Footprints on the Moon (1/1)
Title: FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON
Author:
catsfiction
Pairing/Characters: Ten, Martha
Beta:
aibhinn
Rating: G
Spoilers: Up to S3/10
Warnings: A few rude words
Disclaimer: The characters depicted herein are not owned by anyone other than the BBC and no infringement is intended.
Illustration by o4nbod
Summary: He was doing it again, Martha thought, as she came into the control room. She had to swallow down her irritation. He was lounging around in his smug-git-owns-the-place pose, with his feet up on the console and that expression on his face……
A rather dark little scene, to match the prompt. Inspired by the S3 outtakes from “Blink”, where the Doctor records his emergency message, although for the sake of continuity we have to assume he changed his suit at some point.
Challenge:
dwliterotica October mp3
Prompt: I Want You, by Elvis Costello
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark
It scares you witless
But in time you see things clear and stark
I want you
Go on and hurt me, then we’ll let it drop
I want you
I’m afraid I won’t know where to stop
I want you
I’m not ashamed to say I cried for you
I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do too
I want you
I want to hear (s)he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you
I want you
He was doing it again, Martha thought, as she came into the control room. She had to swallow down her irritation. He was lounging around in his smug-git-owns-the-place pose, with his feet up on the console and that expression on his face. The one that looked as if a bluebottle had landed on the end of his nose, and he was having an argument about life, the Universe and everything with it before he flicked it off.
“’Ello, Marfa Jones,” he bellowed, in his East End barrow-boy accent. This was not one of his plummy John Smith days, definitely not.
“Was I interrupting something?” she asked.
“Oh no.” He didn’t move from his position. He did own the place, of course, which made it somehow even worse. If he’d cocked his leg and weed on the console, he could hardly have made it more obvious.
She wondered if it annoyed the TARDIS as much as her. Or whether they were in it together. And what was he doing, anyway, all that time he spent blethering on to the screen when nobody was listening? Not some creepy video diary to Rose, she hoped. That would just about finish her off.
“You sounded like you doing some webcam-type thing,” she said.
“Emergency Protocol One,” he answered, his face and his tone of voice receding light-years from her. Not that he’d been close before. If he had been, he wouldn’t have greeted her like the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s “Oliver.”
He didn’t want to elaborate, but she knew how to deal with that. She didn’t sit down, she just folded her arms and waited. Anyway, she couldn’t sit down; there was only one seat, and he’d commandeered it.
The silence lengthened. Martha wondered whether to break it with some throwaway remark about oxygen masks being lowered from the ceiling. Then she remembered the last time something had been lowered from that ceiling and he’d put it on.
“Well, you never know,” he said at last.
“Never know what?”
“What’s round the corner, so to speak.”
Martha’s chin rose a little and her back stiffened. “You mean you actually have some kind of safety procedures on this thing? Could’ve fooled me.”
The imaginary bluebottle had left the building. His face hardened into a grim frown. “I might be a free agent, cruising around on the winds of time. But the people I travel with aren’t. They have people who care about whether they ever come back.”
“So?” Martha said, her brash tone wavering a little.
“One day, we might be in a situation where there’s no way out,” he said. “That’s when the Emergency Protocol kicks in. As long as you - or whoever….” he added, rapidly, “is safe in here, I can… activate it remotely.”
He stopped, looked away. His silence at that point spoke volumes.
“And?” she pressed.
He looked down and mumbled the next bit. “And the TARDIS takes you home.”
He said it like an established fact, not something anyone might have an opinion about. And, clearly, that was how he saw it.
“You send us home? Just like that? No consultation……nothing?”
He was really annoyed now, and it showed, though he didn’t shout. It had bypassed shouting in an eyeblink, and the air was somehow chillier. “There isn’t always time to consult, Martha Jones.” He made “consulting” sound like something between singing “The Wheels on the Bus” and saying you needed to go for a pee. “If consulting means you go home in a body bag, or not at all, I’d rather you were stroppy about it after the fact, quite frankly.”
It wasn’t the first time Martha had been spoken to like that. She was a medical student, after all. But it was the first time she’d scrubbed floors for someone, been called an insane servant, watched him fall in love and had to persuade him, with tears rolling down his cheeks, that innocent people would die if he didn’t let go of the illusion that he was human - and then, that person had spoken to her like that.
