The Bigger Picture
THE BIGGER PICTURE
AUTHOR: sensiblecat
LENGTH: 4281 words
RATING: FRC
SHOW/SPOILERS DW3 up to “Gridlock”
CHARACTERS: Ten, Martha, the TARDIS, Rose
SUMMARY : After “Gridlock” Martha sees many things differently, particularly the TARDIS
Martha followed the Doctor into the TARDIS, noticing the old-fashioned coat stand beside the door for the first time as he shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto one of the hooks. He was obviously practiced at doing it; he didn’t need to glance for it to land in precisely the right spot. After all that talking, they’d both fallen silent; she was struggling to take in what he’d told her, and he was probably a little bit shocked that he’d said so much. She didn’t know him well enough to probe any further, and she waited for him to flip a switch and announce that he was taking her home. In fact, she’d already picked up enough experience to reach for the nearest strut and brace herself against the shock wave. Either his driving, or the suspension on this thing, was diabolical.
He was looking down, avoiding her eyes, knob-twiddling like he had been when she’d asked about the Planet of the Time Lords. It seemed like a conversation with someone else, already hundreds of years in the past.
“Well,” he said, after a moment. “I suppose it’s time I took you home.”
She wondered how she was supposed to answer that. There’d certainly be some good things about going home. Being surrounded by her family, her friends, her routine. Being able to have a shower, change her undies, grab a bite to eat. None of those human needs seemed to be on his radar. He must eat something now and then, he must need to rest, but there was no sign of him ever doing either in the room they were in. Maybe he had a little bachelor pad somewhere, or he used to live with Rose, before he lost her to some mysterious fate he wouldn’t discuss, something that involved her being fine and with her family, and him in a state of badly-hidden mourning. He must be fairly high-maintenance, Martha reflected, having gone through all that. He wasn’t the type that things simply rolled off, even if he liked to give that impression. Maybe all that, plus the alien bit, had been too much for Rose to deal with. Yes, that was probably it. He needed a more mature woman. Or nobody. Or far more than anyone could provide.
If she was going home anyway, she reasoned, it couldn’t do her any harm to ask a few more questions. She was getting better at picking up the “Don’t go there” signals when she overstepped the mark. Like saying, “You’ve got me.” He hadn’t liked that. Not one bit.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
He froze in mid-twiddle and she saw a ripple of tension stiffen his arm through his sleeve. “Course I do,” he said, breezily. “Where else would I live?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you might live in a house or something, just park it in the garden for when you fancy going somewhere.”
“No,” he said. “Never cared for houses, me. I’m always on the move. And the TARDIS isn’t an it, she’s a she.”
Of course, Martha thought. Tradition, wasn’t it? God bless her and all who sail in her. Yet she had the feeling, from his tone of voice and the way his fingers trailed over the dashboard, almost caressing it, that there was more to it than that.
She looked around at the knobbly walls. She’d never seen anything less like her imagined concept of a spaceship. If anyone had said, last week, “An alien’s going to pick you up and give you a lift in his ship,” she’d have imagined somewhere like the USS Enterprise, all swishing doors, white walls and discreet blinking lights. Rather like a hospital, in fact. This place, on the other hand, had an organic feel to it. Random, verging on chaotic, quirky, very individual. Of course he lived here. How could it be otherwise? But what puzzled her was the mechanics of it. There only seemed to be this room; it was nearly as bad as the glorified camper vans people lived in on New Earth.
He must have noticed that she’d been staring at the place for longer than was polite. “You going to stand there all day?” he asked.
“There isn’t any door,” she noted. “Apart from the one we came in through. ”
“So?” he demanded. “Got a problem with that? If you want a door, she’ll make one for you. If you tell her what room you want, she’ll probably park it just on the other side, or at least the right end of the corridor. She’s not going to waste energy leaving stuff around that no-one’s going to use.”
Martha’s mouth dropped open. “You talk about her as if she’s alive,” she gasped, wondering if he’d gone completely round the bed from being on his own too much.
“She is.” He seemed to be looking at her without any trace of awkwardness, so her only reasonable choice was to believe him. “Actually, no. It’s more accurate to call her sentient.”
“She’s got feelings?”
“Intelligence, definitely. It’s called the Imprimitur. Every TARDIS chooses - chose - the Time Lord she wanted to bond with, and then it develops over the centuries into a kind of symbiosis.”
Martha hadn’t missed his rapid correction into his past tense. Or that word “centuries.” “So, it’s like a father-to-son thing?”
“No.” His brown eyes, which were really rather beautiful in a way that didn’t necessarily lead to her actually fancying him - theoretically, at least - were fixed very intently on her now, and his smile was beginning to reach them. “That’s just how long we live. I’m nearly a thousand years old.”
“You live for ever?” Oh bugger, she’d put her foot in it there, she realised with a sinking heart. All the other Time Lords were dead - very dead - even if he did keep talking about them as if they weren’t. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He didn’t acknowledge her faux-pas, though she was sure he hadn’t missed it.
