seal that restrained her, Ryoko took back the life energy to help restore herself. However, she was able to incorporate the kitten's DNA into Ryo-Ohki, which is where the Cat part of our Cabbit comes from.
• UFO Princess Valkyrie: When Valkyrie crashes on Earth, she accidentally kills Kazuto. She gives him half of her life energy to restore him, but this has the unintended consequence of de-aging her.
• Vermeil in Gold: When Vermeil accidentally stabs Alto through his heart, she's forced to link her own heart to his via magic to keep him alive. The catch is, should either of them die, the other will die as well. Alto is naturally very upset about this, but Vermeil doesn't care, since if Alto dies she wouldn't have any reason to live anyway.
• YuYu Hakusho: Happens to Yusuke during the Saint Beast Arc. While Yusuke was able to defeat the Beasts' leader Suzaku, it used up all of his life energy to do so. Fortunately Kuwabara was able to transfer some of his own life energy, keeping Yusuke from another stint as a ghost.

Films — Live-Action

• The whole point of the first Dragonheart movie is that Draco gave half his heart to Prince Einon to save his life. Now when one dies the other will as well.
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle: While they're inside the Jumanji game world, Bethany saves Alex from the brink of death by transferring one of her Video-Game Lives to him through CPR.
• In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Rey is able to heal people by transferring some of the force energy within her into them, though the force is usually established as a Background Magic Field, and not a form of Mana contained within oneself. She uses it to heal a wounded and angry snake monster and later Kylo Ren after defeating him in a lightsaber duel who in return uses the last of his life energy to save her after Palpatine almost kills her.

Literature

• The Bone Maker: The protagonist discovers a spell to bring people Back from the Dead by transferring years of the spellcaster's own life. She happily splits her remaining lifespan with her dead husband, but they decide No Man Should Have This Power when they learn that the Big Bad can modify the spell to steal other people's lifespans instead.
• The Fire's Stone: Thanks to his Synchronization with Aaron, Darvish survives a brutal detox from alcohol by leaning on Aaron's life force and draining him near to the point of coma himself.
• Reaper Man shows that when Death's Hourglass runs out for someone, another person who knows how can keep them Living on Borrowed Time from their own hourglass. While he's stuck in human form, Death himself donates his lifespan to a dying girl, and Miss Flitworth gives him back a few crucial moments in the climax.
• In the final book of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Nicholas has less than one day left to live before the elixir of life runs out for him, due to him using magic that's Cast from Lifespan. His wife Perenelle has two days, but gives up one so they can be Together in Death.
• Shades of Magic: Kell's desperate attempt to revive his brother Rhy triggers a nearby Amplifier Artifact, permanently binding Rhy's life force to Kell's. It doesn't affect Kell's life, but Rhy can only live while Kell lives, and can't die until Kell does.
• In The Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk, Tristan binds his life force to Miles's to save Miles's life at the end of the book—and since Tristan is basically an immortal god, Miles is likely to live for a long time. As a bonus, Tristan says its the equivalent of marriage in his society.
• Bazil Broketail: Lessis is partially revived from near death in the first book by a group of rats sharing their life force with her, along with her friend Ecator sacrificing himself and a great spell from Lagdalen.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • The episode "The Quality of Mercy" depicts a de-licensed doctor using an alien machine to donate some of her own life energy to heal others (she's suffering from a chronic disease that will soon kill her anyway). She ends up being confronted with a serial killer who threatens the life of her and her daughter, and while he demands she heal him with the machine, the former doctor instead drains the serial killer, curing herself of her chronic condition in the process. This episode establishes that the machine was designed as a means of capital punishment, where the life-energy of the convicted criminal is used to heal those in poor health. As the machine is dangerous in the wrong hands, she is forced to turn it over to the authorities on Babylon 5.
  • In "Revelations", Dr. Franklin and Sheridan, via the same alien machine, used some of their life-energy to revive Garibaldi, who had been on the edge of dying since the end of the first season after being shot in the back. Before his own use of the machine, Marcus accesses Franklin's logs surrounding the incident, and Franklin states that even this brief and controlled usage of the machine was too dangerous to the donor(s) to use in the future.
  • Finally, in "Endgame", Marcus Cole uses the machine to transfer his life-energy to save his beloved Susan Ivanova when she is mortally wounded. He is drained to the point of death in the process, and gets stored as a Human Popsicle until human science can replenish him without killing someone else.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Let's Kill Hitler", River Song dumps almost all of her Regeneration Energy into The Doctor to save him from the poison that she herself administered after undergoing a Heel–Face Turn (Timey-Wimey Ball is in effect, because the audience has always known River as a good person, but she and the Doctor keep meeting in the wrong order, and this is where she first becomes River Song).
  • In "The Angels Take Manhattan", The Doctor does a downplayed version, giving River a bit of his own Regeneration Energy to restore her broken wrist.
  • In the two-parter "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar", Davros tricks the Doctor into giving him some of his Regeneration Energy, knowing the Doctor would show mercy to a dying old man, and Davros intends to use that to give the Daleks the ability to Regenerate. As it turns out, Davros was Out-Gambitted, as The Doctor already suspected the plan, and knew it would also transfer to the sludge of dying Daleks in the sewers of Skaro, causing them to rise up and try to choke out their living Dalek brethren.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: The magic bond between a mage and their Familiar has the side effect of prolonging the familiar's natural lifespan to match the mage's if it would otherwise be shorter — a very useful perk, since Wizards Live Longer and most familiars are small animals. If a familiar dies of old age, the mage had better get their affairs in order.

Video Games

• In Granblue Fantasy, at the beginning of the story the player character is fatally wounded protecting Lyria. Out of a desperate attempt to save them, Lyria shares her life force with them, restoring them to life but binding their lives together. The Rescue Romance aspect is sometimes hinted at: while Lyria is The Ingenue she sometimes expresses discomfort when someone else shows romantic interest in the player character. In an example of Gameplay and Story Integration, when Lyria was introduced as a playable character a unique mechanic is that if either she or the player character are knocked out, the other will be knocked out as well.

Visual Novels

• In Tsukihime, this turns out to be the reason behind Akiha Tohno's poor health: as a child, her biological brother SHIKI succumbed to ancestral insanity while playing with their adoptive brother Shiki and fatally stabbed him. In the last moment, Akiha transferred half of her life force to Shiki, keeping him alive at the cost of poor health and an even greater risk of succumbing to insanity herself.

Webcomics

• Darken: When Mink is injured beyond the power of normal healing magic to save, Gort agrees to a ritual that permanently Synchronizes them, so that any harm either of them suffers is divided between them. His allies are more surprised that he'd ever suffer on someone else's behalf.

Western Animation

• The Halloween Tree: Tom Skellington, and in turn all of Pipkin's friends, offer Moundshroud one year of their lives in exchange for saving Pipkin from the grave due to his appendicitis. Moundshroud cautions them about it, saying they may not miss it right away, but when he comes to collect, they might regret it. He does agree to the deal, though.
• X-Men: The Animated Series: At the tail end of the series' version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, Jean Grey dies after having used a Shi'ar laser cannon to perform a Heroic Sacrifice and stop the Phoenix from going wild. It's sanity restored, the Phoenix claims it can use it's powers to transfer life energy back into Jean and revive her. Of course the X-Men all volunteer, even as though such an action will kill them. Phoenix says that the donation of life need not come from only one, and that a smaller amount from each will be enough to bring Jean back, but each of the donors' own lives will be diminished by that amount as well.

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