(no subject)
Title: A Post-script to a Coda
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Spoilers: up to "Journey's End".
Sequel to A Coda to a Journey.
Beta: Thank you,
persiflage_1for saving me from my wandering tenses and tone-deaf adolescents.
A Post-script to a Coda
‘Where is Rose?’ Martha asks, after she promises to save him. Oh, and that would be her first question. She promises to save him and now she’ll tear him apart.
‘She’s with -‘ The Doctor thinks of many descriptors (killer, impostor, and so lucky), none of them which Martha wants to hear.
‘The other you?’ she suggests, taking coffee with no sugar or milk. She seems content, both with the answer and in herself, the mug warming her palms, and the fire in the hearth warming the rest of her. The Doctor wants so much to touch her, but he keeps his hands to himself (he always shatters calm of any kind).
‘But you loved her,’ Martha points out, and she was wrong and right.
‘Did you know,’ the Doctor asks Martha, although she really couldn’t have known, ‘that I met Rose in a previous regeneration?’
Martha (this is why he loves her) just sips her coffee while he fiddles around with expository rhetoric.
‘It’s like being an amnesiac with someone else’s past. You’ve got this new skin which you’re trying to stretch over decades of memories, and this new perspective which sort of skews it all, and you try to work out who you are while all the people around you have this idea of who you were.’
The Doctor wonders, while Martha commits all this to memory (he knows she’s doing it, and he likes it, so he allows her the time, now), how they came from Rose to him divulging Time Lord knowledge (this always happens with Martha, because her eyes say I want to know, and he knows exactly how that feels and can’t deny her).
‘So, there I was, facing a girl who I knew I loved, but somehow didn’t. And I tried, and somehow that turned into pretending,’ he abandons this tangent, because Martha knows all about how he pretends. ‘Well, yes. And then, she did something impossible, and powerful, and time took notice of her, and I sort of thought…’
Martha puts down her mug on a coaster, making another ring of coffee around the Taj Mahal. ‘Thought that she might be close enough.’
‘And when she found her way back, walking through dimensions.’ The Doctor, runs both his hands through his hair. ‘But then Donna’s transformation reminded me that no human could ever be a Time Lord.’
He sat still for a moment, recalling Donna’s instinctive grasp of Dalek technology and how the TARDIS reached out to her like the tides to the moon.
But then, didn’t the TARDIS also love Martha, who had visited her when there truly were no Time Lords left, not even him, and didn’t Martha figure out all on her own how the Daleks had configured the planets in the Medusa Cascade?
‘Is that such a bad thing?’ she asks, warm and still curious about the universe.
The Doctor considers it, from this new perspective.
‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’