“Barring accidents, or disasters, we regenerate up to twelve times,” he explained. “Our bodies are completely renewed. Gender stays constant. Well, usually. Everything else is up for grabs. Looks, hair colour, personality. Know that Bob Dylan song, ‘But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’? Like that.” Throughout his speech, she watched his smile become less forced, until he was almost the man she’d first encountered lying in a hospital bed, eyes full of mischief and adventure.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s horrible. So I’m very grateful to you for getting my hearts going again, that last time. I really didn’t want to go through it all again, just yet.”
“You could have changed your body? Right in front of me?”
“You wouldn’t be the first person it’s happened to,” he said. “It’s not easy, convincing people it’s still me in there. Last time…….”
He stopped. He’d obviously decided against mentioning Rose’s name again. Nothing was more obvious, Martha thought, silently, than a bloke in love pretending that he wasn’t.
Now she really didn’t want to go home. Never mind that she was ravenous, her feet were killing her, and she had a nasty, crawling sensation on her skin which was making her fear the worst about that Elizabethan bed she’d dropped off in. She was sitting on medical dynamite here. Was there any polite way to say, “Please may I scan you and write it up?” Not to someone as intelligent as him.
He’d decided to change the subject. “I could show you around if you like,” he proposed. “Oh.” He paused and tugged at his hair. “I’m sorry. When did you last eat? You must be starving.”
“That lump of bread at the inn,” she reminded him. And that hadn’t been exactly appetizing. She wasn’t going to turn down a peek at the TARDIS kitchen, though she dreaded to think when it had last crossed his mind to do the washing up.
“Right, then. Dinnertime.” He took her hand and led her over to the opposite side of the room, and sure enough, a door appeared without so much as a one-word incantation.
“There,” he announced, happily. “Platform nine and three-quarters in space, and you don’t even have to push a luggage trolley through it. Told you so.”
***********
He rustled up an omelette for her, cracking eggs one-handed by applying his thumbnail to precisely the right pressure point on the shell. Once you got used to the fact that they came out red instead of yellow, and were from a bird that didn’t even exist on Earth, it wasn’t bad at all. The salad was fresh and he put together a tasty dressing with a practiced hand, chatting easily all the while.
He was very independent. He’d had to be, she supposed. It was clear that scrounging spare parts from the most unlikely sources and using them to repair the TARDIS was somewhere between a never-ending worry and an all-absorbing hobby for him. One of those worth-his-weight-in-gold blokes who could find a workaround for any problem if you left him on his own for long enough.
He loved his ship with a passion that he didn’t bother hiding or apologizing for. They were a job lot; you couldn’t have one without the other. He hadn’t fallen apart when his planet had blown up, or even when Rose had left him, but she had the feeling that if you took the TARDIS away he wouldn’t last five minutes. After they’d eaten, he showed her around, his face glowing with pride, and she knew it was a substitute for showing her Gallifrey. Was Gallifrey - all that was left of it.
“Why does the TARDIS look like a blue box?” she asked.
“Oh, that was because her chameleon circuit got stuck.”
“Her what?”
“The circuit that changes her shape, so she can blend in anywhere. It got stuck,” he repeated, “so she went in for repair. But nobody could fix it, so she was going to be scrapped. Until I showed up. I wanted to leave home, and nobody would let me, because they knew me well enough to know that once I saw things, I’d start wanting to change them. To interfere. And that wasn’t allowed.”
“You ran away?” He’d made his planet sound like such a paradise; that came as a surprise.
“Well, sort of,” he admitted. “Nobody else wanted her. Nobody else wanted me, not until I grew up and got all that stuff out of my system. We were a good fit.”
She laughed. “Most people get a big mother ship and little green men. I get a joyrider drop out in a ship he fixed up himself.”
From the smile he gave her as he leaned against the wall and looked at her, she guessed that he regarded that as a bit of a compliment. “Yes,” he agreed. “I’m the kind of bloke your mother warned you about.”
That mention of her mum brought her back down to earth with a bump. She was already picking up vibes from him that, despite his pride and devotion to her, a lot of things about the TARDIS worked in fits and starts, at best. What if he didn’t manage to return her home at the right time? Suppose she’d disappeared for months? How on earth would she explain all this?
“My mum’s got enough on her plate without worrying about who I’m seeing,” she sighed, as much to reassure herself as him.
“Like your dad?” he asked.
She was surprised that he’d been so perceptive. On the other hand, you’d need to be fairly dense not to figure out some of the problem, at least, from the fight he’d overheard at Leo’s party. “Yeah, my Dad,” she sighed. “Midlife crisis on wheels, he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with Anneliese, except she’s got a brain you could fit in a Petri dish and she’s wrecked my parents’ marriage. Apart from that, really nice person, you know? Believes everything she reads in the Daily Mail, including aliens don’t exist.”
He raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Maybe she was scuba-diving that day.”
Somehow, she just knew he was referring to Canary Wharf. He didn’t need to say it. He’d been there, she remembered. She wondered who with.
“The worst thing about it was not really knowing what happened to Adeola,” she said, her eyes far away and not really seeing him. “They wouldn’t release the body, wouldn’t say a thing. We just couldn’t get any closure. And we weren’t the only ones, they did it to hundreds of people who were there. All classified. They even tried to close the survivors’ support groups on the Internet down. I think if we just knew what had bloody well happened, we could start to live with it. You know?”
