The Strength to Hold On (The Halley’s Comet Remix) [Liz/Martha | PG-13]
Title: The Strength to Hold On (The Halley’s Comet Remix)
Author: stunt_muppet
Characters/Pairings: Liz Shaw/Martha Jones, Liz Shaw/OFC, Third Doctor, Eighth Doctor
Rating: PG-13/Teen
Summary: Forty years in the life of Elizabeth Shaw, waiting for a paradox to unravel.
Word Count: ~6,600
Original Story: The Strength to Let Go (http://atraphoenix.livejournal.com/84418.html) by atraphoenix
Notes: With many apologies to astrophysicists everywhere for my more-or-less winging it with regards to their profession, and especially to Charles T. Kowal for co-opting his work to make Liz look good.
--
The day she first met Martha Jones, Liz Shaw wasn’t thinking about leaving, nor staying. The immediate future provided more than enough to think about.
Mostly she was worried; worried about the Doctor, worried about the drill and the penetration site, worried that she’d mulled over the physics of the whole operation to the point where the Doctor’s misgivings seemed not without merit.
But underneath the worry lay boredom. For all that could happen at the drill head little actually had, and the Doctor remained infuriatingly absent. No way of knowing if he’d come back in the next ten minutes or the next two endless, sticky, overheated hours (or, she amended, if he’d come back at all).
Liz had never been fond of waiting, in such uncertain circumstances especially.
It was reactive, all this waiting around, she thought, looking over the instrumentation that a few hours ago had fed into the TARDIS console. That was what was so confounding about it. It was what was so confounding about this job, come to think of it. You waited around for something - attempted invasion, return of the Earth reptiles, alien plague, what have you - without knowing if it ever would, with nothing to do but prepare yourself for whatever you thought might happen. For all the wonders she’d seen during her time at UNIT she missed doing something, acting rather than being acted upon.
Which was why it came almost as a relief when a pretty young woman with a headband in her dark hair peeked through the front door of the hut.
Liz had never seen her before, not at UNIT and not among the project staff, which made her claims that Professor Stahlman sent her rather suspicious. And then she went and called her an assistant, which was bad enough when the Doctor did it; like it was her fault a man from another planet had swanned in and taken her job.
She was just about to call for the Sergeant when the girl explained, rather hastily, that she was a time traveller.
It was quite possibly the only time that such an explanation was the more believable one.
---
Her name was Martha Jones, she explained; she’d started travelling with the Doctor in the year 2008, and after wandering the past and the future and the cosmos they’d apparently gotten stuck here, in 1969, waiting for a paradox to unravel itself so they could go back home (her home, anyway). And she’d been doing nothing but serving chips to make rent and trying to entertain the Doctor for the past month and a half and they’d driven up to the project headquarters in search of something - anything - to do, and the Doctor had mentioned that some other version of him was already here somehow and, really, you couldn’t exactly blame her for getting curious, right?
Strange how a paradox could just crop up and disappear like that, with no apparent damage to the universe at large, Liz thought. But then, she supposed her even having this conversation was a minor paradox in itself, because now she knew that nothing disastrous was going to happen to the Doctor, and he’d repair his TARDIS after all.
Of course, it was possible that the future Martha came from was contingent, and she and her other Doctor and indeed all of them were going to blink out of existence at any moment. Liz found it difficult to contemplate the intricacies of it all, because now that she was no longer looking for a reason to throw her out she noticed that Martha was a distractingly lovely young woman, all long dark eyelashes that rimmed wide eyes and lips that pursed just slightly with worry as Liz told her own story.
Why she bothered to tell it she couldn’t say - surely this girl couldn’t be that concerned with all the mundanities of a stranger’s life - but after a year among people who weren’t bothered with what she thought so long as she did her job it was a relief to be worried, tired, even a little regretful. And Martha listened - it was almost thrilling how she listened. And when she had nothing left to listen to the talk turned to other things - the Doctor, what it was like to live in the TARDIS. Liz couldn’t help but be curious.
“Do you think you’ll go with him?” Martha asked. “When he fixes it, I mean.”
“I’m not sure,” Liz answered; truth be told she hadn’t even thought about it. Up until Martha’s arrival she hadn’t been entirely convinced that the TARDIS could travel in time at all (for all its other peculiar qualities), and that the Doctor wasn’t just trying to be impressive. “I’d be interesting, certainly. But I have got my job here. And my research project, if I’m ever allowed back to Cambridge. Might even go for readership, eventually.” She shook her head. “Just leaving all that behind, maybe never coming back to it...it doesn’t seem worth it. I’ve got a pretty good life here, all in all.”
“You’d pass up a chance to see alien planets because of a research project?” Martha asked, incredulous. Liz almost laughed; she was still very young, this girl, still eager to wander and live with no responsibilities. And yet it couldn’t all be starry-eyed youth; Martha didn’t seem that much of a dreamer. Perhaps she really did feel that way, that an ordinary life paled in comparison to a life among the stars.
Martha rested her head on her hand and looked at her; Liz found her eyes wandering to the flawless skin of her cheek, and wondering idly what the rest of that skin looked like. “Once-in-a-lifetime thing you’d be letting go.” Martha added.
“There are plenty of once-in-a-lifetime things right here on Earth, Miss Jones,” she said with a smile. It must have been quite unnerving, she imagined, being thrust out into a wider, deeper universe while you were barely old enough to know who you were yourself. No wonder Martha couldn’t imagine leaving; she’d been given the cosmos and everything in it with no time to think about whether she wanted it, or even what she wanted at all. In a way she reminded her a bit of herself, when she started this job; so many new parameters to understand that it was hard to decipher what to do with them. “Besides, even if I did leave with him, I’d come back eventually. Only I’d be missing five years from the time we travelled, or I’d be so...desensitized to the magnitude of what I saw that I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I’d rather have a whole lifetime here than lose part of it up there.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
Somewhere in the main building the alarm klaxons went off, echoed by the alarms inside the hut, and Liz felt another twinge of irritation at being confined. If the rest of the lab staff weren’t able to take care of it this time, she’d have to go and help them, whatever it was; the stakes were simply too high for her not to try. Besides, if something went too badly wrong there was a distinct possibility that there wouldn’t be a compound for the Doctor to return to.
Martha cast a nervous glance at the door; a contingent of UNIT soldiers rushed by, not paying them a second look, and she realized that if she did leave, Martha couldn’t stay here on her own. Someone might discover her. She might get arrested, injured, lost. The Doctor might come back unexpectedly, and then who knew what would happen; paradoxes weren’t Liz’s specialty.
It was probably nearing time for her to leave anyway; her other Doctor had to be looking for her. Liz imagined that one of the other disadvantages of time travel was that you met plenty of people that you were almost certainly never going to see again. She wasn’t sure how you said goodbye in circumstances like that, especially to someone like Martha Jones.
She found she didn’t want to; she’d never met anyone quite like her. There was something real about the unknown, the future in her, something welcoming and alive and more beguiling than anything dwelling amongst the stars or deep beneath the Earth.
Which was why, when Martha made her first attempt at heading out the door (no more eager to leave than Liz was to see her go), Liz asked her to come back for her, whenever she left the TARDIS behind.
