Fiction: Shades of Blue (for echarperouge) (M) [part 1/2]
Title: Shades of Blue
Author/Artist: Midori
Canon: Doctor Who / Phantom of the Opera (Musical or Susan Kay)
Pairing(s): Martha Jones/10th Doctor
Rating: M
Summary: A strange blue box appears in "the Phantom's" domain, and he cannot keep himself from wandering inside. But its occupants sense that a stranger is in their midst! Will they be able to find him before he has them both in his thrall and wreaks havoc upon their lives?
Warnings (if any): Sex. Fairly graphic.
Total word count: 18,476
Original prompt request number: 18
CORNFLOWER BLUE
London, 2007, across the street from Sparrow and Nightingale Antiquarian Books and Rare DVDs, next to Josef’s Hairstylist shop. As their adventures went, it was not exactly an exotic locale for her, but the work involved was plenty unusual. Martha Jones groaned as she scrunched up her face and wiped globs of green goo off her clothes. “Ugh. If I never see another giant alien lizard egg, it will be too soon,”
The Doctor was standing nearby doing very much the same thing. He stopped, looked quizzically at her, then smirked. “There’s something you don’t get to say every day. Well done.”
She climbed out of her brown mesh cardigan and held it up, assessing the damage. “Well, I suppose if we can get it to a good dry cleaner...”
“Oh! I know a planet that specialises in that!”
She smiled at him. “Okay. But I was just thinking I know a place right around the corner. But if you’d rather travel across the universe, I won’t argue.”
He looked at her with his nose and chin in the air, still with the smirk. His expression seemed to say, “Cheeky girl!” But in response, he disentangled himself from the rucksack filled with arrows that he had taken from Martha in a desperate moment, and the longbow draped across his shoulder. Then he peeled off his tan trenchcoat.
“Lucky I took off my tie before going in,” he said. “That one was my favourite - wouldn’t want it splashed with lizard blood.”
He handed the coat to Martha. She took it without question or protest and draped it over her arm. “I’ll do this, you get lunch?” she asked.
“All right,” he managed to say using a high-pitched tone, no actual words. “Curry?”
“Nah, Chinese.”
He pulled a face. “Pizza?”
“Yeah, that. Leporello’s is just a block that way.”
“Okay. The TARDIS is parked on Queensway across from the Bayswater station.”
“Yep. Meet you there in half an hour.”
“Yeah.”
They went their separate ways for the time being. She went around the corner to Pappas’ Dry Cleaning and Pastries.
“Ah, Miss Jones,” he exclaimed as she entered. “You’ve come back!”
“So it would seem,” she said with a smile.
“You wait here. I have your dress.”
“Oh! Okay.” She waited in the lobby as Mr. Pappas disappeared behind the strips of opaque plastic hanging from the doorjamb. When he returned, he was carrying a wrapped garment that must be the bridesmaid dress she had worn about two weeks before it began to rain upwards at the hospital and her life changed forever.
“The shrimp cocktail is a bugger to remove,” Mr. Pappas told her in his thick Greek accent, hanging it on the tall hook. “But it should be good as new now.”
“Thank you,” she said, rather surprised. She had entirely forgotten she had brought that dress here. With exams and Leo’s 21st and Annalise, she had had so much on her mind at that time, a blue satin dress was the least of her worries.
She loaded up the counter with the two garments. Hers was a tiny brown fitted thing, and the Doctor’s trenchcoat, of course, totally overwhelmed it. Mr. Pappas zeroed in on it immediately.
“What’s this?” the five-foot-five dry cleaner asked, hefting the tan coat to its full height. He turned it round and round draped on the tip of his finger, looked at it with amusement, and then at Martha. “Is there a new man in your life, Miss Jones?”
“I guess you could say that,” she said flatly.
“A doctor like you, I hope,” he probed, referring to Martha’s projected profession.
“Yes, a doctor. But not like me.”
“A tall man, by the looks of it,” he commented, this time referring to the coat.
“Yep,” she sighed. “Tall and brilliant. But also strangely clueless.”
“Well, Miss Jones,” he said to her, draping the long coat over his arm. “Sometimes men need to be shown. Not all males are sensitive and responsive to subtlety like yours truly.” He said this, then laughed heartily to show it was a joke.
“You can say that again,” she said, rolling her eyes. She dug into her pockets for some money. She handed him a tenner. “Thank you, Mr. Pappas.”
He grabbed her hand as he took the money. “Honestly, all joking aside. If he is clueless as you say, then perhaps he needs a bit of persuasion. I’d hate for you to miss out on something brilliant because you were too afraid... and for him to miss out on a pretty girl like you.”
Far from pulling her hand away, she felt oddly comforted by his warm smile, and sighed again. “I know. But it’s complicated.”
“Life is complicated. We do our best with what we’ve got.” He let go of her hand.
“There’s... someone else. Sort of an ex.”
“She won’t go away?”
“It’s not that. It’s not her fault. He just can’t get his mind off her.”
“Ah, I see,” he said. “That requires a bit more manoeuvering. Like I said, Miss Jones, he needs to be shown.”
She stared at him, but the wheels were turning. She’d spent now nearly nine months with the Doctor and she had long since given up on “manoeuvering.” She had managed to convince herself that she was content to accept his little hang-up on a blonde in another universe, and simply be the best friend that he so badly needed. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to throw herself into that particular fray again, but she did mull over, quite thoughtfully, what Mr. Pappas said.
She smiled brightly, warmly. “Thank you, really,” she said. “Erm, is the tenner enough?”
“Oh yes yes, more than enough for you, Miss Jones,” he told her. He gathered up the two coats in his arms as Martha gathered up her dress and turned to go. “Miss Jones?”
She turned back. “Yes?”
“You forgot this. It was inside Doctor Clueless’ trenchcoat. Hmm. The pockets seem to be bigger on the inside.”
She reached out and took the purple plastic portfolio in her hand. It was the packet of information that the girl from the DVD shop down the street had given the Doctor. “Thank you,” she said, before leaving.
She boarded the Underground not far away, and as the train jetted through the tunnels, she stared at the information packet. The girl (what was her name... Sally?) had said that the Doctor was, sometime soon, to be stranded in the year 1969. How she knew this, Martha had no idea, but she seemed like a nice person - clearly smitten with the Doctor, but then, who was she to cast stones for that?
But stranded in 1969? She laid the dress across her lap, opened the packet and read a bit. She learned that the Doctor and his companion (it was Martha, according to the DVD Easter egg transcript) were to be stuck without their time vehicle in London of 1969 for an unknown duration. However, it would be long enough that Martha would have to get a job to support the two of them, apparently while the Doctor worked out how to use Sally’s instructions to get them out of there.
Oh, that was not good. That meant probably months she would be with him, trapped without the TARDIS, likely living together, playing house. Worst case scenario: they’d have to pretend to be husband and wife in order to be allowed to rent anywhere that didn’t have fleas, and they would have to share a bed. If that was to happen, then she would be in even more pain than she was in now. Traveling together in an infinitely large spaceship was one thing, but if she didn’t want to be sharing a bed (again) and playing at marriage with Doctor Clueless, then for her own sanity, she needed to do something. She either needed to get over it, or do as Mr. Pappas said: show him.
She exited the Bayswater station and crossed the street. The TARDIS was just hanging about, weirdly unnoticed as always, right next to a Tesco. She pushed on the door, but it was locked. That meant the Doctor hadn’t returned with the pizza yet, so she used her key to get inside.
She placed the info packet on the navigator’s chair, then wandered back to her room to put the dress away.
It was wrapped in white plastic which was tied off at the bottom. She hung it on the peg inside her closet door and unwrapped it. Contrary to the nasty reputation most bridesmaid dresses carried, she had really loved this dress, and had enjoyed wearing it - she had loved how she looked in it, and so had lots of men at the reception! She smiled at the memory. She had taken Oliver Morgenstern to the wedding as her date, which was fun, but dancing with a gay man provided few prospects. She had never turned so many heads in her life, though, and that had been enough for her, for the time being.
Impulsively, she decided to try the dress on. After being splattered with alien lizard goo, she needed to change her clothes anyway, and she could use a bit of a pick-me-up. She had no idea how long before the Doctor came back, but it didn’t really matter - it’s not like he was ever interested in entering her bedroom. He could wait for a bit.
She pulled the pink scarf from her head with one quick motion and grabbed a spider clip from the vanity and pinned her hair up. Then she stripped down to only her knickers, took the dress from its hanger, and stepped into it.
It was a strapless A-line gown, in cornflower blue satin, with a lacy, cream-coloured embroidered pattern crawling its way across the hem and bustline. A cream-coloured sash stretched across her middle, and she did her best to tie it behind her back. It accentuated her dainty waist and sculpted arms. The colour was perfect against her liquid dark skin tone, though it did not exactly match the pink eyeshadow she had put on that morning. She wished she had the faux-diamond necklace she had worn before, and the matching earrings, but... oh well, the necklace and earrings she was wearing were fine for a quick flight of fancy.
She admired herself in the full-length mirror, which is not something she’d had a chance to do very often of late. Her life had been about running and fighting aliens and saving planets, laser this, sonic that, and a man who wouldn’t notice her appearance if she showed up at the breakfast table naked. Not an environment conducive to playing dress-up.
But today, she sighed with satisfaction, and a bemused smile on her face. She made a mental note to buy a new dress every now and then as a treat for herself. She’d forgotten how good this felt.
She had also forgotten to close her bedroom door, and when the exclamation of “Oh!” came from the doorway, it startled her terribly. Her face grew hot, and the unpleasant rush spread down the rest of her body.
“Doctor!” she cried, her hand at her chest which was threatening to split open from the harsh beating inside. “God, you scared me to death!”
The expression on his face was frozen in a surprised “O” for a few moments, and then he seemed to shake it off. “S-Sorry,” he said, placing one hand on the back of his neck, not making eye contact. “I didn’t mean to scare you. The door was open, and...”
“I know, I know,” she said, taking a few steps toward him. “I should have closed it, sorry. So, ready for lunch?”
He met her eyes, and just looked at her for a moment with wide-open, shocked eyes. Then he said, “W-what? Oh, oh, yes... y-yes.”
“I’ll just change,” she said, signaling for him to leave. But he did not.
His wide-as-saucers eyes traveled from her eyes all the way down to the cream-coloured embroidery near the floor, and back. There was no lasciviousness on his face, no amusement or bemusement, but when he did that, the unpleasant blush spread down her body once more.
“What?” she asked.
“What?” he echoed, snapping out of some kind of stupor. “S-sorry, I’m just...”
“What?”
“Surprised.”
“Surprised at what?”
“You look...” and in lieu of an adjective which he could not seem to recall, he simply exhaled quickly through pursed lips.
“Thank you,” she said, coquettishly not meeting his eyes. The spreading blush was back, but more pleasant this time.
“That dress is... be-beautiful, just...” he sighed, at a loss. “Beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
He took two steps toward her and took her hands. He looked into her eyes, not for the first time, but in an entirely new way, and said, “I mean... you are beautiful.”
For the third time, she said, “Thank you, Doctor.” A lump was forming in her throat, and butterflies seemed to be dancing in her stomach. He held her hands and gazed at her, not speaking. She searched his face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing there.
“Doctor?” she asked softly.
“Yes?”
“Are you ready for lunch?”
“Yes,” he told her.
“Okay then. I’m going to need to change. Meet you in the breakfast nook in a few?”
“Okay,” he whispered, breaking eye contact. As he moved away from her, his hand held onto hers for as long as possible, before he disappeared behind the door.
She was clever enough to shut the door this time, and she shed the cornflower dress and hung it in the back of the closet, out of sight. She felt that she should be happy about what had just happened, but she wasn’t, somehow. It only made her nervous. She supposed it was the uncertainty that was bothering her, and tried to push it down. She knew that if she was going to “do something” about Doctor Clueless before they got stuck in 1969 (God knew when), that she’d have to weather the uncertainty and the possibility of rejection for a while.
It was getting colder, so she threw on a long black skirt over the tights and boots she was already wearing, and pulled a long-sleeved white fitted tee-shirt over her head. She swallowed the lump in her throat and went to the breakfast nook to have lunch with the Doctor.
