dw fic: mondays [ten/martha, pg]
mondays
doctor who; ten, martha; pg; 2,250 words
seven mondays for martha jones. blink. for calliopes_pen (as part of the smith_n_jones 1969 ficathon). she wanted humour, bananas, and a duel. many thanks to synecdoche for the speedy beta.
Mondays
Every Monday her mother’s still energized enough from the weekend to make them proper lunches, so six-year-old Martha gets sandwiches with everything in them - sometimes there’s salami, sometimes cheese and pickle, and there’s always a banana because her mother’s the kind who makes them all take chewable multivitamins and tells them that bananas are a good source of potassium.
Martha used to seek out Tish to eat lunch but she can never find her anymore. When they walk home together and Martha brings this up - “I looked for you at lunch today again” - Tish responds in a way that makes Martha sure she doesn’t want to be found.
So Mondays Martha eats her banana alone, scuffing her shoes against the woodchips beside the school building. One day a boy comes over and asks if she’ll trade her banana for a biscuit. “My mum never packs me a lunch,” he says, showing her the plastic Sainsbury’s wrappers in his carrier bag. Martha makes the trade and, when the boy sits down next to her and eats the rest of his lunch with her, she wonders if this is how you make friends.
She thinks Mondays are pretty fantastic from then on. Not to mention bananas.
--
Ten years later Mondays aren’t as easy. Martha gets home late because of practice for something - she lines up activities to keep her away from home now.
Because this is what she’s expecting:
She turns the key in the lock and it’s too quiet. Tish and Leo and sitting at the kitchen table and her parents are standing, not looking at their children or each other but some sort of vague middle distance. All pairs of eyes turn to Martha when she walks through the door and she’s pierced with relief and confusion and resignation and conviction, like punches that hit her on different sides of her face, bending her out of shape.
Twenty minutes later Martha’s in her room with two facts in her head. One is that her parents are splitting up, the other is that she hates Mondays.
--
Two months into university, Martha isn’t sure she even had a life before. This, this is what life is supposed to be like. Reading what she wants and messing about at the weekends without having to worry what her mother will say and the sound of chatter that fills the halls that isn’t anyone in her family yelling at anyone else.
And there’s the freedom to make her own schedule. She stacks her Mondays with courses to distract herself from what day it is, throwing bananas and granola in her bag to eat during her ten minute breaks so she can give herself an excuse not to return her mum’s call during them.
Tish comes up for the weekend and they’re at dinner, proper dinner, not cafeteria food for once and Martha feels like such a real person she thinks she might burst. When Tish asks her if she’s running away it’s the first time she realizes she already has.
--
She does a double shift at A&E every Monday after her first year of medical school so she misses the call. When she checks her voice mail it’s probably Tuesday already but it doesn’t feel like it to her. “It’s not tomorrow until you go to sleep,” her mother used to say. Martha wonders over this every all-nighter she pulls, as Mondays stretch across weeks and suck up all her moments.
But this Monday, there’s a message about cousin Adeola dead at Canary Wharf and she remembers lunch with Leo last Christmas, after that great big spaceship stopped casting a shadow over the city.
“Do you believe in aliens now?” she’d asked, her hand with two chips on the way to her mouth. She didn’t want to ask it as a serious question, but she probably failed completely miserably at that. She’s always been serious, and it’s always been Leo who calls her on it.
But it’s already a month later and there isn’t time to think about aliens or bananas or her parents or Adeola because it’s Monday and Monday means a double shift in A&E. She trying to juggle about a million family phone calls because something’s threatening to fall apart again and that winking patient’s face is still flickering around the corners or her mind and then it starts raining up.
And then it starts.
--
Travelling with the Doctor, well, it’s been sort of like a boulder through her routine. And it’s fantastic.
Take the duel, for instance. Martha’s never seen a proper duel, but here on some planet that she can’t pronounce the name of duelling seems to be some kind of organized sport, which could be why the Doctor is wearing a lavender sequined uniform and wielding what, from her seat in the stands, looks like double-ended light saber.
Of course.
Still, the Doctor’s surprisingly good at alien duelling, and ends up winning some sort of prize for it. Martha’s laughing out loud in the first row of a set of bleachers as a fuchsia-sequined official presents him with a plaque. He gives it to her to hold as he pulls his lavender jumper over his head, glitter raining down on both of them, and she glances at the lettering. It’s gold and elaborate and she swears she can feel the words shift over so slightly to spell out something she can understand. The word “Monday” is all over the thing.
