shake up your style.
I've been debating a whole lot whether to post this or not recently. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I don't think I ever will be. Actually, it fails that hard that it makes SMeyer look good (which is a talent in itself) but... it's not about that. Me writing again was always about me trying to improve and grow in confidence with it. So, I'm doing that here.
Don't say I didn't warn you of the fail though.
As always, comments and conrit are my ~own brand of heroine~. All the cool kids are doing it.
Wrecking Ball Through Your Eyes
Doctor Who/Supernatural Crossover. Martha Jones/Dean Winchester. PG-13. ~3300 words.
Beta-ed by the awesome
persiflage_1
They meet for the first time in West Texas.
---
It’s late at night in a smoke-filled bar; the world’s falling apart outside and the ground’s soaked in the blood of innocent people. He looks at her with an empty edge in his eyes and she looks at him like he’s someone that needs saving (he probably does, but then, doesn’t everyone?).
And that’s how it goes isn’t it? Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy falls for girl. Girl falls for boy. Boy and girl ride off into the sunset in a white carriage.
But the apocalypse is coming and murdering robots are flying through the sky. This isn’t the stuff fairytales are made of (but that’s okay because they’ve both long since given up on happy-ever-afters).
“So you're Martha Jones?”
---
“Nice car.”
He grins back at her (a strange look glittering in the corners of his eyes, something almost like wonder but you can never be sure) and lays his hand across the top of hood, “Chevy Impala. ’67.”
He laughs and looks up at her, “She’s the only one that’s not left me yet.” She knows that he means it as a joke but nothing’s funny anymore (not when it’s the truth, and the truth… it stings.)
Martha just nods. She knows what it feels like to be alone.
“You comin’?” He opens the door on the driver's side, “There’s room.” (There’s something hopeful in his voice, a spark of life buried deep under the wreckage of blades and blood.)
She stares at him for moment and cocks her head to one side, trying to figure him out (like he’s a puzzle that she needs to solve; a Rubik's cube that’s almost completed, but there’s still a green square where a red one should be) before she opens the door, “I’m comin’.”
---
She tells him about The Doctor and for a few minutes (or was it hours? Time had ceased to matter anymore, all that was left was the endless footsteps and stories and the blood pounding in her ears, each beat of the drum telling her that she was still alive, still fighting.) Dean says nothing back.
He just sits in the driver’s seat, hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles have turned white.
“You believe in him that much, huh?” He laughs a little at the end, but it’s a hollow, empty noise, devoid of any humour. (It’s a sound that Martha’s grown all too accustomed to hearing by this point. She’s heard the same sound echoed all over Europe and Asia. Too many people have far too much and make her wonder… what really is the point in all of this? The damage has already been done, a chemical change that can’t be reversed.)
“Yeah, I do.” She has to. Because if she didn’t, that really would be the end. Her faith in The Doctor had been her one foothold in this place that didn’t make sense anymore. Once that gave way she’d be falling. (But then, they say it’s never the fall that kills you.)
He runs a shaky hand through his hair (she can tell that it hasn’t been washed in so long yet her fingers still ache to touch it and she knows that thinking like that is unsafe but she doesn’t care anymore) and stares at her, his green eyes meeting her brown eyes and the colours merge into something new, something dangerous. (She likes it in ways that she won’t admit, even to herself.)
“Okay then.”
---
“Y’know, it’s funny.” His voice breaks the silence so suddenly that it startles her a little. She turns her head to face him and raises an eyebrow, he smirks back at her in return (inside her stomach, something flutters and isn’t that a cliché?), “A few months ago, I would’ve hit on you so hard you wouldn’t have known which way was up. But now…”
She places a hand on his shoulder because she knows. She knows exactly what he means. She’s become fluent in falling-apart and she understand all too well the cracks in Dean’s shell.