He did know, she thought. He’d lost people - oh, so many people. How could he care about one human being? Selfish of her to say all that, really.
He pulled up a chair and sat down on it, backwards, folding his arms across the top. He looked like someone on a permanent adolescent growth spurt, Martha thought, sleeves and trousers riding up whenever he sat down, revealing long inches of pale skin and hands with stubby nails, ingrained with dust and engine grease. He worked hard.
“I was there,” he said. “I was right with her when she died.” He gave her a moment to take the news in, and she got the feeling that he was no stranger to conversations of this sort. “It’s not a nice story,” he went on. “I can see why they thought you’d rather not know.”
“I’m practically a doctor,” she said quietly. “I’d always rather know.”
He sighed. “She was probably the first one to die that day. Somehow, she’d found a Cyberman inside the building. Know those things that people thought were ghosts? They weren’t. Ghosts don’t leave footprints. They’d been trickling in for months, just one or two at first, and then it suddenly went critical. Because once they can get hold of a few people, get into their minds, they can programme them to follow orders. That’s how they opened the hole between your world and theirs, enough to let an army through. An army of ghosts. If only they had been.”
He looked very tired. He’d seen far too much.
“I tried to save your cousin,” he said. “If I could have got that thing out of her brain, and made her how she was before, I’d have done it like a shot. But by the time I got to her, she was as good as dead. I took it out, and half her tissue came with it. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, which was a load of rubbish really. “Main thing is you tried.”
“Jackie thought I’d killed her,” he said.
“Who was Jackie?”
“Rose’s mum.”
“You were in Canary Wharf with Rose’s mum?”
“Yeah, we got on quite well, when she wasn’t slapping my face,” he said. “To be fair, that was only the one time, and I’d deserved it. I was a bit late getting Rose back home. I’d said twelve hours. It was twelve months. Won’t make the same mistake with you.”
He plastered on a smile. Nothing could have said the truth more clearly. Somehow, then she knew. Canary Wharf was where he’d lost her.
“Did she die?” she asked.
“What, Jackie? Oh no, that all worked out really well. See, Rose’s dad had died when she was a baby, but then we found he was still alive in a parallel universe, and we managed to get them back together, and Rose went with them, so she’s better off than she’s ever been and for once I got something right……”
He looked down and avoided her eyes.
“Is it true there were Daleks around that day?” Martha asked.
He nodded. “Thousands of them. My people locked them in a prison ship, another bigger on the inside job. They got it open, and in those few minutes before I stopped them, they killed about two thousand innocent people. Far more than the Cybermen. I’m surprised you even knew about it.”
“You can find out a lot on the Internet. But you don’t always know if it’s true.”
“That was.”
“So what happened?” she asked. “How did you stop them when last time…..Where did they go?”
“Back into the Void. The space between the parallel worlds, where we’d banished them before. I opened up the breach one last time, they all got pulled in, I closed it……”
“On your own?” she gasped. That sounded like a full day, even for him.
The words cut through him like a knife. “No. Rose was there,” he replied. “She helped. We were a team. Mutt and Jeff. Shiver and Shake.”
He stopped talking. This time the raw pain in his eyes wasn’t softened by any happy memories.
“She couldn’t hold on,” he said. “Her dad pulled her through. So at least she’s alive. She’s not stuck in the Void. She’s happy. Doing well.”
She wondered how he knew that, but she didn’t like to ask. “Can’t you go back for her?” she said.
He shook his head. “Not without letting all the Daleks back in, and then your planet would go the way mine did. No, it’s closed. It has to stay that way. We’ll never meet again.”
“Oh my God,” she murmured. “You did that for us. For someone else’s stupid planet.”
He stood up quickly. “Please, don’t say that.” And she knew she’d said enough.
****************
Eventually, even her experience of the rigours of one-to-one rotations couldn’t stop her eyes from closing any more. She’d had barely three hours’ sleep since he’d appeared on that street corner - two days ago, or maybe three? Time had never seemed quite so elastic as it was here. She didn’t want to offend him by nodding off while he was in mid-flight, or raise the delicate matter of bed, but ultimately a loud yawn took care of the problem for her.
“Why don’t you make yourself at home in here, and we’ll decide what to do in the morning?” he suggested.
He showed her into a spacious spare bedroom, decorated exactly to her taste. “Bathroom’s in here. Use the sanitize button on the shower, just in case. I try never to stay the night anywhere older than twentieth century, but needs must sometimes. It’s all done by pulse control, kills every known creepy-crawly and you won’t feel a thing. Leave your clothes in the chute and she’ll have ‘em washed for you by morning. Oh, hang on a minute. Pyjamas.”
He sprinted down the corridor and returned with a blue-and-white striped pair, probably the one he’d worn in the hospital. “Yours?” she asked.
“I don’t sleep much,” he said. She decided not to ask if he had anything more feminine. “If you find a Satsuma in the pocket, let me know. I saved the world with a Satsuma once. You never know when they might come in useful.” He grinned as he poked his head around the door. “Nighty-night.”
Business as usual, she thought. Back to the dorky grin and the silly business with the shoes. Two days ago, I thought that was it. All there was to him. All I really cared about was getting him to fancy me - and if I’m honest, a lot of that was so I could brag about it to my friends.
