whofic: and now we're all alone
Fandom: Doctor Who
Title: And Now We’re All Alone
Rated: PG
Characters: Martha, Jack
Notes: takes place sometime after Sound of Drums, but no real spoilers after Utopia. I was vague, because that’s not what was important in this fic. What was important is what Martha and Jack share, and that's the Doctor. Title from lyrics from Placebo’s “Protect Me From What I Want.” [download]
[ and now we’re all alone ]
by kHo
They’re alone and it’s quiet. Finally, blessedly quiet. The Doctor is himself again, the world is right again, and everyone she’s ever loved is in one piece. Everything is finally, finally okay.
“I need a shower,” Jack says, throwing himself backwards onto the TARDIS’ platform, arms behind his head. “A shower, some food, a beer… no. Not a beer. A martini. The biggest martini ever known to man, with olives. A fucking branch full of olives.”
Martha laughs, and God it feels good to laugh again. There was a time there, a good forty-eight hours, where she thought she’d never laugh again. Jack grins at her and she grins back because his grin lights up the sky like a supernova and in the TARDIS it’s all for her.
“Anything alcoholic for me,” she says, reaching up and scrubbing at her face. It’s marked with dirt and grit and there’s something like dried blood caked to the side of her cheek but she’s not willing to think about it too long right now. Right now she’s only got room for relief. “Beer, scotch, daiquiri, vodka straight up, don’t care. Just enough to get my mind blitzed and forget any of this happened.”
“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” Jack says quietly, arm over his eyes now. She uses the opportunity to really take a good look at him. It’s been so crazy since meeting him, so hectic, that she’s never really gotten the opportunity to take in the fact of just how utterly beautiful he is. “Course, when you’re traveling with a Time Lord, I guess that should be amended to: those who forget the past, present, and/or future, are doomed to repeat it.”
“Fine,” she says, flopping down next to him, hands folded over her stomach as she blinks up at the TARDIS’ ceiling above her. “Not forget. Ignore.”
“Ignoring works,” he says, and then he laughs. She laughs along with him because she doesn’t really know it’s all that funny but when Jack laughs it bubbles up inside her like she’s not even in control of it.
The Doctor is elsewhere. ‘Tying up loose ends,’ he’d said, but Martha was pretty sure he was giving her the opportunity to flee his side. She intended to do no such thing, though, and soon enough he’d figure that out.
“You know, you really should do yourself a favor and get out while you can,” Jack says, startling her with his suddenly serious tone. “Unless it’s already too late. And it probably is. It was probably too late five minutes after you met him.”
“Get out of what,” she asks, but she’s not dumb. She knows exactly what he means.
“You want too much,” he says, looking over at her, eyes stone-cold sober when before they’d been glittering with amusement.
She shuts her mouth shut tightly and glares up at the ceiling, hands clenching into fists. “So he’s talked to you then. He’s told you to get rid of me. Well fat lot of luck that’ll do. He wants me gone, he’s got to say it himself.”
“He doesn’t want you to go, Martha,” he says, and when he reaches for her hand she lets him take it. Breathes a few times while he threads their fingers together and then squeezes her hand. “He’s willing to let you go, if that’s what you want. And he’s said nothing to me. I just understand better than you’d think.”
She blinks back the tears that spring to her eyes, hates herself for their existence. “I love him,” she whispers, and hates the way her voice wobbles. “I feel like if I left him I’d crumble apart and die.”
“I know,” he says, thumb stroking down the outside of her hand. “But do you love him, or do you love what you want from him?”
“Excuse me,” she shouts, jerking her hand out of his and sitting up to glare at him. “What I want from him? What, like I want his riches or something?”
“You have to ask yourself this question,” Jack says, not flinching in the slightest bit from what she knows is her Grade-A top of the line Death Glare. “If he never loves you the way you want him to, if he never kisses you, makes love to you, asks you to marry him… If none of that ever happens, is it still worth it to be with him?”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“He won’t, Martha,” Jack says, sitting up and wrapping his arms around his knees. “He won’t do any of that. Ever.”
“You don’t know that,” she bites back, looking away.