The both of them froze after she spoke the words, and almost immediately Liz regretted saying them. It was a foolish thing to ask of her; they’d only just met, this one time, and she had no reason to think Martha even would walk away eventually. What if she didn’t want to, what if she never did?
Besides, there were forty years between now and the year Martha called home; Liz had just been talking about not giving up part of her life out there in the corners of the universe, and now there was this whole part of her future she was willing to give up to someone she might never see again?
But this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities; she could hardly afford not to at least pursue it. And when Martha smiled in answer, and said that yes, she’d like that, she’d come back for her, Liz couldn’t find it in her to regret a single word.
And so she led Martha to a back room in the hut, where even the Doctor wouldn’t see them should he decide to come back, and slowly committed that perfect skin to her memory.
--
When the Doctor returned he talked of a parallel universe, full of strange and desperate people wearing familiar faces. But that was all he said of it, and after the bore hole was filled and the project abandoned he rarely mentioned it again. He ignored her the few times she asked.
Until a few months later, after she’d made up her mind to leave.
It wasn’t an easy decision; there were still so many things she could see, so much good she could do here - no matter how passive the job she had to admit that routinely saving the planet had a certain cachet. And despite herself she was going to miss the Doctor and the Brigadier, just a little bit.
But knowing that the Doctor would one day repair his TARDIS cemented her resolve. That meant one day he’d leave, and maybe he would ask her along too. And no matter how her curiosity tugged at her that wasn’t the life she wanted. Too reactive. Too dependent.
Besides, she felt slightly less bad about abandoning the Doctor’s unfinished project if he would eventually finish it without her anyway.
So she filled out her paperwork and packed up the few personal items she’d brought with her and said her goodbyes and left one chilly Monday morning. And it was then, just before she got in her car, that the Doctor called after her.
“You asked me once about the other world, Liz,” he said, leaning against the door to the compound. “The one I travelled to.”
“What about it?”
He hesitated before he continued, as if he had meant to say whatever it was for a long time and now could not remember the words. “Would you like to know who you were?” he asked. “Or who you could have been, I suppose.”
She didn’t know what to say at first. It was tempting to know how her circumstances might have shaped her, what range of variation was present in her brain.
But as she looked out the front gates, past the “No entry” sign and out onto the road, she made up her mind. What did it matter who she might have been when this was who she was now?
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said as she shook her head, “but no thank you.” And she opened the driver’s side door.
“You were still you, you know,” he continued, turning back to head inside; his voice is as quiet as it can be and still be heard at this distance. “The others - Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton - I hardly recognized them.”
She paused, the door still open, and he smiled. “You were always Liz. No matter what.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, I suppose.”
“As well you should!”
He retreated back into the building before she lost sight of him, and a few minutes later the guarded front gates shut behind her for the last time.
--
She returned to her old job a few days later, her sabbatical over; the comet trajectory project was yet ongoing, and there was talk of the shadow of a yet-undiscovered satellite of Jupiter in the wobble of the comets’ orbit. She spent that day meticulously drafting parabolas on graph paper and measuring the inconsistencies between them, and she went home that night with a smile on her face. Life was back in order.
Her time at UNIT was relegated to the back of her mind, more often than not; there was too much else to think about now. But there were always reminders, here and there. One of the research fellows would make a sarcastic crack about meteoroids secretly being spaceships, and she’d have to resist the impulse to inform them that sometimes they were, just to see their face. Uncategorizable interference would crackle across the radio telescopes, and she’d almost pick up the phone to dial the Brigadier before she remembered that it wasn’t her problem anymore (but she’d call him anyway; couldn’t trust them to get anything done without her, after all). And, on occasion, there’d be rumours of dinosaurs spotted in London that she couldn’t completely laugh off.
In particular the strangest things brought to mind Martha Jones. Someone else’s dark eyeliner and heavy lashes. Clear water droplets inside the walls of a tea mug like the string of beads Martha wore. The periodicity of comets, sparking bright against the telescope and promising to reappear years, centuries later. (They hardly ever appeared more than once in a human lifetime.)
It was still foolish, what Liz had asked of her, but it would be many years yet before she came back (if she came back) and there was so much to do now. So little time for one thoughtless request and its answer, perhaps equally thoughtless.
It was only a few years after her return that an astronomer from America sent for their research to confirm his findings of Jupiter’s new moon, and when she looked at the tiny point of light in the photographs he’d taken she found she didn’t care what ancient civilization lived there or would live there a thousand years from now. It was just there, up in the sky, exerting its gentle pull on the universe around it.
She made her readership the next year, though of course that meant she was obligated to start teaching again; never her favourite part of the job. But the students she was assigned were for the most part reasonably bright; inquisitive young men and women with initiative and a good head for figures and (in one case) strong shoulders and disorderly dark hair that brought back to mind the girl she’d bid goodbye to just a decade ago.
She started getting into debates with one of the English lecturers over whether literature was truly integral for human development and civilization. Emma, her name was, a small woman with bright green eyes and slender hands that moved restlessly as she spoke and the vestiges of a Liverpool accent. Though language was her first love she was captivated even by Liz’s rather sober tales of the stars she studied, though Liz’s apathy towards the poetic masters appalled her.
They started having those conversations over coffee, over drinks, over dinner. They began to converse about other, less lofty topics - college politics, the vagaries of a male-dominated institution, how very pretty Emma looked when she put up her hair. She fascinated Liz, this woman who could match her wit for wit but whose mind worked so differently than her own.
And one rainy day Emma kissed her before she left for the evening, and for the rest of the night the future and Martha Jones were the furthest things from her mind.
She began spending the days and soon enough the nights in Emma’s room, talking with her, laughing with her, going to college meetings and feigning interest with her. She took Emma to Cavendish Labs at night and directed the optical telescope at the moon for her, and Emma confided in her that when she was small she always thought there were people living on the moon, who’d gone up there long ago and couldn’t get back.
Liz leaned in close and whispered to her that in a hundred years there would be, and never told her how she knew.
Some days Emma led her through the literary library and insisted that she at least try some Eliot, some Neruda, some Wordsworth, in the hopes of finding something she liked. (Not much luck.) And some evenings after they slept together she recited Petrarch and Shakespeare in a ridiculously overdramatic voice because she knew that Liz would laugh and call her a hopeless romantic.
And for four years Liz didn’t think of two-thousand-eight, or of Martha.
Very often.
--
She wasn’t sure what reminded her again, as autumn became winter and 1985 began to wane. Maybe it was the way Emma smiled one morning in her sleep, or the fight they got into two days before that. Maybe it was someone’s leather jacket (vintage) that looked like Martha’s, or a certain turn of phrase in conversation.
Maybe it was Halley’s comet, on the short end of its elliptical orbit next year, that the Astronomy department had been working on tracking for months - the only comet that returned within a human lifetime, depending on when you were lucky enough to be born.
But it had been two decades now, two decades to go, and for whatever reason the future was back on her mind. Twenty years was not such a long time as thirty, forty.
She imagined herself, twenty years later, Emma still at her side when Martha Jones walked back through the door. She imagined the look on Martha’s face - hurt, maybe, or worse, angry. It would only have been a few minutes or days or years for her, and in that short time she’d been replaced.
She imagined Emma, and how she’d try to explain it to her, and how Emma would look at her and then back at Martha, trying to understand it. She wondered if Emma would think she’d been forsaken for someone younger.