He fancied Rose. He more than fancied her, he loved her. Then he gave her up to save our world, and no-one even thanked him. When had that been in the papers, or on TV? Back home, you got awards for being the most popular character in a soap opera, not for stuff like that.
Back home. She didn’t want to go - in some ways, the whole idea disgusted her. Once it had seemed like the most important thing you could do with your life, to become a doctor and save others. You didn’t think about all the people who were ill because they’d refused to give up smoking or stuffing pizza, or beating each other up and getting covered in vomit on Saturday nights. And he hadn’t just fought the Daleks for the clever people, the noble people like himself. He’d done it for those idiots, too.
She’d agreed to come along for the excitement and the ride - who wouldn’t? And okay, the way he’d looked at her when she came out of the pub had helped. He certainly knew how to pick up the women, even if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them once they were installed. If anyone had asked her a few hours ago, she’d have said she couldn’t handle that. Him and her - that had been what the whole thing was about. But now it wasn’t. It wasn’t even just about looking after him, or being useful. It was about the bigger picture. Wars with the whole of creation at stake. Realising all that you’d taken for granted. Your planet, your people, your whole way of life. Someone had been defending it, and she had never known.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” she said, before he disappeared completely.
He assumed she meant the accommodation. “Oh, the TARDIS handles all of that,” he said. “Part of the service.”
“Not that.” She watched his mouth drop open in mild surprise, and found she couldn’t begin to articulate the thoughts in her mind. “How do you thank someone for saving your world?” she asked. “Know any books that cover that?”
“It wasn’t the first time,” he said. “I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Sleep well.”
And with that, he was gone.
*************
The following morning, washed and brushed in his bright blue suit, he asked her where she’d like to go. “Since the last choice was such a disaster,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she remarked. “There were some good things about it.”
“If getting attacked by killer crabs is what you’re into,” he said, avoiding her eyes as he handed her a cup of coffee. She already knew he hardly ever touched the stuff himself, but she noticed he’d already perfected her preferred morning brew. Or maybe the TARDIS had. She was actually starting to believe this stuff now. The pile of freshly laundered clothes by her bedside that morning had convinced her. Unlikely though his claims were, they were slightly easier to swallow than the mental picture of him loading up a washing machine himself in the TARDIS basement.
He’s the most privileged person I’ve ever met, she thought. In some ways. And in other ways the most lost. He’s lonely in a way that I can hardly begin to contemplate. He might never have to worry his head about housework, but he’s probably been up all night worrying about something that nobody else in the universe will be able to fix if he can’t find a way to do it.
“Feel better now?” he asked, flashing her a quick smile.
“Oh yes, thanks,” she agreed. “Good night’s sleep, shower, that was all I needed.”
“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,” he quoted. “Good old Shakespeare. That was good fun, wasn’t it? Haven’t enjoyed myself that much for quite a while.” Silently, he pushed a box of cornflakes across the kitchen table towards her. “So, where to?”
“Does that mean I’m staying?” she asked. The question scared her silly, but she’d known from the moment she’d pulled up that chair on New Earth that it was the only way to deal with him, and that he respected it.
“Dunno,” he shrugged. “It’s your life.”
“It’s your TARDIS.”
“What about your family?” he asked. “Your exams?”
“You did say it travelled in time.” He’d also said only one trip, but he’d not been in any hurry to remind her of that, yesterday.
“The longer you leave it, the harder it is to go back to where you were before,” he said. “I’ve travelled with a lot of people, and most of them said that to me.”
“Who wants to be normal?” she asked, “when you can see the bigger picture?”
He liked that, she was confident, but that didn’t mean he was won over yet. “Normal’s good,” he said. “That’s why I do what I do. So that people can go on living normal lives, without getting invaded and terrorized and massacred. It’s better that people don’t know.”
Martha stared him out across the table. “But once you know, you know,” she said. “There isn’t any going back.”
He didn’t reply for a minute. Then he said, “I like you, Martha Jones. I think you know that. I’m not looking for any replacements, but I think you might be good for me. But in the end, that’s not your job.”
That was probably a no, she reckoned. She stood up. “Well, at least I won’t have any packing to do.”
“Fancy one more trip?” he asked.
She sat down again, trying not to grin from ear to ear. “Okay,” she said.
“Then home,” he added. “Talk to your family. Have a think. Cancel the milk. Do people still get milk delivered in London these days, or am I a bit old fashioned?”
“I always fancied New York,” she said. “The real New York.”
“There are twenty-eight New Yorks in the Milky Way alone,” he pointed out. “And you still haven’t answered my question. There used to be a brilliant advert on the TV about a milkman on his round being followed by lots of little pintas.”
“I think that was a bit before my time,” she said.
“Oh well,” he said. “That’s a Time Lord for you.” He stood up, leaving his breakfast dishes on the table.
“Does she do that as well?” Martha asked.
“Do what?”
“The washing up?”
“She gives me a hard time sometimes if I don’t put them in the sink,” he replied, and she wasn’t entirely sure if he was kidding. “Right, then. 1930’s good. If you don’t mind the Hoovervilles. The year the Empire State Building opened, that’s worth a look.” Halfway to the door, he stopped and winked.