It hurt. It hurt so much that she’d have kicked him in the balls if she’d been able to reach them. Or at least, thrown a glass of cold water into that face. For once, she sympathised with her mother’s feelings as the older woman had slapped him.
“Not exactly a partnership between equals, is it, Doctor?” she observed.
“Nope.” He looked down into his lap. Discussion closed, if he had his way.
“You needed me,” she reminded him. “You trusted me with your life. I looked after you.”
“I know. That’s why I want you to be safe, if it’s in my power. It’s what I’d do for anyone travelling with me. Don’t go getting any ideas that you’re sp- that you’re different.”
He’d made her impotent, she thought, furiously. He’d reduced her to an adolescent sneaking pears onto his breakfast tray to get her own back at him. Special! He didn’t even treat her as if she was human.
He wasn’t human; that was his excuse for everything, and he’d made a right mess of it when he’d tried to become one. And she could forgive him for that. He couldn’t help being an alien. He couldn’t be expected to understand humans.
Except he had - once, at least. None of the excuses had applied to Rose. Had she mildly agreed when he’d spoken to her like that? When he’d tricked her into the TARDIS and then unilaterally shipped her back to Earth? Had he said goodbye? Properly? Had he thought about what her life would be like when he wasn’t in it any more?
Somehow, she knew that he had thought about those things. Maybe not willingly, but he had, or he wouldn’t be in the state he was in now. Rose Tyler had had him whole, but she had him broken, with a force field of unspoken pain and memory between them. She’d a right to know the story, at the very least.
“When was the last time you used that Emergency Protocol?” she asked, rearranging her features into a smile that wouldn’t fool him for a moment.
He pretended he had to think about that. “Ooh, couple of years ago?”
She nodded. “So, this is a drop-off-and-return arrangement, then?”
His eyebrows moved together and furrows, half angry and half puzzled, appeared between them. “Sorry, I’m not with you,” he admitted.
“You’ve still got the TARDIS,” she observed. “Comes back when you whistle, does she? Or is there a little escape pod tucked away somewhere?”
“Well, I can’t promise to find a moment to book you onto the nearest cruiser, can I?” he snapped. “It gets you out of the way, stops you being a liability and gives me one less thing to feel guilty about. That’s all you need to know. If you don’t like it, go home.”
Liability. Bloody hell. “Is that what I was in 1913?” she asked. “A liability?”
“No, of course not!” he retorted, jerking his head backward in frustration. “Stop fishing for compliments. You don’t need to. It happened, you kept your end of the bargain, I’m grateful and I said so at the time.” With a scuffle he put his legs back down, the heels of his trainers knocking dully against the leg of the seat. “Right, shall we go somewhere? Where do you fancy? Or were you serious about going home? Because, if you were….”
“So, she came back.”
He looked, just for a moment, as if someone had stripped his skin away from his face and revealed something so intimate and painful that she glanced away.
“The TARDIS, I mean,” she explained.
“Oh!” He was all bounce again. “Yeah, that’s right. She came back. Always does. Clever old girl. Knows exactly where to find me. She’s amazing, my TARDIS.”
“Yeah.” Martha honestly didn’t know what had got into her today, but it had been building ever since they got back from 1913 and it became clear that anything remotely resembling intimacy between them had vanished, never to return. And now she’d started, some nasty inner devil wouldn’t let her stop. “Planets visited, evil empires crushed, old girlfriends dumped. Good old TARDIS.”
She came back.
“What happened two years ago?” she asked. She’d probably earned herself a one-way ride home by now, so what had she to lose?
“I told you. She came back.”
She. Always she. How many times had he told her, indignantly, that the TARDIS wasn’t just a ship? A thing? What a lot of cowardice a simple pronoun could conceal.
“I don’t mean the TARDIS!” she cried, determined to get some kind of reaction out of him.
Silence.
“You taught her how to drive this thing.” Martha felt as if she’d been kicked in her lower abdomen. “And you sent her away. And she came back. Once, at least.”
The tension between them was almost unbearable now. He looked at her, almost unrecognisable as the cheeky Cockney of a few moments ago. When he spoke again, his voice was choked and she wished she hadn’t asked.
How had he done it? How had he managed to be such a git, and then claim the moral high ground back? And all without a word.
