(Doctor Who/Psych) America: Hotel California for shinealightonme
Title: America: Hotel California
Author: gladdecease
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Psych (along with a cameo from another fandom or two)
Characters: Martha Jones; Henry Spencer, Juliet O'Hara, Burton "Gus" Guster, Carlton Lassiter
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,773
Spoilers: This story takes place in late 2008/early 2009, with spoilers up to the 2008 season of each show.
Warnings: Implied character death.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Psych belong to their respective creators
A/N: This was originally going to be part one of six, but I didn't end up finishing the whole story in time. I intend to finish the rest someday, and will be sure to link back to this one then!
Summary: It's the last stretch of Martha's journey. Just one last country to walk, and she'll be home. First stop: Santa Barbara, California.
+
Martha Jones set foot on the western-most shores of North America with a brisk wind at her back and a single person waiting on the beach for her, squinting when the setting sun shone too brightly. It was colder than she'd expected for California, even in January, and the ocean was freezing where it had seeped into her boots. Still, she stayed in the water an extra minute to enjoy the pleasure of kicking away the dingy lifeboat she'd reached shore in. It reeked of rotting fish and mildew, had been disconcertingly damp, and she'd had to sit in it and paddle for the last few hours. "Unpleasant" didn't even begin to cover the experience.
Her contact, an older man with little hair, sunburnt skin, and tired eyes, seemed to be having similar thoughts, if the disgusted curl of his lip was anything to go by. "What kind of ship would let a lifeboat get like that?" he wondered, appalled.
"Human smugglers." When his expression grew even more exaggerated, Martha shrugged. "It was the only ship that could get out of Japan. What Sang Min and his men do for a living is vile, but they're still human. When it comes down to it, we'll side with each other against... well." She looked up at the blue-gray twilight sky meaningfully. "You know."
"All too well," the balding man said grimly. He held out a hand. "Henry Spencer, retired police detective."
Martha shook. "Martha Jones. Former medical student."
"And our savior, if even a fraction of the stories are true," Henry said wryly.
Martha ducked her head, feeling her cheeks warm. "Nothing so grand as all that," she said, repressing a giggle, "but do you think we could move that conversation to a more private place? Only I feel like I've been rowing all day, and I'm fairly certain I'll fall asleep before I finish the story if I don't tell it soon."
"Of course," Henry said, and led Martha up the beach to a row of shops along a boardwalk. Most of them had broken or boarded up windows - from panicked raiders after the initial Decimation, probably. It wasn't an uncommon sight in Martha's experience, though the nearly untouched shop on the corner was a little unusual.
If it had been better decorated before, the storefront had been stripped of its baubles. All that remained was chipped green lettering on the front windows, spelling out the word "psych." Martha watched Henry knock a pattern against the door and wondered at the shop's past life. A joke shop, maybe? A psychologist's attempt to be clever? Martha listened with some growing disbelief as lock after lock was slowly turned, keyed, or lifted. Ten in all were unlocked before a blonde woman opened the door and let them in.
The inside gave no clues as to the shop's original function either. While there were no shelves for merchandise and only a smattering of furniture, the remaining portions of the floor and walls were covered with all manner of things. Canned food, strange knick-knacks, bottles of water lined up against what looked like a small desalination tank, at least two dozen pineapple-themed objects, and a good number of posters for movies from the 1980's made up only a fraction of the room's occupants Martha could see from where she stood in the doorway. If she didn't know better, she would have thought there was no order to the mess, but she'd lived with the Doctor long enough to recognize a chaotic organizational system, even if she didn't understand the rationale behind it.
The woman who'd let them in to Psych - introduced by Henry as Juliet O'Hara, a police detective before Saxon - smiled apologetically as Martha looked around at the barely contained chaos.
"I know it looks like a mess," she said, carefully stepping around and over stacks of packets of ramen noodles and powdered milk, "but Gus knows where everything is, and it gives him something to do. He's needed that." Reaching a closet on the far side of the room, Juliet paused for a moment. Her eyes went distant. "We all have."
"You've lost people," Martha said. The moment she spoke she winced, wished she hadn't. What an inane thing to say.
"We've all lost people," Juliet said quietly. She rapped softly at the closet door and whispered, "Gus? Gus, we've got a visitor." A male voice replied, too low for Martha to hear. "It's Martha Jones." After a moment of further whispering, Juliet stepped away from the door, giving it room to open. Out stepped... Gus, Martha supposed.