“I don’t know.” The tone of his voice reminds her of the scared little kids in the hospital wards and all she wants to do is make it all better for him. His eyes are so open and honest that it aches somewhere deep inside her bones, “Nothing quite makes sense anymore.” His voice cracks just a little bit, it’s barely audible but it was there.
She lays her head on his shoulder and doesn’t say a word.
She’s not Cinderella and he’s not Prince Charming but right now, that’s okay.
---
“You have to leave.” He doesn’t say it as a question, more as an unfortunate fact, an ugly truth of life, “You’re leaving.”
She wants to tell him no, but of course she can’t. She’s got a job to do and that’s just the way things are right now. She’s got a duty, and if Dean Winchester understands anything in this world, it’s duty.
“Yeah.” She doesn’t trust her voice to say anymore.
He looks at the ceiling for a moment, staring at the damp in the corners and then he looks at her again, “I’ll drive you.”
She wants to tell him no for the second time in five minutes, but once again she can’t do it, she can’t quite force those two letters from her throat. And it’s stupid really, letting herself be this weak when all she needs to be is strong, but she can’t help it.
She follows him out of the door.
---
They meet the Toclafane in Atlanta, a wall of people screaming out in terror and pain. Without thinking, she grabs his hand and together they run.
---
She runs her fingertips over the skin of his hands and watches as the tiny goosebumps rise in their path.
“Pisiform, Triquetral, Lunate, Scaphoid, Trapezium…” She’s whispering the words so softly that they’re almost breaths. But he hears them. He always seems to hear her.
“What’s that?” He asks and curls his fingers around hers just slightly (the metacarpals and the phalanges).
“Bones of the hand.” She doesn’t look up at his face. “I’m a doctor.” (She wonders when that sentence started to sound a little bit like a lie.)
Her touch slides, almost unconsciously, to his wrist and she presses against the pulse point there. (They’re still alive.)
---
When he kisses her for the first time, his face is smeared with blood and they’re both covered in dust but somehow, that only seems right.
He tastes like self-destruction and she tastes like hope. It’s a fatal mixture and they both know it. But just like Snow White and the poison apple, neither can resist.
(Everything around them is coming undone but in that moment, they can’t feel it. Both of them caught in the eye of the storm, together.)
---
She wakes up screaming. (Caught in the web of fear inside her mind it’s all bombs and blades and drums and all she wants to do is get out.)
She can feel Dean’s arms around her waist, holding her down, anchoring her. She turns around to face him, their noses only inches apart.
“You okay?” His voice is still rough around the edges with sleep and she nods, burying her face in the curve of his shoulder. She doesn’t answer him and he doesn’t ask her anymore, just lays his hand against her back, directly between her shoulder blades. He spreads his fingers wide and presses down just a little, just the lightest amount of pressure. The warmth and weight makes her feel safer than she can remember feeling in a long time.
In the distance, she thinks she can hear the wailing of sirens. But no one’s come to help in months now, so maybe it’s all inside her head.
---
He wants to teach her how to fight.
“Hit me as hard as you can,” She opens her mouth to argue but he stops her with a hand across her mouth (she doesn’t know when he got so good at reading her), “I can handle it. Just go for it.”
“Dean…” He silences her again with his hand on her cheek, the pad of his thumb stroking across the skin there. The contrast of his words and too-gentle action make her a little dizzy as he takes a step back.
“Do it.” He’s grinning in a Dean-like way at her (all cockiness and bravado but Martha can still see the splintered edges of all his broken pieces underneath, she ignores it) and spreading his arms out wide, his t-shirt pulling tighter across his chest, “Go on.”
She hits him as hard as she can manage and she can feel his pride radiating back to her. (She feels it like pinpricks against her skin and she wants to shy away from it, show him that Martha Jones isn’t the hero in this story, show him that she’s not worthy of his pride. She smiles at him.)
She isn’t as sweet as she looks and he likes it (of course, he already knew that. He seems to already know everything about her. The realisation should be scarier than it is.)