“Why all the Mondays?” she asks.
“Well,” the Doctor says, folding the jumper and handing it back to the official. “It’s Monday.”
“So?” she asks.
“I mean, it’s always Monday.”
“Come again?”
“Always Monday. Here. Every day.” He takes the plaque back from her and twirls it in his hands. “I’ve got a dark corridor somewhere in the TARDIS where we can hang this up and never see it again. Although mind you, I’ve always sort of wanted to win a Metonymic duel, and now I have.”
He starts walking and she half-runs a few steps to catch him up. “You took me,” she says, “to a planet where it’s always Monday?”
“Well, not exactly,” he draws the words out. “Time moves forward, right, it can never always be Monday. ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow,’ and all that. But they really like Mondays here. So they always call it Monday.”
“You can something anything you want,” Martha says. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it true. I could call myself Annie, but that wouldn’t change who I am.”
“Why would you want to change who you are?”
“I don’t,” she says. “But it’s something everyone thinks about, isn’t it?”
“No,” the Doctor says simply.
“You wouldn’t change anything - you wouldn’t rename anything to dull it, remove it, hide it from your own memories?”
The Doctor sees a line. It’s faint, Martha’s wrapping it in metaphors so it looks like it’s drawn in the sand by a five year old but it’s there and if he answers her question it will be crossed. And no matter how extraordinarily talented at geometry this Martha Jones is he won’t cross this line. Won’t let Martha move it so he crosses it unintentionally. Won’t tell her things that are so terrible renaming them a million times would only destroy languages. Won’t hurt her.
He keeps his face still, thinking all of this, and Martha smiles; she thinks she’s got him. When Martha smiles at him he can read her emotions, can almost feel them, like the tiny snowflakes that pierce numb skies and give them sensation. They hit him and he shakes inside his suit just the tiniest bit because someone can’t feel that much for him without him feeling it back, he’s had long enough to know himself that he knows this. He can feel the line fade away the longer he stays silent. But it’s still there. He’ll cross it eventually. It’ll hurt.
So when he takes Martha Jones’ hand on a Monday afternoon, he grips her fingers with too much pressure. It’s a test. She doesn’t pull away
--
Third week in and the Doctor buys a calendar. “1969” is printed on the top of each page and that’s like a smack in the face, like a dull reminder of a reality he’s trying to avoid. He props it against the countertop and is staring at it when Martha comes home from the shop, like the whole idea of planning a life one day at a time is too difficult for him to understand.
“It’s Monday,” Martha says, unclipping her name badge and throwing it down on the counter in front of him, jolting his attention away from the calendar. “I always know when it’s Monday,” she says, stretching her arms up as he turns around. He catches her little finger on its way down and holds it as she says “It’s like my internal clock is wired to it. I can lose track of time any other day of the week, but there’s something about Mondays.” She sinks down into a chair but he holds on to her hand, and sits right beside her.
“I have an internal clock too, you know,” he says. “‘S matter of fact, I pretty much am an internal clock.
“You’re a clock with two hearts and hair, you are.” She yawns.
“Pretty superior hair,” he defends, letting go of her hand to ruffle it at the back.
She laughs. He stands up and walks to the refrigerator, pulling out something in a casserole dish.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Risotto,” he says. “I had a dream about risotto, perfectly cooked risotto with Vidalia onions and radicchio. But I went down to the shops and they didn’t have anything like that so this has got frozen peas and garlic in it.”
“Don’t you dream about, I don’t know, more important things?” she asks, standing up and reaching for the plates still resting in the draining board.
“Food’s pretty important,” he says. “Travel all across the universe and food is a constant. People cooking together, eating together. Sure they all fight wars and they all try to fall in love but what can everyone, everywhere agree on? Food. Never underestimate the power of a good dinner, Martha Jones.”
The Doctor hovers a spoon over a plate, uncertain as to whether he should serve her or just himself. He squints and dishes out two servings, then says “Help yourself.” She nods and does.
“Mind you,” Martha says after the first mouthful, “I still can’t believe you cook.”