He was a strange sort of man. Curling, flyaway hair as dark as his skin, clothes sagging and clinging to his body in ways that said he hadn't taken them off in quite some time, along with the disorderly order he'd apparently designed said this was a man who had not dealt well with the Saxon administration. But when he looked at Martha his eyes were calm, sane, and all his movements were smooth, well-practiced. A man who'd spent the last few months in a closet wouldn't know how to move around a room like this, even if he'd arranged where all the obstacles laid. "Burton Guster," he said, nodding slightly in an imitation of a bow. "Call me Gus."
"Nice to meet you, Gus," Martha said, smiling. "I'd introduce myself, but I suspect you already know who I am."
"Martha Jones," he said, smiling. "Yeah, I've heard of you. People say you're gonna save the world."
"I'm certainly going to try," she said, glancing between Henry and Juliet. "Is this all of you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like I said, I'm only going to be able to tell this story once before I collapse from exhaustion." Martha sighed; she was already pushing at limits she hadn't known she had three months ago. Walking through Turkey was rough, but Japan had been unbearable at times. She picked her way over to one of the desks and sat down. Juliet and Gus hissed, almost simultaneously. "What?"
Juliet's mouth opened and shut several times before she shook her head. "It's nothing," she said, as obvious a lie as Martha had ever seen. "Really, it's just... that's..."
"It's nothing," Gus repeated, voice breaking.
"Right," Martha muttered under her breath, rubbing at her brow tiredly. "Anyway, I'm only going to be able to tell this once, and it's better if more people hear it. It helps," she added when Henry looked skeptical. "Trust me, this isn't the first time I've had to do this. I know how it works."
The three residents of Psych exchanged looks. Eventually, Henry nodded, slowly, and Juliet echoed the expression. She turned to Gus. "Call him."
Gus maneuvered his way back to his closet. He opened the door wider to reveal a strange assortment of electronics arranged in the tiny space, with only enough room left on the floor for him to squat down to reach everything. Picking up a battered walkie-talkie, he turned a knob until static hissed out of the speaker and said, "Attention: Lassie, we have Thriller contact. Repeat, Thriller has made contact. Lassie, come home." He didn't wait for a reply before switching off the device. "Anyone else?"
"I don't know," Henry said. "How long will you be here?"
It took Martha a moment to realize he was speaking to her now. "I... not long. A day, two tops. Saxon's hunting me down, you know. Have to keep on the move."
"Better not, then," Juliet said. "The chief wouldn't be able to make it in time, not with her daughter."
"Just us, then," Gus said, shutting the closet door. He sat down in the other desk chair and pulled a rubber ball out of one of the drawers. He smiled slightly and tossed the ball to Juliet. She caught it neatly, turned it this way and that, inspecting it, then laughed. She tossed it to Henry before finding a seat on an uncomfortable looking waiting room style chair. Henry frowned, squinting at the ball, and took a seat of his own. "He should be here in twenty minutes," Gus explained to Martha. "Never likes to go too far from town, but he's not the sit around and wait kind of guy, you know?"
Martha thought of the Doctor and nearly laughed. She smiled knowingly and nodded instead, or tried to. The way her head flopped to the side instead surprised her; she hadn't realized she was that close to passing out. Shaking her head slightly, she forced herself to a more upright position. Twenty minutes, plus however long it took her to tell them about the Doctor. She could stay awake that long.
She hid a yawn behind a hand. She could probably stay awake that long.
"You can go ahead and rest your eyes for a minute," Gus said gently. "You look like you need it, and we can wait." He glanced at the others. "Right?" But if they had anything to say against it, Martha didn't hear. She'd leaned her head back the moment Gus gave permission and was out like a light.
+
Sometime later, Martha woke to the sound of quiet voices. There was something about a whisper that woke her more easily than regular speech these days, probably because the people trying not to get her attention were the ones she needed to be awake and aware of. "I remember this," an unfamiliar male voice said slowly. "He hit one of those robot things with this, didn't he?"
"That and a baseball bat," another male voice said, louder and closer to Martha. Blinking slowly, she turned her head in the direction of the sound and saw that it was Gus. "He shoved me under the desk and swung at them, screaming the whole time."
Someone laughed brokenly. "That's so like him."