“And if you see a giant gorilla,” he added, “Run.”
AUTHOR: sensiblecat
LENGTH: 4281 words
RATING: FRC
SHOW/SPOILERS DW3 up to “Gridlock”
CHARACTERS: Ten, Martha, the TARDIS, Rose
SUMMARY : After “Gridlock” Martha sees many things differently, particularly the TARDIS
Martha followed the Doctor into the TARDIS, noticing the old-fashioned coat stand beside the door for the first time as he shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto one of the hooks. He was obviously practiced at doing it; he didn’t need to glance for it to land in precisely the right spot. After all that talking, they’d both fallen silent; she was struggling to take in what he’d told her, and he was probably a little bit shocked that he’d said so much. She didn’t know him well enough to probe any further, and she waited for him to flip a switch and announce that he was taking her home. In fact, she’d already picked up enough experience to reach for the nearest strut and brace herself against the shock wave. Either his driving, or the suspension on this thing, was diabolical.
He was looking down, avoiding her eyes, knob-twiddling like he had been when she’d asked about the Planet of the Time Lords. It seemed like a conversation with someone else, already hundreds of years in the past.
“Well,” he said, after a moment. “I suppose it’s time I took you home.”
She wondered how she was supposed to answer that. There’d certainly be some good things about going home. Being surrounded by her family, her friends, her routine. Being able to have a shower, change her undies, grab a bite to eat. None of those human needs seemed to be on his radar. He must eat something now and then, he must need to rest, but there was no sign of him ever doing either in the room they were in. Maybe he had a little bachelor pad somewhere, or he used to live with Rose, before he lost her to some mysterious fate he wouldn’t discuss, something that involved her being fine and with her family, and him in a state of badly-hidden mourning. He must be fairly high-maintenance, Martha reflected, having gone through all that. He wasn’t the type that things simply rolled off, even if he liked to give that impression. Maybe all that, plus the alien bit, had been too much for Rose to deal with. Yes, that was probably it. He needed a more mature woman. Or nobody. Or far more than anyone could provide.
If she was going home anyway, she reasoned, it couldn’t do her any harm to ask a few more questions. She was getting better at picking up the “Don’t go there” signals when she overstepped the mark. Like saying, “You’ve got me.” He hadn’t liked that. Not one bit.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
He froze in mid-twiddle and she saw a ripple of tension stiffen his arm through his sleeve. “Course I do,” he said, breezily. “Where else would I live?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you might live in a house or something, just park it in the garden for when you fancy going somewhere.”
“No,” he said. “Never cared for houses, me. I’m always on the move. And the TARDIS isn’t an it, she’s a she.”
Of course, Martha thought. Tradition, wasn’t it? God bless her and all who sail in her. Yet she had the feeling, from his tone of voice and the way his fingers trailed over the dashboard, almost caressing it, that there was more to it than that.
She looked around at the knobbly walls. She’d never seen anything less like her imagined concept of a spaceship. If anyone had said, last week, “An alien’s going to pick you up and give you a lift in his ship,” she’d have imagined somewhere like the USS Enterprise, all swishing doors, white walls and discreet blinking lights. Rather like a hospital, in fact. This place, on the other hand, had an organic feel to it. Random, verging on chaotic, quirky, very individual. Of course he lived here. How could it be otherwise? But what puzzled her was the mechanics of it. There only seemed to be this room; it was nearly as bad as the glorified camper vans people lived in on New Earth.
He must have noticed that she’d been staring at the place for longer than was polite. “You going to stand there all day?” he asked.
“There isn’t any door,” she noted. “Apart from the one we came in through. ”
“So?” he demanded. “Got a problem with that? If you want a door, she’ll make one for you. If you tell her what room you want, she’ll probably park it just on the other side, or at least the right end of the corridor. She’s not going to waste energy leaving stuff around that no-one’s going to use.”
Martha’s mouth dropped open. “You talk about her as if she’s alive,” she gasped, wondering if he’d gone completely round the bed from being on his own too much.
“She is.” He seemed to be looking at her without any trace of awkwardness, so her only reasonable choice was to believe him. “Actually, no. It’s more accurate to call her sentient.”
“She’s got feelings?”
“Intelligence, definitely. It’s called the Imprimitur. Every TARDIS chooses - chose - the Time Lord she wanted to bond with, and then it develops over the centuries into a kind of symbiosis.”
Martha hadn’t missed his rapid correction into his past tense. Or that word “centuries.” “So, it’s like a father-to-son thing?”
“No.” His brown eyes, which were really rather beautiful in a way that didn’t necessarily lead to her actually fancying him - theoretically, at least - were fixed very intently on her now, and his smile was beginning to reach them. “That’s just how long we live. I’m nearly a thousand years old.”
“You live for ever?” Oh bugger, she’d put her foot in it there, she realised with a sinking heart. All the other Time Lords were dead - very dead - even if he did keep talking about them as if they weren’t. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He didn’t acknowledge her faux-pas, though she was sure he hadn’t missed it.
