FIC: "Dreaming in Metaphors, Pt. 2" (Doctor Who, Ten/Martha, R)
Part One was here, if you missed it.
And now the conclusion:
5.
Contrary to popular belief, a Time Lord has a very healthy libido.
However, unlike the males of approximately 99.74 percent of all cataloged species, Time Lords are also able to completely control their sexual drives. It’s a necessity, given the travels they undertake and the problems they can encounter along the way. If you get trapped in a singularity for 300 years - oh, it can happen - you’ve really got enough trouble to be getting on with, and there’s no point in dealing with enormous sexual frustration on top of that. A Time Lord can essentially shut down his desire at will. It’s as simple and absolute as flipping a light switch.
(Time Ladies were equally adept at self-control - more so, some claimed - but there are no more Time Ladies, not after the war.)
The Doctor had long preferred to remain in “off” mode, so to speak. Simplified things all around. Of course, closing himself away sexually didn’t mean closing himself away romantically; he understood the difference between sex and romance better than any hormone-enslaved human ever could. He had fallen in love with some of his Companions, over the years: Jo, Sarah Jane, Rose. In a very real sense, he was in love with them still. But he had never touched any of them as a lover, never wanted to, never wanted to want to.
For Martha, he’d flipped the switch back on. And it turned out that an enormous amount of conserved energy was more than ready to go from potential to kinetic.
“Doctor, you can’t,” she whispered into his ear.
“No one’s looking at our barge.”
“I mean - you can’t possibly - again, so soon -?”
“Wait and see.”
Martha’s kohl-lined eyes closed in satisfaction as his hands cupped her breasts. Her eyelids glittered with vivid turquoise powder, and her enormous golden earrings shone in the Egyptian sun. The orange silk canopy overhead provided what little privacy they had, though the Doctor rather thought that if Queen Cleopatra saw what they were up to, she would wholeheartedly approve.
The Pyramids, in the distance, were enormous stone cubes. Not so far off reality that he had to worry about it. He could concentrate on Martha. God, fantastic things, these Egyptian robes, so soft and thin that you could see right through them.
How had he forgotten how fantastic breasts could be? What he was doing felt good to Martha, to judge by her quickening breath, but it felt good for him too, a kind of touching that was as exciting as being touched, which practically defied the law of physics, but there you go.
“Doctor - oh.”
“Yes.”
Even better were thighs. Particularly Martha’s. The warmth of bare flesh beneath fingertips, the subtle friction of his fingerprints against her skin - astonishing.
They lay on their sides, face to face, and he pulled her thigh over his hip so that he could make love to her right there. Martha’s hand tightened on his shoulder, and her head lolled back so that the braids of her wig fell across the thick cushions beneath their bodies. Sensation welled up between them, rich and multidimensional and complex. Mesmerizing. Ah, that was it.
As her consciousness flowed into him, the Doctor pushed deeper - delving into the most fascinating, pleasurable, perfect part of a human being: the mind.
Five years old, standing in Westminster Abbey for the first time, staring up at the great vaulted ceiling in awe.
Dancing in a nightclub during university, wearing a minidress that made her look dead sexy, noticing that the guy she fancied was noticing her right back.
Delivering a baby for the first time, holding the tiny squalling boy up for his parents to see and feeling their love for their son as though it passed right through her.
“You’re thinking my thoughts,” Martha gasped. “How are you -“
“Shhhh.”
“Let me in. Let me in too.”
Oh, he didn’t like the idea of that at all. Or did he? Martha wanted it so badly, and he couldn’t tell where her wanting left off and his began, not when they were like this.
She writhed against him, momentarily bringing the Doctor back to the realm of the physical, and it was very tempting to stay right there. This felt simply amazing, and what in the worlds had been so brilliant about celibacy anyway? Not likely to make that mistake again.
“Let me in,” she whispered again.
The Doctor shut his eyes in surrender.
Standing on the surface of Callisto Prime, looking up at a night sky aglow with four moons, new and full, waxing and waning, unspeakably beautiful.
Laughing out loud as the nanogenes cured everyone, the gas masks dropped away, a little boy put his arms around his mother and once, just once, everybody lived.
Running through the cinnamon grasslands of Gallifrey, still a boy, chasing after the best friend who was almost his brother and had not yet chosen the name Master.
Standing in a hospital corridor, watching Martha politely address a penguin, and knowing what happened next.
The Doctor realized he wasn’t alone any longer. Martha’s spirit was his spirit, her body his body, her excitement his excitement - “Oh, yes.”
“Doctor!”
This time Martha didn’t faint. She was getting much better at that.
For a long time afterward, the Doctor held her as they lay in their nest of cushions. The soothing Nile breeze ruffled his hair, and he could hear the far-off splash of a crocodile taking to the waters for a meal. It seemed to him that there was nothing else to want, save the TARDIS’ full recovery, but surely that was well on its way. Yet the moment was not perfect; Martha was too tense as she lay in his arms.
Finally, once it seemed ridiculous to pretend he hadn’t noticed, he propped up on one arm. “What’s wrong?”
Martha’s beaded collar jangled as she sat upright. “I was there in the hospital when you came back for me.”
“Penguins -- they’re taller than you think, aren’t they?”
“When you came back, you didn’t know for certain whether you loved me,” she said. “You still didn’t know.”
“I know now.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Martha hesitated, clearly wishing she could drop the subject and sink back into his arms. But she didn’t. “You took a big gamble with my heart.”
The Doctor shrugged. “I won.”
She rose, readjusted her robes and walked to the stern of the barge, where she sat on a footstool and stared resolutely at the water. Going after her would obviously be a bad idea. Instead the Doctor sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the cube-shaped Pyramids, still gleaming white and smooth, so soon after their construction. Must have been murder getting those top stones into place, he thought. Terrible for the slaves. Who’d ever think of the real Pyramids as easier?
The silence between them stretched through their return to the TARDIS, when she went to her own room and did not emerge. Although the Doctor now spent rather more time in her quarters than his, he respected the boundary and remained at the controls. If Ancient Egypt was still off, then maybe he ought to try something simpler. Something older. Pre-human, perhaps - scarcely his favorite era in Earth’s history, but fascinating all the same.
Also, it seemed like the sort of thing Martha would particularly like.
He slept alone that night, as he had for thousands of nights before Martha, but he found he had no taste for it any longer.
Why did you do this? the Doctor thought. You’ve never complicated things this way before. Why did you change everything?
But it seemed so pointless to ask why. He had done it, and here he was. If he’d gotten things wrong with Martha, he’d simply have to make them right.
The next morning when he rose, Martha was already awake and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back into a tidy little ponytail. “So, where are we this time?” she said by way of greeting. It might have been her second week aboard.
“Hmm, how best to put this.” The Doctor played along, drumming his fingers upon the wall. “You’re from 2007. ‘Jurassic Park’ has already come out, hasn’t it?”
“Sure, almost twenty years ago -“ Martha’s voice trailed off as her face lit up with an enormous smile. “You don’t mean. Dinosaurs?”
He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go see, shall we?”
Despite its annoying lack of humans, Earth’s Jurassic Period really was a marvel. Ferns the size of willow trees provided cool shade, and trees that dwarfed sequoias reached up into the sky. Martha gasped as a dragonfly buzzed by overhead, longer than a penguin was tall.
When something fuzzy scurried underfoot, the Doctor grasped Martha’s elbow to hold her back. “Watch it. Don’t want to step on that.”
“Is that a vole or a shrew or something?”
“The genus and species aren’t around any longer, but in the greater scheme of things, you might call it, oh, ‘Uncle Frank.’”
Her eyes went wide. “You mean, that’s a human ancestor? That’s brilliant!”
“Great oaks, tiny acorns.” The Doctor squeezed her arm, hoping she would respond to the gesture and take his hand.
Instead, she stepped away from him to peer toward the distance. “Not a single dinosaur yet.”
“If any of the big fellows came around these parts, I doubt so many trees would be standing. Let’s try to find the edge of the forest.”
“Remember where we parked.”
They came to the forest’s edge after only a few minutes of walking. A vast grassland of gently rolling hills stretched out in front of them, the best feature of which was the distant herd of apatosauruses on the horizon.
“Oh, my God.” Martha held her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. “They’re enormous. They’re amazing.”
“Want to get closer?”
“I’m not sure.” She glanced sideways at him - the first time she’d looked him directly in the eye since Ancient Egypt. “Did you ever actually see ‘Jurassic Park’?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I got the gist of it. Never buy those pirated copies. The way the image jig-jogs around, you wonder if someone was using the camcorder for juggling practice.”
“The point is, the movie made it look like a bad idea for humans to get too close to dinosaurs.”
“A wise film indeed. But I’m not talking about getting in their way. Just - closer.”
Slowly, Martha nodded. “All right, then.”
They started forward, but at that moment, the ground beneath their feet started to shake. “Earthquake?” he said, stumbling as he struggled for balance.
“You really didn’t see ‘Jurassic Park,’ did you?” Martha swatted his arm. “Feel the rhythm? That’s not an earthquake, Doctor. It’s footsteps. Dinosaur footsteps.”