FRENCH BLUE
Suddenly, it was like her bedroom existed on the other side of a dimensional portal or something, because when she arrived at the table, the Doctor’s demeanour was completely normal (well, for him, anyway). He seemed to have forgotten the vision of her in the cornflower dress, and the shock he seemed to feel when he saw her. He’d forgotten all about staring wistfully into her eyes, and holding her hands... and she was strangely relieved. Too much too soon could be a bad thing.
They were both famished, and ate like they had just been in a battle with a giant lizard and her spawn. They laughed about the weird little adventure they’d just had, sedating the Yardo Lizard hatchlings (and their dragon of a mother) in order to send them back to their own planet and time through a wormhole. The job had been messier than they had anticipated, and Martha noticed that the Doctor, though he’d taken off his suit jacket, still had some green gooey lizard blood on his blue shirt.
“You will change your shirt before we go anywhere else, won’t you?” she asked, as she wiped her hands on her napkin.
“Why?” he asked, inspecting his clothes. “Oh yeah, look at that. Looks like everything goes to the dry cleaner’s before too long. Wish we could have done that without having to shoot them with poisoned arrows.”
“Better than calling in UNIT to destroy them,” Martha said.
“I suppose so.” Still chewing his last bite of pizza, he shed the blue shirt, and to Martha’s surprise, he had a tan one on underneath it.
“Dressing in layers,” she commented. “Very smart.”
“Yeah,” he said leaning on the table, scratching his eye nervously. “Er, Martha, speaking of dressing...”
Oh, God, here it comes.
“...I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable before. It was totally inappropriate of me.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I was flattered.”
“I entered without knocking, and then I acted like a stuttering schoolboy, all because of a stupid dress!”
“You didn’t act like a schoolboy,” she assured him. “And it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” he said. “I am your friend, and you are not an object. If we’re going to travel together, then things like this can’t just happen.”
“Agreed,” she told him, though she suspected that she felt that way for a totally different reason than he did.
“You need to be able to trust me,” he said. He put his hand on top of hers in a gesture of cameraderie. “I need to act in a way that makes you want to trust me. So... won’t happen again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Now... I think we’ve seen enough alien blood for one day. Let’s have a short holiday. Where would you like to go?”
“Don’t mind,” she told him, drained. She sat back in her chair and defensively crossed her arms over her chest.
“We could go meet someone famous like we did before,” he told her, trying to entice her. “We’ve done Shakespeare... I know! Who’s your favourite painter?”
“Erm, VanGogh, I think. I love Starry Night.”
The Doctor hissed air through his clenched teeth, and said, “Ooh, unstable bloke. He’s likely to fall in love with you and lop off a body part to prove it.”
“Well, we don’t have to...”
“But he did live an interesting life. Born in Holland, died in France, preacher, teacher, salesman, painter. And of course, a complete madman.”
“He’d be treated today with Lithium, I expect,” Martha commented. “Just lived too soon.”
The Doctor looked at her with interest. “You think so? You think he could have been as brilliant as he was if he’d quashed his madness with drugs?”
“Maybe not, but he’d certainly have been a happier guy. Would have lived longer, too.”
“Granted, granted. But the art, the beauty he gave to the human race, Martha,” the Doctor sighed. “Oh, I don’t know if it’s worth the trade.”
“You might be right, at least from the point of view of the rest of humanity.”
“Still, it was a time and place of great creativity. Paris in the 1880s - that’s when VanGogh was in his heyday - just chock full of complete nutters with creativity falling out of their ears. If VanGogh hadn’t been there, surely the richness of the era would not have been diminished by very much. There still would have been Toulouse-Lautrec (opium-addict), Degas (frustrated pedophile), Whistler (Oedipal complex), and those are just painters! That’s not even mentioning the writers and musicians! Oh, that lot is even more interesting!”
“Well, if you’re so excited about it, why don’t we go there?” Martha suggested. “Paris, circa 1880... we’ll take in the culture, bask in the insanity and be back in time for supper. Never been to Paris.”
“Really? You?”
“Really!” she said with a smile. “Been to Egypt, Istanbul, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Iceland, Brazil and all manner of exotic locations with my family, but they never had any desire to stay in Europe, and the only time I’ve been to America was with you! Never seen Spain, never been to Germany...”
“But didn’t you tell me you speak German? You must have studied.”
“Yeah, and French as well, but never traveled to either place,” she smiled. “My studying abroad was done in the Congo with Doctors Without Borders when I was in my second year of medical school.”
The Doctor smiled. “Doctors Without Borders - that’s brilliant. That’s us!”
“It kind of is,” she said.
“In that case, what are we still doing parked in Bayswater? Care to join me for a Parisian holiday, Martha Jones?”
“My pleasure, Doctor!”
Arm in arm, they headed for the console room. On the way, the Doctor chattered away about the time when he had met DaVinci and had hidden a message in the Mona Lisa. While he talked, he stopped at a closet to withdraw a replacement suit jacket and tie. When they arrived in the console room, he took a few moments to complete his ensemble, and then, once again wrapped in brown pinstripes from shoulder to ankle, he adjusted the screen and began to set coordinates.
“Oh, this is going to be brilliant!” he growled. “The heart of Haussman’s Paris! A good bet is Café de la Paix, round 1885 or so. We’re bound to rub elbows with someone interesting there.”
He did what he does with the TARDIS console, pulled the handbreak loose, and then, more appropriately than ever, exclaimed, “Allons-y!”
The jolt of the TARDIS was worse than usual and sent them both tumbling to the floor. The grinding of the gears sounded off, and did not have the usual satisfying ring which exhilirated Martha and gave her a sense of adventure. Today, it was more of a gurgling. The vessel jostled its occupants about, and both the Doctor and Martha scrambled to find purchase on handrails or pillars or anything bolted to the floor.
Finally it came to a halt, and Martha found herself slumped against a far wall, and the Doctor was lying sideways underneath the navigator’s stool.
“Martha, you okay?” he called out, unsure of where she’d landed.
“Fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “Just a bit... shaken.”
The Doctor approached the TARDIS console. He looked up into the cyllindrical energy field, and asked, “What’s wrong, eh? What happened just now?”
He pulled the screen over, and examined it. “The precision toggle is on the blink,” he told Martha. “Won’t take a minute to fix. I’ll do it on the way out.”
“The precision toggle?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The coordinates I set through the computer here are rough. I can name a year and a city, most of the time that’s all I need. But the precision toggle lets me get to a certain date, time and street, if I want. This time I set it for Boulevard des Capucines, noon on New Year’s Day, 1885. It’s quite accurate normally, although today... we might’ve gotten just a bit off course.”
“Let’s find out,” Martha said. She headed for the door, and when she opened it, she was greeted by a penetrating darkness. “Blimey! Have you got a torch?”
The Doctor rooted around below a floor panel for a minute, and emerged with two plastic torches. They each took one and ventured into the darkness.
It was cold, damp and grey, and Martha could hear rats somewhere in the vicinity. The floor was hard and stone, much like the walls, and there seemed to be four options as to which direction they might head.
“Whoa, it’s like a labyrinth,” Martha said, keeping her voice a bit hushed. “Where the hell are we?”
“I have no idea,” the Doctor confessed, looking about in very much the same manner as Martha. “I’ll go out on a limb and say underground.”
“But which way do we go?”
He looked at her with a bit of incredulity, pointed his torch to the left, the only corridor that seemed to be sloped upwards from where they were standing, and said, “Up. Come on.”
POLICE BLUE
He’d been reduced once again to a ghost. For a few brief shining moments, she had made him feel like a man, but today, he wandered - lurked - in the cellars of his Opéra, a shadowy, forgotten figure, masked and one with the dark.
And alone again. Or still? He was never certain. He had never been exactly friendless, but he wasn’t the sort of man who could be stayed with - his existence was too complex, his mind too steep for comprehension by most human beings. Most humans would deny his existence, truth be told. And just as well - he had been through things that would turn most of them cold.
And so, he tried to tell himself, what have I really lost? She is gone, she is with someone who can give her what she needs, what I never can. She was never mine to lose, so why wallow?
But rationality has no place in the realm of love. He could not will himself to let go of her.
And then, an echo in the darkness. Two levels up - he could hear it. An otherworldly grinding, intermingled with a sickly gurgle. He had never heard anything like it in his life - he had absolutely nothing to compare it to. He stopped walking and stood deadly still.
Almost immediately, he could feel something cloying at his mind. An outside force trying to get in, or an inner truth trying to escape? It was in-between, like when he had encountered the mystic shamans in Persia. Mind control, trying to keep the newcomer in check. He had quickly trained himself to shut them out, though it had taken longer to learn how to get in. The Persians used their eyes, intricate carpet weaves, even the vastness of the desert to hypnotise their subjects. He used his voice, the one purely beautiful thing he had ever possessed.
And so he shut out the prying force now. He put a wall between his mind and whatever it was.
After a moment, he heard voices. A man and a woman, speaking in English. A few feet ahead, their dim, orange light could be seen.
“Which way do we go?” asked the woman’s voice.
A beat, and then the man answered, “Up.”
Relief flooded him. At least these two, they had the sense to go away from here - to go up, away from the darkness. He was too tired to involve himself in yet more hapless explorers who should find themselves trapped in the torture chamber. He was reasonably sure that he did not have the strength, and entirely certain he did not have the mercy.
He knew he should go back to his chamber and stay there, but he did not. He needed to know who these people were, these English who knew the craft of mind exploration as he did - he had never met another European (outside of Romania) who could do what he could do. Perhaps these people posed a threat. What did they intend? He didn’t know, and so he followed the sound. What had made that noise? Machinery? An animal? Some combination of the two?
He ran soundlessly up the corridors he knew so well, the labyrinth that he had helped design. He stopped short as something surprised him, seeming to leap in his way. He knew every nook and cranny of this Opéra, and he had never seen this here before. Very few things perplexed him anymore, but this… a blue box, eight feet tall, less than an arm’s length wide had simply appeared in the depths of the Opéra. Light radiated from within, and the words across the top read, again in English, “Police Public Call Box.” It was some sort of device for catching criminals, perhaps.
As he got closer to it, whatever was scratching at his mind grew stronger. He pushed harder.
And when he opened the door of the blue Police box, for the first time, not even the mighty brain of Erik could explain what it was seeing.
Martha giggled as they crossed the street and were nearly run down by four horses and the cart they were pulling. The driver shouted something at her, just as she stumbled against the Doctor.
“This is brilliant,” she cried out. “Paris!”
“You know, you’re not happy unless you’re being almost hit by something,” the Doctor commented, helping set her back on her feet, then offering his arm.
She took it. “Oh you’re one to talk!”
The Doctor looked up, back the way they had come. “Oh, of course! The Opéra! I should have known.”
The large green and gold building loomed before them majestically at the apex of l’Avenue de l’Opéra, a fledgling boulevard lined with saplings, a darling of the new Haussmann’s Paris. The statues of Apollo’s Lyre and Pegasus on the roof gleamed in the sunlight before the bright green dome. The place seemed to be buzzing with excitement, men and women in carriages being dropped off, picked up and driven past the place.
“Opera, eh?”
“Oui oui! This is the Palais Garnier Opera house, opened in 1875 and containing five levels of subterranean tunnels which lead to an underground lake which powers hydraulic stage equipment.”
“There’s a lake under that building?”
“Yep,” he said, popping the P. “They started digging the foundation and ran smack into water, a long-buried tributary of the River Seine. So instead of moving the locale, they used it to their advantage.”
“How did we wind up down there?”
“I told you,” the Doctor replied. “Precision toggle. I was aiming for… well, here, where we’re standing right now, Boulevard des Capucines, 1885.”
“Well, only a couple hundred yards off,” she said. “And how many years, I wonder?”
“Three,” the Doctor answered, looking the other way.
“How’d you know that?”
He pointed inside the café to their left. There was a poster, an advert, which read, “Come Celebrate the New Year at Café de la Paix! Only 50 centimes entry. Fancy dress.” An image of a baby wore a sash that said 1882, and an old man next to him wore one that said 1881.
“New Year’s Eve!” Martha exclaimed. “We dropped in on a party.”