“I do,” he says, and his voice is kind and understanding and it makes her want to rip his face off with her fingernails. “I know, Martha. None of that will happen.”
“Feelings can change,” she hisses, fingers digging into her pant legs hard enough to bite into her skin on the other side of them.
“Feelings can, yes,” Jack says, scooting closer to her and taking her hand again. She lets him because even if she hates him for this, she knows that Jack understands this better than anyone. She doesn’t even know him at all, but she knows that. “But the Doctor won’t.”
“You don’t know that,” she says again, but she doesn’t believe it. Didn’t believe it the first time she said it either.
“He does love you, Martha,” Jack says, scooting closer still, letting go of her hand to put his arm around her shoulder. He pulls her into him, resting his mouth at her hairline. “Real love, the kind of love that doesn’t expect anything back. The kind of love that never dies and never goes sour.”
She blinks and a tear falls. “That’s how I feel about him. It is. I’ll never stop. Not ever.”
“Nor will I,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s said it out loud but she’d known already. She’d known the second she saw the way Jack looked at the Doctor after he’d come back to life the first time. The first time out of about nine now, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to that. “The difference is I don’t expect anything in return. Because you don’t understand Martha. You don’t understand what it’s like to live forever.”
She looks at him. “No, well, I wouldn’t, would I?”
“You watch everyone you care about die,” Jack says, reaching up to wipe away a tear she hadn’t even known had fallen. “Over and over and over. Love like you feel, that kind of love, that can’t… you can’t keep feeling that.”
She closes her eyes. “Sounds lonely.”
“It is,” he says. “Imagine it. You love someone. Fully. Completely. Unendingly. And then they get old, and they get sick, and then they die. Because everyone dies, Martha. Everyone except us. Do you think you could take that? Is that something you could do over and over?”
“So you just cut yourself off,” she asks, because that’s not something she can understand. She can’t understand cutting yourself off from living for the fact that you’ll live forever. “You just don’t feel anything?”
“I feel plenty,” Jack says. “And the Doctor feels everything, more than anyone. But there are certain places I won’t go, and there are certain places he won’t either. And this is one of them, Martha.”
“But Rose,” she says, pulling back to look at him. “He loved Rose. I know he did. He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in his eyes. I can hear it in his voice when he talks about her.”
Jack smiles. “Rose was… she was…” He frowns, shaking his head. “She was special. There was something about Rose.” He looks at her then, raising an eyebrow. “But even her, Martha. Even her he would have eventually had to leave behind.”
“I sort of…” She pauses, wonders if it’s okay to say this. If Jack will hate her for it. “I sort of hate her.”
Jack laughs. “Yeah. I did too. Jealousy will do that. But she was fantastic, Rose was. Even when I hated her I loved her.”
“Well maybe it’s good I’ll never meet her,” Martha says with a slight smile. “Much easier for me to hate her.”
“The point I’m making,” Jack says, jostling her with his shoulder to get her to look at him. “Is that you have to ask yourself if it’s better to love him and lose him than to walk away now. Because you sitting here, pining for him in that painful way where it hurts to even look at him… that’s going to drive you insane, and you’re too brilliant and beautiful for that.”
“I’m that transparent, am I,” she asks, laughing.
He nods. “Only to me, though.”
“Yeah, he sort of is daftly oblivious, isn’t he,” she says, laughing again, feeling like a weight is somehow being lifted off of her chest. At least a little.
“Unbelievably so,” Jack says, grinning back at her.
“He is, you know,” she says softly, twisting her fingers together in her lap and looking down at them so she doesn’t have to look at him. “Worth it. Worth the pain. Watching him, being with him… it’s worth it.”
“Yeah, he is,” Jack says, reaching over and taking her chin in his hand, leaning forward and giving her a soft kiss on the lips. “So are you.”
She smiles and reaches up to touch her lips. “Jack, are you hitting on me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “If I did, would it do any good? Because I will.” He waggles his eyebrows, grinning lasciviously. “I find it’s a good way to get your mind off of things.”
“Jack Harkness, stop flirting with everyone you come into contact with. Blimey, it never ends with you, does it,” the Doctor says as he blusters in, filled with as much energy and exuberance as ever, giving Jack a scolding look that’s only half serious. “How many times must I tell you that there is a time and place?”