Martha stretched, groaning loudly. If this wasn't a conversation they wanted her privy to, best that they know she was awake. Rubbing at a crick that had formed in her neck, she looked around the room. Most of the chaos remained unchanged, though room had been made on the floor for the unfamiliar man to sit down. He was a gruff looking older man, with gray around his temples that Saxon's rule likely hadn't brought on, wearing multiple gun holsters strapped to his chest and legs. He shifted where he sat, revealing a detective's badge strapped to his belt that probably hadn't been official more than half a year now. Yet looking at the rubber ball Gus had found earlier, there was a softness to his expression that spoke of unexpected loss. It was an expression shared by the other members of this odd group, and a feeling Martha knew all too well.
She coughed, gathering their attention, but the looks on their faces made her falter from her script. "Tell me about him?"
After a moment of silent conversation, Henry made his way over to the far wall and picked up a picture frame. He brought it over to Martha, who saw it was of a younger, happier-looking Gus, and a man with spiky hair and a wide smile standing next to him. "His name was Shawn," Henry began.
More than an hour had passed by the time all four of them were satisfied with what they'd said about Shawn. When talking about most of his life, only Henry and Gus spoke, but once they reached present day and the formation of Shawn's psychic detective business - which was what the "psych" stood for, apparently - Juliet and the other man, who they referred to only as Lassiter, jumped into the storytelling, describing cases Shawn had miraculously solved. They laughed about his obsession with pineapple, his fondness for everything the nineteen-eighties had created, and the strange quirks of his nature that made nearly everyone he met like him. They cried about his unexpected bravery when the Toclafane first attacked en mass, how for the first time in the face of serious danger he had fought instead of fleeing. He'd saved Gus's life, at the cost of his own.
They were quiet for a long time after they'd finished, absently wiping away the cold streaks of long since fallen tears, unable to meet each other's eyes after saying so much out of a topic they'd neatly avoided speaking on up to now.
Quietly, Martha thanked them for sharing something so deeply personal with her. Their open honesty and love for one of the people they'd lost made it easier for her to tell them a story of her own. She had dozens to choose from, naturally, but this time she thought one of the stories she hadn't told before would work best. It had been on a planet far from here, in the far-off future, but she thought the police officer she and the Doctor had inadvertently assisted in his investigation might speak to these people better than her other stories would.
When the story was over, she told them the same thing she'd told everybody else. "I need you to spread the word," she said. "I can only tell so many people myself, but if you leave here and tell them for me, then on that day, a year to the day from when the Toclafane first arrived and Saxon took over, the Doctor will save us."
"Leave?" It was a surprisingly pain-riddled word. Gus looked around at the organized chaos he'd created. "I can't - "
"Yes, you can," Juliet said gently. She crouched down until their eyes were level and reached out to hold his shoulder steady. "I know you can, Gus. For Shawn."
He shuddered gently under her touch, and nodded. "For Shawn." He looked up at Martha. "Where do you want us to go?"
"I'm headed east," she said. "North or south would be best - I don't know if I'll be able to reach South America and still get back to England by May."
"Then we'll head south," Gus said firmly, placing his hand on Juliet's as she nodded. He smiled faintly and chuckled. "I've gone to the Mexican border for him before, what's one more time?"
Lassiter sighed. "And I'll head north. Tell the chief and McNab while I'm going." He started holstering the guns he'd been cleaning while she spoke, looking speculatively at the supplies Gus had built the room around.
Martha turned to the last member of the party. "Henry?"
He watched her for a moment. "How are you planning on getting east?" he asked.
"Walking, mostly - cars aren't really an option these days - "
"Mine is," he said, brokering no argument. "I'll take you."
"You could get killed!" Martha protested, knowing already that there was no point to it.
Sure enough, Henry just grimly said, "My son and my ex-wife are already dead. If helping you means hurting the bastards that killed them, I'll take that chance."
+
In the morning, the psych office looked completely different. They'd split the food, water and supplies that Gus had stocked up between the five of them, and everything else that remained had found a place on the desks and tables. Looking at it now, Martha could almost imagine how it used to be - Gus at his desk, Shawn at his, the two of them bickering fondly over childhood movies and modern day murderers. From the small smile on Gus' face as he locked the door behind him, she gathered that he could imagine it too.
Lassiter had left without a word as soon as he got his share of the supplies. With him gone, Gus and Juliet saw no reason for long goodbyes, and so it was with little fanfare that Martha Jones left Santa Barbara behind.
"Where to?" Henry asked as they got onto the highway.
"Anywhere," Martha said, staring out the window at the trees they drove past. The speed made them all seem to blur together, in one long, green mass. "But at some point? Colorado Springs. There's someone I need to see there."
+
-END-
Prompt: Doctor Who/Any Scenario: Martha Jones got help from unexpected places during the Year that Never Was.