They stared each other out, a matador and a bull poised to charge. And then something broke in him, and he looked away.
“Twice,” he said. “I sent her to another universe. She still came back. Now, can we change the subject?”
No! she wanted to scream. Tell me everything. Tell me what’s wrong with you, for fuck’s sake. But he never would. He wouldn’t explain why Rose was good enough to drive his precious ship and she wasn’t. He wouldn’t explain why he hadn’t walked away from a woman who’d dared to resist being a liability, but opened up even more of his locked and bolted soul to her.
Not once, but twice.
“Will you promise me something?” she asked, when he’d had a few more minutes to get a hold of himself. Because, how ever much she hated him at this moment, she couldn’t take his façade away from him. What else did he have?
“Oh, you know me.” The Artful Dodger was back. “I’d do anyfink for you, Martha Jones. Paint my face bright blue? Why not? Timbuktu? And back again. No problem. Catching a kangaroo might be tricky. They have miniature ones on Alceteris 4, would that do?”
“Just this.” She waited until his little banter battery had run down. “However you remember me,” she went on, “I don’t want it to be as a liability.”
There were so many things he could have done at that moment. Said he was sorry, told her the truth - at least some of it. Hugged her. Oh, you should have seen that old planet. Those skies. That old Rose.
He needed it. Why would he rather just sit there, stone-faced, not admitting that she’d wounded him? She remembered that moment of truth back in New New York so clearly. The tacky plastic chair he’d pulled up. The singing in the distance. The sound of polythene sheeting flapping in the wind. The aching longing in his eyes. And the dream that, just for a moment, had seemed to float into her grasp, then out of her fingers once more, carried up far away from her by forces unknown.
The dream of being allowed to love him. She wouldn’t presume to be loved in return. That look on his face, that brief flash of communication…..and then, when he could have taken her home, when he’d said he was going to, no negotiations…….but he hadn’t.
Hope could be so cruel. Now, she thought it would have been easier if he’d said, straight out, “You’ll never replace her.”
Then she remembered he had. The trouble was, she hadn’t heard it. She’d been too busy saying she only went for humans.
And she called him a liar.
She felt like Jane Eyre. Little unassuming plain Jane, fading into the background, grateful for any scraps from the table of his attention while she burned with silent devotion to him. Grant me at least a new servitude.
Like a housemaid scrubbing floor tiles, she made herself small.
“If you send me away, give me something useful to do. Something you couldn’t do yourself.”
He nodded again, more slowly. “I promise, Martha Jones.”
And stop calling me Martha fucking Jones, she wanted to add. But didn’t.
There’d be no more concessions. She’d had her lot. He smiled his bright and shallow smile.
“So, fancy a trip?” he asked.
She noticed how often he started a conversation with that little word. And how rarely it had any real point to it. “What kind of trip?” she asked. “Good? Bad? Acid? Marmalade skies?”
“I could do 1969 if you like,” he offered. “Quite a year that was. Moon landing. One small step.”
He’d done it again. He’d pushed everything back down into the box and tied it up with a pretty pink bow, and she couldn’t resist.
“You could do that? Take me to the Moon? Would I have to wear a space suit? Oh my God, the bloody Moon!”
“Either a space suit or a hospital,” he quipped. “Space suit might be more convenient. And a bit of practice in zero G wouldn’t hurt. I know you’ve done low-G, but zero G is another matter. Don’t want you floating off into space, or anything like that.”
“There was this thing with the American flag, wasn’t there?” she recalled. “Why it was flapping when there’s no atmosphere on the Moon.”
He looked awkward and poked at his eye. “Oh, that was me. Took a thirty-first century leaf blower. We had a good laugh about that.” He jumped up. “Right! Come on, then. And don’t forget, put your best shoes on. Your footprints will be there for ever, you know. Just like Neil Armstrong’s.”
And who else’s?
Martha decided she’d look very carefully at that space suit he lent her. Particularly the pattern on the soles. It wouldn’t prove anything, of course. It could have been anybody - he’d travelled with so many people over the years. And it didn’t matter, anyway. What mattered was she was going to see the moon landing. Not what he’d done, why he’d laughed, and who he’d laughed with the last time around.
But she’d still look at the footprints very carefully. And if she didn’t work it out the first time, she’d keep asking to go back until she did.