She imagined wanting both and having neither.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, looking out the window, stroking Emma’s hair as she slept. It wasn’t fair to Emma to be the placeholder, the second choice in case she couldn’t have her first. It wasn’t fair to Martha to lose patience on her because she hadn’t got here fast enough.
It wasn’t fair to her to have to choose when she didn’t know if Martha’d ever come back.
She tried to brush it off, just like she used to, but two-thousand-eight got closer every day, and she couldn’t conceal the worry anymore, and once Emma started asking about it Liz, for all that she didn’t believe in premonitions or feelings, couldn’t help but sense something inevitable.
She explained to Emma two weeks later that she couldn’t do this, that it wasn’t Emma’s fault, that Emma had been nothing but wonderful to her but it was time for her to leave. She tried to put it as delicately as she could, but she was unused to dealing with such messy and imprecise things, and for all she tried to reassure her Emma started to cry anyway.
She asked Liz if she’d done something wrong, and Liz wanted nothing more than to tell her the truth. That it wasn’t anything she’d done, it was just a stupid, stupid decision she’d made twenty years ago and couldn’t take back. But who would believe her if she said a thing like that? She’d never told Emma about UNIT or time-travel or any of that; why would she? She’d left it behind.
She moved out the next day, and neither of them said a word beyond “goodbye”.
--
She spent the next few months working, for the most part, preparing her lessons and setting up the lab computers to better receive the satellite images to come. In the evenings she went back to her room and read, or went back to the lab, or sometimes just slept (she always felt tired these days; must have been the early sunset).
She rarely saw Emma; she was in a whole different department, after all. The few times she did see her they didn’t speak. Most of the time Emma wouldn’t even meet her eyes.
She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel, afterwards, or what she’d expected. She’d expected it to hurt, yes. She’d expected the regret and the sadness; all perfectly normal.
What she hadn’t expected, she realized, was the anger.
Seventeen years - it’d been seventeen years now since she left UNIT. Seventeen years since the last time she saw Martha. How long had she spent on this ridiculous gamble with little hope of reward? How much time had she wasted for someone who might not even remember her, who might not ever even come back?
It wasn’t that she’d had a bad life - she’d tracked meteoroids across the skies and helped measure the moons of Jupiter, become respected and knowledgeable and everything she thought she would be. And that almost made it worse, because she’d had the life she thought she would have to begin with and she still wasn’t happy and she should have been. She shouldn’t have had this single extraneous element, this possibility hanging over her head, making her wonder what she’d passed up, how much better things might have been were she not under obligation. She shouldn’t wonder if the reason she’d never accepted a job anywhere else wasn’t because she was happy at Cambridge but out of some absurd fear that if she left Martha might not find her, or might look for her here and find her gone and not think her worth the effort to pursue.
She shouldn’t have had those choices to make.
How did she know, she thought to herself one evening, that she even loved Martha at all? She only met her that once, all those years ago. It could have been infatuation or the stress of the Inferno Project. It could have been mere curiosity - a girl from the future, living proof of an impossibility, of course she’d been attracted.
She’d never been one for illusions, after all. Never much of a romantic.
She should go back to Emma and try to apologize, somehow. Try to make it right. She was tired of the uncertainty. But when she went to knock on her door she heard a voice that wasn’t Emma’s talking excitedly inside.
It could have been anyone - could have been a friend, or a professor, or family - but Liz still went back to the lab.
--
Liz was still in an ill mood, and still quite buried in her work, when, just a few days before Halley’s perihelion, the Doctor knocked on the lab door.
He looked different, with dark brown curls instead of gray and a face a good decade or two younger, but he mentioned UNIT and the Recovery probe that no one else would have known about, not even here, and she remembered that the Brigadier had mentioned that the Doctor could change his appearance.
He all but pulled her away from her work and insisted on getting her a cup of coffee, though how he paid for it she decided not to contemplate. They reminisced for a while about their year at UNIT and he told her he’d left, his TARDIS back in working order, ten or twelve years for her and hundreds for him. He talked excitedly of the places he’d been, the people who’d travelled with him, the men he’d been in those centuries.
Predictably, he didn’t once stop to ask her how she’d been until he’d covered all 500 years. She gave him the basics - her career at Cambridge, her readership, a few of the more interesting students she’d had. She didn’t mention Martha; quite possibly he wasn’t her Doctor yet, one couldn’t be sure. She didn’t mention Emma either.
They ran out of things to say after a while, though the Doctor seemed to remember something terribly exciting that he hadn’t told her yet every time there was a lull in conversation. (It awed her that he could possibly be the same man as the one she’d bid goodbye. He seemed so very much younger.) When she mentioned, her eyes on the rim of dark liquid at the bottom of her empty coffee cup, that she should get back to the lab, his response was “Come along with me.”
“I didn’t get the chance to ask you before,” he added, when she looked up at him, “The universe is a fascinating place, Liz. I can’t imagine you were never curious.”
She almost said no without even thinking about it - she’d walked away before, she could do it again. But that sort of life had a strange appeal now, one that it didn’t before; it had a certainty to it, and an ease. She could leave and see the furthest reaches of space, watch the birth and death of stars, and come back as if she’d never even left. She wouldn’t have to choose.
She wondered if Martha had walked away, wherever her present time was at the moment. She wondered if that conversation seventeen years ago had changed anything at all.
She told him thank you but no thank you, again, and reminded him that she had quite a nice life here and a job to do; new satellite pictures of Halley were coming in as perihelion neared, and she had some important calculations to make.
He replied, with a smile as he rose from his chair, “You think that’s exciting? Few months from now there’ll be a new planet in the sky.”
But before she could ask him for any specifics, he’d already bid her goodbye and began walking away.
She sat at the coffee shop table for a while after he left, considering. A new planet would certainly be a sight to behold; though she couldn’t help but wonder what sort of problems that would cause for Earth’s tides and gravitation, the Doctor didn’t seem overly concerned about it, and he probably would have warned her if there was disaster to come. Quite probably he would have tried to stop it; it was the sort of thing he did.
And that was the difference, wasn’t it, what separated the Doctor from people like her. He was drawn to cataclysm, the disastrous and the grand, events that would be written in history books or poetry. What was one little comet, brief and predictable, against a one-time-only cosmic event?
But she and the people around her would wait 76 years for one barely-visible light amongst all the others in the sky, and they’d watch it and analyze it and the newspapers would write about its coming. Not because it was unique, or particularly exciting - Halley was in its composition little different than the comets too far out in space for the naked eye to see, which their telescopes followed all the time - but because it came back. That was all that was different about it.
Liz smiled, feeling lighter than she had before, and watched the last drop of coffee slide around the rim of the mug. Yes, she could wait for something small and beautiful and utterly ordinary in the grand scheme of things. She could keep that promise - not obey that stricture. She could go back to work and chart the heavens like she’d always thought she would, had the life she’d wanted, only with something wonderful to hope for a decade or two away. She could wait for Martha Jones. People had waited longer for so much less.
Of course there was a risk. The comet might break up in orbit somewhere past Pluto, never to be seen again. Didn’t stop anybody watching.
Didn’t mean it wasn’t worth it.