He shrugs, “I do pretty much everything.” She rolls her eyes. “Once you get to be my age it’s not pompous to say that anymore,” he argues. “Besides, cooking’s basically chemistry. With yummier results.”
He’s cleverly multitasking, eating while talking at the same time and there may be things called manners but he’s never been one for them - not nearly as universal as food and chatter. Martha’s only taken a few bites, though, and is just nodding along to whatever he’s saying.
He reaches across the table and clicks his fork against her thumb. “Eat up, I know it’s good.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“Not true. You were practically salivating when I told you about my food dream. Of course, I was too, thus the impetus to go out and secure the goods to make said food dream come true. C’mon, Martha, just because I never stop talking doesn’t mean you can’t eat and listen to me at the same time. You can even ignore me a little but while you tuck in. Promise I won’t mind.”
Martha smiles weakly. “You do never shut up, do you?”
“That’s me.”
“It’s just it’s Monday, so I’m not that hungry.”
“On Mondays you eat less? Is that some weird tradition in your family?”
“Nah, I’ve just never liked Mondays much.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?” She digs the heels of her palms in the edge of the table and pushes her chair back.
He’s still eating. “Course it does.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she stands up but doesn’t move, so she just towers over him and the table. “You and I,” she starts, “You and I and, we don’t chatter away about our histories and the things we’re used to,” she takes a step back, like she wants to physically distance him from what she’s saying. “I don’t tell you things like my parents split up on a Monday or that’s when I heard that my cousin died or that’s the one day when I never want to jump straight out of bed and that worries me because I think I don’t love what I do enough and I wonder if I’m even doing the right thing and then I go to work and I find some reason to hate a patient and - ”
“Martha,” he says. She’s still talking, or her lips are moving, but there’s no sound coming out. It’s funny. He thought the line was made for him. But he should have known - you can walk through a door in either direction; you can cross a line from either side. “Martha,” he says, standing up and walking towards her, touching her arm with two fingertips. Her skin is hot. “Martha,” a third time, just to be sure of her name, maybe. Just to be sure that she’s there.
She looks up.
“Tomorrow will be Tuesday, Martha,” the Doctor says. “What do you want to happen on Tuesday?”
doctor who; ten, martha; pg; 2,250 words
seven mondays for martha jones. blink. for calliopes_pen (as part of the smith_n_jones 1969 ficathon). she wanted humour, bananas, and a duel. many thanks to synecdoche for the speedy beta.
Mondays
Every Monday her mother’s still energized enough from the weekend to make them proper lunches, so six-year-old Martha gets sandwiches with everything in them - sometimes there’s salami, sometimes cheese and pickle, and there’s always a banana because her mother’s the kind who makes them all take chewable multivitamins and tells them that bananas are a good source of potassium.
Martha used to seek out Tish to eat lunch but she can never find her anymore. When they walk home together and Martha brings this up - “I looked for you at lunch today again” - Tish responds in a way that makes Martha sure she doesn’t want to be found.
So Mondays Martha eats her banana alone, scuffing her shoes against the woodchips beside the school building. One day a boy comes over and asks if she’ll trade her banana for a biscuit. “My mum never packs me a lunch,” he says, showing her the plastic Sainsbury’s wrappers in his carrier bag. Martha makes the trade and, when the boy sits down next to her and eats the rest of his lunch with her, she wonders if this is how you make friends.
She thinks Mondays are pretty fantastic from then on. Not to mention bananas.
--
Ten years later Mondays aren’t as easy. Martha gets home late because of practice for something - she lines up activities to keep her away from home now.
Because this is what she’s expecting:
She turns the key in the lock and it’s too quiet. Tish and Leo and sitting at the kitchen table and her parents are standing, not looking at their children or each other but some sort of vague middle distance. All pairs of eyes turn to Martha when she walks through the door and she’s pierced with relief and confusion and resignation and conviction, like punches that hit her on different sides of her face, bending her out of shape.
Twenty minutes later Martha’s in her room with two facts in her head. One is that her parents are splitting up, the other is that she hates Mondays.
--
Two months into university, Martha isn’t sure she even had a life before. This, this is what life is supposed to be like. Reading what she wants and messing about at the weekends without having to worry what her mother will say and the sound of chatter that fills the halls that isn’t anyone in her family yelling at anyone else.