“Can’t say I don’t show you a good time, Martha Jones.”
At that moment, not quite a hundred feet away, a stegosaurus thundered from the forest. Great bone plates studded its back and dwarfed its triangular head. Its long horned tail swished back and forth, as if to ward off predators.
The predators in question turned out to be a dozen medieval samurai.
“Doctor?”
“I see them.” Blast it, the paradoxes were still happening! Humans existing millions of years before they ought to have evolved - “Oh, this is bad.”
One of the samurai saw them and pointed his sword in their direction. “This prey is ours! You will not steal it!”
Martha muttered, “It just got worse.”
“Right.” As the samurai gave up their pursuit of the stegosaurus and started toward them, battle flags fluttering ominously, he grabbed Martha’s hand. “Run.”
They dashed through the primeval forest, darting that way and this, going as fast as they possibly could. An arrow thwacked into a tree only inches from Martha’s head, and she yelped.
Almost there, almost there -
Just as the samurai were catching up, the TARDIS appeared in front of him, as sure a savior as any the Doctor had ever known. He swung Martha ahead so that she hit the door first and stumbled in to safety. Another arrow struck the side of the TARDIS, vibrating violently, but the Doctor paid that no mind. Wasn’t the first time.
He ran after Martha, slammed the door behind him and leapt straight to the controls. The whirring of the TARDIS made him breathe easier as he felt that familiar shiver, the shifting of the time vortex all around them.
For a few moments afterward, nobody spoke. Then Martha turned to him, her palms against the controls and her expression set. “I’m not helping.”
“You are.”
“The TARDIS isn’t getting any better, Doctor! Face facts. I’m not saying it can’t be fixed, but I’m not the one to fix it.”
How little that seemed to matter at the moment. “I don’t want you to go.”
Martha simply stared at him, disbelieving. “You only brought me here because of the TARDIS.”
“I do love you,” he said. “I know that now. Does it matter why I came back for you? As long as I came back?”
“I’m not sure.” Martha’s head drooped, as if she had been carrying some great weight for too long. “The more I know you - the closer we become - the more I know how much you aren’t like me. You’re not human. You’re beyond human. The things you comprehend and the choices you make - it’s past me. I don’t think you realize how scary that can be.”
“There are things in this galaxy beyond me. I’ve encountered them.”
“Did you love them, too? Because that makes it a hundred times scarier.” The TARDIS’ shimmering light bathed Martha in green and gold. “We’re so different. It seems impossible that you could really love me the same way that I love you.”
“Yet here we are.”
The Doctor cupped her chin in one hand and kissed her. He meant for it to be tender, but Martha gripped him close, almost convulsively. Then his mouth was open, his hands at her waist and their bodies pressed together but still too far apart.
She led him to his room, not hers. This time he was the one who lay beneath her, the one who let the other lead the way. It took her a while to open up to him - for a long time the sex was only bodies, though that was all right, because he’d almost forgotten how fantastic that could be on its own. When Martha finally closed her eyes and allowed them to flow together, the Doctor didn’t look inside her, desperately as he wanted to.
Instead he took her to Gallifrey, where they stood on a hill and looked at the great domed city of the Time Lords glittering on the horizon. Though he knew Martha had not actually been there, he could look to the side and see her, as vivid as the city. Even more so.
Later, as they stretched beside each other in bed, still breathing hard, Martha whispered, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever believed you were real.”
“Yes.” He clutched her hand in his so tightly it hurt.
6.
It was a relief when the Doctor finally gave up on the idea that Martha would somehow magically heal the TARDIS simply by being aboard, as though one small element could fix everything. As a physician, she’d never been entirely comfortable with the concept of homeopathy.
And she thought it was a pity that they had to be so worried about the TARDIS all the time, because honestly, most of the paradoxes were rather enjoyable.
“I’d give anything to see Russell Crowe film this!” Martha clapped her hands above her head as they sat in the Colosseum on a blazing summer day in AD 387.
The Doctor cackled with delight. “This is much better than the real thing!”
They sat on stone steps amid a crowd of nearly 50,000 people, all of whom were madly cheering the spectacle in the arena. If you looked closely enough, you could see that some of their eyes were uncertain, but nobody was going to be the first to ask if something wasn’t quite right.
Meanwhile, in the heart of the arena, several dozen gladiators were having a vigorous pillow fight.
“Oooh, trident right in the pillowcase!” The Doctor winced as feathers flew into the air. “Thumbs down for that one.”
Tears of laughter rolled down Martha’s face as she held aloft her mobile phone to get a few snaps. “God, this is brilliant.”
“Hey.” A burly man in a tunic and leggings, who seemed to be on staff in some capacity, scowled at them. “There are no women allowed in this section.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “What, the feathers are scattering all around us and you’re going to be a stickler for historical accuracy about that?”
“Oh, no!” Martha’s smile faded as she saw that the guards were bringing out the next show, which banners proclaimed to be a group of Christians due to be fed to beasts. “I’m not sure I want to see this.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and his hand in front of her eyes. When the crowd began to roar again, the Doctor began to chuckle. “Take a peek.”
She did. Sure enough, the beasts in question were running forward. The Christians had been thrown upon the mercy of several dozen - pug dogs.
Nobody had given the pugs any historical notes about religious persecution or bread and circuses. As such they appeared to be wholly innocent of their intended role in the proceedings. The little dogs pottered about the arena, panting and snorting, occasionally stopping to scratch or pee or blink at random sections of air they seemed to find worthy of note.
Martha, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, held on to the Doctor to keep from falling over. Though he was laughing too, he kissed her quickly on the forehead, and the happy glow inside her only became brighter.
I should write a book. Your Timelord, Your Terms: How to Get Him Exactly That Into You. Of course, I don’t have any idea what it was I did, but it’s not like you need a lot of credentials in the self-help area to start with.
In the arena, one of the pugs had rolled onto his back, the better to receive a belly rub from a few extremely relieved Christians. “The TARDIS is getting absolutely extravagant,” the Doctor said. “It’s past time for a full diagnostic.”
“And end the fun?”
“Not all the fun.” His thumb brushed against the nape of Martha’s neck.
**
“So how does a full diagnostic of the TARDIS work?”
“I’ll need to check the energy balances,” the Doctor said as they walked up a spiral staircase. They were at the top of the ship now. Odd how she’d never come up here before. “See if they’ve normalized at all.”
“I’m surprised you’ve only now gotten around to doing this.”
“Oh, I ran a diagnostic before I ever came back for you.” His expression clouded, as if he’d lost his train of thought, but he shook it off. “She was sick then. I’m going to see if she’s gotten better.”
“How do you do that? I imagine it like checking the oil in a car. Does the TARDIS have a dipstick?”
“I’m the dipstick.” He stopped climbing. “That came out wrong.”
Martha managed not to laugh at him, but she couldn’t help smiling.
They reached the top level and walked toward what looked like a steamy Jacuzzi tub. “What, there’s a pool on board and you’ve been hogging it for yourself? You’re in trouble.”
“Look again.”
As they stepped closer, Martha saw the glow beneath the greenish water and realized what the light was: the TARDIS core, from above. The bottom of the pool was transparent, so that it looked down in the glowing green light of the TARDIS control console itself. “This pool has something to do with how the TARDIS runs, doesn’t it?”
“We’re linked, you know. Psychically, physically, the works. That’s how it always was, before. Each Time Lord grew a TARDIS and bonded with her to be sure she would run true. Well. How it usually was.” The Doctor stood at the water’s edge, loosening his tie as he kicked off his shoes. “No better diagnostic for her than bonding again.”
“So each TARDIS has a kind of - bonding tank?”
“The space changes with each reconfiguration.” Draping his jacket over a nearby railing, he added, “Sometimes it’s water. Sometimes it’s light. For a long time, it was something called the Zero Room. Whatever form it takes, there’s always a place within the TARDIS where she and I can merge. Sometimes it’s about her figuring out what’s wrong with me, but other times, it’s about me figuring out what’s wrong with her.”
“Wow, that’s really - remarkable - are you stripping?”
He grinned as he stepped out of his trousers. “Guess I could wear trunks, but modesty seems a bit ridiculous, given how the TARDIS knows me inside and out.” Now naked, the Doctor jumped in feet-first. He sank beneath the surface like a stone, so quickly it startled her, but then he came up and shook out his wet hair just like a dog. “Ahh. Feels marvelous.”
“It’s pleasant for you? Is that a Time Lord thing?”
“At this stage, it’s more of a warm tub sort of thing.” The Doctor hesitated, clearly weighing an idea. He didn’t meet her eyes when he said, very casually, “Why not see for yourself?”
“You’re asking me in?”
He didn’t say yes or no, didn’t look up at her. It was clearly an offer he was only going to make once - and despite his studied nonchalance, the offer was important to him. Martha quickly shimmied out of her clothes, tucked her hair into a makeshift bun and plunged in.
Warm currents swirled around her as she treaded water, her legs pedaling beneath her. Light shone from below, casting odd shadows on the Doctor’s face. The liquid was thicker than water, but only slightly, so every ripple caused the gentlest shadow of sensation. Martha imagined she could feel the pulse of energy flowing through. “Wow.”