When she got back to the lab that afternoon one of her co-workers guessed from the change in her demeanour that the Doctor must have been someone very special indeed, and while she’d never been one to entertain questions about her personal life she couldn’t help but smile.
Four days later Halley, almost invisible, trailed across the sky, and Liz, her own telescope trained on it, wondered if Martha was watching it as well, was old enough to know what it was.
--
The satellites tracked Halley as it left, and work returned to normal, but it was as if Liz had shaken off cobwebs, ready to keep moving forward again. No more second-guessing, no more looking back to see what she’d missed.
She put her name forward for research director; she’d published more than enough papers and taken part in more than enough projects. It was what she wanted, right from the beginning; no reason to doubt it now. Within a few years (after one more contributing paper) she was given her own office in one of the third-floor labs, tentatively put in charge of a research team of graduate students. She didn’t decorate it overmuch - she’d never seen the sense in hauling in a bunch of nonsense that you’ll have to remove eventually anyway - but on the wall she kept a calendar, updated every year, and a copy of one of the satellite photographs of Halley beside it, the most concrete reminder she had.
She continued to publish and led her graduate team in further explorations of the Jupiter and Saturn satellites, sketching out what their surfaces must be like. She became a name among the faculty, someone acknowledged when she passed by. She was even, one day, among the department members invited to dinner with the Astronomer Royal.
She went back and explained things to Emma, though she left out the details about time travel; she only told her that she’d met someone a long time ago, who wouldn’t be back for an even longer time. She apologized for not telling her the truth. She wasn’t sure if Emma forgave her, and it didn’t ease all the regret, but the apology was another fetter cast off, another way of severing the sense of obligation.
Sometimes when she went home for the evening she would imagine she could see the moons they were studying out her window, and wondered what strange, fantastic creatures would inhabit them one day.
--
The morning - the last one - was no different than any other morning for the past few years. Same classes to prepare for, same quick walk to the laboratory, same flutter of anticipation in her chest that maybe today, maybe it’d happen today.
She was checking one of the post-grad’s calculations when the whole room fell quiet and everyone turned to look at the door, and Liz didn’t even need to raise her eyes to know who they were looking at.
She almost couldn’t look up, couldn’t believe what she knew she’d see. She almost didn’t dare.
Across the room, dressed all in black, untouched by the decades of her absence, Martha Jones smiled.
--
The front door of her office didn’t even have time to shut before Martha pulled her into another embrace, another urgent kiss (the students had all been sent home for the day; how could she possibly be expected to teach at a time like this?). Liz held on to her as tight as she could, felt that same beautiful skin, real again after all this time, and it wasn’t enough, it could never be enough; how did you somehow express the uncertainty and hope and relief of forty long years? But for now, just for now, this would do.
“I missed you,” Martha murmured when they parted, lips still close enough to touch.
“I missed you,” Liz echoed. Now that she looked at her - now that she could even begin to try to think again - Martha wasn’t quite the same as she remembered her. She hadn’t aged a day in forty years and yet she somehow still seemed older, more careworn despite the smile in her eyes. “I thought -” she began, and hoped that the falter in her voice was not so pronounced as it sounded, “for a while, I thought you might not come back.”
“Why not?” Martha looked up at her. “I did say I would.”
“I know.” She laid her hand on Martha’s cheek. How needless, how overwrought her doubts seemed now. “I had a long time to think about it. Longer than I should have, probably.” She felt as if she had watched her grow up, even though she’d seen nothing of Martha’s journey. “I’m very proud of you, you know. I’m not sure I’d have been able to walk away in your position.”
Martha dropped her gaze for a moment, and there was a sadness to her smile. “It’s easier than it looks,” she said wryly, “at the end.”
Martha told her of the year that hadn’t happened, of the death of ten percent of all the men, women, and children in the world, of the Master’s reign, of the lonely days and nights just walking, always walking, and hoping no black-masked soldier or innocuous-looking robot lay over the next hill. Wondering if the next small band of survivors would be the one to hand her over for her execution.
“Only so many times you can save the world, you know?” she said as she finished, a bit shaken even at the retelling. It must not have been very long. “After that, I...needed to get out. Even if it wasn’t back to normal life.”
She bowed her head, as if even the telling exhausted her, and Liz had no idea what to say. She was astonished that something like that could have happened and then just vanished from her memory - even if it hadn’t really ever happened at all. “I’m sorry,” she attempted; what else could she say? “I had no i - well, of course I had no idea,” she amended. “I suppose no one does.”
Martha shook her head. “Not a one. Except for whoever was on the Valiant; for everyone else nothing even happened. Nobody knows.” She laughed, softly, to herself. “It was a bit like Oz, really. I keep finding all these people I’ve already met, and I just - I want to go up to them and say ‘And you were there!’” She pointed at imaginary passerby to illustrate, as if to make up for the grim mood. “’And you! And you! You went over to his side early, and you wouldn’t hand over your family to save yourself, and you -”
Without even realizing it, Martha had looked back up at Liz. She stopped before she went any further.
“It’s all right,” Liz said. There was a time when she wouldn’t have wanted to know, when she didn’t have to live that future anymore so what did it matter. But talking about it seemed to make Martha feel better. “Go ahead.”
“You were one of the leaders,” she told her, “sort of without even meaning to. The person who told me - they must’ve known you - they said even early on you were already tending to the wounded, trying to get people shelter if they needed it. But when you heard what I was doing you went right to work. You set up shop in what was left of the labs, trying to find some way to weaken the Toclafane, or disable them; something that would help people - me - fight back. A few of the people taking shelter in Cambridge used to be scientists; they worked with you. People started hearing about it; they came to you too if they thought they could help.” There was another humourless laugh. “They said you had a whole team going at the end, dozens of people. You were the one who first figured out something that might bring the Toclafane down, even if it was only one at a time.”
She paused. “At the end?” Liz asked, knowing what was coming next.
Martha nodded. “After that the Master started to figure things out. He stormed the university, had everyone in it killed, even the people who’d never heard of the project.” She wasn’t looking at Liz anymore. “Five people survived.”
“I take it I wasn’t among them.”
She shook her head, saying nothing more. “I thought about you a lot then,” she said at last, after another silence. “Sometimes I’d be...miles, continents away, and I’d just think ‘I didn’t get to keep my promise’. I thought that if it ever ended, if any of it ever ended, I’d come and find you again. Like I said I would.” Her arms, already around Liz’s shoulders, curled tighter, as she rested her head against her shoulder. “I’m so glad I found you, Liz.”
Liz kissed her hair in answer, let her hand drift down her back. Despite the grim tale Martha had just told she felt as if she had fallen in love with her all over again; she was in awe of the strength it must have taken for her to keep on going, every single day when the world was falling down around her, when she surely must have wished it was someone else’s job to do. And she was surprised to find that the story she told swept away the last doubts from her mind.
You were still you, the Doctor had said, a very long time ago. You were always Liz, no matter what. The Liz that Martha had told her about, who died less than a year from now, was no different than herself; all that differed were her circumstances. If that Liz could give up her life to help a brave, wonderful woman whom she’d met once, forty long years ago, whom she had little hope of seeing again and who probably didn’t remember her, amongst all she’d endured, then surely the Liz that held Martha now could do something so simple as love her.