The noise as her fist connects with his cheekbone makes her feel sick as it echoes quietly in the corners of their room.
He raises his head and grins at her. She can already see a bruise forming underneath his right eye.
“Good. Now, again.” He takes a step closer to her and spreads his arms out again, waiting for it once more, “Hit me.”
She does.
---
He only got caught on the shoulder; she pulled him away before any real damage was done. He’s okay. He’s fine. She knows this, yet the sight of red liquid against his skin makes her head swim.
Her fingers shake a little too much on the first stitch and Dean doesn’t even wince when she goes a little too deep with the needle. She strokes the hair that curls at the back of his neck with her thumbnail just a little and moves to pull away (she doesn’t want to hurt him anymore). He only laughs and says, “Thought you were a doctor.”
He rests his hand on her shoulder and the shaking stops.
---
At the bottom of his bag, she finds a shirt that’s too big for him.
She lifts it out of the bag and just holds it for a while, just letting in lie on her hands. There was a rip straight across the front, right where the heart would be, and more across the left bicep and back. Dark red stains cover most of the checked material and she can feel the deep sense of wrongness in her handling it. The feeling makes her fingers ache and all she wants to do is put it back and forget that she ever saw it in the first place. (Of course, she holds on.)
“Don’t touch that!” Dean’s voice is almost a growl from the doorway, “Put it down.”
She drops it in an instant, like the fabric was burning in the palms of her hands (it was in way). Words that that should be spoken get stuck in her throat, the awkwardness of the situation making her head hurt, “I’m sorry…”
When she looks at him next he’s not looking back at her. He’s folding the shirt, but there’s something different in the way he’s doing it, all of his previous anger drained suddenly. His hands are careful as he moves his fingertips over the fabric, smoothing it out.
“Don’t.” His voice sounds small as resigned and so unDean-like that it hurts to hear it. She just nods and turns her head. She thinks she sees him smell the shirt, breathing it in, but she can’t be sure.
(They all have their ghosts.)
---
They give up trying to find motels in the end and sleep together, a tangled mess of limbs on the back seat of his car.
Pressed together so that no air can fit in-between their bodies like if they press hard enough, their broken pieces will fit together enough to create a whole person.
---
He plays 70s rock music too loud and the volume of the screaming guitars makes her head hurt and the body of the car shake but Martha likes the fact that it’s tapes and not CDs. It makes her remember times when the world wasn’t going to hell at the hands of a Time Lord driven mad by the constant sound of drums and robots weren’t wiping out the world's population, limb by limb.
She tells him this but she doesn’t know why. Dean has a way of making her want to tell him everything she knows.
“You mean it wasn’t always like this?” He means it sarcastically but the words fall flat in the air between them.
---
They never stop running; state-to-state they travel while Martha tells her stories of The Doctor. Never once do they look back. All that lies behind is a trail of fire and death.
(Just like Hansel And Gretel leaving the breadcrumbs through the forest. Only this time, the birds don’t come and take it away. The fires rage on and on as the body count grows.)
---
She can feel Dean’s heart beating against her back, the tiny movement echoing inside her own chest. It tells her that he’s still alive, still breathing, still functioning. She counts the beats aloud (one, two, three, four…). He wakes up on beat thirty and looks at her for a moment, and she watches as the snowy static of sleep clears from his eyes.
He counts with her.
---
He eats too many burgers and she warns him about grease and the effect it has on arteries and heart disease. He looks at her for a moment, forehead wrinkled in confusion or affection (she hasn’t learnt to tell yet with Dean, he always gets them mixed up) and slowly a smile creeps onto his face.
“We’re on the run in an apocalyptic world ruled by a sociopathic alien… and you’re worrying about heart disease?” He throws a fry at her.
It’s all sounds so ridiculous that she has to laugh, and then he laughs back with her and she laughs again, and it all becomes an endless hall of mirrors. The sound reflected over and over forever as long as they don’t move.