“So it would seem. And at Café de la Paix, no less.”
“Fancy dress, though?”
“Well, it’s a tradition at the Opéra to have a masked ball on New Year’s, but most people can’t afford that sort of thing… most people can’t even get invited to that sort of thing. Only the rich and important. So there are, shall we say, poor-man’s fancy dress parties all over town. This is a popular one just by virtue of the fact it’s across the street from the Palais Garnier itself.”
Martha looked at the Doctor expectantly, like a child. “Doctor?”
He returned the look, only with a mischievous air. “I’ve got some 19th century centimes in one my junk drawers on the TARDIS.” He smiled widely, which always could draw a big smile out of Martha as well.
“Shall we do it?” she asked.
“Oh yes!” he answered.
Excitedly, she turned and walked straight into the café, and the Doctor followed. Martha opened her mouth, and proudly asked, “Pardonnez-moi monsieur, est-ce que vous pouvez me dire s’il va falloir acheter en avance des billets pour la fête de la nouvelle année?”
The man behind the counter looked at her blankly for a few seconds. Finally, the man opened his mouth and shouted “Sorry! I don’t speak English!”
She looked at the Doctor. “TARDIS translation circuits,” he told her.
She was exasperated. “Even when they’re speaking a language I understand?”
“It tunes into your native language and interprets the words as… oh, just ask him again in English, will you?”
Martha sighed. “Sir, can you tell me if we will need to pre-pay for tickets to the New Year’s celebration tonight?”
“No, miss,” the man said. “Not necessary. We’ll admit as many people as arrive.”
“Isn’t that a fire hazard?” she asked.
The Doctor cleared his throat loudly.
“Right,” she said, coming back to herself. “Thank you.”
“Oh, and miss?” the barman said. “You do mean tomorrow night, don’t you? Today is the 30th.”
“Ah!” she covered. “Of course. My mistake.”
“Can I interest you and your gentleman friend in some Absinthe?” he asked, pulling the bottle from a shelf below.
“God, no!”
“Then would you mind clearing the counter space? I’m trying to run a business.”
“Right, thank you, sir,” the Doctor said, leading Martha away by the shoulders.
As they left the café, Martha tittered, “Oh, I’m so excited! I can’t believe I’m going to a fancy dress ball in 19th century Paris! Maybe I’ll get to meet Van Gogh after all. Although, how will I know him? I guess I’ll just look for the bloke with one ear!”
“Oh, he’s still got both ears in 1881, but you’ll know him because he looks a bit like a young Kirk Douglas, only ginger,” the Doctor said. Looking up and down the street, he rocked back on his heels, and asked, “So, we’ve got a day and a half in Paris. What would you like to do? It’s all about the art at this time in history, Martha. There’s no Eiffel Tower yet, Notre Dame Cathedral is in ruins from the revolution, Invalides is still a hospital, Jim Morrison’s grave isn’t here… what’s here is the Louvre, Montmartre’s art district, the Comédie Française…”
“Sounds good.”
“What does?”
“All of it. Let’s see it all!”
When the Doctor darkened the TARDIS’ door that evening, it was without Martha. She had wanted to choose a costume for the fancy dress party tomorrow night, and the Doctor had decided to leave her to it.
Immediately when the Doctor came inside, he could sense something wrong. The TARDIS was agitated, repressed somehow, causing something like a psychic din inside his head. He approached the console and ran his eyes carefully over the controls. They were in the same positions as when he had left them. The screen showed the darkness outside, the cyllinder in the center glowed as usual. But there was an inexplicable unrest - the TARDIS had been tampered with in some way. The Doctor scowled and began to look about.
A tiny detail caught his eye: a shock of black fabric sticking out from between two metal rods that made up the railing around the console area. He knelt, took his glasses from his pocket and inspected it before pulling it from its tight spot. Someone had walked through this area and gotten their clothes caught and torn. He extracted the little piece of fabric and looked at it even closer. Silk, he surmised, of good quality.
“That’s odd,” he said out loud to himself. That meant someone wealthy had walked through this area and gotten their clothes caught and torn. Based on the locale, someone had ripped their opera cloak inside the TARDIS. He had a feeling it wouldn’t work, but he held the sonic screwdriver aloft and used four different settings to scan for transmitters, weapons, alien technology and the like. Nothing.
Whatever was on-board was very good at cloaking its presence, and it had a near-infinite space in which simply to hide. He decided that whoever it was should not know that he was there. He tiptoed outside the vessel and waited in the shadows for Martha. He knew he would scare her to death when she arrived, but it was better than having her bounding into the TARDIS unawares - the being on-board could be malevolent indeed. Most likely they were after him and it was possible they didn’t even know about Martha. If that was the case, he’d like to keep it that way.
Sure enough, when she came down the ramp with a tissue paper-covered garment draped over her arm, her torch failed to illuminate him standing beside the TARDIS, and when he met her a few yards away and grabbed her, putting his hand over her mouth, she let out a muffled scream.
“It’s me,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. Please don’t shout.” He let go.
“What the hell are you doing?” she rasped at him.
“Someone is in the TARDIS,” he whispered. “I don’t want them to know we’re here.”
“What? Someone’s in there? How do you know?”
“She told me, the TARDIS did,” he answered. “I mean, not with words, but…”
“Do you know how to find them?”
“No, it’s huge in there. I scanned for all the usual things, but I’ve got nothing,” he said, exasperated. He faced the TARDIS and buried his hands in his hair and pulled. “Thing is, it’s not even supposed to be noticed. You only see it if you know it’s there. That means it’s someone looking for me, maybe someone been following us for God knows how long.”
“What do we do?”
“We hole up for the night in a secure room and double-lock the doors, set an alarm and try to get some sleep. We’ll start scouring the TARDIS in the morning.”
“Can’t we go stay somewhere else?”
“We can’t risk it,” he insisted. “What if it’s a rogue Time Agent? What if it’s a being that feeds on time energy?” He took her hand and motioned for silence, and began pulling her toward the TARDIS door.
She looked at him with worried eyes. She never thought the day would come when she would feel unsafe entering the TARDIS.
He tried to reassure her. “Come on, it’s okay. You’re with me, right? I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. Trust me?”
“Of course,” she said, smiling nervously.
They pushed open the door. He led her across the noisy metal floor slowly, trying not to crinkle the tissue paper or clang their feet on the floor. They tiptoed round three corners and behind a door. He sonicked the door locked, and began punching a code into an elaborate keyboard near the door. Martha assumed he was arming an alarm.
Martha looked up. It was a large room with a high ceiling. Straight ahead, there was a king-sized bed, unmade, one side clearly slept-in, the other side crowded with open books, unrolled maps and gadgets. Over to the right, a sunken mini-living room revealed much the same scenario spread over a small coffee table. Beyond the bed, a wide, curved staircase led up, and her eyes followed the banister to a second floor walled entirely by unkempt, but well-used, bookshelves. A large wardrobe sat near the staircase, the door hanging slightly ajar. She wandered over and looked inside. About 25 blue and brown pin-striped suits hung inside, and on the floor, just as many white and red Converse trainers. A myriad of tan, white and blue dress shirts hung to the right, and on the inside of the door, she counted twelve brown ties and one special Christmas tie with reindeer.
She turned and looked at him, still typing codes into the pad near the door. “This is your bedroom,” she said, incredulously.
“Yar,” he said distractedly, the sonic screwdriver sideways in his teeth, impeding his speech.
He would be busy for another minute, so Martha took this opportunity to drink it all in. She couldn’t help it - her eyes were pulled involuntarily to the bed. She and the Doctor had been forced to share a bed before, but this was different. This was his bed, the way he kept it, the way he liked it, where he did all of his most private thinking, enjoyed all of his most unguarded moments. She felt an intimacy with him just from seeing his bed unmade, and she felt an insane, compulsive need to memorise everything about it. A dark red bedspread presided over tan sheets, crinkled from the dream-driven movements of the Doctor’s body. A long pillow still dented from the weight of the Doctor’s head. A large, cold space covered with books and food for his great brain, a clear reminder that he slept here alone, and had for some time. How many times had she lain so nearby and longed to occupy that space?
“You can hang that in the wardrobe, if you’d like,” he told her, taking her by surprise.
“Are you sure?” she asked him, coming to.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Mi cámara es su cámara. I’m just sorry it’s such a mess.”
“It’s all right,” she said quietly, making her way to the wardrobe. She hung the tissue-covered costume inside, and admired how it comingled with the Doctor’s suits.
When she turned around, he was clearing off the bed, making semi-neat stacks on the credenza near the footboard. She watched, did not interrupt.
When he was finished, he looked at her strangely and said, “Oh, sorry - I didn’t even ask. Is this all right, sleeping here next to me?”
She choked. “Yeah,” she said, a bit more emphatically than she would have liked. “It’s fine. No problem.”
“There are some drawers to your right. Maybe there’s something in there you can wear.”
She opened one of the drawers and found multiple pairs of identical pyjamas in dark blue, or as she had come to think of it, Police Box blue. She extracted one of the tops and held it up to her shoulders. Martha was just over five feet tall, the Doctor just over six. The shirttail hit her an inch above the knee. She stepped behind a wall out of sight, gingerly shed her clothes and underwear, and buttoned up the pyjama top around her. She came out from behind the wall to find the Doctor sitting on the edge of the bed wearing what could have been the bottom half of the pyjama set she was wearing, along with the white tee-shirt he’d had on under his clothes all day. His glasses were on, and he seemed to be researching something.
“What’re you reading?” she asked, pulling her hair loose from the spider clip.
Almost without moving his lips, he answered, “I’m researching ways to detect organic presences in large labyrinthine spaces, using only the tools I have on-board,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave the TARDIS again until we find out who’s in here with us.”
Suddenly, he shut the book with a loud snap and threw it to the floor beside the bed. He took off his glasses and looked up at her. He paused. She had seen that look before… earlier today when he’d walked in on her wearing the cornflower dress.
Like before, she asked, “What?”
“Er, nothing. It’s just that you look a lot better in my pyjamas than I do. You’ve got nicer legs,” he told her with a crooked smile.
She didn’t say anything, but was forced to avert her eyes. She walked around to “her” side of the bed, and he watched her as she did. In one swift motion, he had shifted his body into a supine position and lay on his side with his head in one hand. She timidly pulled the sheets back and crawled into bed, trying to be modest about it. She uncomfortably arranged herself so that she was lying on her side, facing him, just like in Dolly Bailey’s Inn in Shakespeare’s time.
“You’re a good sport, Martha,” he said. “I hope this is the only night we have to do this.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, again averting her eyes.
“Are you worried we won’t be safe in here?” he asked, sensing some discomfort.
“No, it’s not that.”
“What is it?”
She sighed. “Good night, Doctor.” She settled her head upon the pristine pillow and closed her eyes. Doctor Clueless, she thought, from behind sealed eyelids.
The Doctor was puzzled, but he shrugged, extinguished the lights using the sonic, and lay himself down, whispering, “Good night, Martha.”
MIDNIGHT BLUE
Fifty years of life had never brought Erik this kind of wonder or delight. Every form of prestidigitation he had ever seen, every act of léger de main had been fully explicable to him, and therefore boring. Even his own trickery was growing stale. His amusement at being called The Phantom of the Opéra was part of what caused him to press forward with frightening the tutus off the ballet chorus, no longer the fun of the tricks themselves. It had been diverting enough, until he fell in love. Then it went too far...
But no matter now. He was in a kind of labyrinth he had never seen before. How could such vast spaces, such mazes, such cavernous rooms fit inside the blue box he had seen? It was impossible and wondrous, and as far as he could tell, nothing short of supernatural. Finally, someone had succeeded in deceiving Erik into believing in real magic.
The controls did not interest him much, though he promised himself that if he had the chance, he would come back this way and investigate. What interested him was the spatial paradox. His mind was stretched to its limits just being here (along with trying to keep out that force, cloying at his consciousness), and he decided simply to wander.