“Come on,” Liz whispered in Martha’s ear. “Let’s go home. I’ve got a few stories of my own to tell.”
Author: stunt_muppet
Characters/Pairings: Liz Shaw/Martha Jones, Liz Shaw/OFC, Third Doctor, Eighth Doctor
Rating: PG-13/Teen
Summary: Forty years in the life of Elizabeth Shaw, waiting for a paradox to unravel.
Word Count: ~6,600
Original Story: The Strength to Let Go (http://atraphoenix.livejournal.com/84418.html) by atraphoenix
Notes: With many apologies to astrophysicists everywhere for my more-or-less winging it with regards to their profession, and especially to Charles T. Kowal for co-opting his work to make Liz look good.
--
The day she first met Martha Jones, Liz Shaw wasn’t thinking about leaving, nor staying. The immediate future provided more than enough to think about.
Mostly she was worried; worried about the Doctor, worried about the drill and the penetration site, worried that she’d mulled over the physics of the whole operation to the point where the Doctor’s misgivings seemed not without merit.
But underneath the worry lay boredom. For all that could happen at the drill head little actually had, and the Doctor remained infuriatingly absent. No way of knowing if he’d come back in the next ten minutes or the next two endless, sticky, overheated hours (or, she amended, if he’d come back at all).
Liz had never been fond of waiting, in such uncertain circumstances especially.
It was reactive, all this waiting around, she thought, looking over the instrumentation that a few hours ago had fed into the TARDIS console. That was what was so confounding about it. It was what was so confounding about this job, come to think of it. You waited around for something - attempted invasion, return of the Earth reptiles, alien plague, what have you - without knowing if it ever would, with nothing to do but prepare yourself for whatever you thought might happen. For all the wonders she’d seen during her time at UNIT she missed doing something, acting rather than being acted upon.
Which was why it came almost as a relief when a pretty young woman with a headband in her dark hair peeked through the front door of the hut.
Liz had never seen her before, not at UNIT and not among the project staff, which made her claims that Professor Stahlman sent her rather suspicious. And then she went and called her an assistant, which was bad enough when the Doctor did it; like it was her fault a man from another planet had swanned in and taken her job.
She was just about to call for the Sergeant when the girl explained, rather hastily, that she was a time traveller.
It was quite possibly the only time that such an explanation was the more believable one.
---
Her name was Martha Jones, she explained; she’d started travelling with the Doctor in the year 2008, and after wandering the past and the future and the cosmos they’d apparently gotten stuck here, in 1969, waiting for a paradox to unravel itself so they could go back home (her home, anyway). And she’d been doing nothing but serving chips to make rent and trying to entertain the Doctor for the past month and a half and they’d driven up to the project headquarters in search of something - anything - to do, and the Doctor had mentioned that some other version of him was already here somehow and, really, you couldn’t exactly blame her for getting curious, right?
Strange how a paradox could just crop up and disappear like that, with no apparent damage to the universe at large, Liz thought. But then, she supposed her even having this conversation was a minor paradox in itself, because now she knew that nothing disastrous was going to happen to the Doctor, and he’d repair his TARDIS after all.
Of course, it was possible that the future Martha came from was contingent, and she and her other Doctor and indeed all of them were going to blink out of existence at any moment. Liz found it difficult to contemplate the intricacies of it all, because now that she was no longer looking for a reason to throw her out she noticed that Martha was a distractingly lovely young woman, all long dark eyelashes that rimmed wide eyes and lips that pursed just slightly with worry as Liz told her own story.
Why she bothered to tell it she couldn’t say - surely this girl couldn’t be that concerned with all the mundanities of a stranger’s life - but after a year among people who weren’t bothered with what she thought so long as she did her job it was a relief to be worried, tired, even a little regretful. And Martha listened - it was almost thrilling how she listened. And when she had nothing left to listen to the talk turned to other things - the Doctor, what it was like to live in the TARDIS. Liz couldn’t help but be curious.
“Do you think you’ll go with him?” Martha asked. “When he fixes it, I mean.”
“I’m not sure,” Liz answered; truth be told she hadn’t even thought about it. Up until Martha’s arrival she hadn’t been entirely convinced that the TARDIS could travel in time at all (for all its other peculiar qualities), and that the Doctor wasn’t just trying to be impressive. “I’d be interesting, certainly. But I have got my job here. And my research project, if I’m ever allowed back to Cambridge. Might even go for readership, eventually.” She shook her head. “Just leaving all that behind, maybe never coming back to it...it doesn’t seem worth it. I’ve got a pretty good life here, all in all.”
“You’d pass up a chance to see alien planets because of a research project?” Martha asked, incredulous. Liz almost laughed; she was still very young, this girl, still eager to wander and live with no responsibilities. And yet it couldn’t all be starry-eyed youth; Martha didn’t seem that much of a dreamer. Perhaps she really did feel that way, that an ordinary life paled in comparison to a life among the stars.
Martha rested her head on her hand and looked at her; Liz found her eyes wandering to the flawless skin of her cheek, and wondering idly what the rest of that skin looked like. “Once-in-a-lifetime thing you’d be letting go.” Martha added.
“There are plenty of once-in-a-lifetime things right here on Earth, Miss Jones,” she said with a smile. It must have been quite unnerving, she imagined, being thrust out into a wider, deeper universe while you were barely old enough to know who you were yourself. No wonder Martha couldn’t imagine leaving; she’d been given the cosmos and everything in it with no time to think about whether she wanted it, or even what she wanted at all. In a way she reminded her a bit of herself, when she started this job; so many new parameters to understand that it was hard to decipher what to do with them. “Besides, even if I did leave with him, I’d come back eventually. Only I’d be missing five years from the time we travelled, or I’d be so...desensitized to the magnitude of what I saw that I wouldn’t be able to go back to my old life. I’d rather have a whole lifetime here than lose part of it up there.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
Somewhere in the main building the alarm klaxons went off, echoed by the alarms inside the hut, and Liz felt another twinge of irritation at being confined. If the rest of the lab staff weren’t able to take care of it this time, she’d have to go and help them, whatever it was; the stakes were simply too high for her not to try. Besides, if something went too badly wrong there was a distinct possibility that there wouldn’t be a compound for the Doctor to return to.
Martha cast a nervous glance at the door; a contingent of UNIT soldiers rushed by, not paying them a second look, and she realized that if she did leave, Martha couldn’t stay here on her own. Someone might discover her. She might get arrested, injured, lost. The Doctor might come back unexpectedly, and then who knew what would happen; paradoxes weren’t Liz’s specialty.
It was probably nearing time for her to leave anyway; her other Doctor had to be looking for her. Liz imagined that one of the other disadvantages of time travel was that you met plenty of people that you were almost certainly never going to see again. She wasn’t sure how you said goodbye in circumstances like that, especially to someone like Martha Jones.
She found she didn’t want to; she’d never met anyone quite like her. There was something real about the unknown, the future in her, something welcoming and alive and more beguiling than anything dwelling amongst the stars or deep beneath the Earth.
Which was why, when Martha made her first attempt at heading out the door (no more eager to leave than Liz was to see her go), Liz asked her to come back for her, whenever she left the TARDIS behind.
The both of them froze after she spoke the words, and almost immediately Liz regretted saying them. It was a foolish thing to ask of her; they’d only just met, this one time, and she had no reason to think Martha even would walk away eventually. What if she didn’t want to, what if she never did?