Author:
catsfiction
Pairing/Characters: Ten, Martha
Beta:
aibhinn
Rating: G
Spoilers: Up to S3/10
Warnings: A few rude words
Disclaimer: The characters depicted herein are not owned by anyone other than the BBC and no infringement is intended.
Illustration by o4nbod
Summary: He was doing it again, Martha thought, as she came into the control room. She had to swallow down her irritation. He was lounging around in his smug-git-owns-the-place pose, with his feet up on the console and that expression on his face……
A rather dark little scene, to match the prompt. Inspired by the S3 outtakes from “Blink”, where the Doctor records his emergency message, although for the sake of continuity we have to assume he changed his suit at some point.
Challenge:
dwliterotica October mp3
Prompt: I Want You, by Elvis Costello
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark
It scares you witless
But in time you see things clear and stark
I want you
Go on and hurt me, then we’ll let it drop
I want you
I’m afraid I won’t know where to stop
I want you
I’m not ashamed to say I cried for you
I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do too
I want you
I want to hear (s)he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you
I want you
He was doing it again, Martha thought, as she came into the control room. She had to swallow down her irritation. He was lounging around in his smug-git-owns-the-place pose, with his feet up on the console and that expression on his face. The one that looked as if a bluebottle had landed on the end of his nose, and he was having an argument about life, the Universe and everything with it before he flicked it off.
“’Ello, Marfa Jones,” he bellowed, in his East End barrow-boy accent. This was not one of his plummy John Smith days, definitely not.
“Was I interrupting something?” she asked.
“Oh no.” He didn’t move from his position. He did own the place, of course, which made it somehow even worse. If he’d cocked his leg and weed on the console, he could hardly have made it more obvious.
She wondered if it annoyed the TARDIS as much as her. Or whether they were in it together. And what was he doing, anyway, all that time he spent blethering on to the screen when nobody was listening? Not some creepy video diary to Rose, she hoped. That would just about finish her off.
“You sounded like you doing some webcam-type thing,” she said.
“Emergency Protocol One,” he answered, his face and his tone of voice receding light-years from her. Not that he’d been close before. If he had been, he wouldn’t have greeted her like the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s “Oliver.”
He didn’t want to elaborate, but she knew how to deal with that. She didn’t sit down, she just folded her arms and waited. Anyway, she couldn’t sit down; there was only one seat, and he’d commandeered it.
The silence lengthened. Martha wondered whether to break it with some throwaway remark about oxygen masks being lowered from the ceiling. Then she remembered the last time something had been lowered from that ceiling and he’d put it on.
“Well, you never know,” he said at last.
“Never know what?”
“What’s round the corner, so to speak.”
Martha’s chin rose a little and her back stiffened. “You mean you actually have some kind of safety procedures on this thing? Could’ve fooled me.”
The imaginary bluebottle had left the building. His face hardened into a grim frown. “I might be a free agent, cruising around on the winds of time. But the people I travel with aren’t. They have people who care about whether they ever come back.”
“So?” Martha said, her brash tone wavering a little.
“One day, we might be in a situation where there’s no way out,” he said. “That’s when the Emergency Protocol kicks in. As long as you - or whoever….” he added, rapidly, “is safe in here, I can… activate it remotely.”
He stopped, looked away. His silence at that point spoke volumes.
“And?” she pressed.
He looked down and mumbled the next bit. “And the TARDIS takes you home.”
He said it like an established fact, not something anyone might have an opinion about. And, clearly, that was how he saw it.
“You send us home? Just like that? No consultation……nothing?”
He was really annoyed now, and it showed, though he didn’t shout. It had bypassed shouting in an eyeblink, and the air was somehow chillier. “There isn’t always time to consult, Martha Jones.” He made “consulting” sound like something between singing “The Wheels on the Bus” and saying you needed to go for a pee. “If consulting means you go home in a body bag, or not at all, I’d rather you were stroppy about it after the fact, quite frankly.”
It wasn’t the first time Martha had been spoken to like that. She was a medical student, after all. But it was the first time she’d scrubbed floors for someone, been called an insane servant, watched him fall in love and had to persuade him, with tears rolling down his cheeks, that innocent people would die if he didn’t let go of the illusion that he was human - and then, that person had spoken to her like that.