A sterile-looking room attracted his attention not far beyond the main room. It was large and brown-tinged, much like the rest of the interior. What looked like a large pewter box stood near a corner, and it was larger than he was! He opened it and found food inside, contained within an artificially cold space. Further on, he found a flat surface with four metal coils. Dials nearby read “low, medium, high,” and he surmised that this must be some kind of heating device. Cabinets yielded gadgets he could not identify, though he worked out that most of them were run on electricity. A fruit bowl sat in a wicker basket on the counter, so he took an apple and dropped it in a pocket for later.
He found a room that seemed to contain games - he saw a Mah-Jongg table and an elaborate chess board in mid-play. The block nearby indicated that it was black’s turn - he saw an excellent next move for black, and decided to take it. He smiled at his quiet cleverness and moved on. He found a room that seemed to be used for storage, as it was stuffed to the gills with more electrical devices. Eventually, he came upon a bedroom. It was obvious that a woman slept here, as there was jewellery spread out over the vanity. He merely looked inside, he did not linger. This was clearly a private space.
He turned a few corners. He found a sitting room with a fireplace, he found an observatory, a swimming pool, a room filled with nothing but men’s clothes, and eventually, another bedroom, this time an enormous room with even a second floor. Again, he did not go inside, merely looked from the doorway. The colours inside and the clothes that he could barely see hanging in the wardrobe suggested that a man slept here. The bed and other surfaces were covered with books and maps, and Erik immediately felt a kindred understanding with this man.
A woman slept in another part of the labyrinth. He had a large bed, but he chose to fill the empty space with knowledge. This arrangement seemed tragic and familiar, and he wondered if the man was like him: clever, strange and detrimentally unique. He closed his eyes and could feel a longing lingering in the air like an aroma, but he knew he might just be projecting his own brokenness into these rooms. For their sakes, he hoped he was wrong. He hoped that this man did not fill his bed with cold intelligence rather than warm flesh because he loved a woman that he could not touch.
He tried to shake this train of thought away. The most interesting, astounding moments of his life were currently ensuing in this impossible space, and yet the most anguished moments of his life were still at the forefront of his mind. Hard as he tried, Christine would not leave him. Funny that. Six months ago, hard as he tried, she would not stay.
His wandering led him further and further into his own curiosity, and further and further into this amazing place. At some point, he realised that he had wandered in so far that he would never find his way out again, but he did not concern himself. Only the journey seemed to matter now. He only amusedly hoped that there was no trap door set, waiting to ensnare him in some sort of torture chamber.
So engrossed was he, that hours later, he almost failed to hear the voice. As far as he could tell, the man said only “That’s odd,” and then nothing else. His silence caused Erik to suspect that he knew someone was in his lair, just as Erik always did when people wandered too far down into the bowels of the Opéra. Then the man seemed to leave again. Erik heard nothing more until two muffled voices came from the depths of the labyrinth. His sense of direction was normally excellent, but today, in this place, it was quite shaky. Nevertheless, he thought he could tell that the voices were coming from the direction of the man’s bedroom. They were not saying much, but the fact that they were together was enough.
Erik secreted himself in the nearest room, where he figured he would stay the night. He did not believe in God, but if he had, he would have prayed for these two people, now sharing the vast space with him. But he didn’t need God or prayer. He had always comforted himself and others with song.
The room he was in was semi-illuminated, and he could see a crimson velvet fainting couch - he would sleep there. He also saw another unidentifiable apparatus hanging from the wall, something he was now used to seeing as a result of the day’s adventure. This thing would have looked like a painting in a frame, except that it was blank and grey. He wondered if somehow images might appear on the surface by way of electricity or other “magic.”
He shed his opera cloak and his waistcoat and laid them aside. He stood quite still and waited until he was certain that the voices had stopped. Then he gave himself one hour’s meditation. Once he was relaxed, he conjured a song from the corners of his mind. It was a song he had written for Christine, in his mind a masterpiece, but it had caused her to faint when she heard it. So shrouded was he with love and fantasy, he thought of it as a piece to which he had given birth, rather than written.
He sang. It was a cloudy, warm reverie born in the night...
En nuit je m’enveloppe en me sentant, en me souvenant,
Je respire l’odeur et tu es dans l’air, en t’attardant.
Ton essence me remplit le corps, es-tu remplie de moi ?
Je sais que ce n’est qu’une fantaisie mais ça ne m’empêche pas…
J’étends mes bras, tu y réponds d’un baiser,
Et puis tu réponds de ton toi, ton être entier.
Maintenant c’est décidé, je suis à toi, tu es la mienne,
Exactement comme en noir deux amants s’appartiennent.
Emballé, je m’en vais, je tombe au-delà du seuil,
Tu me remues, et puis tu m’accueilles.
Quand même je deviens solide et tu deviens liquide,
Nos êtres sont en harmonie, saisissants et intrépides.
Notre ouverture grandit, se joue, commence l’opéra magique !
Je suis les paroles, mon amour, et tu es la musique,
Soudain tu m’entoures de chaleur, tu me contiens,
Nos mouvements font une chœur, chantant envers le même refrain.
Les cordes brouillent notre chanson en beauté, en démence
Et leur rythme nous apporte en avance, en avance…
En cordes lisses, une basse nous impose son impatience,
Alors, la musique, et les paroles dedans, suivent sa guidance.
Et un mélange parfait d’un mot ouvert et une note pendue, il vient.
Ensemble ils versent et répandent dans l’air des violons peint.
L’amour orchestral nous possède, nous en somme une partie.
L’opéra est neuve, mon amour, les cordes nous supplient.
And when the song was finished, he repeated it. Then, Erik lay down on the crimson couch and drifted off to sleep.
The sound did not wake Martha so much as it extracted her from sleep. The painful tones brought her round, until she found herself, quite involuntarily, sitting up in bed straining to hear. A song, exquisite, anguished, hypnotic, was sounding inside her head. The words were in French, but she understood them - a love song… sensual, dreamlike and yearning.
Something stirred beside her, and she turned her head. Her bedmate sat up and looked at her with a quizzical expression she had seen hundreds of times. “Listen,” he whispered, and then his face morphed into an expression she had never seen. Their eyes locked as the song dissipated, and they stared into one another with amazement and some kind of… intoxication.
And then the song began again. The same pure tones emerged through the darkness, the same tactile, sensuous words…
En nuit je m’enveloppe en me sentant, en me souvenant,
Je respire l’odeur et tu es dans l’air, en t’attardant.
Ton essence me remplit le corps, es-tu remplie de moi ?
Je sais que ce n’est qu’une fantaisie mais ça ne m’empêche pas…
Her eyes did not move from the Doctor’s, nor did his move from hers. Their souls seemed to look askance at each other. Es-tu rempli de moi? Are you filled with my essence? Ce n’est qu’une fantaisie... it’s only a fantasy.
J’étends mes bras, tu y réponds d’un baiser
Et puis tu réponds de ton toi, ton être entier.
He reached out tentatively toward her lovely face, as though to touch her jaw with his palm. She caught his hand and kissed it, first the palm, then across the wrist and down his arm. Desire was stirring in both of them, and the next time their eyes met, so did their lips. A full-bodied kiss gave way, and as his tongue probed her mouth, she pushed her body closer, against him, and clung with her arms, and her whole being. He pushed her gently back until her head was resting on the pillow and the length of his body was resting upon her. In the fog of confusion and love and music, they were lost to one another, floating in the smoke of a different consciousness, a whole new world.
Maintenant c’est décidé, je suis à toi, tu es la mienne,
Exactement comme en noir deux amants s’appartiennent.
A blip of sanity crossed the Doctor’s mind, and a shadow of reality shone in his eyes as he pulled reluctantly away from Martha’s embrace.
Emballé, je m’en vais, je tombe au-delà du seuil…
“Martha,” he panted. “I can’t stop.”
Tu me remues, et puis tu m’accueilles.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she whispered, and all reason forgotten, he buried his mouth in the crook of her neck, eliciting a symphonic groan from her. Into the night, she whispered again, “No, please don’t stop.” Then she tugged at his t-shirt and helped him wrestle himself out of it without pulling away from her for too long.
Quand même je deviens solide et tu deviens liquide…
He shifted his weight, and for the first time, she felt a certain hardness pressing against her thigh. The feel of it made her melt with desire. She knew she was growing molten at her centre.
Nos êtres sont en harmonie, saisissants et intrépides.
She felt hungry for something, she wanted to consume, and she could tell that he felt the same way. He unbuttoned the blue pyjama top that she was wearing, nearly ripping the buttons off in the process. His mouth traversed her shoulders, breasts, neck and lips, searching for something, and his body was grinding into hers, probing, needing. At last, he manoeuvred himself between her legs. Supporting himself on his hands, he looked down at her with lucidity, and a seriousness he normally reserved for planets in peril. She pushed his pyjama bottoms down over his erection, and with her eyes, gave him approval.
Notre ouverture grandit, se joue, commence l’opéra magique.
Je suis les paroles, mon amour, et tu es la musique,
Soudain tu m’entoures de chaleur, tu me contiens…
The suspense threatened to break her in two, and now the wait was over. He pushed inside her with one liquid motion, answered by a moan from each.
Nos mouvements font une chœur, chantant envers le même refrain.
His lips pressed against hers once again, and his tongue probed her mouth as though he wanted to be completely entrenched in her. He moved inside her with force, all gentle overtures having been left behind, and reflecting the same urgency that she felt. Her body glowed with the pleasure of it, his perfect thrusts, his seeming ability to read her mind and listen to her body.
Les cordes brouillent notre chanson en beauté, en démence
The fog that surrounded them in the form of song was palpable now. It filled their senses and made them insatiable and unhinged.
Et leur rythme nous apporte en avance, en avance…
It spurred them on, and Martha could feel herself advancing closer and closer to the brink, and she felt the Doctor’s body moving with ever greater urgency.
En cordes lisses, une basse nous impose son impatience,
Suddenly, it was here, a force boiled up from deep inside and told them it’s time. He looked at her starkly again, and she saw in his eyes the same unhinged need that was boiling up inside her. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have mistaken the expression for anger.
“Martha,” he hissed, and she reveled in the sound of her name on his lips, pushed out from a place of pure lust. “I still can’t stop. The time is now…”
Alors, la musique, et les paroles dedans, suivent sa guidance.
“Yes,” she told him, replicating his throaty whisper. “Let it take you, Doctor. Bring me with you.”
Et un mélange parfait d’un mot ouvert et une note pendue, il vient.
And then they were taken together. In a perfect, exquisite moment, they came together with interlocking moans…
Ensemble ils versent et répandent dans l’air des violons peint.
… and each one relished the feeling of the other spasming, flooding, giving in to the music in the air.
L’amour orchestral nous possède, nous en somme une partie.
L’opéra est neuve, mon amour, les cordes nous supplient.
And as they recovered, the Doctor looking down upon her with shock in his eyes, Martha looking back with unabashed love, they knew they were not finished. They knew in that moment that their relationship had changed, their lives had changed. And they knew that they must be taken again…
The Doctor leaned in once more and kissed Martha with a combustible craving, and their song recommenced in due time. Each noticed in their turn, just barely, that the singing had stopped, but their opera was just beginning.
part 2
Erik's song: translation
In the night, I am enveloped, feeling and remembering
I breathe in the scent and you are in the air, lingering.
Your essence fills my body, are you filled with me ?
I know that it’s only a fantasy, but that doesn’t inhibit me...
I reach out my arms, and you answer with a kiss,
And then you answer with your self, your entire being.
Now it’s decided, I am yours, you are mine,
Exactly as two lovers belong to one another in the night.
Enfolded, I go on, I fall beyond the threshold,
You stir me, and then you welcome me.
Even as I am becoming solid and you are becoming liquid,
Our beings are in harmony, grasping and fearless.
Our overture swells, is played, the magical opera begins!
I am the words, my love, and you are the music,
Suddenly you surround me with heat, you contain me,
Our movements make a chorus, singing toward the same refrain.
The strings shroud our song in beauty, in madness
And their rhythm brings us forward, foraward...
Within the smooth strings, a bass imposes upon us its impatience,
So, the music, and the words inside, follow its guidance.
And a perfect combination of open word and a hanging note, it comes.
Together they spill and spread in the air painted with violins.
Orchestral love posesses us, we are part of it.