Besides, there were forty years between now and the year Martha called home; Liz had just been talking about not giving up part of her life out there in the corners of the universe, and now there was this whole part of her future she was willing to give up to someone she might never see again?
But this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities; she could hardly afford not to at least pursue it. And when Martha smiled in answer, and said that yes, she’d like that, she’d come back for her, Liz couldn’t find it in her to regret a single word.
And so she led Martha to a back room in the hut, where even the Doctor wouldn’t see them should he decide to come back, and slowly committed that perfect skin to her memory.
--
When the Doctor returned he talked of a parallel universe, full of strange and desperate people wearing familiar faces. But that was all he said of it, and after the bore hole was filled and the project abandoned he rarely mentioned it again. He ignored her the few times she asked.
Until a few months later, after she’d made up her mind to leave.
It wasn’t an easy decision; there were still so many things she could see, so much good she could do here - no matter how passive the job she had to admit that routinely saving the planet had a certain cachet. And despite herself she was going to miss the Doctor and the Brigadier, just a little bit.
But knowing that the Doctor would one day repair his TARDIS cemented her resolve. That meant one day he’d leave, and maybe he would ask her along too. And no matter how her curiosity tugged at her that wasn’t the life she wanted. Too reactive. Too dependent.
Besides, she felt slightly less bad about abandoning the Doctor’s unfinished project if he would eventually finish it without her anyway.
So she filled out her paperwork and packed up the few personal items she’d brought with her and said her goodbyes and left one chilly Monday morning. And it was then, just before she got in her car, that the Doctor called after her.
“You asked me once about the other world, Liz,” he said, leaning against the door to the compound. “The one I travelled to.”
“What about it?”
He hesitated before he continued, as if he had meant to say whatever it was for a long time and now could not remember the words. “Would you like to know who you were?” he asked. “Or who you could have been, I suppose.”
She didn’t know what to say at first. It was tempting to know how her circumstances might have shaped her, what range of variation was present in her brain.
But as she looked out the front gates, past the “No entry” sign and out onto the road, she made up her mind. What did it matter who she might have been when this was who she was now?
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said as she shook her head, “but no thank you.” And she opened the driver’s side door.
“You were still you, you know,” he continued, turning back to head inside; his voice is as quiet as it can be and still be heard at this distance. “The others - Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton - I hardly recognized them.”
She paused, the door still open, and he smiled. “You were always Liz. No matter what.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, I suppose.”
“As well you should!”
He retreated back into the building before she lost sight of him, and a few minutes later the guarded front gates shut behind her for the last time.
--
She returned to her old job a few days later, her sabbatical over; the comet trajectory project was yet ongoing, and there was talk of the shadow of a yet-undiscovered satellite of Jupiter in the wobble of the comets’ orbit. She spent that day meticulously drafting parabolas on graph paper and measuring the inconsistencies between them, and she went home that night with a smile on her face. Life was back in order.
Her time at UNIT was relegated to the back of her mind, more often than not; there was too much else to think about now. But there were always reminders, here and there. One of the research fellows would make a sarcastic crack about meteoroids secretly being spaceships, and she’d have to resist the impulse to inform them that sometimes they were, just to see their face. Uncategorizable interference would crackle across the radio telescopes, and she’d almost pick up the phone to dial the Brigadier before she remembered that it wasn’t her problem anymore (but she’d call him anyway; couldn’t trust them to get anything done without her, after all). And, on occasion, there’d be rumours of dinosaurs spotted in London that she couldn’t completely laugh off.
In particular the strangest things brought to mind Martha Jones. Someone else’s dark eyeliner and heavy lashes. Clear water droplets inside the walls of a tea mug like the string of beads Martha wore. The periodicity of comets, sparking bright against the telescope and promising to reappear years, centuries later. (They hardly ever appeared more than once in a human lifetime.)
It was still foolish, what Liz had asked of her, but it would be many years yet before she came back (if she came back) and there was so much to do now. So little time for one thoughtless request and its answer, perhaps equally thoughtless.
It was only a few years after her return that an astronomer from America sent for their research to confirm his findings of Jupiter’s new moon, and when she looked at the tiny point of light in the photographs he’d taken she found she didn’t care what ancient civilization lived there or would live there a thousand years from now. It was just there, up in the sky, exerting its gentle pull on the universe around it.
She made her readership the next year, though of course that meant she was obligated to start teaching again; never her favourite part of the job. But the students she was assigned were for the most part reasonably bright; inquisitive young men and women with initiative and a good head for figures and (in one case) strong shoulders and disorderly dark hair that brought back to mind the girl she’d bid goodbye to just a decade ago.
She started getting into debates with one of the English lecturers over whether literature was truly integral for human development and civilization. Emma, her name was, a small woman with bright green eyes and slender hands that moved restlessly as she spoke and the vestiges of a Liverpool accent. Though language was her first love she was captivated even by Liz’s rather sober tales of the stars she studied, though Liz’s apathy towards the poetic masters appalled her.
They started having those conversations over coffee, over drinks, over dinner. They began to converse about other, less lofty topics - college politics, the vagaries of a male-dominated institution, how very pretty Emma looked when she put up her hair. She fascinated Liz, this woman who could match her wit for wit but whose mind worked so differently than her own.
And one rainy day Emma kissed her before she left for the evening, and for the rest of the night the future and Martha Jones were the furthest things from her mind.
She began spending the days and soon enough the nights in Emma’s room, talking with her, laughing with her, going to college meetings and feigning interest with her. She took Emma to Cavendish Labs at night and directed the optical telescope at the moon for her, and Emma confided in her that when she was small she always thought there were people living on the moon, who’d gone up there long ago and couldn’t get back.
Liz leaned in close and whispered to her that in a hundred years there would be, and never told her how she knew.
Some days Emma led her through the literary library and insisted that she at least try some Eliot, some Neruda, some Wordsworth, in the hopes of finding something she liked. (Not much luck.) And some evenings after they slept together she recited Petrarch and Shakespeare in a ridiculously overdramatic voice because she knew that Liz would laugh and call her a hopeless romantic.
And for four years Liz didn’t think of two-thousand-eight, or of Martha.
Very often.
--
She wasn’t sure what reminded her again, as autumn became winter and 1985 began to wane. Maybe it was the way Emma smiled one morning in her sleep, or the fight they got into two days before that. Maybe it was someone’s leather jacket (vintage) that looked like Martha’s, or a certain turn of phrase in conversation.
Maybe it was Halley’s comet, on the short end of its elliptical orbit next year, that the Astronomy department had been working on tracking for months - the only comet that returned within a human lifetime, depending on when you were lucky enough to be born.
But it had been two decades now, two decades to go, and for whatever reason the future was back on her mind. Twenty years was not such a long time as thirty, forty.
She imagined herself, twenty years later, Emma still at her side when Martha Jones walked back through the door. She imagined the look on Martha’s face - hurt, maybe, or worse, angry. It would only have been a few minutes or days or years for her, and in that short time she’d been replaced.
She imagined Emma, and how she’d try to explain it to her, and how Emma would look at her and then back at Martha, trying to understand it. She wondered if Emma would think she’d been forsaken for someone younger.