And there’s the freedom to make her own schedule. She stacks her Mondays with courses to distract herself from what day it is, throwing bananas and granola in her bag to eat during her ten minute breaks so she can give herself an excuse not to return her mum’s call during them.
Tish comes up for the weekend and they’re at dinner, proper dinner, not cafeteria food for once and Martha feels like such a real person she thinks she might burst. When Tish asks her if she’s running away it’s the first time she realizes she already has.
--
She does a double shift at A&E every Monday after her first year of medical school so she misses the call. When she checks her voice mail it’s probably Tuesday already but it doesn’t feel like it to her. “It’s not tomorrow until you go to sleep,” her mother used to say. Martha wonders over this every all-nighter she pulls, as Mondays stretch across weeks and suck up all her moments.
But this Monday, there’s a message about cousin Adeola dead at Canary Wharf and she remembers lunch with Leo last Christmas, after that great big spaceship stopped casting a shadow over the city.
“Do you believe in aliens now?” she’d asked, her hand with two chips on the way to her mouth. She didn’t want to ask it as a serious question, but she probably failed completely miserably at that. She’s always been serious, and it’s always been Leo who calls her on it.
But it’s already a month later and there isn’t time to think about aliens or bananas or her parents or Adeola because it’s Monday and Monday means a double shift in A&E. She trying to juggle about a million family phone calls because something’s threatening to fall apart again and that winking patient’s face is still flickering around the corners or her mind and then it starts raining up.
And then it starts.
--
Travelling with the Doctor, well, it’s been sort of like a boulder through her routine. And it’s fantastic.
Take the duel, for instance. Martha’s never seen a proper duel, but here on some planet that she can’t pronounce the name of duelling seems to be some kind of organized sport, which could be why the Doctor is wearing a lavender sequined uniform and wielding what, from her seat in the stands, looks like double-ended light saber.
Of course.
Still, the Doctor’s surprisingly good at alien duelling, and ends up winning some sort of prize for it. Martha’s laughing out loud in the first row of a set of bleachers as a fuchsia-sequined official presents him with a plaque. He gives it to her to hold as he pulls his lavender jumper over his head, glitter raining down on both of them, and she glances at the lettering. It’s gold and elaborate and she swears she can feel the words shift over so slightly to spell out something she can understand. The word “Monday” is all over the thing.
“Why all the Mondays?” she asks.
“Well,” the Doctor says, folding the jumper and handing it back to the official. “It’s Monday.”
“So?” she asks.
“I mean, it’s always Monday.”
“Come again?”
“Always Monday. Here. Every day.” He takes the plaque back from her and twirls it in his hands. “I’ve got a dark corridor somewhere in the TARDIS where we can hang this up and never see it again. Although mind you, I’ve always sort of wanted to win a Metonymic duel, and now I have.”
He starts walking and she half-runs a few steps to catch him up. “You took me,” she says, “to a planet where it’s always Monday?”
“Well, not exactly,” he draws the words out. “Time moves forward, right, it can never always be Monday. ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow,’ and all that. But they really like Mondays here. So they always call it Monday.”
“You can something anything you want,” Martha says. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it true. I could call myself Annie, but that wouldn’t change who I am.”
“Why would you want to change who you are?”
“I don’t,” she says. “But it’s something everyone thinks about, isn’t it?”
“No,” the Doctor says simply.
“You wouldn’t change anything - you wouldn’t rename anything to dull it, remove it, hide it from your own memories?”
The Doctor sees a line. It’s faint, Martha’s wrapping it in metaphors so it looks like it’s drawn in the sand by a five year old but it’s there and if he answers her question it will be crossed. And no matter how extraordinarily talented at geometry this Martha Jones is he won’t cross this line. Won’t let Martha move it so he crosses it unintentionally. Won’t tell her things that are so terrible renaming them a million times would only destroy languages. Won’t hurt her.
He keeps his face still, thinking all of this, and Martha smiles; she thinks she’s got him. When Martha smiles at him he can read her emotions, can almost feel them, like the tiny snowflakes that pierce numb skies and give them sensation. They hit him and he shakes inside his suit just the tiniest bit because someone can’t feel that much for him without him feeling it back, he’s had long enough to know himself that he knows this. He can feel the line fade away the longer he stays silent. But it’s still there. He’ll cross it eventually. It’ll hurt.