The opera is brand new, my love, the strings are pleading with us.
Author/Artist: Midori
Canon: Doctor Who / Phantom of the Opera (Musical or Susan Kay)
Pairing(s): Martha Jones/10th Doctor
Rating: M
Summary: A strange blue box appears in "the Phantom's" domain, and he cannot keep himself from wandering inside. But its occupants sense that a stranger is in their midst! Will they be able to find him before he has them both in his thrall and wreaks havoc upon their lives?
Warnings (if any): Sex. Fairly graphic.
Total word count: 18,476
Original prompt request number: 18
CORNFLOWER BLUE
London, 2007, across the street from Sparrow and Nightingale Antiquarian Books and Rare DVDs, next to Josef’s Hairstylist shop. As their adventures went, it was not exactly an exotic locale for her, but the work involved was plenty unusual. Martha Jones groaned as she scrunched up her face and wiped globs of green goo off her clothes. “Ugh. If I never see another giant alien lizard egg, it will be too soon,”
The Doctor was standing nearby doing very much the same thing. He stopped, looked quizzically at her, then smirked. “There’s something you don’t get to say every day. Well done.”
She climbed out of her brown mesh cardigan and held it up, assessing the damage. “Well, I suppose if we can get it to a good dry cleaner...”
“Oh! I know a planet that specialises in that!”
She smiled at him. “Okay. But I was just thinking I know a place right around the corner. But if you’d rather travel across the universe, I won’t argue.”
He looked at her with his nose and chin in the air, still with the smirk. His expression seemed to say, “Cheeky girl!” But in response, he disentangled himself from the rucksack filled with arrows that he had taken from Martha in a desperate moment, and the longbow draped across his shoulder. Then he peeled off his tan trenchcoat.
“Lucky I took off my tie before going in,” he said. “That one was my favourite - wouldn’t want it splashed with lizard blood.”
He handed the coat to Martha. She took it without question or protest and draped it over her arm. “I’ll do this, you get lunch?” she asked.
“All right,” he managed to say using a high-pitched tone, no actual words. “Curry?”
“Nah, Chinese.”
He pulled a face. “Pizza?”
“Yeah, that. Leporello’s is just a block that way.”
“Okay. The TARDIS is parked on Queensway across from the Bayswater station.”
“Yep. Meet you there in half an hour.”
“Yeah.”
They went their separate ways for the time being. She went around the corner to Pappas’ Dry Cleaning and Pastries.
“Ah, Miss Jones,” he exclaimed as she entered. “You’ve come back!”
“So it would seem,” she said with a smile.
“You wait here. I have your dress.”
“Oh! Okay.” She waited in the lobby as Mr. Pappas disappeared behind the strips of opaque plastic hanging from the doorjamb. When he returned, he was carrying a wrapped garment that must be the bridesmaid dress she had worn about two weeks before it began to rain upwards at the hospital and her life changed forever.
“The shrimp cocktail is a bugger to remove,” Mr. Pappas told her in his thick Greek accent, hanging it on the tall hook. “But it should be good as new now.”
“Thank you,” she said, rather surprised. She had entirely forgotten she had brought that dress here. With exams and Leo’s 21st and Annalise, she had had so much on her mind at that time, a blue satin dress was the least of her worries.
She loaded up the counter with the two garments. Hers was a tiny brown fitted thing, and the Doctor’s trenchcoat, of course, totally overwhelmed it. Mr. Pappas zeroed in on it immediately.
“What’s this?” the five-foot-five dry cleaner asked, hefting the tan coat to its full height. He turned it round and round draped on the tip of his finger, looked at it with amusement, and then at Martha. “Is there a new man in your life, Miss Jones?”
“I guess you could say that,” she said flatly.
“A doctor like you, I hope,” he probed, referring to Martha’s projected profession.
“Yes, a doctor. But not like me.”
“A tall man, by the looks of it,” he commented, this time referring to the coat.
“Yep,” she sighed. “Tall and brilliant. But also strangely clueless.”
“Well, Miss Jones,” he said to her, draping the long coat over his arm. “Sometimes men need to be shown. Not all males are sensitive and responsive to subtlety like yours truly.” He said this, then laughed heartily to show it was a joke.
“You can say that again,” she said, rolling her eyes. She dug into her pockets for some money. She handed him a tenner. “Thank you, Mr. Pappas.”
He grabbed her hand as he took the money. “Honestly, all joking aside. If he is clueless as you say, then perhaps he needs a bit of persuasion. I’d hate for you to miss out on something brilliant because you were too afraid... and for him to miss out on a pretty girl like you.”
Far from pulling her hand away, she felt oddly comforted by his warm smile, and sighed again. “I know. But it’s complicated.”
“Life is complicated. We do our best with what we’ve got.” He let go of her hand.
“There’s... someone else. Sort of an ex.”
“She won’t go away?”
“It’s not that. It’s not her fault. He just can’t get his mind off her.”
“Ah, I see,” he said. “That requires a bit more manoeuvering. Like I said, Miss Jones, he needs to be shown.”
She stared at him, but the wheels were turning. She’d spent now nearly nine months with the Doctor and she had long since given up on “manoeuvering.” She had managed to convince herself that she was content to accept his little hang-up on a blonde in another universe, and simply be the best friend that he so badly needed. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to throw herself into that particular fray again, but she did mull over, quite thoughtfully, what Mr. Pappas said.
She smiled brightly, warmly. “Thank you, really,” she said. “Erm, is the tenner enough?”
“Oh yes yes, more than enough for you, Miss Jones,” he told her. He gathered up the two coats in his arms as Martha gathered up her dress and turned to go. “Miss Jones?”
She turned back. “Yes?”
“You forgot this. It was inside Doctor Clueless’ trenchcoat. Hmm. The pockets seem to be bigger on the inside.”
She reached out and took the purple plastic portfolio in her hand. It was the packet of information that the girl from the DVD shop down the street had given the Doctor. “Thank you,” she said, before leaving.
She boarded the Underground not far away, and as the train jetted through the tunnels, she stared at the information packet. The girl (what was her name... Sally?) had said that the Doctor was, sometime soon, to be stranded in the year 1969. How she knew this, Martha had no idea, but she seemed like a nice person - clearly smitten with the Doctor, but then, who was she to cast stones for that?
But stranded in 1969? She laid the dress across her lap, opened the packet and read a bit. She learned that the Doctor and his companion (it was Martha, according to the DVD Easter egg transcript) were to be stuck without their time vehicle in London of 1969 for an unknown duration. However, it would be long enough that Martha would have to get a job to support the two of them, apparently while the Doctor worked out how to use Sally’s instructions to get them out of there.
Oh, that was not good. That meant probably months she would be with him, trapped without the TARDIS, likely living together, playing house. Worst case scenario: they’d have to pretend to be husband and wife in order to be allowed to rent anywhere that didn’t have fleas, and they would have to share a bed. If that was to happen, then she would be in even more pain than she was in now. Traveling together in an infinitely large spaceship was one thing, but if she didn’t want to be sharing a bed (again) and playing at marriage with Doctor Clueless, then for her own sanity, she needed to do something. She either needed to get over it, or do as Mr. Pappas said: show him.
She exited the Bayswater station and crossed the street. The TARDIS was just hanging about, weirdly unnoticed as always, right next to a Tesco. She pushed on the door, but it was locked. That meant the Doctor hadn’t returned with the pizza yet, so she used her key to get inside.
She placed the info packet on the navigator’s chair, then wandered back to her room to put the dress away.
It was wrapped in white plastic which was tied off at the bottom. She hung it on the peg inside her closet door and unwrapped it. Contrary to the nasty reputation most bridesmaid dresses carried, she had really loved this dress, and had enjoyed wearing it - she had loved how she looked in it, and so had lots of men at the reception! She smiled at the memory. She had taken Oliver Morgenstern to the wedding as her date, which was fun, but dancing with a gay man provided few prospects. She had never turned so many heads in her life, though, and that had been enough for her, for the time being.
Impulsively, she decided to try the dress on. After being splattered with alien lizard goo, she needed to change her clothes anyway, and she could use a bit of a pick-me-up. She had no idea how long before the Doctor came back, but it didn’t really matter - it’s not like he was ever interested in entering her bedroom. He could wait for a bit.
She pulled the pink scarf from her head with one quick motion and grabbed a spider clip from the vanity and pinned her hair up. Then she stripped down to only her knickers, took the dress from its hanger, and stepped into it.
It was a strapless A-line gown, in cornflower blue satin, with a lacy, cream-coloured embroidered pattern crawling its way across the hem and bustline. A cream-coloured sash stretched across her middle, and she did her best to tie it behind her back. It accentuated her dainty waist and sculpted arms. The colour was perfect against her liquid dark skin tone, though it did not exactly match the pink eyeshadow she had put on that morning. She wished she had the faux-diamond necklace she had worn before, and the matching earrings, but... oh well, the necklace and earrings she was wearing were fine for a quick flight of fancy.
She admired herself in the full-length mirror, which is not something she’d had a chance to do very often of late. Her life had been about running and fighting aliens and saving planets, laser this, sonic that, and a man who wouldn’t notice her appearance if she showed up at the breakfast table naked. Not an environment conducive to playing dress-up.
But today, she sighed with satisfaction, and a bemused smile on her face. She made a mental note to buy a new dress every now and then as a treat for herself. She’d forgotten how good this felt.
She had also forgotten to close her bedroom door, and when the exclamation of “Oh!” came from the doorway, it startled her terribly. Her face grew hot, and the unpleasant rush spread down the rest of her body.
“Doctor!” she cried, her hand at her chest which was threatening to split open from the harsh beating inside. “God, you scared me to death!”
The expression on his face was frozen in a surprised “O” for a few moments, and then he seemed to shake it off. “S-Sorry,” he said, placing one hand on the back of his neck, not making eye contact. “I didn’t mean to scare you. The door was open, and...”
“I know, I know,” she said, taking a few steps toward him. “I should have closed it, sorry. So, ready for lunch?”
He met her eyes, and just looked at her for a moment with wide-open, shocked eyes. Then he said, “W-what? Oh, oh, yes... y-yes.”
“I’ll just change,” she said, signaling for him to leave. But he did not.
His wide-as-saucers eyes traveled from her eyes all the way down to the cream-coloured embroidery near the floor, and back. There was no lasciviousness on his face, no amusement or bemusement, but when he did that, the unpleasant blush spread down her body once more.
“What?” she asked.
“What?” he echoed, snapping out of some kind of stupor. “S-sorry, I’m just...”
“What?”
“Surprised.”
“Surprised at what?”
“You look...” and in lieu of an adjective which he could not seem to recall, he simply exhaled quickly through pursed lips.
“Thank you,” she said, coquettishly not meeting his eyes. The spreading blush was back, but more pleasant this time.
“That dress is... be-beautiful, just...” he sighed, at a loss. “Beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
He took two steps toward her and took her hands. He looked into her eyes, not for the first time, but in an entirely new way, and said, “I mean... you are beautiful.”
For the third time, she said, “Thank you, Doctor.” A lump was forming in her throat, and butterflies seemed to be dancing in her stomach. He held her hands and gazed at her, not speaking. She searched his face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing there.
“Doctor?” she asked softly.
“Yes?”
“Are you ready for lunch?”
“Yes,” he told her.
“Okay then. I’m going to need to change. Meet you in the breakfast nook in a few?”
“Okay,” he whispered, breaking eye contact. As he moved away from her, his hand held onto hers for as long as possible, before he disappeared behind the door.
She was clever enough to shut the door this time, and she shed the cornflower dress and hung it in the back of the closet, out of sight. She felt that she should be happy about what had just happened, but she wasn’t, somehow. It only made her nervous. She supposed it was the uncertainty that was bothering her, and tried to push it down. She knew that if she was going to “do something” about Doctor Clueless before they got stuck in 1969 (God knew when), that she’d have to weather the uncertainty and the possibility of rejection for a while.
It was getting colder, so she threw on a long black skirt over the tights and boots she was already wearing, and pulled a long-sleeved white fitted tee-shirt over her head. She swallowed the lump in her throat and went to the breakfast nook to have lunch with the Doctor.