“Well when is this time and where is this place,” Jack yells, spreading his arms wide as he stands to face the Doctor. “Because it never seems to be either when you’re around. And I’d think saving the world from total annihilation is definitely the time, and I don’t see why the TARDIS isn’t the place.”
The Doctor steps in front of him, smirking. “And you said I was the cheeky one.”
Jack grins and the Doctor grins back and Martha decides right then and there that Jack is maybe the best thing she’s encountered since she met the Doctor.
“I was thinking it’s time for something tame. Something nice and easy. Maybe the Renaissance again,” the Doctor says, looking at her. “Could visit Shakespeare again.”
“Ooh, Shakespeare,” Jack says, smiling dreamily. “Met him. Wonderful kisser.”
“Oh, of course you’ve had Shakespeare,” the Doctor says, rolling his eyes as he walks over to the control panel. “Who haven’t you had, Jack?”
Jack meets Martha’s eyes over the Doctor’s head and raises an eyebrow. “Well. I haven’t had either of you now, have I?”
The Doctor laughs and shakes his head. “Well I can’t speak for Martha, but me, I keep telling you, buy me a drink first.”
“Promises, promises, Doctor,” Jack says, leaning against the controls and giving Martha a look.
“Well then let’s get on with it,” Martha says, standing and walking over to them. “I vote for the Victorian age. Always did like the way they dressed.”
The Doctor gives her a blinding grin and it lights up her heart just like it always does. “Martha Jones, you’re brilliant. Victorian England it is!”
She meets Jack’s eyes as the vortex begins to form and knows, then and there, that everything will be worth it.
And when it seems like it’s not maybe Jack will help her see the way again.
* This was originally going to be a Martha And Jack Get It On fic, and then like... I don't know what the hell happened. The angst bunny bit me until I gave up on the sex and just let the convo take place. Bloody hell, why do I have to love this show so much? I JUST WANTED TO WRITE THE SEX!
Somebody please, please write me Martha/Jack smut. Please?
Title: And Now We’re All Alone
Rated: PG
Characters: Martha, Jack
Notes: takes place sometime after Sound of Drums, but no real spoilers after Utopia. I was vague, because that’s not what was important in this fic. What was important is what Martha and Jack share, and that's the Doctor. Title from lyrics from Placebo’s “Protect Me From What I Want.” [download]
[ and now we’re all alone ]
by kHo
They’re alone and it’s quiet. Finally, blessedly quiet. The Doctor is himself again, the world is right again, and everyone she’s ever loved is in one piece. Everything is finally, finally okay.
“I need a shower,” Jack says, throwing himself backwards onto the TARDIS’ platform, arms behind his head. “A shower, some food, a beer… no. Not a beer. A martini. The biggest martini ever known to man, with olives. A fucking branch full of olives.”
Martha laughs, and God it feels good to laugh again. There was a time there, a good forty-eight hours, where she thought she’d never laugh again. Jack grins at her and she grins back because his grin lights up the sky like a supernova and in the TARDIS it’s all for her.
“Anything alcoholic for me,” she says, reaching up and scrubbing at her face. It’s marked with dirt and grit and there’s something like dried blood caked to the side of her cheek but she’s not willing to think about it too long right now. Right now she’s only got room for relief. “Beer, scotch, daiquiri, vodka straight up, don’t care. Just enough to get my mind blitzed and forget any of this happened.”
“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” Jack says quietly, arm over his eyes now. She uses the opportunity to really take a good look at him. It’s been so crazy since meeting him, so hectic, that she’s never really gotten the opportunity to take in the fact of just how utterly beautiful he is. “Course, when you’re traveling with a Time Lord, I guess that should be amended to: those who forget the past, present, and/or future, are doomed to repeat it.”
“Fine,” she says, flopping down next to him, hands folded over her stomach as she blinks up at the TARDIS’ ceiling above her. “Not forget. Ignore.”
“Ignoring works,” he says, and then he laughs. She laughs along with him because she doesn’t really know it’s all that funny but when Jack laughs it bubbles up inside her like she’s not even in control of it.
