Out of Joint
AUTHOR:
catsfiction
CHARACTERS: Jack, Martha, Tenth Doctor, the Saxons
SPOILERS: LOTTL
RATING: G. A few swear words.
xp'd to
dwliterotica
dwfiction and Teaspoon
DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction based on characters and situations owned by the BBC. No personal profit is intended.
CREDITS: First I'd like to thank everyone who responded so positively to my last story. The illustration is by
cazthehobbit
A kind of companion piece to "The Fall of a Sparrow", this looks at the emotional fallout from LOTTL from Jack and Martha's perspective.
With all my love I do commend me to you:
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Hamlet Act 1 Scene V
Four-wheel drive wouldn’t take them any further and the teleport would get them noticed. The two of them stood propped against the vehicle, fighting off tiredness and staring up at the stony, winding path, already losing definition in the rapidly fading light.
Martha wrapped her arms around her and hopped around to offset the chill of the biting wind. “He is not bloody going through that on his own,” she declared.
Jack didn’t need to ask her what she was talking about. The two of them had spent an agonizing day watching the Doctor wearing himself out dragging branches and kindling up a Welsh mountain in the middle of nowhere, refusing all offers of help. They’d not slept for days and they’d only managed to track down the TARDIS by calling in a lot of favours and using some very non-contemporaneous GPS technology. If he’d seen them, he wasn’t acknowledging it. Probably he hadn’t. There was only room for one person in the Doctor’s universe right now.
“I don’t see how we’re gonna stop him,” said Jack. “We tried the legal argument. We tried the Lucy argument. Far as he’s concerned, this body doesn’t belong to anyone but him.”
“He’ll be bringing him out of the TARDIS any moment.” Martha’s voice was a flat monotone, all the colour leached from it by exhaustion and despair. “Jack, we can’t just leave him. He could do anything. He’s the worst case of PSTD I’ve ever seen.”
Jack shrugged, but his shoulders went on looking tight under his coat and Martha wasn’t fooled.
“He could do anything anyway,” he sighed. “And the awful thing is, he probably will. Why d’you think I’ve spent the last two days in session with UNIT and what’s left of the Cabinet?”
“I thought that was to arrange a state funeral without a body?”
“Not just that.”
“Lucy ought to be here,” Martha said, angrily. “Or at least she should have had the choice.”
“Oh come on. She shot him.” Lucy was on suicide watch at a private clinic in the Swiss Alps. Her family were being debriefed by Valiant survivors. Jack was on standby with a Retcon usage licence, should they decide to go that particular route.
“She needs closure more than anybody,” Martha said.
Jack looked over and pondered putting out a hand to comfort her. He’d never been the kind to hold back from physical contact with a good-looking potential partner, but there was something almost robotic about Martha’s appearance at the moment. It only went skin deep, but it was all she had. That illusion of control - not a hair out of place, not a streak of dirt anywhere. How the hell had she done it? She’d been on the run in a wasteland for the last twelve months.
He didn’t know how she’d managed to stay so well-groomed, but he was pretty sure he understood why. Sometimes the big things were so inconceivable, you needed to put the smaller ones in their place to hold yourself together.
On the Valiant, they’d not had that option. They’d not been part of events. For the Doctor, that had been the hardest thing of all to bear.
He’d cried out a lot in the nights. One name, and it hadn’t been Martha’s.
“We have to let him do this,” said Jack. “It’s the only way he’ll ever move on. The way he sees it, he’s the last, he’s responsible, it’s all his fault.”
“That’s crazy,” Martha argued. “If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine. I showed him the bloody watch…..”
Jack sighed. “You can play that kind of game all the way back to the Big Bang, and what good’s it gonna do you? Some of it he brought on himself. There were things he did, back when he was with Rose and he thought nothing could touch him. And I don’t just mean running out on me.”
Martha’s hand came up and combed through her hair. She looked very, very tired. “You know what was the hardest thing for me?” she said, resting her palm against her forehead. “All the mixed messages. I didn’t know if she was dead, or whatever. He tried to get off with me. I don’t care what anybody says about him being an alien and not knowing the effect he has on people. He bloody pulled me, Jack, and he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “The old rebound thing. You deserve better. He never was too good at figuring out what was happening to him emotionally. And Rose…….well, she was very young. Young and scared of losing him.”
Martha pulled a face. “Oh c’mon. You weren’t even around - not once he turned into Mr Come To Bed Eyes.”
“I work for Torchwood. I know the history. He got cocky. Remember Harriet Jones? He brought her down with six words. Pulled apart the timeline he’d predicted himself, just to make a point. If anybody let in Saxon, it was him.”
Martha shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “D’you think Harriet Jones’ll make a comeback?”
“Could be,” said Jack. “If this coalition sticks and they manage to keep the UN Task Force out, she might have a chance.”
“And I wonder where he’ll be by then?” Martha speculated.
Jack hoped she didn’t know him well enough to recognise the shiver of fear that went through him at that question. His Time Agency background had given him a feel for these things - the risk management and the consequences of a foul-up. He knew what the Doctor was capable of. Knew that, already, he’d been back and watched Rose a few times. He’d never admitted it, that wasn’t his way. But when he’d confessed to doing it himself, there’d been that look of recognition in the Doctor’s eyes.