She imagined wanting both and having neither.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, looking out the window, stroking Emma’s hair as she slept. It wasn’t fair to Emma to be the placeholder, the second choice in case she couldn’t have her first. It wasn’t fair to Martha to lose patience on her because she hadn’t got here fast enough.
It wasn’t fair to her to have to choose when she didn’t know if Martha’d ever come back.
She tried to brush it off, just like she used to, but two-thousand-eight got closer every day, and she couldn’t conceal the worry anymore, and once Emma started asking about it Liz, for all that she didn’t believe in premonitions or feelings, couldn’t help but sense something inevitable.
She explained to Emma two weeks later that she couldn’t do this, that it wasn’t Emma’s fault, that Emma had been nothing but wonderful to her but it was time for her to leave. She tried to put it as delicately as she could, but she was unused to dealing with such messy and imprecise things, and for all she tried to reassure her Emma started to cry anyway.
She asked Liz if she’d done something wrong, and Liz wanted nothing more than to tell her the truth. That it wasn’t anything she’d done, it was just a stupid, stupid decision she’d made twenty years ago and couldn’t take back. But who would believe her if she said a thing like that? She’d never told Emma about UNIT or time-travel or any of that; why would she? She’d left it behind.
She moved out the next day, and neither of them said a word beyond “goodbye”.
--
She spent the next few months working, for the most part, preparing her lessons and setting up the lab computers to better receive the satellite images to come. In the evenings she went back to her room and read, or went back to the lab, or sometimes just slept (she always felt tired these days; must have been the early sunset).
She rarely saw Emma; she was in a whole different department, after all. The few times she did see her they didn’t speak. Most of the time Emma wouldn’t even meet her eyes.
She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel, afterwards, or what she’d expected. She’d expected it to hurt, yes. She’d expected the regret and the sadness; all perfectly normal.
What she hadn’t expected, she realized, was the anger.
Seventeen years - it’d been seventeen years now since she left UNIT. Seventeen years since the last time she saw Martha. How long had she spent on this ridiculous gamble with little hope of reward? How much time had she wasted for someone who might not even remember her, who might not ever even come back?
It wasn’t that she’d had a bad life - she’d tracked meteoroids across the skies and helped measure the moons of Jupiter, become respected and knowledgeable and everything she thought she would be. And that almost made it worse, because she’d had the life she thought she would have to begin with and she still wasn’t happy and she should have been. She shouldn’t have had this single extraneous element, this possibility hanging over her head, making her wonder what she’d passed up, how much better things might have been were she not under obligation. She shouldn’t wonder if the reason she’d never accepted a job anywhere else wasn’t because she was happy at Cambridge but out of some absurd fear that if she left Martha might not find her, or might look for her here and find her gone and not think her worth the effort to pursue.
She shouldn’t have had those choices to make.
How did she know, she thought to herself one evening, that she even loved Martha at all? She only met her that once, all those years ago. It could have been infatuation or the stress of the Inferno Project. It could have been mere curiosity - a girl from the future, living proof of an impossibility, of course she’d been attracted.
She’d never been one for illusions, after all. Never much of a romantic.
She should go back to Emma and try to apologize, somehow. Try to make it right. She was tired of the uncertainty. But when she went to knock on her door she heard a voice that wasn’t Emma’s talking excitedly inside.
It could have been anyone - could have been a friend, or a professor, or family - but Liz still went back to the lab.
--
Liz was still in an ill mood, and still quite buried in her work, when, just a few days before Halley’s perihelion, the Doctor knocked on the lab door.
He looked different, with dark brown curls instead of gray and a face a good decade or two younger, but he mentioned UNIT and the Recovery probe that no one else would have known about, not even here, and she remembered that the Brigadier had mentioned that the Doctor could change his appearance.
He all but pulled her away from her work and insisted on getting her a cup of coffee, though how he paid for it she decided not to contemplate. They reminisced for a while about their year at UNIT and he told her he’d left, his TARDIS back in working order, ten or twelve years for her and hundreds for him. He talked excitedly of the places he’d been, the people who’d travelled with him, the men he’d been in those centuries.
Predictably, he didn’t once stop to ask her how she’d been until he’d covered all 500 years. She gave him the basics - her career at Cambridge, her readership, a few of the more interesting students she’d had. She didn’t mention Martha; quite possibly he wasn’t her Doctor yet, one couldn’t be sure. She didn’t mention Emma either.
They ran out of things to say after a while, though the Doctor seemed to remember something terribly exciting that he hadn’t told her yet every time there was a lull in conversation. (It awed her that he could possibly be the same man as the one she’d bid goodbye. He seemed so very much younger.) When she mentioned, her eyes on the rim of dark liquid at the bottom of her empty coffee cup, that she should get back to the lab, his response was “Come along with me.”
“I didn’t get the chance to ask you before,” he added, when she looked up at him, “The universe is a fascinating place, Liz. I can’t imagine you were never curious.”
She almost said no without even thinking about it - she’d walked away before, she could do it again. But that sort of life had a strange appeal now, one that it didn’t before; it had a certainty to it, and an ease. She could leave and see the furthest reaches of space, watch the birth and death of stars, and come back as if she’d never even left. She wouldn’t have to choose.
She wondered if Martha had walked away, wherever her present time was at the moment. She wondered if that conversation seventeen years ago had changed anything at all.
She told him thank you but no thank you, again, and reminded him that she had quite a nice life here and a job to do; new satellite pictures of Halley were coming in as perihelion neared, and she had some important calculations to make.
He replied, with a smile as he rose from his chair, “You think that’s exciting? Few months from now there’ll be a new planet in the sky.”
But before she could ask him for any specifics, he’d already bid her goodbye and began walking away.
She sat at the coffee shop table for a while after he left, considering. A new planet would certainly be a sight to behold; though she couldn’t help but wonder what sort of problems that would cause for Earth’s tides and gravitation, the Doctor didn’t seem overly concerned about it, and he probably would have warned her if there was disaster to come. Quite probably he would have tried to stop it; it was the sort of thing he did.
And that was the difference, wasn’t it, what separated the Doctor from people like her. He was drawn to cataclysm, the disastrous and the grand, events that would be written in history books or poetry. What was one little comet, brief and predictable, against a one-time-only cosmic event?
But she and the people around her would wait 76 years for one barely-visible light amongst all the others in the sky, and they’d watch it and analyze it and the newspapers would write about its coming. Not because it was unique, or particularly exciting - Halley was in its composition little different than the comets too far out in space for the naked eye to see, which their telescopes followed all the time - but because it came back. That was all that was different about it.
Liz smiled, feeling lighter than she had before, and watched the last drop of coffee slide around the rim of the mug. Yes, she could wait for something small and beautiful and utterly ordinary in the grand scheme of things. She could keep that promise - not obey that stricture. She could go back to work and chart the heavens like she’d always thought she would, had the life she’d wanted, only with something wonderful to hope for a decade or two away. She could wait for Martha Jones. People had waited longer for so much less.
Of course there was a risk. The comet might break up in orbit somewhere past Pluto, never to be seen again. Didn’t stop anybody watching.
Didn’t mean it wasn’t worth it.
When she got back to the lab that afternoon one of her co-workers guessed from the change in her demeanour that the Doctor must have been someone very special indeed, and while she’d never been one to entertain questions about her personal life she couldn’t help but smile.