“Barring accidents, or disasters, we regenerate up to twelve times,” he explained. “Our bodies are completely renewed. Gender stays constant. Well, usually. Everything else is up for grabs. Looks, hair colour, personality. Know that Bob Dylan song, ‘But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’? Like that.” Throughout his speech, she watched his smile become less forced, until he was almost the man she’d first encountered lying in a hospital bed, eyes full of mischief and adventure.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s horrible. So I’m very grateful to you for getting my hearts going again, that last time. I really didn’t want to go through it all again, just yet.”
“You could have changed your body? Right in front of me?”
“You wouldn’t be the first person it’s happened to,” he said. “It’s not easy, convincing people it’s still me in there. Last time…….”
He stopped. He’d obviously decided against mentioning Rose’s name again. Nothing was more obvious, Martha thought, silently, than a bloke in love pretending that he wasn’t.
Now she really didn’t want to go home. Never mind that she was ravenous, her feet were killing her, and she had a nasty, crawling sensation on her skin which was making her fear the worst about that Elizabethan bed she’d dropped off in. She was sitting on medical dynamite here. Was there any polite way to say, “Please may I scan you and write it up?” Not to someone as intelligent as him.
He’d decided to change the subject. “I could show you around if you like,” he proposed. “Oh.” He paused and tugged at his hair. “I’m sorry. When did you last eat? You must be starving.”
“That lump of bread at the inn,” she reminded him. And that hadn’t been exactly appetizing. She wasn’t going to turn down a peek at the TARDIS kitchen, though she dreaded to think when it had last crossed his mind to do the washing up.
“Right, then. Dinnertime.” He took her hand and led her over to the opposite side of the room, and sure enough, a door appeared without so much as a one-word incantation.
“There,” he announced, happily. “Platform nine and three-quarters in space, and you don’t even have to push a luggage trolley through it. Told you so.”
***********
He rustled up an omelette for her, cracking eggs one-handed by applying his thumbnail to precisely the right pressure point on the shell. Once you got used to the fact that they came out red instead of yellow, and were from a bird that didn’t even exist on Earth, it wasn’t bad at all. The salad was fresh and he put together a tasty dressing with a practiced hand, chatting easily all the while.
He was very independent. He’d had to be, she supposed. It was clear that scrounging spare parts from the most unlikely sources and using them to repair the TARDIS was somewhere between a never-ending worry and an all-absorbing hobby for him. One of those worth-his-weight-in-gold blokes who could find a workaround for any problem if you left him on his own for long enough.
He loved his ship with a passion that he didn’t bother hiding or apologizing for. They were a job lot; you couldn’t have one without the other. He hadn’t fallen apart when his planet had blown up, or even when Rose had left him, but she had the feeling that if you took the TARDIS away he wouldn’t last five minutes. After they’d eaten, he showed her around, his face glowing with pride, and she knew it was a substitute for showing her Gallifrey. Was Gallifrey - all that was left of it.
“Why does the TARDIS look like a blue box?” she asked.
“Oh, that was because her chameleon circuit got stuck.”
“Her what?”
“The circuit that changes her shape, so she can blend in anywhere. It got stuck,” he repeated, “so she went in for repair. But nobody could fix it, so she was going to be scrapped. Until I showed up. I wanted to leave home, and nobody would let me, because they knew me well enough to know that once I saw things, I’d start wanting to change them. To interfere. And that wasn’t allowed.”
“You ran away?” He’d made his planet sound like such a paradise; that came as a surprise.
“Well, sort of,” he admitted. “Nobody else wanted her. Nobody else wanted me, not until I grew up and got all that stuff out of my system. We were a good fit.”
She laughed. “Most people get a big mother ship and little green men. I get a joyrider drop out in a ship he fixed up himself.”
From the smile he gave her as he leaned against the wall and looked at her, she guessed that he regarded that as a bit of a compliment. “Yes,” he agreed. “I’m the kind of bloke your mother warned you about.”
That mention of her mum brought her back down to earth with a bump. She was already picking up vibes from him that, despite his pride and devotion to her, a lot of things about the TARDIS worked in fits and starts, at best. What if he didn’t manage to return her home at the right time? Suppose she’d disappeared for months? How on earth would she explain all this?
“My mum’s got enough on her plate without worrying about who I’m seeing,” she sighed, as much to reassure herself as him.
“Like your dad?” he asked.
She was surprised that he’d been so perceptive. On the other hand, you’d need to be fairly dense not to figure out some of the problem, at least, from the fight he’d overheard at Leo’s party. “Yeah, my Dad,” she sighed. “Midlife crisis on wheels, he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with Anneliese, except she’s got a brain you could fit in a Petri dish and she’s wrecked my parents’ marriage. Apart from that, really nice person, you know? Believes everything she reads in the Daily Mail, including aliens don’t exist.”
He raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Maybe she was scuba-diving that day.”
Somehow, she just knew he was referring to Canary Wharf. He didn’t need to say it. He’d been there, she remembered. She wondered who with.
“The worst thing about it was not really knowing what happened to Adeola,” she said, her eyes far away and not really seeing him. “They wouldn’t release the body, wouldn’t say a thing. We just couldn’t get any closure. And we weren’t the only ones, they did it to hundreds of people who were there. All classified. They even tried to close the survivors’ support groups on the Internet down. I think if we just knew what had bloody well happened, we could start to live with it. You know?”
He did know, she thought. He’d lost people - oh, so many people. How could he care about one human being? Selfish of her to say all that, really.