Prompt: it's the end of the world, but we're not giving up yet
Author: gladdecease
Fandoms: Doctor Who, Psych (along with a cameo from another fandom or two)
Characters: Martha Jones; Henry Spencer, Juliet O'Hara, Burton "Gus" Guster, Carlton Lassiter
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,773
Spoilers: This story takes place in late 2008/early 2009, with spoilers up to the 2008 season of each show.
Warnings: Implied character death.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Psych belong to their respective creators
A/N: This was originally going to be part one of six, but I didn't end up finishing the whole story in time. I intend to finish the rest someday, and will be sure to link back to this one then!
Summary: It's the last stretch of Martha's journey. Just one last country to walk, and she'll be home. First stop: Santa Barbara, California.
+
Martha Jones set foot on the western-most shores of North America with a brisk wind at her back and a single person waiting on the beach for her, squinting when the setting sun shone too brightly. It was colder than she'd expected for California, even in January, and the ocean was freezing where it had seeped into her boots. Still, she stayed in the water an extra minute to enjoy the pleasure of kicking away the dingy lifeboat she'd reached shore in. It reeked of rotting fish and mildew, had been disconcertingly damp, and she'd had to sit in it and paddle for the last few hours. "Unpleasant" didn't even begin to cover the experience.
Her contact, an older man with little hair, sunburnt skin, and tired eyes, seemed to be having similar thoughts, if the disgusted curl of his lip was anything to go by. "What kind of ship would let a lifeboat get like that?" he wondered, appalled.
"Human smugglers." When his expression grew even more exaggerated, Martha shrugged. "It was the only ship that could get out of Japan. What Sang Min and his men do for a living is vile, but they're still human. When it comes down to it, we'll side with each other against... well." She looked up at the blue-gray twilight sky meaningfully. "You know."
"All too well," the balding man said grimly. He held out a hand. "Henry Spencer, retired police detective."
Martha shook. "Martha Jones. Former medical student."
"And our savior, if even a fraction of the stories are true," Henry said wryly.
Martha ducked her head, feeling her cheeks warm. "Nothing so grand as all that," she said, repressing a giggle, "but do you think we could move that conversation to a more private place? Only I feel like I've been rowing all day, and I'm fairly certain I'll fall asleep before I finish the story if I don't tell it soon."
"Of course," Henry said, and led Martha up the beach to a row of shops along a boardwalk. Most of them had broken or boarded up windows - from panicked raiders after the initial Decimation, probably. It wasn't an uncommon sight in Martha's experience, though the nearly untouched shop on the corner was a little unusual.
If it had been better decorated before, the storefront had been stripped of its baubles. All that remained was chipped green lettering on the front windows, spelling out the word "psych." Martha watched Henry knock a pattern against the door and wondered at the shop's past life. A joke shop, maybe? A psychologist's attempt to be clever? Martha listened with some growing disbelief as lock after lock was slowly turned, keyed, or lifted. Ten in all were unlocked before a blonde woman opened the door and let them in.
The inside gave no clues as to the shop's original function either. While there were no shelves for merchandise and only a smattering of furniture, the remaining portions of the floor and walls were covered with all manner of things. Canned food, strange knick-knacks, bottles of water lined up against what looked like a small desalination tank, at least two dozen pineapple-themed objects, and a good number of posters for movies from the 1980's made up only a fraction of the room's occupants Martha could see from where she stood in the doorway. If she didn't know better, she would have thought there was no order to the mess, but she'd lived with the Doctor long enough to recognize a chaotic organizational system, even if she didn't understand the rationale behind it.
The woman who'd let them in to Psych - introduced by Henry as Juliet O'Hara, a police detective before Saxon - smiled apologetically as Martha looked around at the barely contained chaos.
"I know it looks like a mess," she said, carefully stepping around and over stacks of packets of ramen noodles and powdered milk, "but Gus knows where everything is, and it gives him something to do. He's needed that." Reaching a closet on the far side of the room, Juliet paused for a moment. Her eyes went distant. "We all have."
"You've lost people," Martha said. The moment she spoke she winced, wished she hadn't. What an inane thing to say.
"We've all lost people," Juliet said quietly. She rapped softly at the closet door and whispered, "Gus? Gus, we've got a visitor." A male voice replied, too low for Martha to hear. "It's Martha Jones." After a moment of further whispering, Juliet stepped away from the door, giving it room to open. Out stepped... Gus, Martha supposed.