The Doctor is elsewhere. ‘Tying up loose ends,’ he’d said, but Martha was pretty sure he was giving her the opportunity to flee his side. She intended to do no such thing, though, and soon enough he’d figure that out.
“You know, you really should do yourself a favor and get out while you can,” Jack says, startling her with his suddenly serious tone. “Unless it’s already too late. And it probably is. It was probably too late five minutes after you met him.”
“Get out of what,” she asks, but she’s not dumb. She knows exactly what he means.
“You want too much,” he says, looking over at her, eyes stone-cold sober when before they’d been glittering with amusement.
She shuts her mouth shut tightly and glares up at the ceiling, hands clenching into fists. “So he’s talked to you then. He’s told you to get rid of me. Well fat lot of luck that’ll do. He wants me gone, he’s got to say it himself.”
“He doesn’t want you to go, Martha,” he says, and when he reaches for her hand she lets him take it. Breathes a few times while he threads their fingers together and then squeezes her hand. “He’s willing to let you go, if that’s what you want. And he’s said nothing to me. I just understand better than you’d think.”
She blinks back the tears that spring to her eyes, hates herself for their existence. “I love him,” she whispers, and hates the way her voice wobbles. “I feel like if I left him I’d crumble apart and die.”
“I know,” he says, thumb stroking down the outside of her hand. “But do you love him, or do you love what you want from him?”
“Excuse me,” she shouts, jerking her hand out of his and sitting up to glare at him. “What I want from him? What, like I want his riches or something?”
“You have to ask yourself this question,” Jack says, not flinching in the slightest bit from what she knows is her Grade-A top of the line Death Glare. “If he never loves you the way you want him to, if he never kisses you, makes love to you, asks you to marry him… If none of that ever happens, is it still worth it to be with him?”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“He won’t, Martha,” Jack says, sitting up and wrapping his arms around his knees. “He won’t do any of that. Ever.”
“You don’t know that,” she bites back, looking away.
“I do,” he says, and his voice is kind and understanding and it makes her want to rip his face off with her fingernails. “I know, Martha. None of that will happen.”
“Feelings can change,” she hisses, fingers digging into her pant legs hard enough to bite into her skin on the other side of them.
“Feelings can, yes,” Jack says, scooting closer to her and taking her hand again. She lets him because even if she hates him for this, she knows that Jack understands this better than anyone. She doesn’t even know him at all, but she knows that. “But the Doctor won’t.”
“You don’t know that,” she says again, but she doesn’t believe it. Didn’t believe it the first time she said it either.
“He does love you, Martha,” Jack says, scooting closer still, letting go of her hand to put his arm around her shoulder. He pulls her into him, resting his mouth at her hairline. “Real love, the kind of love that doesn’t expect anything back. The kind of love that never dies and never goes sour.”
She blinks and a tear falls. “That’s how I feel about him. It is. I’ll never stop. Not ever.”
“Nor will I,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s said it out loud but she’d known already. She’d known the second she saw the way Jack looked at the Doctor after he’d come back to life the first time. The first time out of about nine now, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to that. “The difference is I don’t expect anything in return. Because you don’t understand Martha. You don’t understand what it’s like to live forever.”
She looks at him. “No, well, I wouldn’t, would I?”
“You watch everyone you care about die,” Jack says, reaching up to wipe away a tear she hadn’t even known had fallen. “Over and over and over. Love like you feel, that kind of love, that can’t… you can’t keep feeling that.”
She closes her eyes. “Sounds lonely.”
“It is,” he says. “Imagine it. You love someone. Fully. Completely. Unendingly. And then they get old, and they get sick, and then they die. Because everyone dies, Martha. Everyone except us. Do you think you could take that? Is that something you could do over and over?”
“So you just cut yourself off,” she asks, because that’s not something she can understand. She can’t understand cutting yourself off from living for the fact that you’ll live forever. “You just don’t feel anything?”
“I feel plenty,” Jack says. “And the Doctor feels everything, more than anyone. But there are certain places I won’t go, and there are certain places he won’t either. And this is one of them, Martha.”