He pulled up a chair and sat down on it, backwards, folding his arms across the top. He looked like someone on a permanent adolescent growth spurt, Martha thought, sleeves and trousers riding up whenever he sat down, revealing long inches of pale skin and hands with stubby nails, ingrained with dust and engine grease. He worked hard.
“I was there,” he said. “I was right with her when she died.” He gave her a moment to take the news in, and she got the feeling that he was no stranger to conversations of this sort. “It’s not a nice story,” he went on. “I can see why they thought you’d rather not know.”
“I’m practically a doctor,” she said quietly. “I’d always rather know.”
He sighed. “She was probably the first one to die that day. Somehow, she’d found a Cyberman inside the building. Know those things that people thought were ghosts? They weren’t. Ghosts don’t leave footprints. They’d been trickling in for months, just one or two at first, and then it suddenly went critical. Because once they can get hold of a few people, get into their minds, they can programme them to follow orders. That’s how they opened the hole between your world and theirs, enough to let an army through. An army of ghosts. If only they had been.”
He looked very tired. He’d seen far too much.
“I tried to save your cousin,” he said. “If I could have got that thing out of her brain, and made her how she was before, I’d have done it like a shot. But by the time I got to her, she was as good as dead. I took it out, and half her tissue came with it. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, which was a load of rubbish really. “Main thing is you tried.”
“Jackie thought I’d killed her,” he said.
“Who was Jackie?”
“Rose’s mum.”
“You were in Canary Wharf with Rose’s mum?”
“Yeah, we got on quite well, when she wasn’t slapping my face,” he said. “To be fair, that was only the one time, and I’d deserved it. I was a bit late getting Rose back home. I’d said twelve hours. It was twelve months. Won’t make the same mistake with you.”
He plastered on a smile. Nothing could have said the truth more clearly. Somehow, then she knew. Canary Wharf was where he’d lost her.
“Did she die?” she asked.
“What, Jackie? Oh no, that all worked out really well. See, Rose’s dad had died when she was a baby, but then we found he was still alive in a parallel universe, and we managed to get them back together, and Rose went with them, so she’s better off than she’s ever been and for once I got something right……”
He looked down and avoided her eyes.
“Is it true there were Daleks around that day?” Martha asked.
He nodded. “Thousands of them. My people locked them in a prison ship, another bigger on the inside job. They got it open, and in those few minutes before I stopped them, they killed about two thousand innocent people. Far more than the Cybermen. I’m surprised you even knew about it.”
“You can find out a lot on the Internet. But you don’t always know if it’s true.”
“That was.”
“So what happened?” she asked. “How did you stop them when last time…..Where did they go?”
“Back into the Void. The space between the parallel worlds, where we’d banished them before. I opened up the breach one last time, they all got pulled in, I closed it……”
“On your own?” she gasped. That sounded like a full day, even for him.
The words cut through him like a knife. “No. Rose was there,” he replied. “She helped. We were a team. Mutt and Jeff. Shiver and Shake.”
He stopped talking. This time the raw pain in his eyes wasn’t softened by any happy memories.
“She couldn’t hold on,” he said. “Her dad pulled her through. So at least she’s alive. She’s not stuck in the Void. She’s happy. Doing well.”
She wondered how he knew that, but she didn’t like to ask. “Can’t you go back for her?” she said.
He shook his head. “Not without letting all the Daleks back in, and then your planet would go the way mine did. No, it’s closed. It has to stay that way. We’ll never meet again.”
“Oh my God,” she murmured. “You did that for us. For someone else’s stupid planet.”
He stood up quickly. “Please, don’t say that.” And she knew she’d said enough.
****************
Eventually, even her experience of the rigours of one-to-one rotations couldn’t stop her eyes from closing any more. She’d had barely three hours’ sleep since he’d appeared on that street corner - two days ago, or maybe three? Time had never seemed quite so elastic as it was here. She didn’t want to offend him by nodding off while he was in mid-flight, or raise the delicate matter of bed, but ultimately a loud yawn took care of the problem for her.
“Why don’t you make yourself at home in here, and we’ll decide what to do in the morning?” he suggested.
He showed her into a spacious spare bedroom, decorated exactly to her taste. “Bathroom’s in here. Use the sanitize button on the shower, just in case. I try never to stay the night anywhere older than twentieth century, but needs must sometimes. It’s all done by pulse control, kills every known creepy-crawly and you won’t feel a thing. Leave your clothes in the chute and she’ll have ‘em washed for you by morning. Oh, hang on a minute. Pyjamas.”
He sprinted down the corridor and returned with a blue-and-white striped pair, probably the one he’d worn in the hospital. “Yours?” she asked.
“I don’t sleep much,” he said. She decided not to ask if he had anything more feminine. “If you find a Satsuma in the pocket, let me know. I saved the world with a Satsuma once. You never know when they might come in useful.” He grinned as he poked his head around the door. “Nighty-night.”
Business as usual, she thought. Back to the dorky grin and the silly business with the shoes. Two days ago, I thought that was it. All there was to him. All I really cared about was getting him to fancy me - and if I’m honest, a lot of that was so I could brag about it to my friends.