He was a strange sort of man. Curling, flyaway hair as dark as his skin, clothes sagging and clinging to his body in ways that said he hadn't taken them off in quite some time, along with the disorderly order he'd apparently designed said this was a man who had not dealt well with the Saxon administration. But when he looked at Martha his eyes were calm, sane, and all his movements were smooth, well-practiced. A man who'd spent the last few months in a closet wouldn't know how to move around a room like this, even if he'd arranged where all the obstacles laid. "Burton Guster," he said, nodding slightly in an imitation of a bow. "Call me Gus."
"Nice to meet you, Gus," Martha said, smiling. "I'd introduce myself, but I suspect you already know who I am."
"Martha Jones," he said, smiling. "Yeah, I've heard of you. People say you're gonna save the world."
"I'm certainly going to try," she said, glancing between Henry and Juliet. "Is this all of you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like I said, I'm only going to be able to tell this story once before I collapse from exhaustion." Martha sighed; she was already pushing at limits she hadn't known she had three months ago. Walking through Turkey was rough, but Japan had been unbearable at times. She picked her way over to one of the desks and sat down. Juliet and Gus hissed, almost simultaneously. "What?"
Juliet's mouth opened and shut several times before she shook her head. "It's nothing," she said, as obvious a lie as Martha had ever seen. "Really, it's just... that's..."
"It's nothing," Gus repeated, voice breaking.
"Right," Martha muttered under her breath, rubbing at her brow tiredly. "Anyway, I'm only going to be able to tell this once, and it's better if more people hear it. It helps," she added when Henry looked skeptical. "Trust me, this isn't the first time I've had to do this. I know how it works."
The three residents of Psych exchanged looks. Eventually, Henry nodded, slowly, and Juliet echoed the expression. She turned to Gus. "Call him."
Gus maneuvered his way back to his closet. He opened the door wider to reveal a strange assortment of electronics arranged in the tiny space, with only enough room left on the floor for him to squat down to reach everything. Picking up a battered walkie-talkie, he turned a knob until static hissed out of the speaker and said, "Attention: Lassie, we have Thriller contact. Repeat, Thriller has made contact. Lassie, come home." He didn't wait for a reply before switching off the device. "Anyone else?"
"I don't know," Henry said. "How long will you be here?"
It took Martha a moment to realize he was speaking to her now. "I... not long. A day, two tops. Saxon's hunting me down, you know. Have to keep on the move."
"Better not, then," Juliet said. "The chief wouldn't be able to make it in time, not with her daughter."
"Just us, then," Gus said, shutting the closet door. He sat down in the other desk chair and pulled a rubber ball out of one of the drawers. He smiled slightly and tossed the ball to Juliet. She caught it neatly, turned it this way and that, inspecting it, then laughed. She tossed it to Henry before finding a seat on an uncomfortable looking waiting room style chair. Henry frowned, squinting at the ball, and took a seat of his own. "He should be here in twenty minutes," Gus explained to Martha. "Never likes to go too far from town, but he's not the sit around and wait kind of guy, you know?"
Martha thought of the Doctor and nearly laughed. She smiled knowingly and nodded instead, or tried to. The way her head flopped to the side instead surprised her; she hadn't realized she was that close to passing out. Shaking her head slightly, she forced herself to a more upright position. Twenty minutes, plus however long it took her to tell them about the Doctor. She could stay awake that long.
She hid a yawn behind a hand. She could probably stay awake that long.
"You can go ahead and rest your eyes for a minute," Gus said gently. "You look like you need it, and we can wait." He glanced at the others. "Right?" But if they had anything to say against it, Martha didn't hear. She'd leaned her head back the moment Gus gave permission and was out like a light.
+
Sometime later, Martha woke to the sound of quiet voices. There was something about a whisper that woke her more easily than regular speech these days, probably because the people trying not to get her attention were the ones she needed to be awake and aware of. "I remember this," an unfamiliar male voice said slowly. "He hit one of those robot things with this, didn't he?"
"That and a baseball bat," another male voice said, louder and closer to Martha. Blinking slowly, she turned her head in the direction of the sound and saw that it was Gus. "He shoved me under the desk and swung at them, screaming the whole time."
Someone laughed brokenly. "That's so like him."
Martha stretched, groaning loudly. If this wasn't a conversation they wanted her privy to, best that they know she was awake. Rubbing at a crick that had formed in her neck, she looked around the room. Most of the chaos remained unchanged, though room had been made on the floor for the unfamiliar man to sit down. He was a gruff looking older man, with gray around his temples that Saxon's rule likely hadn't brought on, wearing multiple gun holsters strapped to his chest and legs. He shifted where he sat, revealing a detective's badge strapped to his belt that probably hadn't been official more than half a year now. Yet looking at the rubber ball Gus had found earlier, there was a softness to his expression that spoke of unexpected loss. It was an expression shared by the other members of this odd group, and a feeling Martha knew all too well.