Four days later Halley, almost invisible, trailed across the sky, and Liz, her own telescope trained on it, wondered if Martha was watching it as well, was old enough to know what it was.
--
The satellites tracked Halley as it left, and work returned to normal, but it was as if Liz had shaken off cobwebs, ready to keep moving forward again. No more second-guessing, no more looking back to see what she’d missed.
She put her name forward for research director; she’d published more than enough papers and taken part in more than enough projects. It was what she wanted, right from the beginning; no reason to doubt it now. Within a few years (after one more contributing paper) she was given her own office in one of the third-floor labs, tentatively put in charge of a research team of graduate students. She didn’t decorate it overmuch - she’d never seen the sense in hauling in a bunch of nonsense that you’ll have to remove eventually anyway - but on the wall she kept a calendar, updated every year, and a copy of one of the satellite photographs of Halley beside it, the most concrete reminder she had.
She continued to publish and led her graduate team in further explorations of the Jupiter and Saturn satellites, sketching out what their surfaces must be like. She became a name among the faculty, someone acknowledged when she passed by. She was even, one day, among the department members invited to dinner with the Astronomer Royal.
She went back and explained things to Emma, though she left out the details about time travel; she only told her that she’d met someone a long time ago, who wouldn’t be back for an even longer time. She apologized for not telling her the truth. She wasn’t sure if Emma forgave her, and it didn’t ease all the regret, but the apology was another fetter cast off, another way of severing the sense of obligation.
Sometimes when she went home for the evening she would imagine she could see the moons they were studying out her window, and wondered what strange, fantastic creatures would inhabit them one day.
--
The morning - the last one - was no different than any other morning for the past few years. Same classes to prepare for, same quick walk to the laboratory, same flutter of anticipation in her chest that maybe today, maybe it’d happen today.
She was checking one of the post-grad’s calculations when the whole room fell quiet and everyone turned to look at the door, and Liz didn’t even need to raise her eyes to know who they were looking at.
She almost couldn’t look up, couldn’t believe what she knew she’d see. She almost didn’t dare.
Across the room, dressed all in black, untouched by the decades of her absence, Martha Jones smiled.
--
The front door of her office didn’t even have time to shut before Martha pulled her into another embrace, another urgent kiss (the students had all been sent home for the day; how could she possibly be expected to teach at a time like this?). Liz held on to her as tight as she could, felt that same beautiful skin, real again after all this time, and it wasn’t enough, it could never be enough; how did you somehow express the uncertainty and hope and relief of forty long years? But for now, just for now, this would do.
“I missed you,” Martha murmured when they parted, lips still close enough to touch.
“I missed you,” Liz echoed. Now that she looked at her - now that she could even begin to try to think again - Martha wasn’t quite the same as she remembered her. She hadn’t aged a day in forty years and yet she somehow still seemed older, more careworn despite the smile in her eyes. “I thought -” she began, and hoped that the falter in her voice was not so pronounced as it sounded, “for a while, I thought you might not come back.”
“Why not?” Martha looked up at her. “I did say I would.”
“I know.” She laid her hand on Martha’s cheek. How needless, how overwrought her doubts seemed now. “I had a long time to think about it. Longer than I should have, probably.” She felt as if she had watched her grow up, even though she’d seen nothing of Martha’s journey. “I’m very proud of you, you know. I’m not sure I’d have been able to walk away in your position.”
Martha dropped her gaze for a moment, and there was a sadness to her smile. “It’s easier than it looks,” she said wryly, “at the end.”
Martha told her of the year that hadn’t happened, of the death of ten percent of all the men, women, and children in the world, of the Master’s reign, of the lonely days and nights just walking, always walking, and hoping no black-masked soldier or innocuous-looking robot lay over the next hill. Wondering if the next small band of survivors would be the one to hand her over for her execution.
“Only so many times you can save the world, you know?” she said as she finished, a bit shaken even at the retelling. It must not have been very long. “After that, I...needed to get out. Even if it wasn’t back to normal life.”
She bowed her head, as if even the telling exhausted her, and Liz had no idea what to say. She was astonished that something like that could have happened and then just vanished from her memory - even if it hadn’t really ever happened at all. “I’m sorry,” she attempted; what else could she say? “I had no i - well, of course I had no idea,” she amended. “I suppose no one does.”
Martha shook her head. “Not a one. Except for whoever was on the Valiant; for everyone else nothing even happened. Nobody knows.” She laughed, softly, to herself. “It was a bit like Oz, really. I keep finding all these people I’ve already met, and I just - I want to go up to them and say ‘And you were there!’” She pointed at imaginary passerby to illustrate, as if to make up for the grim mood. “’And you! And you! You went over to his side early, and you wouldn’t hand over your family to save yourself, and you -”
Without even realizing it, Martha had looked back up at Liz. She stopped before she went any further.
“It’s all right,” Liz said. There was a time when she wouldn’t have wanted to know, when she didn’t have to live that future anymore so what did it matter. But talking about it seemed to make Martha feel better. “Go ahead.”
“You were one of the leaders,” she told her, “sort of without even meaning to. The person who told me - they must’ve known you - they said even early on you were already tending to the wounded, trying to get people shelter if they needed it. But when you heard what I was doing you went right to work. You set up shop in what was left of the labs, trying to find some way to weaken the Toclafane, or disable them; something that would help people - me - fight back. A few of the people taking shelter in Cambridge used to be scientists; they worked with you. People started hearing about it; they came to you too if they thought they could help.” There was another humourless laugh. “They said you had a whole team going at the end, dozens of people. You were the one who first figured out something that might bring the Toclafane down, even if it was only one at a time.”
She paused. “At the end?” Liz asked, knowing what was coming next.
Martha nodded. “After that the Master started to figure things out. He stormed the university, had everyone in it killed, even the people who’d never heard of the project.” She wasn’t looking at Liz anymore. “Five people survived.”
“I take it I wasn’t among them.”
She shook her head, saying nothing more. “I thought about you a lot then,” she said at last, after another silence. “Sometimes I’d be...miles, continents away, and I’d just think ‘I didn’t get to keep my promise’. I thought that if it ever ended, if any of it ever ended, I’d come and find you again. Like I said I would.” Her arms, already around Liz’s shoulders, curled tighter, as she rested her head against her shoulder. “I’m so glad I found you, Liz.”
Liz kissed her hair in answer, let her hand drift down her back. Despite the grim tale Martha had just told she felt as if she had fallen in love with her all over again; she was in awe of the strength it must have taken for her to keep on going, every single day when the world was falling down around her, when she surely must have wished it was someone else’s job to do. And she was surprised to find that the story she told swept away the last doubts from her mind.
You were still you, the Doctor had said, a very long time ago. You were always Liz, no matter what. The Liz that Martha had told her about, who died less than a year from now, was no different than herself; all that differed were her circumstances. If that Liz could give up her life to help a brave, wonderful woman whom she’d met once, forty long years ago, whom she had little hope of seeing again and who probably didn’t remember her, amongst all she’d endured, then surely the Liz that held Martha now could do something so simple as love her.
“Come on,” Liz whispered in Martha’s ear. “Let’s go home. I’ve got a few stories of my own to tell.”