The doctor strolled back onto the TARDIS feeling pretty pleased with himself, he had averted a crisis on 28th century earth and saved a woman who had been very grateful for his assistance. He threw his long coat onto the hanger near the door and started up the engines, leaving the TARDIS cruising in the vortex while he went to see how the Master was doing. He felt almost felt guilty for leaving the man here while he had been off saving the world until he remembered that that same man had been a pain in his backside for the last week, maybe it would show the Master that the entire universe did not revolve around him. He touched the console and moved to unlock the room the TARDIS was holding the other timelord in when he saw how she had kept him from escaping it, his hands flew over the controls while he reversed what she had done so it was safe to walk through the door and ran away down the half dozen hallways and staircases it took to reach his destination.

In his dark little room the Master waited, really there was nothing to do but wait for the Doctor to come back. He had no idea how long whatever the other man gave him had knocked him out for so he didn't really have any sense of how long he had been trapped here and in his irritation he had smashed the room's only lamp soon after waking so for a lack of anything to do he curled up on the bed waiting with only the drums and his increasingly dry throat to tell him the passing of time. Exhausted but resisting the pull of his heavy eyelids fearing that the Doctor would come back, find him sleeping and leave him here again.

When eventually his stomach grew hungry enough to serve as a distraction and quieten the drums the hours seemed to pass even slower until finally the door opened and the Master was blinded but managed to make out the silhouette of the Doctor in the doorway. The other man was breathing heavily and tried the light switch only to find the evidence of the master's frustration and shook his head, reaching into his bigger on the inside trouser pockets he pulled out something the size of a marble, shook it roughly and three it into the air where it hovered and lit the room in a slightly blue-white light. His eyes were taking longer than usual to adjust to the new light so the Master rolled over on the bed and closed them, suddenly tireder than he had felt a few minutes earlier he decided that moving had not been his smartest move and he could barely do more than fall almost entirely face down after rolling a little too enthusiastically. From across the room the Doctor frowned – it was true that it could be another of the Master's tricks but still moved to help the other man into a seated position, what he had seen on the console screen having left him feeling too guilty not to check.. Their eyes made contact for a moment before the master's became glazed and he slumped back down again. The doctor caught him and took a good look at the man in his arms. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry and cracked and he was so pale that he was almost grey. Cursing the TARDIS for the first time in a very long time he scooped up the man on the bed with some difficulty and carried him to the kitchen, when he had seen that the TARDIS was keeping the Master's room out of sync to keep the other man from crossing the doorway he hadn't known how out of sync. He would have to do some calculations when he got back upstairs but he guessed that at least three hours passed in the Master's room for every one that passed outside of it and he had left the master in there for what couldn't have been less than a day. The man's condition was hardly surprising and as soon as he got him into the kitchen he put him down on a sofa which sat against the longer wall and brought him glass after glass of water and some of the leftover soup martha had made one time, one advantage of a TARDIS fridge was that things never went bad, he still had some scones of Sarah Jane's he was saving for a special occasion. Eventually the Master seemed to be done, The doctor took a blanket from the back of the sofa and watched as the man he saw supposed to be caring for and had half starved to death fell into a deep sleep, all but passing out now he didn't have to worry about missing the doctor or being locked in again.

In the weeks that followed man who had always been so loud was now silent, the doctor had half expected that once he had rested and eaten some more that the Master would scream at him for leaving him for so long but he hadn't even mentioned it, he hadn't mentioned much at all really besides the odd 'hmm' which the Doctor was having to accept as the man's answer for most questions. He had moved him from the room downstairs to a nicer one a few doors from the Doctor's own room, it was decorated in red, had a large open fireplace and floor to ceiling bookcases on one wall. The master didn't seem to care about the other furnishings but went straight for the large bed so after showing him the room the Doctor backed away to leave the man in peace. The first day the Doctor had left the door ajar behind him. It would mean that he would have to keep an eye on the Master to make sure that he didn't get up to any mischief but he didn't think that the other man would react well to being locked in again tonight. The Doctor did lock the door when he passed on his way to bed but by this point the Master was fast asleep.

After that day the TARDIS was much quieter, the Master no longer tried to kill the Doctor at every opportunity and every morning when the Doctor unlocked the door to the other man's bedroom he was showered, dressed and ready to spend the day with the doctor in the console room. Most of the time he just sat on the floor fiddling with different pieces of technology which would have the Doctor worried if he wasn't entirely sure that they were harmless, from what he could tell, the Master was building a type of transducer which converted time energy into sound, while the TARDIS flew through the vortex it would produce music. The project was frivolous but as long as it gave the Master something to do the doctor wasn't going to complain, also it would be nice to hear the vortex again, at the academy their class had built similar devices but the doctor had not been particularly interested in that particular subject so after Gallifrey burned so much of his people's technology was lost to him forever. The Master had been much more committed to his studies, almost to the point of being annoying and he still took pleasure in correcting the Doctor's Gallifreyan grammar, it was one of the few times the man still spoke and the Doctor took to infuriating the Master's somewhat pedantic nature by deliberately butchering his own language just to get a reaction out of his old friend. He always earned himself a scowl with this and when the Master didn't think he was looking, half a smirk so perhaps there was hope afterall.