It hurt. It hurt so much that she’d have kicked him in the balls if she’d been able to reach them. Or at least, thrown a glass of cold water into that face. For once, she sympathised with her mother’s feelings as the older woman had slapped him.
“Not exactly a partnership between equals, is it, Doctor?” she observed.
“Nope.” He looked down into his lap. Discussion closed, if he had his way.
“You needed me,” she reminded him. “You trusted me with your life. I looked after you.”
“I know. That’s why I want you to be safe, if it’s in my power. It’s what I’d do for anyone travelling with me. Don’t go getting any ideas that you’re sp- that you’re different.”
He’d made her impotent, she thought, furiously. He’d reduced her to an adolescent sneaking pears onto his breakfast tray to get her own back at him. Special! He didn’t even treat her as if she was human.
He wasn’t human; that was his excuse for everything, and he’d made a right mess of it when he’d tried to become one. And she could forgive him for that. He couldn’t help being an alien. He couldn’t be expected to understand humans.
Except he had - once, at least. None of the excuses had applied to Rose. Had she mildly agreed when he’d spoken to her like that? When he’d tricked her into the TARDIS and then unilaterally shipped her back to Earth? Had he said goodbye? Properly? Had he thought about what her life would be like when he wasn’t in it any more?
Somehow, she knew that he had thought about those things. Maybe not willingly, but he had, or he wouldn’t be in the state he was in now. Rose Tyler had had him whole, but she had him broken, with a force field of unspoken pain and memory between them. She’d a right to know the story, at the very least.
“When was the last time you used that Emergency Protocol?” she asked, rearranging her features into a smile that wouldn’t fool him for a moment.
He pretended he had to think about that. “Ooh, couple of years ago?”
She nodded. “So, this is a drop-off-and-return arrangement, then?”
His eyebrows moved together and furrows, half angry and half puzzled, appeared between them. “Sorry, I’m not with you,” he admitted.
“You’ve still got the TARDIS,” she observed. “Comes back when you whistle, does she? Or is there a little escape pod tucked away somewhere?”
“Well, I can’t promise to find a moment to book you onto the nearest cruiser, can I?” he snapped. “It gets you out of the way, stops you being a liability and gives me one less thing to feel guilty about. That’s all you need to know. If you don’t like it, go home.”
Liability. Bloody hell. “Is that what I was in 1913?” she asked. “A liability?”
“No, of course not!” he retorted, jerking his head backward in frustration. “Stop fishing for compliments. You don’t need to. It happened, you kept your end of the bargain, I’m grateful and I said so at the time.” With a scuffle he put his legs back down, the heels of his trainers knocking dully against the leg of the seat. “Right, shall we go somewhere? Where do you fancy? Or were you serious about going home? Because, if you were….”
“So, she came back.”
He looked, just for a moment, as if someone had stripped his skin away from his face and revealed something so intimate and painful that she glanced away.
“The TARDIS, I mean,” she explained.
“Oh!” He was all bounce again. “Yeah, that’s right. She came back. Always does. Clever old girl. Knows exactly where to find me. She’s amazing, my TARDIS.”
“Yeah.” Martha honestly didn’t know what had got into her today, but it had been building ever since they got back from 1913 and it became clear that anything remotely resembling intimacy between them had vanished, never to return. And now she’d started, some nasty inner devil wouldn’t let her stop. “Planets visited, evil empires crushed, old girlfriends dumped. Good old TARDIS.”
She came back.
“What happened two years ago?” she asked. She’d probably earned herself a one-way ride home by now, so what had she to lose?
“I told you. She came back.”
She. Always she. How many times had he told her, indignantly, that the TARDIS wasn’t just a ship? A thing? What a lot of cowardice a simple pronoun could conceal.
“I don’t mean the TARDIS!” she cried, determined to get some kind of reaction out of him.
Silence.
“You taught her how to drive this thing.” Martha felt as if she’d been kicked in her lower abdomen. “And you sent her away. And she came back. Once, at least.”
The tension between them was almost unbearable now. He looked at her, almost unrecognisable as the cheeky Cockney of a few moments ago. When he spoke again, his voice was choked and she wished she hadn’t asked.
How had he done it? How had he managed to be such a git, and then claim the moral high ground back? And all without a word.