FRENCH BLUE
Suddenly, it was like her bedroom existed on the other side of a dimensional portal or something, because when she arrived at the table, the Doctor’s demeanour was completely normal (well, for him, anyway). He seemed to have forgotten the vision of her in the cornflower dress, and the shock he seemed to feel when he saw her. He’d forgotten all about staring wistfully into her eyes, and holding her hands... and she was strangely relieved. Too much too soon could be a bad thing.
They were both famished, and ate like they had just been in a battle with a giant lizard and her spawn. They laughed about the weird little adventure they’d just had, sedating the Yardo Lizard hatchlings (and their dragon of a mother) in order to send them back to their own planet and time through a wormhole. The job had been messier than they had anticipated, and Martha noticed that the Doctor, though he’d taken off his suit jacket, still had some green gooey lizard blood on his blue shirt.
“You will change your shirt before we go anywhere else, won’t you?” she asked, as she wiped her hands on her napkin.
“Why?” he asked, inspecting his clothes. “Oh yeah, look at that. Looks like everything goes to the dry cleaner’s before too long. Wish we could have done that without having to shoot them with poisoned arrows.”
“Better than calling in UNIT to destroy them,” Martha said.
“I suppose so.” Still chewing his last bite of pizza, he shed the blue shirt, and to Martha’s surprise, he had a tan one on underneath it.
“Dressing in layers,” she commented. “Very smart.”
“Yeah,” he said leaning on the table, scratching his eye nervously. “Er, Martha, speaking of dressing...”
Oh, God, here it comes.
“...I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable before. It was totally inappropriate of me.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I was flattered.”
“I entered without knocking, and then I acted like a stuttering schoolboy, all because of a stupid dress!”
“You didn’t act like a schoolboy,” she assured him. “And it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” he said. “I am your friend, and you are not an object. If we’re going to travel together, then things like this can’t just happen.”
“Agreed,” she told him, though she suspected that she felt that way for a totally different reason than he did.
“You need to be able to trust me,” he said. He put his hand on top of hers in a gesture of cameraderie. “I need to act in a way that makes you want to trust me. So... won’t happen again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Now... I think we’ve seen enough alien blood for one day. Let’s have a short holiday. Where would you like to go?”
“Don’t mind,” she told him, drained. She sat back in her chair and defensively crossed her arms over her chest.
“We could go meet someone famous like we did before,” he told her, trying to entice her. “We’ve done Shakespeare... I know! Who’s your favourite painter?”
“Erm, VanGogh, I think. I love Starry Night.”
The Doctor hissed air through his clenched teeth, and said, “Ooh, unstable bloke. He’s likely to fall in love with you and lop off a body part to prove it.”
“Well, we don’t have to...”
“But he did live an interesting life. Born in Holland, died in France, preacher, teacher, salesman, painter. And of course, a complete madman.”
“He’d be treated today with Lithium, I expect,” Martha commented. “Just lived too soon.”
The Doctor looked at her with interest. “You think so? You think he could have been as brilliant as he was if he’d quashed his madness with drugs?”
“Maybe not, but he’d certainly have been a happier guy. Would have lived longer, too.”
“Granted, granted. But the art, the beauty he gave to the human race, Martha,” the Doctor sighed. “Oh, I don’t know if it’s worth the trade.”
“You might be right, at least from the point of view of the rest of humanity.”
“Still, it was a time and place of great creativity. Paris in the 1880s - that’s when VanGogh was in his heyday - just chock full of complete nutters with creativity falling out of their ears. If VanGogh hadn’t been there, surely the richness of the era would not have been diminished by very much. There still would have been Toulouse-Lautrec (opium-addict), Degas (frustrated pedophile), Whistler (Oedipal complex), and those are just painters! That’s not even mentioning the writers and musicians! Oh, that lot is even more interesting!”
“Well, if you’re so excited about it, why don’t we go there?” Martha suggested. “Paris, circa 1880... we’ll take in the culture, bask in the insanity and be back in time for supper. Never been to Paris.”
“Really? You?”
“Really!” she said with a smile. “Been to Egypt, Istanbul, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Iceland, Brazil and all manner of exotic locations with my family, but they never had any desire to stay in Europe, and the only time I’ve been to America was with you! Never seen Spain, never been to Germany...”
“But didn’t you tell me you speak German? You must have studied.”
“Yeah, and French as well, but never traveled to either place,” she smiled. “My studying abroad was done in the Congo with Doctors Without Borders when I was in my second year of medical school.”
The Doctor smiled. “Doctors Without Borders - that’s brilliant. That’s us!”
“It kind of is,” she said.
“In that case, what are we still doing parked in Bayswater? Care to join me for a Parisian holiday, Martha Jones?”
“My pleasure, Doctor!”
Arm in arm, they headed for the console room. On the way, the Doctor chattered away about the time when he had met DaVinci and had hidden a message in the Mona Lisa. While he talked, he stopped at a closet to withdraw a replacement suit jacket and tie. When they arrived in the console room, he took a few moments to complete his ensemble, and then, once again wrapped in brown pinstripes from shoulder to ankle, he adjusted the screen and began to set coordinates.
“Oh, this is going to be brilliant!” he growled. “The heart of Haussman’s Paris! A good bet is Café de la Paix, round 1885 or so. We’re bound to rub elbows with someone interesting there.”
He did what he does with the TARDIS console, pulled the handbreak loose, and then, more appropriately than ever, exclaimed, “Allons-y!”
The jolt of the TARDIS was worse than usual and sent them both tumbling to the floor. The grinding of the gears sounded off, and did not have the usual satisfying ring which exhilirated Martha and gave her a sense of adventure. Today, it was more of a gurgling. The vessel jostled its occupants about, and both the Doctor and Martha scrambled to find purchase on handrails or pillars or anything bolted to the floor.
Finally it came to a halt, and Martha found herself slumped against a far wall, and the Doctor was lying sideways underneath the navigator’s stool.
“Martha, you okay?” he called out, unsure of where she’d landed.
“Fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “Just a bit... shaken.”
The Doctor approached the TARDIS console. He looked up into the cyllindrical energy field, and asked, “What’s wrong, eh? What happened just now?”
He pulled the screen over, and examined it. “The precision toggle is on the blink,” he told Martha. “Won’t take a minute to fix. I’ll do it on the way out.”
“The precision toggle?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The coordinates I set through the computer here are rough. I can name a year and a city, most of the time that’s all I need. But the precision toggle lets me get to a certain date, time and street, if I want. This time I set it for Boulevard des Capucines, noon on New Year’s Day, 1885. It’s quite accurate normally, although today... we might’ve gotten just a bit off course.”
“Let’s find out,” Martha said. She headed for the door, and when she opened it, she was greeted by a penetrating darkness. “Blimey! Have you got a torch?”
The Doctor rooted around below a floor panel for a minute, and emerged with two plastic torches. They each took one and ventured into the darkness.
It was cold, damp and grey, and Martha could hear rats somewhere in the vicinity. The floor was hard and stone, much like the walls, and there seemed to be four options as to which direction they might head.
“Whoa, it’s like a labyrinth,” Martha said, keeping her voice a bit hushed. “Where the hell are we?”
“I have no idea,” the Doctor confessed, looking about in very much the same manner as Martha. “I’ll go out on a limb and say underground.”
“But which way do we go?”
He looked at her with a bit of incredulity, pointed his torch to the left, the only corridor that seemed to be sloped upwards from where they were standing, and said, “Up. Come on.”
POLICE BLUE
He’d been reduced once again to a ghost. For a few brief shining moments, she had made him feel like a man, but today, he wandered - lurked - in the cellars of his Opéra, a shadowy, forgotten figure, masked and one with the dark.
And alone again. Or still? He was never certain. He had never been exactly friendless, but he wasn’t the sort of man who could be stayed with - his existence was too complex, his mind too steep for comprehension by most human beings. Most humans would deny his existence, truth be told. And just as well - he had been through things that would turn most of them cold.
And so, he tried to tell himself, what have I really lost? She is gone, she is with someone who can give her what she needs, what I never can. She was never mine to lose, so why wallow?
But rationality has no place in the realm of love. He could not will himself to let go of her.
And then, an echo in the darkness. Two levels up - he could hear it. An otherworldly grinding, intermingled with a sickly gurgle. He had never heard anything like it in his life - he had absolutely nothing to compare it to. He stopped walking and stood deadly still.
Almost immediately, he could feel something cloying at his mind. An outside force trying to get in, or an inner truth trying to escape? It was in-between, like when he had encountered the mystic shamans in Persia. Mind control, trying to keep the newcomer in check. He had quickly trained himself to shut them out, though it had taken longer to learn how to get in. The Persians used their eyes, intricate carpet weaves, even the vastness of the desert to hypnotise their subjects. He used his voice, the one purely beautiful thing he had ever possessed.
And so he shut out the prying force now. He put a wall between his mind and whatever it was.
After a moment, he heard voices. A man and a woman, speaking in English. A few feet ahead, their dim, orange light could be seen.
“Which way do we go?” asked the woman’s voice.
A beat, and then the man answered, “Up.”
Relief flooded him. At least these two, they had the sense to go away from here - to go up, away from the darkness. He was too tired to involve himself in yet more hapless explorers who should find themselves trapped in the torture chamber. He was reasonably sure that he did not have the strength, and entirely certain he did not have the mercy.
He knew he should go back to his chamber and stay there, but he did not. He needed to know who these people were, these English who knew the craft of mind exploration as he did - he had never met another European (outside of Romania) who could do what he could do. Perhaps these people posed a threat. What did they intend? He didn’t know, and so he followed the sound. What had made that noise? Machinery? An animal? Some combination of the two?
He ran soundlessly up the corridors he knew so well, the labyrinth that he had helped design. He stopped short as something surprised him, seeming to leap in his way. He knew every nook and cranny of this Opéra, and he had never seen this here before. Very few things perplexed him anymore, but this… a blue box, eight feet tall, less than an arm’s length wide had simply appeared in the depths of the Opéra. Light radiated from within, and the words across the top read, again in English, “Police Public Call Box.” It was some sort of device for catching criminals, perhaps.
As he got closer to it, whatever was scratching at his mind grew stronger. He pushed harder.
And when he opened the door of the blue Police box, for the first time, not even the mighty brain of Erik could explain what it was seeing.
Martha giggled as they crossed the street and were nearly run down by four horses and the cart they were pulling. The driver shouted something at her, just as she stumbled against the Doctor.
“This is brilliant,” she cried out. “Paris!”
“You know, you’re not happy unless you’re being almost hit by something,” the Doctor commented, helping set her back on her feet, then offering his arm.
She took it. “Oh you’re one to talk!”
The Doctor looked up, back the way they had come. “Oh, of course! The Opéra! I should have known.”
The large green and gold building loomed before them majestically at the apex of l’Avenue de l’Opéra, a fledgling boulevard lined with saplings, a darling of the new Haussmann’s Paris. The statues of Apollo’s Lyre and Pegasus on the roof gleamed in the sunlight before the bright green dome. The place seemed to be buzzing with excitement, men and women in carriages being dropped off, picked up and driven past the place.
“Opera, eh?”
“Oui oui! This is the Palais Garnier Opera house, opened in 1875 and containing five levels of subterranean tunnels which lead to an underground lake which powers hydraulic stage equipment.”
“There’s a lake under that building?”
“Yep,” he said, popping the P. “They started digging the foundation and ran smack into water, a long-buried tributary of the River Seine. So instead of moving the locale, they used it to their advantage.”
“How did we wind up down there?”
“I told you,” the Doctor replied. “Precision toggle. I was aiming for… well, here, where we’re standing right now, Boulevard des Capucines, 1885.”
“Well, only a couple hundred yards off,” she said. “And how many years, I wonder?”
“Three,” the Doctor answered, looking the other way.
“How’d you know that?”
He pointed inside the café to their left. There was a poster, an advert, which read, “Come Celebrate the New Year at Café de la Paix! Only 50 centimes entry. Fancy dress.” An image of a baby wore a sash that said 1882, and an old man next to him wore one that said 1881.
“New Year’s Eve!” Martha exclaimed. “We dropped in on a party.”