He throws another fry at her (she eats it).
---
He has an amulet hanging around his neck on a thin leather strap. He never takes it off.
When she asks him about it, he gets a faraway look in his eyes, and for a moment he looks completely different. A version of Dean Winchester that she’s never seen before. He looks like the whole jigsaw, the finished product. So unlike the Dean she knows (pieces missing in the corners, a gap where a piece of grass or sky should be, a gaping hole where there’s meant to be the sun) and it’s all so raw that makes her teeth ache just a little.
“I just don’t.”
He doesn’t let go of it for a while after that.
---
They watch as Illinois burns to the ground in front of them.
She can feel the heat of the flames against her face and hands… but she doesn’t shrink away from it. She can’t make herself look away. (She wonders when she became so fascinated with the blaze.)
“They say that Martha Jones can save the world.” He speaks without looking at her and tangles their fingers together, the heel of his palm grinding into hers (somehow crushing all the pain and destruction between them, leaving it all as dust between their hands).
“They do.”
(In that moment he understands it all. He sees all the fragile fragments that she holds inside her chest, all those broken pieces… and he gets it. Martha Jones doesn’t quite believe in herself. After everything, she still doesn’t see her own strength and that moment, she’s so very tiny and so very brave that he can’t see anything else.)
---
He only mentions his brother to her once.
It’s midnight in Chicago and everything's black outside as they lean against the side of the Impala. The dust from the road is covering them but neither care. They’re both drunk on the whiskey Dean keeps for “emergencies” and he gets this look in his eyes, like he’s not with Martha anymore. He’s just remembering.
He leans his head back against the metal and lets it roll to face her as he talks about watching as those robots ripped his brother apart. His voice sounds hollow in a way that’s frightening. He talks about the way the blood felt against his skin and the way that his voice sounded once the blood had flooded his throat.
The next morning he doesn’t look her in the eye.
---
He saves her life in Pennsylvania.
She’s fixing someone’s broken arm with a makeshift splint and in that one moment of her guard being down, she doesn’t even sense the Toclafane behind her head. All she hears is Dean’s scream and his hands on her shoulders, pulling her away, hard.
“Don’t do that again!” He sounds angry but his hands are shaking as they grip the cloth of her shirt and she can feel the tension running through his body. When he pushes their mouths together all she can taste is fire and smoke but it doesn’t matter.
---
It happens one night in New York, lying together on the back seat of the Impala. The city’s long since fallen and the streets are empty (all except for the ghosts and Martha feels every one of them).
“I think… I could’ve loved you.” She feels his hot breath against the skin of her neck and she turns to face him, inches apart, “I know I could’ve.”
She doesn’t say anything back. Instead she presses their fingertips together and places a tiny kiss on his right temple (where his hair just curls around the shell of his ear just a little bit).
“I know it.” He repeats himself again and something in Martha’s chest cracks (not broken, but near enough to make it hurt) and she squeezes his hand, “I know it.”
(Maybe she could’ve loved him too, but she’ll never know. Their story’s made of what-ifs and possibilities. What never was and what never could be. It wouldn’t make any sense to change it now.)
Everything’s coming to an end and she left most of her heart up in the sky with a man who doesn’t even know he’s holding on to it. She’s sure there’s irony there but she doesn’t care enough to find out. What use is irony in a world that’s being ripped open at the seams in front everyone to see? What use is anything anymore?
(Doctor.)
---
The next morning when she leaves, she doesn’t wake him.
She doesn’t know how long she lay there, just watching him. Sleeping, he looks like a little boy; innocent. Like he hasn’t seen all the death and destruction that has followed him his whole life, like he hasn’t watched as his family have dropped one by one around him, leaving him all alone in the world.
She leaves a note and winces at the cheapness of it all. It feels wrong. But then, the whole world is wrong and it’s up to Martha Jones to fix it.