That made the Doctor smile at last. “Amazing, isn’t she?”
“The light beneath the console - I’ve always meant to ask -“
“The Heart of the TARDIS. You must never look at it directly. Never, Martha.” His voice was as stern as she’d ever heard it.
“All right, all right, I get it.” She brushed her hands along her cheeks. Already her skin was hot with steam. “So, how do we go about checking her out?”
“I get a feel for her, that’s all.”
The Doctor shut his eyes as he braced his hands against the edge of the tank. His rail-thin body looked like a ripple of broken shadows in the green-gold water. There was something enormously sexy about his face when he was concentrating like that. Martha resisted the urge to run her hands along his back. Instead she kept treading water, enjoying the feel of the currents against her skin.
“Huon/artron balance is still off,” the Doctor murmured. “Not as bad as it used to be, though.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Better than nothing. She’s not exactly short on Zeiton-7, but I suppose we could pick up some extra. Restock.”
“We’re all about side trips.”
“It might not fix the problem, but it will help. Perk her up a bit. Yes. That’s something, anyway.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “That’s a relief.”
“Always feels better to have something constructive to do.” Martha nodded as she slipped her arms around the Doctor’s neck. “Don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.” He considered her, that same odd distant smile on his face, then kissed her. Steam wreathed around them as he opened her mouth with his, and Martha realized for the first time how erotic he found this. She understood why, too.
As one of his hands dipped down to cup her breast, she murmured, “Careful, or we’ll wind up having sex right here. Might gum up the works.”
“I don’t think it would,” he said thoughtfully.
“You don’t mean - you want to -“ He cut off her words with another kiss. Martha wound her legs around him and realized he absolutely wanted to. “God, you’re turned on. Is this your idea of a threesome or something?”
He grinned. “Kind of, yeah.”
As he kissed his way down the long column of her throat, she whispered, “Isn’t it, I don’t know, sacrilegious for you? Making love in here?”
The Doctor stopped, and she thought for a moment that she’d stupidly talked him out of it. Then he looked her in the eyes and said, very quietly, “This is what’s sacred.”
Martha felt almost afraid. “This isn’t just about sex, is it?”
“The TARDIS is bonded to me. When you and I -“
“I’ll bond to the TARDIS too.”
The Doctor nodded.
For the first time, Martha knew, she was the one in danger of shutting herself off and pushing the Doctor away. This was scary. This was like meeting the parents times 10,000. The TARDIS was even more mysterious and powerful than the Doctor - sick, too - what was going to happen?
Only one way to find out, and if she loved him, she had to find out.
Martha kissed the Doctor again, and he understood. With one hand he braced them against the edge of the tank; with the other, he caressed her until she was close to the brink. It didn’t take long, not with the currents humming against her skin. When he parted her legs, Martha tilted her head back and held very still as he entered her. Even now, when she’d had him in every position and every mood either of them could imagine, it felt so unreal to her. Almost miraculous. Like a dream.
Then she felt his pleasure, too, intensified by the TARDIS all around them, and gasped.
“Reach in,” he breathed against her collarbone. “You know the way. You know.”
Martha imagined the Doctor’s soul as the core of the TARDIS, glowing and warm and open for her, and she plunged within.
Once again she was on Gallifrey, standing beside the Doctor. He looked so very different - like an old man, but not his own elderly self as he’d been with the Master. No, this was some other gentleman entirely, one with long white hair swept severely back from his face, revealing a widow’s peak. Yet he was the Doctor, too, equally as dear to her as her own. He was standing within the TARDIS, gazing up with adoration as he looked at it for the very first time.
“Stolen! You stole the TARDIS,” she gasped. “Naughty.”
The Doctor’s forehead pressed against her temple as they moved, and his voice sounded rough. “Mine.”
She was here with him now, there with him then. She was both places and everyplace. Suddenly one of the scenes shifted, a flash of perspective that shocked and delighted her. Martha was looking down at the old Doctor as he looked up at her for that very first time. If only she could have laughed! It was all she lacked in the universe, the ability to laugh. Such joy demanded laughter. Such love demanded joy.
Martha knew it, then - the third presence. She and the Doctor were not alone, not in their own minds. The other presence was even more alien than the Doctor, but not frightening. Never that.
Her eyes flew open. The Doctor’s mouth was agape, yet almost a smile. “You feel it? You do!”
“Yes --” Pleasure arced up inside her, and Martha cried out wordlessly, sweeping them - all of them - over the edge.
When she could see again, she was clinging to the side of the tank. The Doctor had sagged against her shoulder, his head nestled in the curve of her neck. Martha wondered if he was the one who’d passed out this time. She felt absurdly proud of herself. Bringing her wet fingers to his cheek, she whispered, “You all right?”
“Never finer.” He put one hand on the side of the tank, the same loving caress he’d given Martha moments before. “I imagine she feels better than she has in a while, too.”
“The TARDIS isn’t so very sick.”
Martha hadn’t known that she knew that until she said it out loud. The Doctor lifted his head to stare at her. “What?”
How could she put it into words? It was something she’d sensed when she’d been the TARDIS, meeting the Doctor for the first time - something very close to feeling the lack of laughter. “I believe - I believe the TARDIS is making the paradoxes on purpose.”
“Can’t be.” Then the Doctor considered it again, comprehension dawning. “Wait. You mean - she’s playing.”
“Sometimes, after something really terrible happens, you need to play.” Her family had gotten together every night for months after the Year That Wasn’t, but after the first few evenings, they hadn’t said a word about the Master. Instead they’d played card games - Blitz and Go Fish and Three-Card Stud - or watched silly television shows and talked back to the screen the whole time to make one another laugh. It had been ridiculous, but not really. “I imagine having a Paradox Machine inside you for a year would be pretty terrible. Especially knowing that it was all for the good of the Master, and that the Master was hurting you. I bet that was worse for her than any of the rest.”
“Bless.” The Doctor looked tenderly downward into the churning liquid glow. “So the paradoxes aren’t the sickness. They’re how she’s healing herself.”
Martha smiled. “With hot-pink Vikings, and snow in summertime, and -“
They said the last together: “And penguins.”
The Doctor laughed out loud, and Martha mussed his wet hair. Wryly, she said, “Lucky you didn’t realize earlier.”
“Why is that?”
“You wouldn’t have come back for me. Would you?”
“But you were the one who saw it. I was too close. You were who the TARDIS needed.” He hesitated, then said, more quietly. “Who I needed.”
The Doctor embraced her, and Martha let go of the edge of the pool to hug him back. Together they sank beneath the surface, surrounded entirely by the TARDIS’ flow and a swirl of bubbles, and it hardly felt like holding her breath at all.
7.
The truth didn’t hit the Doctor until his second glass of bathtub gin.
Splendid place, Chicago, and rarely more splendid than it had been in the 1920s, which were currently living up to their nickname and roaring. He and Martha had found an integrated speakeasy - not the simplest task, but not impossible, either. Breaking the laws of Prohibition made people more willing to ignore all kinds of boundaries.
So they were in a basement that had been transformed into a nightclub, quite possibly the hottest jazz club in Chicago in the ‘20s, or maybe on any planet, at any time, ever. Martha, bedecked in a white, rhinestone-encrusted dress of fringe, was on the bar with half a dozen other girls, all of them vigorously doing the Charleston.
In the Doctor’s admittedly subjective opinion, Martha was the best of the lot.
The saxophones and trombones swayed from side to side on the beat, catching the light as they moved. Cigarette smoke tainted the air, but at least it gave the proceedings a certain hazy glamour. Red walls gleamed wetly of cheap lead paint, and girls in short shiny dresses walked around selling mints from baskets they wore at the waist. The scene was gaudy and rude and so wonderfully human.
Fine times, the Doctor thought. All’s right with the world.
Wait.
He stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his glass of gin. A couple of people stared at him, but most couldn’t take their eyes off the dancers. Small wonder, as Martha had just begun a rather delicious version of the shimmy. The feather she wore in her headband jittered with every move.
The Doctor hated to interrupt, but he thought it important. “Martha?” he shouted as he weaved through the crowd toward the bar. “Martha, I need to speak to you!”
She heard him despite the din. Instead of simply hopping down, she made it part of the dance - pointing to her lover, putting her other hand to her cheek and making a face not unlike Betty Boop. The Doctor, realizing how this was supposed to go, held up his arms. Martha jumped down so that he could catch her at the waist, and he grinned as he dipped her backward.
“Show-off,” he murmured.
“You’re one to talk.”
They kissed deeply, and the crowd applauded.
As the band swung into the Black Bottom Stomp, he led her toward the exit. “Is anything wrong?” Martha said. “You look happy, but we’re in an awful hurry. What’s our paradox this time?”
“That’s just it. There isn’t one.”
She gaped at him as they went out the exit, the bouncer nodding at them as they passed. “You’re right. There hasn’t been anything! Nothing at all! The TARDIS is well”
He hugged her tightly and wondered if she would let him do the tango with her all the way down the avenue. The full moon and Martha and the entire universe once again his to explore - this was happiness, and it had been absent from his life for too long.