They stared each other out, a matador and a bull poised to charge. And then something broke in him, and he looked away.
“Twice,” he said. “I sent her to another universe. She still came back. Now, can we change the subject?”
No! she wanted to scream. Tell me everything. Tell me what’s wrong with you, for fuck’s sake. But he never would. He wouldn’t explain why Rose was good enough to drive his precious ship and she wasn’t. He wouldn’t explain why he hadn’t walked away from a woman who’d dared to resist being a liability, but opened up even more of his locked and bolted soul to her.
Not once, but twice.
“Will you promise me something?” she asked, when he’d had a few more minutes to get a hold of himself. Because, how ever much she hated him at this moment, she couldn’t take his façade away from him. What else did he have?
“Oh, you know me.” The Artful Dodger was back. “I’d do anyfink for you, Martha Jones. Paint my face bright blue? Why not? Timbuktu? And back again. No problem. Catching a kangaroo might be tricky. They have miniature ones on Alceteris 4, would that do?”
“Just this.” She waited until his little banter battery had run down. “However you remember me,” she went on, “I don’t want it to be as a liability.”
There were so many things he could have done at that moment. Said he was sorry, told her the truth - at least some of it. Hugged her. Oh, you should have seen that old planet. Those skies. That old Rose.
He needed it. Why would he rather just sit there, stone-faced, not admitting that she’d wounded him? She remembered that moment of truth back in New New York so clearly. The tacky plastic chair he’d pulled up. The singing in the distance. The sound of polythene sheeting flapping in the wind. The aching longing in his eyes. And the dream that, just for a moment, had seemed to float into her grasp, then out of her fingers once more, carried up far away from her by forces unknown.
The dream of being allowed to love him. She wouldn’t presume to be loved in return. That look on his face, that brief flash of communication…..and then, when he could have taken her home, when he’d said he was going to, no negotiations…….but he hadn’t.
Hope could be so cruel. Now, she thought it would have been easier if he’d said, straight out, “You’ll never replace her.”
Then she remembered he had. The trouble was, she hadn’t heard it. She’d been too busy saying she only went for humans.
And she called him a liar.
She felt like Jane Eyre. Little unassuming plain Jane, fading into the background, grateful for any scraps from the table of his attention while she burned with silent devotion to him. Grant me at least a new servitude.
Like a housemaid scrubbing floor tiles, she made herself small.
“If you send me away, give me something useful to do. Something you couldn’t do yourself.”
He nodded again, more slowly. “I promise, Martha Jones.”
And stop calling me Martha fucking Jones, she wanted to add. But didn’t.
There’d be no more concessions. She’d had her lot. He smiled his bright and shallow smile.
“So, fancy a trip?” he asked.
She noticed how often he started a conversation with that little word. And how rarely it had any real point to it. “What kind of trip?” she asked. “Good? Bad? Acid? Marmalade skies?”
“I could do 1969 if you like,” he offered. “Quite a year that was. Moon landing. One small step.”
He’d done it again. He’d pushed everything back down into the box and tied it up with a pretty pink bow, and she couldn’t resist.
“You could do that? Take me to the Moon? Would I have to wear a space suit? Oh my God, the bloody Moon!”
“Either a space suit or a hospital,” he quipped. “Space suit might be more convenient. And a bit of practice in zero G wouldn’t hurt. I know you’ve done low-G, but zero G is another matter. Don’t want you floating off into space, or anything like that.”
“There was this thing with the American flag, wasn’t there?” she recalled. “Why it was flapping when there’s no atmosphere on the Moon.”
He looked awkward and poked at his eye. “Oh, that was me. Took a thirty-first century leaf blower. We had a good laugh about that.” He jumped up. “Right! Come on, then. And don’t forget, put your best shoes on. Your footprints will be there for ever, you know. Just like Neil Armstrong’s.”
And who else’s?
Martha decided she’d look very carefully at that space suit he lent her. Particularly the pattern on the soles. It wouldn’t prove anything, of course. It could have been anybody - he’d travelled with so many people over the years. And it didn’t matter, anyway. What mattered was she was going to see the moon landing. Not what he’d done, why he’d laughed, and who he’d laughed with the last time around.
But she’d still look at the footprints very carefully. And if she didn’t work it out the first time, she’d keep asking to go back until she did.