They resurrected him for little more than to foil the order of Skaro.
There would be no war today, but the undercurrent lurked. Everyone could feel it. The very sensation lingered in the corner of every mind, affecting everyone from the central cities outward to the provinces. Tensions had begun to rise and it was only a matter of time, now, until the species would realize what had been done to prevent them.
Someone once had been asked to step up and stop the development of the ruthless race before they could even come about, but he could only delay the inevitable. Lines already were drawn and the Time Lords knew that at any day, the truth could be found and the entirety of existence could come crashing down.
There was no war yet, and there would be no war today. Tensions could carry out in all their prideful and petty dealings, be it with lies or life. His was just another in the balance.
The denizens of Skaro had allowed him that much, perhaps in that last gesture of what optimists would call humanity, and realists call appeasement. They had passed on a message following his death, concerning where his remains were to be taken. The Daleks were not yet the Daleks entirely, and though mercy was fading from their vocabulary, diplomacy had survived until this point. So they could kill a criminal but what was done with him would be left to the people. Tensions could rise. No one could be guaranteed to win. No one wanted a war yet.
His final wish had been that the Doctor would take his remains back to Gallifrey. So when he did – unwittingly, taking not even the ashes but only the inkling – they had torn apart the TARDIS to get him.
When they found him it was nothing but a trace of mind and a hint of genetic strand that was not yet Time Lord. It took time and it took corruption, but the last wish was too interesting and the child too promising to let the ordinary laws bind him - and besides, the decision of Skaro could hold no power.
They would keep it a secret. The Master and his existence would be hidden and none outside a privileged circle would know about his fourteenth body.
He would be kept like an experiment, a curiosity. The resurrection went smoothly as it could go and the Master was Time Lord, again. He was to be confined. Studied, perhaps. An oddity along with the best of them.
And because the request had been so specific – the Doctor taking the Master home again – the suspicions of the Council had been piqued. The side excursion of domination of world and flesh held no interest to the hierarchy; one enemy asking the help of another was all the interest they needed.
Twenty one generations between the two of them and they were still children of Gallifrey, and were treated like such. It was like a time-out, a grounding – house arrest, they called it, for two disobedient if brilliant men. With the Doctor stripped of his TARDIS and the Master held to the spot, there was little to do except to make the two bickering children get along.
So they had put them together.
And so where everything else had gone wrong, some semblance of the Master’s genius still remained.
He had gotten his body. Gotten his lives back. And now he had even gotten the Doctor within his grasp, to do as he might please.
...
The last thing he remembers of his body is that it was coming apart at the cell.
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