So when he takes Martha Jones’ hand on a Monday afternoon, he grips her fingers with too much pressure. It’s a test. She doesn’t pull away
--
Third week in and the Doctor buys a calendar. “1969” is printed on the top of each page and that’s like a smack in the face, like a dull reminder of a reality he’s trying to avoid. He props it against the countertop and is staring at it when Martha comes home from the shop, like the whole idea of planning a life one day at a time is too difficult for him to understand.
“It’s Monday,” Martha says, unclipping her name badge and throwing it down on the counter in front of him, jolting his attention away from the calendar. “I always know when it’s Monday,” she says, stretching her arms up as he turns around. He catches her little finger on its way down and holds it as she says “It’s like my internal clock is wired to it. I can lose track of time any other day of the week, but there’s something about Mondays.” She sinks down into a chair but he holds on to her hand, and sits right beside her.
“I have an internal clock too, you know,” he says. “‘S matter of fact, I pretty much am an internal clock.
“You’re a clock with two hearts and hair, you are.” She yawns.
“Pretty superior hair,” he defends, letting go of her hand to ruffle it at the back.
She laughs. He stands up and walks to the refrigerator, pulling out something in a casserole dish.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Risotto,” he says. “I had a dream about risotto, perfectly cooked risotto with Vidalia onions and radicchio. But I went down to the shops and they didn’t have anything like that so this has got frozen peas and garlic in it.”
“Don’t you dream about, I don’t know, more important things?” she asks, standing up and reaching for the plates still resting in the draining board.
“Food’s pretty important,” he says. “Travel all across the universe and food is a constant. People cooking together, eating together. Sure they all fight wars and they all try to fall in love but what can everyone, everywhere agree on? Food. Never underestimate the power of a good dinner, Martha Jones.”
The Doctor hovers a spoon over a plate, uncertain as to whether he should serve her or just himself. He squints and dishes out two servings, then says “Help yourself.” She nods and does.
“Mind you,” Martha says after the first mouthful, “I still can’t believe you cook.”
He shrugs, “I do pretty much everything.” She rolls her eyes. “Once you get to be my age it’s not pompous to say that anymore,” he argues. “Besides, cooking’s basically chemistry. With yummier results.”
He’s cleverly multitasking, eating while talking at the same time and there may be things called manners but he’s never been one for them - not nearly as universal as food and chatter. Martha’s only taken a few bites, though, and is just nodding along to whatever he’s saying.
He reaches across the table and clicks his fork against her thumb. “Eat up, I know it’s good.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“Not true. You were practically salivating when I told you about my food dream. Of course, I was too, thus the impetus to go out and secure the goods to make said food dream come true. C’mon, Martha, just because I never stop talking doesn’t mean you can’t eat and listen to me at the same time. You can even ignore me a little but while you tuck in. Promise I won’t mind.”
Martha smiles weakly. “You do never shut up, do you?”
“That’s me.”
“It’s just it’s Monday, so I’m not that hungry.”
“On Mondays you eat less? Is that some weird tradition in your family?”
“Nah, I’ve just never liked Mondays much.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?” She digs the heels of her palms in the edge of the table and pushes her chair back.
He’s still eating. “Course it does.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she stands up but doesn’t move, so she just towers over him and the table. “You and I,” she starts, “You and I and, we don’t chatter away about our histories and the things we’re used to,” she takes a step back, like she wants to physically distance him from what she’s saying. “I don’t tell you things like my parents split up on a Monday or that’s when I heard that my cousin died or that’s the one day when I never want to jump straight out of bed and that worries me because I think I don’t love what I do enough and I wonder if I’m even doing the right thing and then I go to work and I find some reason to hate a patient and - ”
“Martha,” he says. She’s still talking, or her lips are moving, but there’s no sound coming out. It’s funny. He thought the line was made for him. But he should have known - you can walk through a door in either direction; you can cross a line from either side. “Martha,” he says, standing up and walking towards her, touching her arm with two fingertips. Her skin is hot. “Martha,” a third time, just to be sure of her name, maybe. Just to be sure that she’s there.
She looks up.
“Tomorrow will be Tuesday, Martha,” the Doctor says. “What do you want to happen on Tuesday?”