He fancied Rose. He more than fancied her, he loved her. Then he gave her up to save our world, and no-one even thanked him. When had that been in the papers, or on TV? Back home, you got awards for being the most popular character in a soap opera, not for stuff like that.
Back home. She didn’t want to go - in some ways, the whole idea disgusted her. Once it had seemed like the most important thing you could do with your life, to become a doctor and save others. You didn’t think about all the people who were ill because they’d refused to give up smoking or stuffing pizza, or beating each other up and getting covered in vomit on Saturday nights. And he hadn’t just fought the Daleks for the clever people, the noble people like himself. He’d done it for those idiots, too.
She’d agreed to come along for the excitement and the ride - who wouldn’t? And okay, the way he’d looked at her when she came out of the pub had helped. He certainly knew how to pick up the women, even if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them once they were installed. If anyone had asked her a few hours ago, she’d have said she couldn’t handle that. Him and her - that had been what the whole thing was about. But now it wasn’t. It wasn’t even just about looking after him, or being useful. It was about the bigger picture. Wars with the whole of creation at stake. Realising all that you’d taken for granted. Your planet, your people, your whole way of life. Someone had been defending it, and she had never known.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” she said, before he disappeared completely.
He assumed she meant the accommodation. “Oh, the TARDIS handles all of that,” he said. “Part of the service.”
“Not that.” She watched his mouth drop open in mild surprise, and found she couldn’t begin to articulate the thoughts in her mind. “How do you thank someone for saving your world?” she asked. “Know any books that cover that?”
“It wasn’t the first time,” he said. “I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Sleep well.”
And with that, he was gone.
*************
The following morning, washed and brushed in his bright blue suit, he asked her where she’d like to go. “Since the last choice was such a disaster,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she remarked. “There were some good things about it.”
“If getting attacked by killer crabs is what you’re into,” he said, avoiding her eyes as he handed her a cup of coffee. She already knew he hardly ever touched the stuff himself, but she noticed he’d already perfected her preferred morning brew. Or maybe the TARDIS had. She was actually starting to believe this stuff now. The pile of freshly laundered clothes by her bedside that morning had convinced her. Unlikely though his claims were, they were slightly easier to swallow than the mental picture of him loading up a washing machine himself in the TARDIS basement.
He’s the most privileged person I’ve ever met, she thought. In some ways. And in other ways the most lost. He’s lonely in a way that I can hardly begin to contemplate. He might never have to worry his head about housework, but he’s probably been up all night worrying about something that nobody else in the universe will be able to fix if he can’t find a way to do it.
“Feel better now?” he asked, flashing her a quick smile.
“Oh yes, thanks,” she agreed. “Good night’s sleep, shower, that was all I needed.”
“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,” he quoted. “Good old Shakespeare. That was good fun, wasn’t it? Haven’t enjoyed myself that much for quite a while.” Silently, he pushed a box of cornflakes across the kitchen table towards her. “So, where to?”
“Does that mean I’m staying?” she asked. The question scared her silly, but she’d known from the moment she’d pulled up that chair on New Earth that it was the only way to deal with him, and that he respected it.
“Dunno,” he shrugged. “It’s your life.”
“It’s your TARDIS.”
“What about your family?” he asked. “Your exams?”
“You did say it travelled in time.” He’d also said only one trip, but he’d not been in any hurry to remind her of that, yesterday.
“The longer you leave it, the harder it is to go back to where you were before,” he said. “I’ve travelled with a lot of people, and most of them said that to me.”
“Who wants to be normal?” she asked, “when you can see the bigger picture?”
He liked that, she was confident, but that didn’t mean he was won over yet. “Normal’s good,” he said. “That’s why I do what I do. So that people can go on living normal lives, without getting invaded and terrorized and massacred. It’s better that people don’t know.”
Martha stared him out across the table. “But once you know, you know,” she said. “There isn’t any going back.”
He didn’t reply for a minute. Then he said, “I like you, Martha Jones. I think you know that. I’m not looking for any replacements, but I think you might be good for me. But in the end, that’s not your job.”
That was probably a no, she reckoned. She stood up. “Well, at least I won’t have any packing to do.”
“Fancy one more trip?” he asked.
She sat down again, trying not to grin from ear to ear. “Okay,” she said.
“Then home,” he added. “Talk to your family. Have a think. Cancel the milk. Do people still get milk delivered in London these days, or am I a bit old fashioned?”
“I always fancied New York,” she said. “The real New York.”
“There are twenty-eight New Yorks in the Milky Way alone,” he pointed out. “And you still haven’t answered my question. There used to be a brilliant advert on the TV about a milkman on his round being followed by lots of little pintas.”
“I think that was a bit before my time,” she said.
“Oh well,” he said. “That’s a Time Lord for you.” He stood up, leaving his breakfast dishes on the table.
“Does she do that as well?” Martha asked.
“Do what?”
“The washing up?”
“She gives me a hard time sometimes if I don’t put them in the sink,” he replied, and she wasn’t entirely sure if he was kidding. “Right, then. 1930’s good. If you don’t mind the Hoovervilles. The year the Empire State Building opened, that’s worth a look.” Halfway to the door, he stopped and winked.
“And if you see a giant gorilla,” he added, “Run.”