When at last the Doctor let Martha go, he clapped his hands together, eager to make plans. “I believe the TARDIS is ready to get back to work. Thank goodness for that. So, my lady, where to? The ship is yours to command.”
Her smile changed - it was still there, but it became softer, almost hesitant. She squeezed his hand. “London. 2007.”
“You mean - home.”
“I’ve been studying when I had spare time, but some of my training’s getting a bit rusty. I mean, I definitely hope I don’t have to intubate anyone tomorrow. Probably make a botch of it if I did.”
“Ah. So. You want to stick with the original plan, then. Because, you know, we could take a few trips just to make certain the TARDIS is back in the pink.”
“My terms. You said.” Martha looked uneasy, but she was standing her ground. “We’ll have more adventures. You know we will! But I need to know that we can do this the right way.”
The Doctor sighed and started walking beside her. “I keep my promises, Martha Jones.”
“So, my next day off - you’ll be there?”
“You’ve got to tell me what it is first.”
Her face clouded as she searched her memory. “I think it’s October 19.”
“Then on October 19, 2007, I shall call for you first thing in the morning. Don’t even eat breakfast. I’ll have waffles waiting.”
“You really will?”
“You know I can.”
“It’s not the distance,” she said softly. “It’s the commitment.”
He stopped beneath a streetlamp and pulled her close. The white feather from her headband brushed against his temple. “If I’m not there, you’re to go straight to Torchwood and tell Jack Harkness that a rescue mission is called for. Nothing less is going to keep me away. All right?”
“All right.” Martha kissed him, and he felt the sharp edge of desire for her, cutting deep. He put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back toward the TARDIS. If he had to tell her goodbye for a while, he was going to do it properly, and that would require most of the night.
**
The next morning - around 8 a.m. on that particular day, or six hours after Martha had left her shift with the penguins - the TARDIS reappeared in the hospital car park. Reluctantly, the Doctor opened the door and grimaced at the black clouds and drizzle. “Maybe that stormy weather wasn’t a paradox after all.”
“What did you say?” Martha came up behind him, already dressed in her familiar jeans and jumper.
“Nothing. Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.”
He had to turn up the collar of his jacket against the rain, though it didn’t keep him from getting wet through. Martha didn’t even flinch; instead, there was a definite spring in her step. “It’s not that I’m not going to miss you, because I will, terribly. You know that, right? It’s just good to be home.”
“You want to see your family.” The Doctor considered that for a second. He’d regretted not getting to know the Joneses better, or at least under pleasanter circumstances. “Do you think they’d like to come along once?”
“Mum and Dad and Tish? In the TARDIS?”
“They had to endure the Master. Only fair they should see some of the wonder of the universe as well. We could head out deep, show them a supernova. What do you think?”
Her smile illuminated her face. “I think - I think they’d love it.”
“Then it’s a date.”
Martha laughed. There was no mistaking the raindrops on her cheeks for tears. “I’ll be counting the days until October 19.”
“I won’t. I’ve half a mind to jump straight there.” The Doctor grinned.
“You wouldn’t. Or would you?” When she turned toward him, she squinted as if blinded by the sun. She had the most amazing smile. He ought to have worked harder to earn that smile from the very first day he met her, but he could make up for lost time. What else was a time machine for? “Whether it’s ten seconds for you or ten years, I promise a reunion you won’t forget.”
“I believe you. If it rained twice as hard as this, I bet I wouldn’t feel a drop.”
That was rather romantic, wasn’t it? But Martha didn’t look pleased. She looked confused. “What do you mean?”
He held up his palms, which stung from the droplets driving onto his skin. “This isn’t your idea of a rainstorm?”
“But it’s sunny. So sunny I’m burning up in this jumper already. Do you really see rain?”
“Yes.” He felt a strange uneasiness, a shifting of perspective. A vase, two faces.
“It’s another paradox.”
“I don’t think so,” the Doctor said.
“What else could it be?” Martha cast a lovingly reproachful look at the TARDIS. “Not ready for me to go?”
“This isn’t like the ones before. We always saw the same paradoxes earlier, but not now. I mean, you’re in a completely different day from me. Totally different weather. It’s as if - as if we aren’t in the same place -“
“What do you mean? Doctor?”
Oh, no. No, no, no.
The bonding cure. The need to laugh. Such love demanded joy.
“It’s all been a paradox.” As soon as he said the words, they were true. Oh, they’d been true before that - true all along - but the Doctor knew it now, and the knowledge fell on him like something cold and foul. “You’ve been with me, but you haven’t been with me. It all happened, but none of it did.”
“That can’t be right. It can’t be.” Martha shook her head. “We’ll go back to the TARDIS and set it right.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” he said hollowly.
“It has to work that way! You have a time machine! You can always go back and - and undo it. Can’t you?”
“No. I can’t. Martha, I can’t undo what -“ The Doctor felt sick. “I can’t undo what was never done to start with.”
“Don’t you do this to me.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she took a step toward him - but was a step farther away. “What was that?”
The Doctor stepped toward her, and once again he was a step more distant than he had been before.
Martha frowned in consternation, took another step, then another, until she was running for him with all her might but moving ever deeper into the distance. “Doctor!”
“Martha!” The Doctor ran toward her too. Though he realized it would do no good, that she wouldn’t even remember it, he wanted her to have one moment where she could know that he was trying to get to her again. “Martha -- I see you - Martha!”
He broke the surface of the tank, gasping for air. How long had he been under? No telling. The shimmering green-gold glow of the TARDIS was once again bright beneath him. The bonding cure was complete.
Wet, naked and trembling, the Doctor braced himself against the edge of the tank. His discarded blue suit and trainers lay on the floor nearby. He imagined himself in them - the himself he’d been hours or days before when ran the full diagnostic, realized the depth of the TARDIS’ illness and made the choice to undertake the bonding cure.
You took a big gamble with my heart.
I won.
The TARDIS had needed joy to heal. That wasn’t something the Doctor found easy to give her since the Time Wars, and after the Master’s Year That Wasn’t, it had been impossible. So he had surrendered himself to the trance of the bonding cure, trusting the TARDIS to do what she must in order to heal itself.
He couldn’t blame the ship. She’d only done what she had to do. Besides, the right person to blame was himself.
Shakily the Doctor climbed from the tank. He ought to have gone down to his quarters straightaway to sleep; even his Time Lord’s body had been taxed to the extreme, and exhaustion sapped him hollow. Instead he lay on his side, listening to the humming of the TARDIS.
Martha won’t remember. At most she’ll think she had a dream.
That ought to have sufficed. Why wasn’t it enough?
The Doctor didn’t want to know. He pillowed his head on his own shirt and remained still for a very long time.
When at last he rose, he could sense a kind of questioning in the air. Where to? Where to indeed.
For a moment, he considered going to Earth on October 19, 2007, and waiting in a car park for Dr. Martha Jones. Even if she didn’t remember, she’d hear him out. But what would he say?
“Levixtian Three, I think.” The Doctor curled his shirt around his neck like a spa bather might a towel. “I wouldn’t mind visiting another Sky Festival. But let’s go to one of the later ones, after they incorporate the hoverdiscs into the dance. That’s smashing, isn’t it?”
Thinking of it that way removed any sense of wistfulness about the fact that it wouldn’t snow.
8.
Martha normally slept in on her days off, but for some reason she woke up bright and early on October 19. Though her stomach was growling even before she opened her eyes, she kept postponing breakfast, though she couldn’t think why.
For at least an hour, she sat in her tiny window seat and stared down at the pavement. To her embarrassment, she realized she was wishing for the TARDIS to appear.
Honestly. It’s been eight months. You’ve thought about him a lot less since Roger. Are you having a relapse?
She sighed and rested her chin on her knees. Getting on with her life would be simpler if she hadn’t had that erotic dream about the Doctor a week ago. Unbelievably erotic, really. The sort of thing no real person could ever live up to. Her subconscious wasn’t doing her any favors, that was for sure.
Sometimes it’s worth getting your heart broken, she reminded herself. It reminds you that you can still feel.
The phone rang around 11 a.m. Martha glanced at the caller ID and smiled as she picked up. “Hello, Mum.”
“Hello, dear. I know you usually have plans for your free days, but I wondered if you felt like doing a bit of shopping this afternoon. I’ve got to get a new dress for this work do of your father’s.”
“I don’t think so. Not quite up to shopping today.” She sighed. “I wouldn’t mind some company, though.”
“Are you all right?” Francine sounded worried. Since the Year That Wasn’t, she’d become much better about putting others’ needs before her own. Sometimes the difference was jarring, but mostly it was nice. “You sound blue.”
“Guess I am, sort of.”
“Tell you what. Come by the house. We’ll have some tea. Play cards. Waste time.”
This, Martha reminded herself, is how we heal. “That sounds great.”
So she got dressed and headed out the door. Somehow she remained reluctant to leave - it felt as if she were waiting for something that hadn’t happened yet. An adventure, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t the Doctor she missed as much as the sense of adventure she’d known when she was with him.
But Martha reminded herself that the adventure was still happening, and would go on every day that she lived.