---
He doesn’t even read the note once he wakes up.
---
Sometimes, she can still feel of his smile against the back of her neck or her shoulder, like a phantom limb.
Don't say I didn't warn you of the fail though.
As always, comments and conrit are my ~own brand of heroine~. All the cool kids are doing it.
Wrecking Ball Through Your Eyes
Doctor Who/Supernatural Crossover. Martha Jones/Dean Winchester. PG-13. ~3300 words.
Beta-ed by the awesome
persiflage_1
They meet for the first time in West Texas.
---
It’s late at night in a smoke-filled bar; the world’s falling apart outside and the ground’s soaked in the blood of innocent people. He looks at her with an empty edge in his eyes and she looks at him like he’s someone that needs saving (he probably does, but then, doesn’t everyone?).
And that’s how it goes isn’t it? Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy falls for girl. Girl falls for boy. Boy and girl ride off into the sunset in a white carriage.
But the apocalypse is coming and murdering robots are flying through the sky. This isn’t the stuff fairytales are made of (but that’s okay because they’ve both long since given up on happy-ever-afters).
“So you're Martha Jones?”
---
“Nice car.”
He grins back at her (a strange look glittering in the corners of his eyes, something almost like wonder but you can never be sure) and lays his hand across the top of hood, “Chevy Impala. ’67.”
He laughs and looks up at her, “She’s the only one that’s not left me yet.” She knows that he means it as a joke but nothing’s funny anymore (not when it’s the truth, and the truth… it stings.)
Martha just nods. She knows what it feels like to be alone.
“You comin’?” He opens the door on the driver's side, “There’s room.” (There’s something hopeful in his voice, a spark of life buried deep under the wreckage of blades and blood.)
She stares at him for moment and cocks her head to one side, trying to figure him out (like he’s a puzzle that she needs to solve; a Rubik's cube that’s almost completed, but there’s still a green square where a red one should be) before she opens the door, “I’m comin’.”
---
She tells him about The Doctor and for a few minutes (or was it hours? Time had ceased to matter anymore, all that was left was the endless footsteps and stories and the blood pounding in her ears, each beat of the drum telling her that she was still alive, still fighting.) Dean says nothing back.
He just sits in the driver’s seat, hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles have turned white.
“You believe in him that much, huh?” He laughs a little at the end, but it’s a hollow, empty noise, devoid of any humour. (It’s a sound that Martha’s grown all too accustomed to hearing by this point. She’s heard the same sound echoed all over Europe and Asia. Too many people have far too much and make her wonder… what really is the point in all of this? The damage has already been done, a chemical change that can’t be reversed.)
“Yeah, I do.” She has to. Because if she didn’t, that really would be the end. Her faith in The Doctor had been her one foothold in this place that didn’t make sense anymore. Once that gave way she’d be falling. (But then, they say it’s never the fall that kills you.)
He runs a shaky hand through his hair (she can tell that it hasn’t been washed in so long yet her fingers still ache to touch it and she knows that thinking like that is unsafe but she doesn’t care anymore) and stares at her, his green eyes meeting her brown eyes and the colours merge into something new, something dangerous. (She likes it in ways that she won’t admit, even to herself.)
“Okay then.”
---
“Y’know, it’s funny.” His voice breaks the silence so suddenly that it startles her a little. She turns her head to face him and raises an eyebrow, he smirks back at her in return (inside her stomach, something flutters and isn’t that a cliché?), “A few months ago, I would’ve hit on you so hard you wouldn’t have known which way was up. But now…”
She places a hand on his shoulder because she knows. She knows exactly what he means. She’s become fluent in falling-apart and she understand all too well the cracks in Dean’s shell.
“I don’t know.” The tone of his voice reminds her of the scared little kids in the hospital wards and all she wants to do is make it all better for him. His eyes are so open and honest that it aches somewhere deep inside her bones, “Nothing quite makes sense anymore.” His voice cracks just a little bit, it’s barely audible but it was there.