She coughed, gathering their attention, but the looks on their faces made her falter from her script. "Tell me about him?"
After a moment of silent conversation, Henry made his way over to the far wall and picked up a picture frame. He brought it over to Martha, who saw it was of a younger, happier-looking Gus, and a man with spiky hair and a wide smile standing next to him. "His name was Shawn," Henry began.
More than an hour had passed by the time all four of them were satisfied with what they'd said about Shawn. When talking about most of his life, only Henry and Gus spoke, but once they reached present day and the formation of Shawn's psychic detective business - which was what the "psych" stood for, apparently - Juliet and the other man, who they referred to only as Lassiter, jumped into the storytelling, describing cases Shawn had miraculously solved. They laughed about his obsession with pineapple, his fondness for everything the nineteen-eighties had created, and the strange quirks of his nature that made nearly everyone he met like him. They cried about his unexpected bravery when the Toclafane first attacked en mass, how for the first time in the face of serious danger he had fought instead of fleeing. He'd saved Gus's life, at the cost of his own.
They were quiet for a long time after they'd finished, absently wiping away the cold streaks of long since fallen tears, unable to meet each other's eyes after saying so much out of a topic they'd neatly avoided speaking on up to now.
Quietly, Martha thanked them for sharing something so deeply personal with her. Their open honesty and love for one of the people they'd lost made it easier for her to tell them a story of her own. She had dozens to choose from, naturally, but this time she thought one of the stories she hadn't told before would work best. It had been on a planet far from here, in the far-off future, but she thought the police officer she and the Doctor had inadvertently assisted in his investigation might speak to these people better than her other stories would.
When the story was over, she told them the same thing she'd told everybody else. "I need you to spread the word," she said. "I can only tell so many people myself, but if you leave here and tell them for me, then on that day, a year to the day from when the Toclafane first arrived and Saxon took over, the Doctor will save us."
"Leave?" It was a surprisingly pain-riddled word. Gus looked around at the organized chaos he'd created. "I can't - "
"Yes, you can," Juliet said gently. She crouched down until their eyes were level and reached out to hold his shoulder steady. "I know you can, Gus. For Shawn."
He shuddered gently under her touch, and nodded. "For Shawn." He looked up at Martha. "Where do you want us to go?"
"I'm headed east," she said. "North or south would be best - I don't know if I'll be able to reach South America and still get back to England by May."
"Then we'll head south," Gus said firmly, placing his hand on Juliet's as she nodded. He smiled faintly and chuckled. "I've gone to the Mexican border for him before, what's one more time?"
Lassiter sighed. "And I'll head north. Tell the chief and McNab while I'm going." He started holstering the guns he'd been cleaning while she spoke, looking speculatively at the supplies Gus had built the room around.
Martha turned to the last member of the party. "Henry?"
He watched her for a moment. "How are you planning on getting east?" he asked.
"Walking, mostly - cars aren't really an option these days - "
"Mine is," he said, brokering no argument. "I'll take you."
"You could get killed!" Martha protested, knowing already that there was no point to it.
Sure enough, Henry just grimly said, "My son and my ex-wife are already dead. If helping you means hurting the bastards that killed them, I'll take that chance."
+
In the morning, the psych office looked completely different. They'd split the food, water and supplies that Gus had stocked up between the five of them, and everything else that remained had found a place on the desks and tables. Looking at it now, Martha could almost imagine how it used to be - Gus at his desk, Shawn at his, the two of them bickering fondly over childhood movies and modern day murderers. From the small smile on Gus' face as he locked the door behind him, she gathered that he could imagine it too.
Lassiter had left without a word as soon as he got his share of the supplies. With him gone, Gus and Juliet saw no reason for long goodbyes, and so it was with little fanfare that Martha Jones left Santa Barbara behind.
"Where to?" Henry asked as they got onto the highway.
"Anywhere," Martha said, staring out the window at the trees they drove past. The speed made them all seem to blur together, in one long, green mass. "But at some point? Colorado Springs. There's someone I need to see there."
+
-END-
Prompt: Doctor Who/Any Scenario: Martha Jones got help from unexpected places during the Year that Never Was.
Prompt: it's the end of the world, but we're not giving up yet