She smiled as she set out on the journey back home.
THE END
And now the conclusion:
5.
Contrary to popular belief, a Time Lord has a very healthy libido.
However, unlike the males of approximately 99.74 percent of all cataloged species, Time Lords are also able to completely control their sexual drives. It’s a necessity, given the travels they undertake and the problems they can encounter along the way. If you get trapped in a singularity for 300 years - oh, it can happen - you’ve really got enough trouble to be getting on with, and there’s no point in dealing with enormous sexual frustration on top of that. A Time Lord can essentially shut down his desire at will. It’s as simple and absolute as flipping a light switch.
(Time Ladies were equally adept at self-control - more so, some claimed - but there are no more Time Ladies, not after the war.)
The Doctor had long preferred to remain in “off” mode, so to speak. Simplified things all around. Of course, closing himself away sexually didn’t mean closing himself away romantically; he understood the difference between sex and romance better than any hormone-enslaved human ever could. He had fallen in love with some of his Companions, over the years: Jo, Sarah Jane, Rose. In a very real sense, he was in love with them still. But he had never touched any of them as a lover, never wanted to, never wanted to want to.
For Martha, he’d flipped the switch back on. And it turned out that an enormous amount of conserved energy was more than ready to go from potential to kinetic.
“Doctor, you can’t,” she whispered into his ear.
“No one’s looking at our barge.”
“I mean - you can’t possibly - again, so soon -?”
“Wait and see.”
Martha’s kohl-lined eyes closed in satisfaction as his hands cupped her breasts. Her eyelids glittered with vivid turquoise powder, and her enormous golden earrings shone in the Egyptian sun. The orange silk canopy overhead provided what little privacy they had, though the Doctor rather thought that if Queen Cleopatra saw what they were up to, she would wholeheartedly approve.
The Pyramids, in the distance, were enormous stone cubes. Not so far off reality that he had to worry about it. He could concentrate on Martha. God, fantastic things, these Egyptian robes, so soft and thin that you could see right through them.
How had he forgotten how fantastic breasts could be? What he was doing felt good to Martha, to judge by her quickening breath, but it felt good for him too, a kind of touching that was as exciting as being touched, which practically defied the law of physics, but there you go.
“Doctor - oh.”
“Yes.”
Even better were thighs. Particularly Martha’s. The warmth of bare flesh beneath fingertips, the subtle friction of his fingerprints against her skin - astonishing.
They lay on their sides, face to face, and he pulled her thigh over his hip so that he could make love to her right there. Martha’s hand tightened on his shoulder, and her head lolled back so that the braids of her wig fell across the thick cushions beneath their bodies. Sensation welled up between them, rich and multidimensional and complex. Mesmerizing. Ah, that was it.
As her consciousness flowed into him, the Doctor pushed deeper - delving into the most fascinating, pleasurable, perfect part of a human being: the mind.
Five years old, standing in Westminster Abbey for the first time, staring up at the great vaulted ceiling in awe.
Dancing in a nightclub during university, wearing a minidress that made her look dead sexy, noticing that the guy she fancied was noticing her right back.
Delivering a baby for the first time, holding the tiny squalling boy up for his parents to see and feeling their love for their son as though it passed right through her.
“You’re thinking my thoughts,” Martha gasped. “How are you -“
“Shhhh.”
“Let me in. Let me in too.”
Oh, he didn’t like the idea of that at all. Or did he? Martha wanted it so badly, and he couldn’t tell where her wanting left off and his began, not when they were like this.
She writhed against him, momentarily bringing the Doctor back to the realm of the physical, and it was very tempting to stay right there. This felt simply amazing, and what in the worlds had been so brilliant about celibacy anyway? Not likely to make that mistake again.
“Let me in,” she whispered again.
The Doctor shut his eyes in surrender.
Standing on the surface of Callisto Prime, looking up at a night sky aglow with four moons, new and full, waxing and waning, unspeakably beautiful.
Laughing out loud as the nanogenes cured everyone, the gas masks dropped away, a little boy put his arms around his mother and once, just once, everybody lived.
Running through the cinnamon grasslands of Gallifrey, still a boy, chasing after the best friend who was almost his brother and had not yet chosen the name Master.
Standing in a hospital corridor, watching Martha politely address a penguin, and knowing what happened next.
The Doctor realized he wasn’t alone any longer. Martha’s spirit was his spirit, her body his body, her excitement his excitement - “Oh, yes.”
“Doctor!”
This time Martha didn’t faint. She was getting much better at that.
For a long time afterward, the Doctor held her as they lay in their nest of cushions. The soothing Nile breeze ruffled his hair, and he could hear the far-off splash of a crocodile taking to the waters for a meal. It seemed to him that there was nothing else to want, save the TARDIS’ full recovery, but surely that was well on its way. Yet the moment was not perfect; Martha was too tense as she lay in his arms.
Finally, once it seemed ridiculous to pretend he hadn’t noticed, he propped up on one arm. “What’s wrong?”
Martha’s beaded collar jangled as she sat upright. “I was there in the hospital when you came back for me.”
“Penguins -- they’re taller than you think, aren’t they?”
“When you came back, you didn’t know for certain whether you loved me,” she said. “You still didn’t know.”
“I know now.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Martha hesitated, clearly wishing she could drop the subject and sink back into his arms. But she didn’t. “You took a big gamble with my heart.”
The Doctor shrugged. “I won.”
She rose, readjusted her robes and walked to the stern of the barge, where she sat on a footstool and stared resolutely at the water. Going after her would obviously be a bad idea. Instead the Doctor sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the cube-shaped Pyramids, still gleaming white and smooth, so soon after their construction. Must have been murder getting those top stones into place, he thought. Terrible for the slaves. Who’d ever think of the real Pyramids as easier?
The silence between them stretched through their return to the TARDIS, when she went to her own room and did not emerge. Although the Doctor now spent rather more time in her quarters than his, he respected the boundary and remained at the controls. If Ancient Egypt was still off, then maybe he ought to try something simpler. Something older. Pre-human, perhaps - scarcely his favorite era in Earth’s history, but fascinating all the same.
Also, it seemed like the sort of thing Martha would particularly like.
He slept alone that night, as he had for thousands of nights before Martha, but he found he had no taste for it any longer.
Why did you do this? the Doctor thought. You’ve never complicated things this way before. Why did you change everything?
But it seemed so pointless to ask why. He had done it, and here he was. If he’d gotten things wrong with Martha, he’d simply have to make them right.
The next morning when he rose, Martha was already awake and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back into a tidy little ponytail. “So, where are we this time?” she said by way of greeting. It might have been her second week aboard.
“Hmm, how best to put this.” The Doctor played along, drumming his fingers upon the wall. “You’re from 2007. ‘Jurassic Park’ has already come out, hasn’t it?”
“Sure, almost twenty years ago -“ Martha’s voice trailed off as her face lit up with an enormous smile. “You don’t mean. Dinosaurs?”
He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go see, shall we?”
Despite its annoying lack of humans, Earth’s Jurassic Period really was a marvel. Ferns the size of willow trees provided cool shade, and trees that dwarfed sequoias reached up into the sky. Martha gasped as a dragonfly buzzed by overhead, longer than a penguin was tall.
When something fuzzy scurried underfoot, the Doctor grasped Martha’s elbow to hold her back. “Watch it. Don’t want to step on that.”
“Is that a vole or a shrew or something?”
“The genus and species aren’t around any longer, but in the greater scheme of things, you might call it, oh, ‘Uncle Frank.’”
Her eyes went wide. “You mean, that’s a human ancestor? That’s brilliant!”
“Great oaks, tiny acorns.” The Doctor squeezed her arm, hoping she would respond to the gesture and take his hand.
Instead, she stepped away from him to peer toward the distance. “Not a single dinosaur yet.”
“If any of the big fellows came around these parts, I doubt so many trees would be standing. Let’s try to find the edge of the forest.”
“Remember where we parked.”
They came to the forest’s edge after only a few minutes of walking. A vast grassland of gently rolling hills stretched out in front of them, the best feature of which was the distant herd of apatosauruses on the horizon.
“Oh, my God.” Martha held her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. “They’re enormous. They’re amazing.”
“Want to get closer?”
“I’m not sure.” She glanced sideways at him - the first time she’d looked him directly in the eye since Ancient Egypt. “Did you ever actually see ‘Jurassic Park’?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I got the gist of it. Never buy those pirated copies. The way the image jig-jogs around, you wonder if someone was using the camcorder for juggling practice.”
“The point is, the movie made it look like a bad idea for humans to get too close to dinosaurs.”
“A wise film indeed. But I’m not talking about getting in their way. Just - closer.”
Slowly, Martha nodded. “All right, then.”
They started forward, but at that moment, the ground beneath their feet started to shake. “Earthquake?” he said, stumbling as he struggled for balance.
“You really didn’t see ‘Jurassic Park,’ did you?” Martha swatted his arm. “Feel the rhythm? That’s not an earthquake, Doctor. It’s footsteps. Dinosaur footsteps.”
“Can’t say I don’t show you a good time, Martha Jones.”