She lays her head on his shoulder and doesn’t say a word.
She’s not Cinderella and he’s not Prince Charming but right now, that’s okay.
---
“You have to leave.” He doesn’t say it as a question, more as an unfortunate fact, an ugly truth of life, “You’re leaving.”
She wants to tell him no, but of course she can’t. She’s got a job to do and that’s just the way things are right now. She’s got a duty, and if Dean Winchester understands anything in this world, it’s duty.
“Yeah.” She doesn’t trust her voice to say anymore.
He looks at the ceiling for a moment, staring at the damp in the corners and then he looks at her again, “I’ll drive you.”
She wants to tell him no for the second time in five minutes, but once again she can’t do it, she can’t quite force those two letters from her throat. And it’s stupid really, letting herself be this weak when all she needs to be is strong, but she can’t help it.
She follows him out of the door.
---
They meet the Toclafane in Atlanta, a wall of people screaming out in terror and pain. Without thinking, she grabs his hand and together they run.
---
She runs her fingertips over the skin of his hands and watches as the tiny goosebumps rise in their path.
“Pisiform, Triquetral, Lunate, Scaphoid, Trapezium…” She’s whispering the words so softly that they’re almost breaths. But he hears them. He always seems to hear her.
“What’s that?” He asks and curls his fingers around hers just slightly (the metacarpals and the phalanges).
“Bones of the hand.” She doesn’t look up at his face. “I’m a doctor.” (She wonders when that sentence started to sound a little bit like a lie.)
Her touch slides, almost unconsciously, to his wrist and she presses against the pulse point there. (They’re still alive.)
---
When he kisses her for the first time, his face is smeared with blood and they’re both covered in dust but somehow, that only seems right.
He tastes like self-destruction and she tastes like hope. It’s a fatal mixture and they both know it. But just like Snow White and the poison apple, neither can resist.
(Everything around them is coming undone but in that moment, they can’t feel it. Both of them caught in the eye of the storm, together.)
---
She wakes up screaming. (Caught in the web of fear inside her mind it’s all bombs and blades and drums and all she wants to do is get out.)
She can feel Dean’s arms around her waist, holding her down, anchoring her. She turns around to face him, their noses only inches apart.
“You okay?” His voice is still rough around the edges with sleep and she nods, burying her face in the curve of his shoulder. She doesn’t answer him and he doesn’t ask her anymore, just lays his hand against her back, directly between her shoulder blades. He spreads his fingers wide and presses down just a little, just the lightest amount of pressure. The warmth and weight makes her feel safer than she can remember feeling in a long time.
In the distance, she thinks she can hear the wailing of sirens. But no one’s come to help in months now, so maybe it’s all inside her head.
---
He wants to teach her how to fight.
“Hit me as hard as you can,” She opens her mouth to argue but he stops her with a hand across her mouth (she doesn’t know when he got so good at reading her), “I can handle it. Just go for it.”
“Dean…” He silences her again with his hand on her cheek, the pad of his thumb stroking across the skin there. The contrast of his words and too-gentle action make her a little dizzy as he takes a step back.
“Do it.” He’s grinning in a Dean-like way at her (all cockiness and bravado but Martha can still see the splintered edges of all his broken pieces underneath, she ignores it) and spreading his arms out wide, his t-shirt pulling tighter across his chest, “Go on.”
She hits him as hard as she can manage and she can feel his pride radiating back to her. (She feels it like pinpricks against her skin and she wants to shy away from it, show him that Martha Jones isn’t the hero in this story, show him that she’s not worthy of his pride. She smiles at him.)
She isn’t as sweet as she looks and he likes it (of course, he already knew that. He seems to already know everything about her. The realisation should be scarier than it is.)
The noise as her fist connects with his cheekbone makes her feel sick as it echoes quietly in the corners of their room.