“But Rose,” she says, pulling back to look at him. “He loved Rose. I know he did. He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in his eyes. I can hear it in his voice when he talks about her.”
Jack smiles. “Rose was… she was…” He frowns, shaking his head. “She was special. There was something about Rose.” He looks at her then, raising an eyebrow. “But even her, Martha. Even her he would have eventually had to leave behind.”
“I sort of…” She pauses, wonders if it’s okay to say this. If Jack will hate her for it. “I sort of hate her.”
Jack laughs. “Yeah. I did too. Jealousy will do that. But she was fantastic, Rose was. Even when I hated her I loved her.”
“Well maybe it’s good I’ll never meet her,” Martha says with a slight smile. “Much easier for me to hate her.”
“The point I’m making,” Jack says, jostling her with his shoulder to get her to look at him. “Is that you have to ask yourself if it’s better to love him and lose him than to walk away now. Because you sitting here, pining for him in that painful way where it hurts to even look at him… that’s going to drive you insane, and you’re too brilliant and beautiful for that.”
“I’m that transparent, am I,” she asks, laughing.
He nods. “Only to me, though.”
“Yeah, he sort of is daftly oblivious, isn’t he,” she says, laughing again, feeling like a weight is somehow being lifted off of her chest. At least a little.
“Unbelievably so,” Jack says, grinning back at her.
“He is, you know,” she says softly, twisting her fingers together in her lap and looking down at them so she doesn’t have to look at him. “Worth it. Worth the pain. Watching him, being with him… it’s worth it.”
“Yeah, he is,” Jack says, reaching over and taking her chin in his hand, leaning forward and giving her a soft kiss on the lips. “So are you.”
She smiles and reaches up to touch her lips. “Jack, are you hitting on me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “If I did, would it do any good? Because I will.” He waggles his eyebrows, grinning lasciviously. “I find it’s a good way to get your mind off of things.”
“Jack Harkness, stop flirting with everyone you come into contact with. Blimey, it never ends with you, does it,” the Doctor says as he blusters in, filled with as much energy and exuberance as ever, giving Jack a scolding look that’s only half serious. “How many times must I tell you that there is a time and place?”
“Well when is this time and where is this place,” Jack yells, spreading his arms wide as he stands to face the Doctor. “Because it never seems to be either when you’re around. And I’d think saving the world from total annihilation is definitely the time, and I don’t see why the TARDIS isn’t the place.”
The Doctor steps in front of him, smirking. “And you said I was the cheeky one.”
Jack grins and the Doctor grins back and Martha decides right then and there that Jack is maybe the best thing she’s encountered since she met the Doctor.
“I was thinking it’s time for something tame. Something nice and easy. Maybe the Renaissance again,” the Doctor says, looking at her. “Could visit Shakespeare again.”
“Ooh, Shakespeare,” Jack says, smiling dreamily. “Met him. Wonderful kisser.”
“Oh, of course you’ve had Shakespeare,” the Doctor says, rolling his eyes as he walks over to the control panel. “Who haven’t you had, Jack?”
Jack meets Martha’s eyes over the Doctor’s head and raises an eyebrow. “Well. I haven’t had either of you now, have I?”
The Doctor laughs and shakes his head. “Well I can’t speak for Martha, but me, I keep telling you, buy me a drink first.”
“Promises, promises, Doctor,” Jack says, leaning against the controls and giving Martha a look.
“Well then let’s get on with it,” Martha says, standing and walking over to them. “I vote for the Victorian age. Always did like the way they dressed.”
The Doctor gives her a blinding grin and it lights up her heart just like it always does. “Martha Jones, you’re brilliant. Victorian England it is!”
She meets Jack’s eyes as the vortex begins to form and knows, then and there, that everything will be worth it.
And when it seems like it’s not maybe Jack will help her see the way again.
* This was originally going to be a Martha And Jack Get It On fic, and then like... I don't know what the hell happened. The angst bunny bit me until I gave up on the sex and just let the convo take place. Bloody hell, why do I have to love this show so much? I JUST WANTED TO WRITE THE SEX!
Somebody please, please write me Martha/Jack smut. Please?