“So it would seem. And at Café de la Paix, no less.”
“Fancy dress, though?”
“Well, it’s a tradition at the Opéra to have a masked ball on New Year’s, but most people can’t afford that sort of thing… most people can’t even get invited to that sort of thing. Only the rich and important. So there are, shall we say, poor-man’s fancy dress parties all over town. This is a popular one just by virtue of the fact it’s across the street from the Palais Garnier itself.”
Martha looked at the Doctor expectantly, like a child. “Doctor?”
He returned the look, only with a mischievous air. “I’ve got some 19th century centimes in one my junk drawers on the TARDIS.” He smiled widely, which always could draw a big smile out of Martha as well.
“Shall we do it?” she asked.
“Oh yes!” he answered.
Excitedly, she turned and walked straight into the café, and the Doctor followed. Martha opened her mouth, and proudly asked, “Pardonnez-moi monsieur, est-ce que vous pouvez me dire s’il va falloir acheter en avance des billets pour la fête de la nouvelle année?”
The man behind the counter looked at her blankly for a few seconds. Finally, the man opened his mouth and shouted “Sorry! I don’t speak English!”
She looked at the Doctor. “TARDIS translation circuits,” he told her.
She was exasperated. “Even when they’re speaking a language I understand?”
“It tunes into your native language and interprets the words as… oh, just ask him again in English, will you?”
Martha sighed. “Sir, can you tell me if we will need to pre-pay for tickets to the New Year’s celebration tonight?”
“No, miss,” the man said. “Not necessary. We’ll admit as many people as arrive.”
“Isn’t that a fire hazard?” she asked.
The Doctor cleared his throat loudly.
“Right,” she said, coming back to herself. “Thank you.”
“Oh, and miss?” the barman said. “You do mean tomorrow night, don’t you? Today is the 30th.”
“Ah!” she covered. “Of course. My mistake.”
“Can I interest you and your gentleman friend in some Absinthe?” he asked, pulling the bottle from a shelf below.
“God, no!”
“Then would you mind clearing the counter space? I’m trying to run a business.”
“Right, thank you, sir,” the Doctor said, leading Martha away by the shoulders.
As they left the café, Martha tittered, “Oh, I’m so excited! I can’t believe I’m going to a fancy dress ball in 19th century Paris! Maybe I’ll get to meet Van Gogh after all. Although, how will I know him? I guess I’ll just look for the bloke with one ear!”
“Oh, he’s still got both ears in 1881, but you’ll know him because he looks a bit like a young Kirk Douglas, only ginger,” the Doctor said. Looking up and down the street, he rocked back on his heels, and asked, “So, we’ve got a day and a half in Paris. What would you like to do? It’s all about the art at this time in history, Martha. There’s no Eiffel Tower yet, Notre Dame Cathedral is in ruins from the revolution, Invalides is still a hospital, Jim Morrison’s grave isn’t here… what’s here is the Louvre, Montmartre’s art district, the Comédie Française…”
“Sounds good.”
“What does?”
“All of it. Let’s see it all!”
When the Doctor darkened the TARDIS’ door that evening, it was without Martha. She had wanted to choose a costume for the fancy dress party tomorrow night, and the Doctor had decided to leave her to it.
Immediately when the Doctor came inside, he could sense something wrong. The TARDIS was agitated, repressed somehow, causing something like a psychic din inside his head. He approached the console and ran his eyes carefully over the controls. They were in the same positions as when he had left them. The screen showed the darkness outside, the cyllinder in the center glowed as usual. But there was an inexplicable unrest - the TARDIS had been tampered with in some way. The Doctor scowled and began to look about.
A tiny detail caught his eye: a shock of black fabric sticking out from between two metal rods that made up the railing around the console area. He knelt, took his glasses from his pocket and inspected it before pulling it from its tight spot. Someone had walked through this area and gotten their clothes caught and torn. He extracted the little piece of fabric and looked at it even closer. Silk, he surmised, of good quality.
“That’s odd,” he said out loud to himself. That meant someone wealthy had walked through this area and gotten their clothes caught and torn. Based on the locale, someone had ripped their opera cloak inside the TARDIS. He had a feeling it wouldn’t work, but he held the sonic screwdriver aloft and used four different settings to scan for transmitters, weapons, alien technology and the like. Nothing.
Whatever was on-board was very good at cloaking its presence, and it had a near-infinite space in which simply to hide. He decided that whoever it was should not know that he was there. He tiptoed outside the vessel and waited in the shadows for Martha. He knew he would scare her to death when she arrived, but it was better than having her bounding into the TARDIS unawares - the being on-board could be malevolent indeed. Most likely they were after him and it was possible they didn’t even know about Martha. If that was the case, he’d like to keep it that way.
Sure enough, when she came down the ramp with a tissue paper-covered garment draped over her arm, her torch failed to illuminate him standing beside the TARDIS, and when he met her a few yards away and grabbed her, putting his hand over her mouth, she let out a muffled scream.
“It’s me,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. Please don’t shout.” He let go.
“What the hell are you doing?” she rasped at him.
“Someone is in the TARDIS,” he whispered. “I don’t want them to know we’re here.”
“What? Someone’s in there? How do you know?”
“She told me, the TARDIS did,” he answered. “I mean, not with words, but…”
“Do you know how to find them?”
“No, it’s huge in there. I scanned for all the usual things, but I’ve got nothing,” he said, exasperated. He faced the TARDIS and buried his hands in his hair and pulled. “Thing is, it’s not even supposed to be noticed. You only see it if you know it’s there. That means it’s someone looking for me, maybe someone been following us for God knows how long.”
“What do we do?”
“We hole up for the night in a secure room and double-lock the doors, set an alarm and try to get some sleep. We’ll start scouring the TARDIS in the morning.”
“Can’t we go stay somewhere else?”
“We can’t risk it,” he insisted. “What if it’s a rogue Time Agent? What if it’s a being that feeds on time energy?” He took her hand and motioned for silence, and began pulling her toward the TARDIS door.
She looked at him with worried eyes. She never thought the day would come when she would feel unsafe entering the TARDIS.
He tried to reassure her. “Come on, it’s okay. You’re with me, right? I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise. Trust me?”
“Of course,” she said, smiling nervously.
They pushed open the door. He led her across the noisy metal floor slowly, trying not to crinkle the tissue paper or clang their feet on the floor. They tiptoed round three corners and behind a door. He sonicked the door locked, and began punching a code into an elaborate keyboard near the door. Martha assumed he was arming an alarm.
Martha looked up. It was a large room with a high ceiling. Straight ahead, there was a king-sized bed, unmade, one side clearly slept-in, the other side crowded with open books, unrolled maps and gadgets. Over to the right, a sunken mini-living room revealed much the same scenario spread over a small coffee table. Beyond the bed, a wide, curved staircase led up, and her eyes followed the banister to a second floor walled entirely by unkempt, but well-used, bookshelves. A large wardrobe sat near the staircase, the door hanging slightly ajar. She wandered over and looked inside. About 25 blue and brown pin-striped suits hung inside, and on the floor, just as many white and red Converse trainers. A myriad of tan, white and blue dress shirts hung to the right, and on the inside of the door, she counted twelve brown ties and one special Christmas tie with reindeer.
She turned and looked at him, still typing codes into the pad near the door. “This is your bedroom,” she said, incredulously.
“Yar,” he said distractedly, the sonic screwdriver sideways in his teeth, impeding his speech.
He would be busy for another minute, so Martha took this opportunity to drink it all in. She couldn’t help it - her eyes were pulled involuntarily to the bed. She and the Doctor had been forced to share a bed before, but this was different. This was his bed, the way he kept it, the way he liked it, where he did all of his most private thinking, enjoyed all of his most unguarded moments. She felt an intimacy with him just from seeing his bed unmade, and she felt an insane, compulsive need to memorise everything about it. A dark red bedspread presided over tan sheets, crinkled from the dream-driven movements of the Doctor’s body. A long pillow still dented from the weight of the Doctor’s head. A large, cold space covered with books and food for his great brain, a clear reminder that he slept here alone, and had for some time. How many times had she lain so nearby and longed to occupy that space?
“You can hang that in the wardrobe, if you’d like,” he told her, taking her by surprise.
“Are you sure?” she asked him, coming to.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Mi cámara es su cámara. I’m just sorry it’s such a mess.”
“It’s all right,” she said quietly, making her way to the wardrobe. She hung the tissue-covered costume inside, and admired how it comingled with the Doctor’s suits.
When she turned around, he was clearing off the bed, making semi-neat stacks on the credenza near the footboard. She watched, did not interrupt.
When he was finished, he looked at her strangely and said, “Oh, sorry - I didn’t even ask. Is this all right, sleeping here next to me?”
She choked. “Yeah,” she said, a bit more emphatically than she would have liked. “It’s fine. No problem.”
“There are some drawers to your right. Maybe there’s something in there you can wear.”
She opened one of the drawers and found multiple pairs of identical pyjamas in dark blue, or as she had come to think of it, Police Box blue. She extracted one of the tops and held it up to her shoulders. Martha was just over five feet tall, the Doctor just over six. The shirttail hit her an inch above the knee. She stepped behind a wall out of sight, gingerly shed her clothes and underwear, and buttoned up the pyjama top around her. She came out from behind the wall to find the Doctor sitting on the edge of the bed wearing what could have been the bottom half of the pyjama set she was wearing, along with the white tee-shirt he’d had on under his clothes all day. His glasses were on, and he seemed to be researching something.
“What’re you reading?” she asked, pulling her hair loose from the spider clip.
Almost without moving his lips, he answered, “I’m researching ways to detect organic presences in large labyrinthine spaces, using only the tools I have on-board,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave the TARDIS again until we find out who’s in here with us.”
Suddenly, he shut the book with a loud snap and threw it to the floor beside the bed. He took off his glasses and looked up at her. He paused. She had seen that look before… earlier today when he’d walked in on her wearing the cornflower dress.
Like before, she asked, “What?”
“Er, nothing. It’s just that you look a lot better in my pyjamas than I do. You’ve got nicer legs,” he told her with a crooked smile.
She didn’t say anything, but was forced to avert her eyes. She walked around to “her” side of the bed, and he watched her as she did. In one swift motion, he had shifted his body into a supine position and lay on his side with his head in one hand. She timidly pulled the sheets back and crawled into bed, trying to be modest about it. She uncomfortably arranged herself so that she was lying on her side, facing him, just like in Dolly Bailey’s Inn in Shakespeare’s time.
“You’re a good sport, Martha,” he said. “I hope this is the only night we have to do this.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, again averting her eyes.
“Are you worried we won’t be safe in here?” he asked, sensing some discomfort.
“No, it’s not that.”
“What is it?”
She sighed. “Good night, Doctor.” She settled her head upon the pristine pillow and closed her eyes. Doctor Clueless, she thought, from behind sealed eyelids.
The Doctor was puzzled, but he shrugged, extinguished the lights using the sonic, and lay himself down, whispering, “Good night, Martha.”
MIDNIGHT BLUE
Fifty years of life had never brought Erik this kind of wonder or delight. Every form of prestidigitation he had ever seen, every act of léger de main had been fully explicable to him, and therefore boring. Even his own trickery was growing stale. His amusement at being called The Phantom of the Opéra was part of what caused him to press forward with frightening the tutus off the ballet chorus, no longer the fun of the tricks themselves. It had been diverting enough, until he fell in love. Then it went too far...
But no matter now. He was in a kind of labyrinth he had never seen before. How could such vast spaces, such mazes, such cavernous rooms fit inside the blue box he had seen? It was impossible and wondrous, and as far as he could tell, nothing short of supernatural. Finally, someone had succeeded in deceiving Erik into believing in real magic.
The controls did not interest him much, though he promised himself that if he had the chance, he would come back this way and investigate. What interested him was the spatial paradox. His mind was stretched to its limits just being here (along with trying to keep out that force, cloying at his consciousness), and he decided simply to wander.