He raises his head and grins at her. She can already see a bruise forming underneath his right eye.
“Good. Now, again.” He takes a step closer to her and spreads his arms out again, waiting for it once more, “Hit me.”
She does.
---
He only got caught on the shoulder; she pulled him away before any real damage was done. He’s okay. He’s fine. She knows this, yet the sight of red liquid against his skin makes her head swim.
Her fingers shake a little too much on the first stitch and Dean doesn’t even wince when she goes a little too deep with the needle. She strokes the hair that curls at the back of his neck with her thumbnail just a little and moves to pull away (she doesn’t want to hurt him anymore). He only laughs and says, “Thought you were a doctor.”
He rests his hand on her shoulder and the shaking stops.
---
At the bottom of his bag, she finds a shirt that’s too big for him.
She lifts it out of the bag and just holds it for a while, just letting in lie on her hands. There was a rip straight across the front, right where the heart would be, and more across the left bicep and back. Dark red stains cover most of the checked material and she can feel the deep sense of wrongness in her handling it. The feeling makes her fingers ache and all she wants to do is put it back and forget that she ever saw it in the first place. (Of course, she holds on.)
“Don’t touch that!” Dean’s voice is almost a growl from the doorway, “Put it down.”
She drops it in an instant, like the fabric was burning in the palms of her hands (it was in way). Words that that should be spoken get stuck in her throat, the awkwardness of the situation making her head hurt, “I’m sorry…”
When she looks at him next he’s not looking back at her. He’s folding the shirt, but there’s something different in the way he’s doing it, all of his previous anger drained suddenly. His hands are careful as he moves his fingertips over the fabric, smoothing it out.
“Don’t.” His voice sounds small as resigned and so unDean-like that it hurts to hear it. She just nods and turns her head. She thinks she sees him smell the shirt, breathing it in, but she can’t be sure.
(They all have their ghosts.)
---
They give up trying to find motels in the end and sleep together, a tangled mess of limbs on the back seat of his car.
Pressed together so that no air can fit in-between their bodies like if they press hard enough, their broken pieces will fit together enough to create a whole person.
---
He plays 70s rock music too loud and the volume of the screaming guitars makes her head hurt and the body of the car shake but Martha likes the fact that it’s tapes and not CDs. It makes her remember times when the world wasn’t going to hell at the hands of a Time Lord driven mad by the constant sound of drums and robots weren’t wiping out the world's population, limb by limb.
She tells him this but she doesn’t know why. Dean has a way of making her want to tell him everything she knows.
“You mean it wasn’t always like this?” He means it sarcastically but the words fall flat in the air between them.
---
They never stop running; state-to-state they travel while Martha tells her stories of The Doctor. Never once do they look back. All that lies behind is a trail of fire and death.
(Just like Hansel And Gretel leaving the breadcrumbs through the forest. Only this time, the birds don’t come and take it away. The fires rage on and on as the body count grows.)
---
She can feel Dean’s heart beating against her back, the tiny movement echoing inside her own chest. It tells her that he’s still alive, still breathing, still functioning. She counts the beats aloud (one, two, three, four…). He wakes up on beat thirty and looks at her for a moment, and she watches as the snowy static of sleep clears from his eyes.
He counts with her.
---
He eats too many burgers and she warns him about grease and the effect it has on arteries and heart disease. He looks at her for a moment, forehead wrinkled in confusion or affection (she hasn’t learnt to tell yet with Dean, he always gets them mixed up) and slowly a smile creeps onto his face.
“We’re on the run in an apocalyptic world ruled by a sociopathic alien… and you’re worrying about heart disease?” He throws a fry at her.
It’s all sounds so ridiculous that she has to laugh, and then he laughs back with her and she laughs again, and it all becomes an endless hall of mirrors. The sound reflected over and over forever as long as they don’t move.
He throws another fry at her (she eats it).
---
He has an amulet hanging around his neck on a thin leather strap. He never takes it off.