At that moment, not quite a hundred feet away, a stegosaurus thundered from the forest. Great bone plates studded its back and dwarfed its triangular head. Its long horned tail swished back and forth, as if to ward off predators.
The predators in question turned out to be a dozen medieval samurai.
“Doctor?”
“I see them.” Blast it, the paradoxes were still happening! Humans existing millions of years before they ought to have evolved - “Oh, this is bad.”
One of the samurai saw them and pointed his sword in their direction. “This prey is ours! You will not steal it!”
Martha muttered, “It just got worse.”
“Right.” As the samurai gave up their pursuit of the stegosaurus and started toward them, battle flags fluttering ominously, he grabbed Martha’s hand. “Run.”
They dashed through the primeval forest, darting that way and this, going as fast as they possibly could. An arrow thwacked into a tree only inches from Martha’s head, and she yelped.
Almost there, almost there -
Just as the samurai were catching up, the TARDIS appeared in front of him, as sure a savior as any the Doctor had ever known. He swung Martha ahead so that she hit the door first and stumbled in to safety. Another arrow struck the side of the TARDIS, vibrating violently, but the Doctor paid that no mind. Wasn’t the first time.
He ran after Martha, slammed the door behind him and leapt straight to the controls. The whirring of the TARDIS made him breathe easier as he felt that familiar shiver, the shifting of the time vortex all around them.
For a few moments afterward, nobody spoke. Then Martha turned to him, her palms against the controls and her expression set. “I’m not helping.”
“You are.”
“The TARDIS isn’t getting any better, Doctor! Face facts. I’m not saying it can’t be fixed, but I’m not the one to fix it.”
How little that seemed to matter at the moment. “I don’t want you to go.”
Martha simply stared at him, disbelieving. “You only brought me here because of the TARDIS.”
“I do love you,” he said. “I know that now. Does it matter why I came back for you? As long as I came back?”
“I’m not sure.” Martha’s head drooped, as if she had been carrying some great weight for too long. “The more I know you - the closer we become - the more I know how much you aren’t like me. You’re not human. You’re beyond human. The things you comprehend and the choices you make - it’s past me. I don’t think you realize how scary that can be.”
“There are things in this galaxy beyond me. I’ve encountered them.”
“Did you love them, too? Because that makes it a hundred times scarier.” The TARDIS’ shimmering light bathed Martha in green and gold. “We’re so different. It seems impossible that you could really love me the same way that I love you.”
“Yet here we are.”
The Doctor cupped her chin in one hand and kissed her. He meant for it to be tender, but Martha gripped him close, almost convulsively. Then his mouth was open, his hands at her waist and their bodies pressed together but still too far apart.
She led him to his room, not hers. This time he was the one who lay beneath her, the one who let the other lead the way. It took her a while to open up to him - for a long time the sex was only bodies, though that was all right, because he’d almost forgotten how fantastic that could be on its own. When Martha finally closed her eyes and allowed them to flow together, the Doctor didn’t look inside her, desperately as he wanted to.
Instead he took her to Gallifrey, where they stood on a hill and looked at the great domed city of the Time Lords glittering on the horizon. Though he knew Martha had not actually been there, he could look to the side and see her, as vivid as the city. Even more so.
Later, as they stretched beside each other in bed, still breathing hard, Martha whispered, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever believed you were real.”
“Yes.” He clutched her hand in his so tightly it hurt.
6.
It was a relief when the Doctor finally gave up on the idea that Martha would somehow magically heal the TARDIS simply by being aboard, as though one small element could fix everything. As a physician, she’d never been entirely comfortable with the concept of homeopathy.
And she thought it was a pity that they had to be so worried about the TARDIS all the time, because honestly, most of the paradoxes were rather enjoyable.
“I’d give anything to see Russell Crowe film this!” Martha clapped her hands above her head as they sat in the Colosseum on a blazing summer day in AD 387.
The Doctor cackled with delight. “This is much better than the real thing!”
They sat on stone steps amid a crowd of nearly 50,000 people, all of whom were madly cheering the spectacle in the arena. If you looked closely enough, you could see that some of their eyes were uncertain, but nobody was going to be the first to ask if something wasn’t quite right.
Meanwhile, in the heart of the arena, several dozen gladiators were having a vigorous pillow fight.
“Oooh, trident right in the pillowcase!” The Doctor winced as feathers flew into the air. “Thumbs down for that one.”
Tears of laughter rolled down Martha’s face as she held aloft her mobile phone to get a few snaps. “God, this is brilliant.”
“Hey.” A burly man in a tunic and leggings, who seemed to be on staff in some capacity, scowled at them. “There are no women allowed in this section.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “What, the feathers are scattering all around us and you’re going to be a stickler for historical accuracy about that?”
“Oh, no!” Martha’s smile faded as she saw that the guards were bringing out the next show, which banners proclaimed to be a group of Christians due to be fed to beasts. “I’m not sure I want to see this.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and his hand in front of her eyes. When the crowd began to roar again, the Doctor began to chuckle. “Take a peek.”
She did. Sure enough, the beasts in question were running forward. The Christians had been thrown upon the mercy of several dozen - pug dogs.
Nobody had given the pugs any historical notes about religious persecution or bread and circuses. As such they appeared to be wholly innocent of their intended role in the proceedings. The little dogs pottered about the arena, panting and snorting, occasionally stopping to scratch or pee or blink at random sections of air they seemed to find worthy of note.
Martha, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, held on to the Doctor to keep from falling over. Though he was laughing too, he kissed her quickly on the forehead, and the happy glow inside her only became brighter.
I should write a book. Your Timelord, Your Terms: How to Get Him Exactly That Into You. Of course, I don’t have any idea what it was I did, but it’s not like you need a lot of credentials in the self-help area to start with.
In the arena, one of the pugs had rolled onto his back, the better to receive a belly rub from a few extremely relieved Christians. “The TARDIS is getting absolutely extravagant,” the Doctor said. “It’s past time for a full diagnostic.”
“And end the fun?”
“Not all the fun.” His thumb brushed against the nape of Martha’s neck.
**
“So how does a full diagnostic of the TARDIS work?”
“I’ll need to check the energy balances,” the Doctor said as they walked up a spiral staircase. They were at the top of the ship now. Odd how she’d never come up here before. “See if they’ve normalized at all.”
“I’m surprised you’ve only now gotten around to doing this.”
“Oh, I ran a diagnostic before I ever came back for you.” His expression clouded, as if he’d lost his train of thought, but he shook it off. “She was sick then. I’m going to see if she’s gotten better.”
“How do you do that? I imagine it like checking the oil in a car. Does the TARDIS have a dipstick?”
“I’m the dipstick.” He stopped climbing. “That came out wrong.”
Martha managed not to laugh at him, but she couldn’t help smiling.
They reached the top level and walked toward what looked like a steamy Jacuzzi tub. “What, there’s a pool on board and you’ve been hogging it for yourself? You’re in trouble.”
“Look again.”
As they stepped closer, Martha saw the glow beneath the greenish water and realized what the light was: the TARDIS core, from above. The bottom of the pool was transparent, so that it looked down in the glowing green light of the TARDIS control console itself. “This pool has something to do with how the TARDIS runs, doesn’t it?”
“We’re linked, you know. Psychically, physically, the works. That’s how it always was, before. Each Time Lord grew a TARDIS and bonded with her to be sure she would run true. Well. How it usually was.” The Doctor stood at the water’s edge, loosening his tie as he kicked off his shoes. “No better diagnostic for her than bonding again.”
“So each TARDIS has a kind of - bonding tank?”
“The space changes with each reconfiguration.” Draping his jacket over a nearby railing, he added, “Sometimes it’s water. Sometimes it’s light. For a long time, it was something called the Zero Room. Whatever form it takes, there’s always a place within the TARDIS where she and I can merge. Sometimes it’s about her figuring out what’s wrong with me, but other times, it’s about me figuring out what’s wrong with her.”
“Wow, that’s really - remarkable - are you stripping?”
He grinned as he stepped out of his trousers. “Guess I could wear trunks, but modesty seems a bit ridiculous, given how the TARDIS knows me inside and out.” Now naked, the Doctor jumped in feet-first. He sank beneath the surface like a stone, so quickly it startled her, but then he came up and shook out his wet hair just like a dog. “Ahh. Feels marvelous.”
“It’s pleasant for you? Is that a Time Lord thing?”
“At this stage, it’s more of a warm tub sort of thing.” The Doctor hesitated, clearly weighing an idea. He didn’t meet her eyes when he said, very casually, “Why not see for yourself?”
“You’re asking me in?”
He didn’t say yes or no, didn’t look up at her. It was clearly an offer he was only going to make once - and despite his studied nonchalance, the offer was important to him. Martha quickly shimmied out of her clothes, tucked her hair into a makeshift bun and plunged in.
Warm currents swirled around her as she treaded water, her legs pedaling beneath her. Light shone from below, casting odd shadows on the Doctor’s face. The liquid was thicker than water, but only slightly, so every ripple caused the gentlest shadow of sensation. Martha imagined she could feel the pulse of energy flowing through. “Wow.”