A sterile-looking room attracted his attention not far beyond the main room. It was large and brown-tinged, much like the rest of the interior. What looked like a large pewter box stood near a corner, and it was larger than he was! He opened it and found food inside, contained within an artificially cold space. Further on, he found a flat surface with four metal coils. Dials nearby read “low, medium, high,” and he surmised that this must be some kind of heating device. Cabinets yielded gadgets he could not identify, though he worked out that most of them were run on electricity. A fruit bowl sat in a wicker basket on the counter, so he took an apple and dropped it in a pocket for later.
He found a room that seemed to contain games - he saw a Mah-Jongg table and an elaborate chess board in mid-play. The block nearby indicated that it was black’s turn - he saw an excellent next move for black, and decided to take it. He smiled at his quiet cleverness and moved on. He found a room that seemed to be used for storage, as it was stuffed to the gills with more electrical devices. Eventually, he came upon a bedroom. It was obvious that a woman slept here, as there was jewellery spread out over the vanity. He merely looked inside, he did not linger. This was clearly a private space.
He turned a few corners. He found a sitting room with a fireplace, he found an observatory, a swimming pool, a room filled with nothing but men’s clothes, and eventually, another bedroom, this time an enormous room with even a second floor. Again, he did not go inside, merely looked from the doorway. The colours inside and the clothes that he could barely see hanging in the wardrobe suggested that a man slept here. The bed and other surfaces were covered with books and maps, and Erik immediately felt a kindred understanding with this man.
A woman slept in another part of the labyrinth. He had a large bed, but he chose to fill the empty space with knowledge. This arrangement seemed tragic and familiar, and he wondered if the man was like him: clever, strange and detrimentally unique. He closed his eyes and could feel a longing lingering in the air like an aroma, but he knew he might just be projecting his own brokenness into these rooms. For their sakes, he hoped he was wrong. He hoped that this man did not fill his bed with cold intelligence rather than warm flesh because he loved a woman that he could not touch.
He tried to shake this train of thought away. The most interesting, astounding moments of his life were currently ensuing in this impossible space, and yet the most anguished moments of his life were still at the forefront of his mind. Hard as he tried, Christine would not leave him. Funny that. Six months ago, hard as he tried, she would not stay.
His wandering led him further and further into his own curiosity, and further and further into this amazing place. At some point, he realised that he had wandered in so far that he would never find his way out again, but he did not concern himself. Only the journey seemed to matter now. He only amusedly hoped that there was no trap door set, waiting to ensnare him in some sort of torture chamber.
So engrossed was he, that hours later, he almost failed to hear the voice. As far as he could tell, the man said only “That’s odd,” and then nothing else. His silence caused Erik to suspect that he knew someone was in his lair, just as Erik always did when people wandered too far down into the bowels of the Opéra. Then the man seemed to leave again. Erik heard nothing more until two muffled voices came from the depths of the labyrinth. His sense of direction was normally excellent, but today, in this place, it was quite shaky. Nevertheless, he thought he could tell that the voices were coming from the direction of the man’s bedroom. They were not saying much, but the fact that they were together was enough.
Erik secreted himself in the nearest room, where he figured he would stay the night. He did not believe in God, but if he had, he would have prayed for these two people, now sharing the vast space with him. But he didn’t need God or prayer. He had always comforted himself and others with song.
The room he was in was semi-illuminated, and he could see a crimson velvet fainting couch - he would sleep there. He also saw another unidentifiable apparatus hanging from the wall, something he was now used to seeing as a result of the day’s adventure. This thing would have looked like a painting in a frame, except that it was blank and grey. He wondered if somehow images might appear on the surface by way of electricity or other “magic.”
He shed his opera cloak and his waistcoat and laid them aside. He stood quite still and waited until he was certain that the voices had stopped. Then he gave himself one hour’s meditation. Once he was relaxed, he conjured a song from the corners of his mind. It was a song he had written for Christine, in his mind a masterpiece, but it had caused her to faint when she heard it. So shrouded was he with love and fantasy, he thought of it as a piece to which he had given birth, rather than written.
He sang. It was a cloudy, warm reverie born in the night...
En nuit je m’enveloppe en me sentant, en me souvenant,
Je respire l’odeur et tu es dans l’air, en t’attardant.
Ton essence me remplit le corps, es-tu remplie de moi ?
Je sais que ce n’est qu’une fantaisie mais ça ne m’empêche pas…
J’étends mes bras, tu y réponds d’un baiser,
Et puis tu réponds de ton toi, ton être entier.
Maintenant c’est décidé, je suis à toi, tu es la mienne,
Exactement comme en noir deux amants s’appartiennent.
Emballé, je m’en vais, je tombe au-delà du seuil,
Tu me remues, et puis tu m’accueilles.
Quand même je deviens solide et tu deviens liquide,
Nos êtres sont en harmonie, saisissants et intrépides.
Notre ouverture grandit, se joue, commence l’opéra magique !
Je suis les paroles, mon amour, et tu es la musique,
Soudain tu m’entoures de chaleur, tu me contiens,
Nos mouvements font une chœur, chantant envers le même refrain.
Les cordes brouillent notre chanson en beauté, en démence
Et leur rythme nous apporte en avance, en avance…
En cordes lisses, une basse nous impose son impatience,
Alors, la musique, et les paroles dedans, suivent sa guidance.
Et un mélange parfait d’un mot ouvert et une note pendue, il vient.
Ensemble ils versent et répandent dans l’air des violons peint.
L’amour orchestral nous possède, nous en somme une partie.
L’opéra est neuve, mon amour, les cordes nous supplient.
And when the song was finished, he repeated it. Then, Erik lay down on the crimson couch and drifted off to sleep.
The sound did not wake Martha so much as it extracted her from sleep. The painful tones brought her round, until she found herself, quite involuntarily, sitting up in bed straining to hear. A song, exquisite, anguished, hypnotic, was sounding inside her head. The words were in French, but she understood them - a love song… sensual, dreamlike and yearning.
Something stirred beside her, and she turned her head. Her bedmate sat up and looked at her with a quizzical expression she had seen hundreds of times. “Listen,” he whispered, and then his face morphed into an expression she had never seen. Their eyes locked as the song dissipated, and they stared into one another with amazement and some kind of… intoxication.
And then the song began again. The same pure tones emerged through the darkness, the same tactile, sensuous words…
En nuit je m’enveloppe en me sentant, en me souvenant,
Je respire l’odeur et tu es dans l’air, en t’attardant.
Ton essence me remplit le corps, es-tu remplie de moi ?
Je sais que ce n’est qu’une fantaisie mais ça ne m’empêche pas…
Her eyes did not move from the Doctor’s, nor did his move from hers. Their souls seemed to look askance at each other. Es-tu rempli de moi? Are you filled with my essence? Ce n’est qu’une fantaisie... it’s only a fantasy.
J’étends mes bras, tu y réponds d’un baiser
Et puis tu réponds de ton toi, ton être entier.
He reached out tentatively toward her lovely face, as though to touch her jaw with his palm. She caught his hand and kissed it, first the palm, then across the wrist and down his arm. Desire was stirring in both of them, and the next time their eyes met, so did their lips. A full-bodied kiss gave way, and as his tongue probed her mouth, she pushed her body closer, against him, and clung with her arms, and her whole being. He pushed her gently back until her head was resting on the pillow and the length of his body was resting upon her. In the fog of confusion and love and music, they were lost to one another, floating in the smoke of a different consciousness, a whole new world.
Maintenant c’est décidé, je suis à toi, tu es la mienne,
Exactement comme en noir deux amants s’appartiennent.
A blip of sanity crossed the Doctor’s mind, and a shadow of reality shone in his eyes as he pulled reluctantly away from Martha’s embrace.
Emballé, je m’en vais, je tombe au-delà du seuil…
“Martha,” he panted. “I can’t stop.”
Tu me remues, et puis tu m’accueilles.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she whispered, and all reason forgotten, he buried his mouth in the crook of her neck, eliciting a symphonic groan from her. Into the night, she whispered again, “No, please don’t stop.” Then she tugged at his t-shirt and helped him wrestle himself out of it without pulling away from her for too long.
Quand même je deviens solide et tu deviens liquide…
He shifted his weight, and for the first time, she felt a certain hardness pressing against her thigh. The feel of it made her melt with desire. She knew she was growing molten at her centre.
Nos êtres sont en harmonie, saisissants et intrépides.
She felt hungry for something, she wanted to consume, and she could tell that he felt the same way. He unbuttoned the blue pyjama top that she was wearing, nearly ripping the buttons off in the process. His mouth traversed her shoulders, breasts, neck and lips, searching for something, and his body was grinding into hers, probing, needing. At last, he manoeuvred himself between her legs. Supporting himself on his hands, he looked down at her with lucidity, and a seriousness he normally reserved for planets in peril. She pushed his pyjama bottoms down over his erection, and with her eyes, gave him approval.
Notre ouverture grandit, se joue, commence l’opéra magique.
Je suis les paroles, mon amour, et tu es la musique,
Soudain tu m’entoures de chaleur, tu me contiens…
The suspense threatened to break her in two, and now the wait was over. He pushed inside her with one liquid motion, answered by a moan from each.
Nos mouvements font une chœur, chantant envers le même refrain.
His lips pressed against hers once again, and his tongue probed her mouth as though he wanted to be completely entrenched in her. He moved inside her with force, all gentle overtures having been left behind, and reflecting the same urgency that she felt. Her body glowed with the pleasure of it, his perfect thrusts, his seeming ability to read her mind and listen to her body.
Les cordes brouillent notre chanson en beauté, en démence
The fog that surrounded them in the form of song was palpable now. It filled their senses and made them insatiable and unhinged.
Et leur rythme nous apporte en avance, en avance…
It spurred them on, and Martha could feel herself advancing closer and closer to the brink, and she felt the Doctor’s body moving with ever greater urgency.
En cordes lisses, une basse nous impose son impatience,
Suddenly, it was here, a force boiled up from deep inside and told them it’s time. He looked at her starkly again, and she saw in his eyes the same unhinged need that was boiling up inside her. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have mistaken the expression for anger.
“Martha,” he hissed, and she reveled in the sound of her name on his lips, pushed out from a place of pure lust. “I still can’t stop. The time is now…”
Alors, la musique, et les paroles dedans, suivent sa guidance.
“Yes,” she told him, replicating his throaty whisper. “Let it take you, Doctor. Bring me with you.”
Et un mélange parfait d’un mot ouvert et une note pendue, il vient.
And then they were taken together. In a perfect, exquisite moment, they came together with interlocking moans…
Ensemble ils versent et répandent dans l’air des violons peint.
… and each one relished the feeling of the other spasming, flooding, giving in to the music in the air.
L’amour orchestral nous possède, nous en somme une partie.
L’opéra est neuve, mon amour, les cordes nous supplient.
And as they recovered, the Doctor looking down upon her with shock in his eyes, Martha looking back with unabashed love, they knew they were not finished. They knew in that moment that their relationship had changed, their lives had changed. And they knew that they must be taken again…
The Doctor leaned in once more and kissed Martha with a combustible craving, and their song recommenced in due time. Each noticed in their turn, just barely, that the singing had stopped, but their opera was just beginning.
part 2
Erik's song: translation
In the night, I am enveloped, feeling and remembering
I breathe in the scent and you are in the air, lingering.
Your essence fills my body, are you filled with me ?
I know that it’s only a fantasy, but that doesn’t inhibit me...
I reach out my arms, and you answer with a kiss,
And then you answer with your self, your entire being.
Now it’s decided, I am yours, you are mine,
Exactly as two lovers belong to one another in the night.
Enfolded, I go on, I fall beyond the threshold,
You stir me, and then you welcome me.
Even as I am becoming solid and you are becoming liquid,
Our beings are in harmony, grasping and fearless.
Our overture swells, is played, the magical opera begins!
I am the words, my love, and you are the music,
Suddenly you surround me with heat, you contain me,
Our movements make a chorus, singing toward the same refrain.
The strings shroud our song in beauty, in madness
And their rhythm brings us forward, foraward...
Within the smooth strings, a bass imposes upon us its impatience,
So, the music, and the words inside, follow its guidance.
And a perfect combination of open word and a hanging note, it comes.
Together they spill and spread in the air painted with violins.
Orchestral love posesses us, we are part of it.
The opera is brand new, my love, the strings are pleading with us.