When she asks him about it, he gets a faraway look in his eyes, and for a moment he looks completely different. A version of Dean Winchester that she’s never seen before. He looks like the whole jigsaw, the finished product. So unlike the Dean she knows (pieces missing in the corners, a gap where a piece of grass or sky should be, a gaping hole where there’s meant to be the sun) and it’s all so raw that makes her teeth ache just a little.
“I just don’t.”
He doesn’t let go of it for a while after that.
---
They watch as Illinois burns to the ground in front of them.
She can feel the heat of the flames against her face and hands… but she doesn’t shrink away from it. She can’t make herself look away. (She wonders when she became so fascinated with the blaze.)
“They say that Martha Jones can save the world.” He speaks without looking at her and tangles their fingers together, the heel of his palm grinding into hers (somehow crushing all the pain and destruction between them, leaving it all as dust between their hands).
“They do.”
(In that moment he understands it all. He sees all the fragile fragments that she holds inside her chest, all those broken pieces… and he gets it. Martha Jones doesn’t quite believe in herself. After everything, she still doesn’t see her own strength and that moment, she’s so very tiny and so very brave that he can’t see anything else.)
---
He only mentions his brother to her once.
It’s midnight in Chicago and everything's black outside as they lean against the side of the Impala. The dust from the road is covering them but neither care. They’re both drunk on the whiskey Dean keeps for “emergencies” and he gets this look in his eyes, like he’s not with Martha anymore. He’s just remembering.
He leans his head back against the metal and lets it roll to face her as he talks about watching as those robots ripped his brother apart. His voice sounds hollow in a way that’s frightening. He talks about the way the blood felt against his skin and the way that his voice sounded once the blood had flooded his throat.
The next morning he doesn’t look her in the eye.
---
He saves her life in Pennsylvania.
She’s fixing someone’s broken arm with a makeshift splint and in that one moment of her guard being down, she doesn’t even sense the Toclafane behind her head. All she hears is Dean’s scream and his hands on her shoulders, pulling her away, hard.
“Don’t do that again!” He sounds angry but his hands are shaking as they grip the cloth of her shirt and she can feel the tension running through his body. When he pushes their mouths together all she can taste is fire and smoke but it doesn’t matter.
---
It happens one night in New York, lying together on the back seat of the Impala. The city’s long since fallen and the streets are empty (all except for the ghosts and Martha feels every one of them).
“I think… I could’ve loved you.” She feels his hot breath against the skin of her neck and she turns to face him, inches apart, “I know I could’ve.”
She doesn’t say anything back. Instead she presses their fingertips together and places a tiny kiss on his right temple (where his hair just curls around the shell of his ear just a little bit).
“I know it.” He repeats himself again and something in Martha’s chest cracks (not broken, but near enough to make it hurt) and she squeezes his hand, “I know it.”
(Maybe she could’ve loved him too, but she’ll never know. Their story’s made of what-ifs and possibilities. What never was and what never could be. It wouldn’t make any sense to change it now.)
Everything’s coming to an end and she left most of her heart up in the sky with a man who doesn’t even know he’s holding on to it. She’s sure there’s irony there but she doesn’t care enough to find out. What use is irony in a world that’s being ripped open at the seams in front everyone to see? What use is anything anymore?
(Doctor.)
---
The next morning when she leaves, she doesn’t wake him.
She doesn’t know how long she lay there, just watching him. Sleeping, he looks like a little boy; innocent. Like he hasn’t seen all the death and destruction that has followed him his whole life, like he hasn’t watched as his family have dropped one by one around him, leaving him all alone in the world.
She leaves a note and winces at the cheapness of it all. It feels wrong. But then, the whole world is wrong and it’s up to Martha Jones to fix it.
---
He doesn’t even read the note once he wakes up.
---
Sometimes, she can still feel of his smile against the back of her neck or her shoulder, like a phantom limb.