That made the Doctor smile at last. “Amazing, isn’t she?”
“The light beneath the console - I’ve always meant to ask -“
“The Heart of the TARDIS. You must never look at it directly. Never, Martha.” His voice was as stern as she’d ever heard it.
“All right, all right, I get it.” She brushed her hands along her cheeks. Already her skin was hot with steam. “So, how do we go about checking her out?”
“I get a feel for her, that’s all.”
The Doctor shut his eyes as he braced his hands against the edge of the tank. His rail-thin body looked like a ripple of broken shadows in the green-gold water. There was something enormously sexy about his face when he was concentrating like that. Martha resisted the urge to run her hands along his back. Instead she kept treading water, enjoying the feel of the currents against her skin.
“Huon/artron balance is still off,” the Doctor murmured. “Not as bad as it used to be, though.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Better than nothing. She’s not exactly short on Zeiton-7, but I suppose we could pick up some extra. Restock.”
“We’re all about side trips.”
“It might not fix the problem, but it will help. Perk her up a bit. Yes. That’s something, anyway.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “That’s a relief.”
“Always feels better to have something constructive to do.” Martha nodded as she slipped her arms around the Doctor’s neck. “Don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.” He considered her, that same odd distant smile on his face, then kissed her. Steam wreathed around them as he opened her mouth with his, and Martha realized for the first time how erotic he found this. She understood why, too.
As one of his hands dipped down to cup her breast, she murmured, “Careful, or we’ll wind up having sex right here. Might gum up the works.”
“I don’t think it would,” he said thoughtfully.
“You don’t mean - you want to -“ He cut off her words with another kiss. Martha wound her legs around him and realized he absolutely wanted to. “God, you’re turned on. Is this your idea of a threesome or something?”
He grinned. “Kind of, yeah.”
As he kissed his way down the long column of her throat, she whispered, “Isn’t it, I don’t know, sacrilegious for you? Making love in here?”
The Doctor stopped, and she thought for a moment that she’d stupidly talked him out of it. Then he looked her in the eyes and said, very quietly, “This is what’s sacred.”
Martha felt almost afraid. “This isn’t just about sex, is it?”
“The TARDIS is bonded to me. When you and I -“
“I’ll bond to the TARDIS too.”
The Doctor nodded.
For the first time, Martha knew, she was the one in danger of shutting herself off and pushing the Doctor away. This was scary. This was like meeting the parents times 10,000. The TARDIS was even more mysterious and powerful than the Doctor - sick, too - what was going to happen?
Only one way to find out, and if she loved him, she had to find out.
Martha kissed the Doctor again, and he understood. With one hand he braced them against the edge of the tank; with the other, he caressed her until she was close to the brink. It didn’t take long, not with the currents humming against her skin. When he parted her legs, Martha tilted her head back and held very still as he entered her. Even now, when she’d had him in every position and every mood either of them could imagine, it felt so unreal to her. Almost miraculous. Like a dream.
Then she felt his pleasure, too, intensified by the TARDIS all around them, and gasped.
“Reach in,” he breathed against her collarbone. “You know the way. You know.”
Martha imagined the Doctor’s soul as the core of the TARDIS, glowing and warm and open for her, and she plunged within.
Once again she was on Gallifrey, standing beside the Doctor. He looked so very different - like an old man, but not his own elderly self as he’d been with the Master. No, this was some other gentleman entirely, one with long white hair swept severely back from his face, revealing a widow’s peak. Yet he was the Doctor, too, equally as dear to her as her own. He was standing within the TARDIS, gazing up with adoration as he looked at it for the very first time.
“Stolen! You stole the TARDIS,” she gasped. “Naughty.”
The Doctor’s forehead pressed against her temple as they moved, and his voice sounded rough. “Mine.”
She was here with him now, there with him then. She was both places and everyplace. Suddenly one of the scenes shifted, a flash of perspective that shocked and delighted her. Martha was looking down at the old Doctor as he looked up at her for that very first time. If only she could have laughed! It was all she lacked in the universe, the ability to laugh. Such joy demanded laughter. Such love demanded joy.
Martha knew it, then - the third presence. She and the Doctor were not alone, not in their own minds. The other presence was even more alien than the Doctor, but not frightening. Never that.
Her eyes flew open. The Doctor’s mouth was agape, yet almost a smile. “You feel it? You do!”
“Yes --” Pleasure arced up inside her, and Martha cried out wordlessly, sweeping them - all of them - over the edge.
When she could see again, she was clinging to the side of the tank. The Doctor had sagged against her shoulder, his head nestled in the curve of her neck. Martha wondered if he was the one who’d passed out this time. She felt absurdly proud of herself. Bringing her wet fingers to his cheek, she whispered, “You all right?”
“Never finer.” He put one hand on the side of the tank, the same loving caress he’d given Martha moments before. “I imagine she feels better than she has in a while, too.”
“The TARDIS isn’t so very sick.”
Martha hadn’t known that she knew that until she said it out loud. The Doctor lifted his head to stare at her. “What?”
How could she put it into words? It was something she’d sensed when she’d been the TARDIS, meeting the Doctor for the first time - something very close to feeling the lack of laughter. “I believe - I believe the TARDIS is making the paradoxes on purpose.”
“Can’t be.” Then the Doctor considered it again, comprehension dawning. “Wait. You mean - she’s playing.”
“Sometimes, after something really terrible happens, you need to play.” Her family had gotten together every night for months after the Year That Wasn’t, but after the first few evenings, they hadn’t said a word about the Master. Instead they’d played card games - Blitz and Go Fish and Three-Card Stud - or watched silly television shows and talked back to the screen the whole time to make one another laugh. It had been ridiculous, but not really. “I imagine having a Paradox Machine inside you for a year would be pretty terrible. Especially knowing that it was all for the good of the Master, and that the Master was hurting you. I bet that was worse for her than any of the rest.”
“Bless.” The Doctor looked tenderly downward into the churning liquid glow. “So the paradoxes aren’t the sickness. They’re how she’s healing herself.”
Martha smiled. “With hot-pink Vikings, and snow in summertime, and -“
They said the last together: “And penguins.”
The Doctor laughed out loud, and Martha mussed his wet hair. Wryly, she said, “Lucky you didn’t realize earlier.”
“Why is that?”
“You wouldn’t have come back for me. Would you?”
“But you were the one who saw it. I was too close. You were who the TARDIS needed.” He hesitated, then said, more quietly. “Who I needed.”
The Doctor embraced her, and Martha let go of the edge of the pool to hug him back. Together they sank beneath the surface, surrounded entirely by the TARDIS’ flow and a swirl of bubbles, and it hardly felt like holding her breath at all.
7.
The truth didn’t hit the Doctor until his second glass of bathtub gin.
Splendid place, Chicago, and rarely more splendid than it had been in the 1920s, which were currently living up to their nickname and roaring. He and Martha had found an integrated speakeasy - not the simplest task, but not impossible, either. Breaking the laws of Prohibition made people more willing to ignore all kinds of boundaries.
So they were in a basement that had been transformed into a nightclub, quite possibly the hottest jazz club in Chicago in the ‘20s, or maybe on any planet, at any time, ever. Martha, bedecked in a white, rhinestone-encrusted dress of fringe, was on the bar with half a dozen other girls, all of them vigorously doing the Charleston.
In the Doctor’s admittedly subjective opinion, Martha was the best of the lot.
The saxophones and trombones swayed from side to side on the beat, catching the light as they moved. Cigarette smoke tainted the air, but at least it gave the proceedings a certain hazy glamour. Red walls gleamed wetly of cheap lead paint, and girls in short shiny dresses walked around selling mints from baskets they wore at the waist. The scene was gaudy and rude and so wonderfully human.
Fine times, the Doctor thought. All’s right with the world.
Wait.
He stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his glass of gin. A couple of people stared at him, but most couldn’t take their eyes off the dancers. Small wonder, as Martha had just begun a rather delicious version of the shimmy. The feather she wore in her headband jittered with every move.
The Doctor hated to interrupt, but he thought it important. “Martha?” he shouted as he weaved through the crowd toward the bar. “Martha, I need to speak to you!”
She heard him despite the din. Instead of simply hopping down, she made it part of the dance - pointing to her lover, putting her other hand to her cheek and making a face not unlike Betty Boop. The Doctor, realizing how this was supposed to go, held up his arms. Martha jumped down so that he could catch her at the waist, and he grinned as he dipped her backward.
“Show-off,” he murmured.
“You’re one to talk.”
They kissed deeply, and the crowd applauded.
As the band swung into the Black Bottom Stomp, he led her toward the exit. “Is anything wrong?” Martha said. “You look happy, but we’re in an awful hurry. What’s our paradox this time?”
“That’s just it. There isn’t one.”
She gaped at him as they went out the exit, the bouncer nodding at them as they passed. “You’re right. There hasn’t been anything! Nothing at all! The TARDIS is well”
He hugged her tightly and wondered if she would let him do the tango with her all the way down the avenue. The full moon and Martha and the entire universe once again his to explore - this was happiness, and it had been absent from his life for too long.
When at last the Doctor let Martha go, he clapped his hands together, eager to make plans. “I believe the TARDIS is ready to get back to work. Thank goodness for that. So, my lady, where to? The ship is yours to command.”
Her smile changed - it was still there, but it became softer, almost hesitant. She squeezed his hand. “London. 2007.”
“You mean - home.”
“I’ve been studying when I had spare time, but some of my training’s getting a bit rusty. I mean, I definitely hope I don’t have to intubate anyone tomorrow. Probably make a botch of it if I did.”
“Ah. So. You want to stick with the original plan, then. Because, you know, we could take a few trips just to make certain the TARDIS is back in the pink.”
“My terms. You said.” Martha looked uneasy, but she was standing her ground. “We’ll have more adventures. You know we will! But I need to know that we can do this the right way.”
The Doctor sighed and started walking beside her. “I keep my promises, Martha Jones.”
“So, my next day off - you’ll be there?”
“You’ve got to tell me what it is first.”
Her face clouded as she searched her memory. “I think it’s October 19.”
“Then on October 19, 2007, I shall call for you first thing in the morning. Don’t even eat breakfast. I’ll have waffles waiting.”
“You really will?”
“You know I can.”
“It’s not the distance,” she said softly. “It’s the commitment.”
He stopped beneath a streetlamp and pulled her close. The white feather from her headband brushed against his temple. “If I’m not there, you’re to go straight to Torchwood and tell Jack Harkness that a rescue mission is called for. Nothing less is going to keep me away. All right?”
“All right.” Martha kissed him, and he felt the sharp edge of desire for her, cutting deep. He put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back toward the TARDIS. If he had to tell her goodbye for a while, he was going to do it properly, and that would require most of the night.
**
The next morning - around 8 a.m. on that particular day, or six hours after Martha had left her shift with the penguins - the TARDIS reappeared in the hospital car park. Reluctantly, the Doctor opened the door and grimaced at the black clouds and drizzle. “Maybe that stormy weather wasn’t a paradox after all.”
“What did you say?” Martha came up behind him, already dressed in her familiar jeans and jumper.
“Nothing. Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.”
He had to turn up the collar of his jacket against the rain, though it didn’t keep him from getting wet through. Martha didn’t even flinch; instead, there was a definite spring in her step. “It’s not that I’m not going to miss you, because I will, terribly. You know that, right? It’s just good to be home.”
“You want to see your family.” The Doctor considered that for a second. He’d regretted not getting to know the Joneses better, or at least under pleasanter circumstances. “Do you think they’d like to come along once?”
“Mum and Dad and Tish? In the TARDIS?”
“They had to endure the Master. Only fair they should see some of the wonder of the universe as well. We could head out deep, show them a supernova. What do you think?”
Her smile illuminated her face. “I think - I think they’d love it.”
“Then it’s a date.”
Martha laughed. There was no mistaking the raindrops on her cheeks for tears. “I’ll be counting the days until October 19.”
“I won’t. I’ve half a mind to jump straight there.” The Doctor grinned.
“You wouldn’t. Or would you?” When she turned toward him, she squinted as if blinded by the sun. She had the most amazing smile. He ought to have worked harder to earn that smile from the very first day he met her, but he could make up for lost time. What else was a time machine for? “Whether it’s ten seconds for you or ten years, I promise a reunion you won’t forget.”
“I believe you. If it rained twice as hard as this, I bet I wouldn’t feel a drop.”
That was rather romantic, wasn’t it? But Martha didn’t look pleased. She looked confused. “What do you mean?”
He held up his palms, which stung from the droplets driving onto his skin. “This isn’t your idea of a rainstorm?”
“But it’s sunny. So sunny I’m burning up in this jumper already. Do you really see rain?”
“Yes.” He felt a strange uneasiness, a shifting of perspective. A vase, two faces.
“It’s another paradox.”
“I don’t think so,” the Doctor said.
“What else could it be?” Martha cast a lovingly reproachful look at the TARDIS. “Not ready for me to go?”
“This isn’t like the ones before. We always saw the same paradoxes earlier, but not now. I mean, you’re in a completely different day from me. Totally different weather. It’s as if - as if we aren’t in the same place -“
“What do you mean? Doctor?”
Oh, no. No, no, no.
The bonding cure. The need to laugh. Such love demanded joy.
“It’s all been a paradox.” As soon as he said the words, they were true. Oh, they’d been true before that - true all along - but the Doctor knew it now, and the knowledge fell on him like something cold and foul. “You’ve been with me, but you haven’t been with me. It all happened, but none of it did.”
“That can’t be right. It can’t be.” Martha shook her head. “We’ll go back to the TARDIS and set it right.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” he said hollowly.
“It has to work that way! You have a time machine! You can always go back and - and undo it. Can’t you?”
“No. I can’t. Martha, I can’t undo what -“ The Doctor felt sick. “I can’t undo what was never done to start with.”
“Don’t you do this to me.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she took a step toward him - but was a step farther away. “What was that?”
The Doctor stepped toward her, and once again he was a step more distant than he had been before.
Martha frowned in consternation, took another step, then another, until she was running for him with all her might but moving ever deeper into the distance. “Doctor!”
“Martha!” The Doctor ran toward her too. Though he realized it would do no good, that she wouldn’t even remember it, he wanted her to have one moment where she could know that he was trying to get to her again. “Martha -- I see you - Martha!”
He broke the surface of the tank, gasping for air. How long had he been under? No telling. The shimmering green-gold glow of the TARDIS was once again bright beneath him. The bonding cure was complete.
Wet, naked and trembling, the Doctor braced himself against the edge of the tank. His discarded blue suit and trainers lay on the floor nearby. He imagined himself in them - the himself he’d been hours or days before when ran the full diagnostic, realized the depth of the TARDIS’ illness and made the choice to undertake the bonding cure.
You took a big gamble with my heart.
I won.
The TARDIS had needed joy to heal. That wasn’t something the Doctor found easy to give her since the Time Wars, and after the Master’s Year That Wasn’t, it had been impossible. So he had surrendered himself to the trance of the bonding cure, trusting the TARDIS to do what she must in order to heal itself.
He couldn’t blame the ship. She’d only done what she had to do. Besides, the right person to blame was himself.
Shakily the Doctor climbed from the tank. He ought to have gone down to his quarters straightaway to sleep; even his Time Lord’s body had been taxed to the extreme, and exhaustion sapped him hollow. Instead he lay on his side, listening to the humming of the TARDIS.
Martha won’t remember. At most she’ll think she had a dream.
That ought to have sufficed. Why wasn’t it enough?
The Doctor didn’t want to know. He pillowed his head on his own shirt and remained still for a very long time.
When at last he rose, he could sense a kind of questioning in the air. Where to? Where to indeed.
For a moment, he considered going to Earth on October 19, 2007, and waiting in a car park for Dr. Martha Jones. Even if she didn’t remember, she’d hear him out. But what would he say?
“Levixtian Three, I think.” The Doctor curled his shirt around his neck like a spa bather might a towel. “I wouldn’t mind visiting another Sky Festival. But let’s go to one of the later ones, after they incorporate the hoverdiscs into the dance. That’s smashing, isn’t it?”
Thinking of it that way removed any sense of wistfulness about the fact that it wouldn’t snow.
8.
Martha normally slept in on her days off, but for some reason she woke up bright and early on October 19. Though her stomach was growling even before she opened her eyes, she kept postponing breakfast, though she couldn’t think why.
For at least an hour, she sat in her tiny window seat and stared down at the pavement. To her embarrassment, she realized she was wishing for the TARDIS to appear.
Honestly. It’s been eight months. You’ve thought about him a lot less since Roger. Are you having a relapse?
She sighed and rested her chin on her knees. Getting on with her life would be simpler if she hadn’t had that erotic dream about the Doctor a week ago. Unbelievably erotic, really. The sort of thing no real person could ever live up to. Her subconscious wasn’t doing her any favors, that was for sure.
Sometimes it’s worth getting your heart broken, she reminded herself. It reminds you that you can still feel.
The phone rang around 11 a.m. Martha glanced at the caller ID and smiled as she picked up. “Hello, Mum.”
“Hello, dear. I know you usually have plans for your free days, but I wondered if you felt like doing a bit of shopping this afternoon. I’ve got to get a new dress for this work do of your father’s.”
“I don’t think so. Not quite up to shopping today.” She sighed. “I wouldn’t mind some company, though.”
“Are you all right?” Francine sounded worried. Since the Year That Wasn’t, she’d become much better about putting others’ needs before her own. Sometimes the difference was jarring, but mostly it was nice. “You sound blue.”
“Guess I am, sort of.”
“Tell you what. Come by the house. We’ll have some tea. Play cards. Waste time.”
This, Martha reminded herself, is how we heal. “That sounds great.”
So she got dressed and headed out the door. Somehow she remained reluctant to leave - it felt as if she were waiting for something that hadn’t happened yet. An adventure, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t the Doctor she missed as much as the sense of adventure she’d known when she was with him.
But Martha reminded herself that the adventure was still happening, and would go on every day that she lived.
She smiled as she set out on the journey back home.
THE END