He felt sorry for Martha. Hell, that didn’t begin to cover it.
Reluctantly, he pulled himself back to the moment they were living through right now. “So, what are we gonna do?” he asked.
“Hike up, if he won’t admit we’re here and let us in the TARDIS. It’s nothing to what I’ve done this past year.”
“Better get going, then,” Jack said. “We’re losing the light.”
“We’ll have the firelight,” Martha reminded him.
**********
The goodbyes in Millennium Square were excruciating. Right up to the bitter end, Jack kept hoping there’d be something acknowledged, something honest said, about the reality of what they’d lived through. They needed each other, dammit. He had to go back to what passed for normal in his crazy existence, head up a team that didn’t remember the worst year of his life.
Several times, he was on the point of asking Martha to stay with him, but his conscience wouldn’t let him. He knew from bitter experience that he could function alone with his memories. The Doctor was more powerful, more vulnerable and far more deeply in denial. He needed a minder and only Martha was volunteering for the job.
Besides, there was his team. They mattered, even though every time he’d referred to them, the look in the Doctor’s eyes had suggested that they were nothing more than a hobby to him. One day he’d do it once too often, the patronising bastard, and Jack just might punch him in the face for it. Hell, it wasn’t as if he was prepared to hang around and help out. Someone had to do it.
And that someone always seemed to be him.
He didn’t know why he’d made that dumb joke about the Face of Boe. Probably just a lame attempt to lighten the tone. It was complete hogwash, the whole tale, and he’d just felt like being the one to spin a line for a change. Later, Martha had called him and he’d admitted as much.
“He asked for it,” she said. “Taking your time hopper off you like that. Who the hell does he think he is?”
“The Last of the Time Lords. Anyway, I’ve another back at the Hub. You should come over sometime.”
“Bet he knew that, too. Why can’t someone be honest for a change?”
Jack drummed on his desk. He looked around him, at the familiar walls of his office, the nearest thing he had to a home, and thought about all those years of waiting for the Doctor, until the waiting became an end in itself, and he didn’t stop to think about the meeting him again. Even whether it would solve anything. He just happened to need a reason for living, and that was the best he could come up with at the time.
They were all out there right now, his team. His quasi-family. Ianto with the coffee and the stopwatch routine, Gwen with the big, ‘Tell me everything’ eyes, Owen with the battle armour of sarcasm and dark horse Tosh, apparently so much happier with screens than people. It seemed a lifetime since he’d noticed in surprise how elegant she looked in her 1940s outfit in that Cardiff dance hall with the first “Vote Saxon” posters lurking outside in their contemporary timeline. Yeah, he’d missed them. Desperately at times. But now he couldn’t talk to them, and he missed Martha even more.
“So how is he?” he asked Martha.
“How’s who?”
“The Doctor, of course. Who else?”
There was a pause and he knew what she was going to say before she spoke. “I left,” she said, at last. “I’ve a life here. My family. My medical training. I couldn’t get near him; it was worse than ever, and I’d wasted too much time already.”
She couldn’t be feeling that clinical about it. Not really. A rush of anger caught him unawares - his harsh judgement of himself masquerading as harsh judgement of someone else who’d made the same decision.
“Christ, Martha! The state he was in! Was that really a smart thing to do?”
“He seemed fine when I left him. Even managed to thank me.”
“He always seems fucking fine. That means nothing. I thought you were gonna stick around!”
“Why?” she snapped. “Because I’m the woman? Because it’s my job? You didn’t.”
“I have my team……” He knew the weakness of the argument, but he said it just the same, just keeping the conversation moving at any cost.
“For God’s sake, Jack! He’s a time traveller! The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“But, Martha……” His voice trailed away. He knew he wasn’t being fair. Yeah, he’d waited a hundred and forty years and that was long enough, but it had been his choice. Nobody had asked him to do it, least of all the Doctor. He’d delegated. He’d counted on her loyalty to let him off the hook.
“I’ve done enough,” she said. “I went on the run for a year.” Her voice wobbled. “I’ll never be able to talk about the things I saw. And do you know what he said when we said goodbye? ‘You saved the world. You were good.’ Good!”
Jack closed his eyes and sighed a deep sigh. Dinner at the lovesick café for two, please.
“Okay,” he conceded, at last. “I’m sorry. You did all you could, I know that.”
“I keep waking up in the night,” she said, after a pause. “Mum won’t talk about it. None of them will. They went through enough, they don’t need my memories on top of it. And you know what the really mad thing is? I won’t tell them, because I’m scared it’d make Mum hate him even more. Sometimes I wish I could hate him, Jack. It would make it easier.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. Over the phone, he could hear her crying.
“Wanna come over sometime?” he offered, after a few minutes.
“Okay,” she replied, when she could speak again.
Jack put down the phone and felt - not exactly anticipation, but a certain inevitable relief. This felt right. It might not tomorrow, or the day after when she arrived in Cardiff, or in a year’s time, but right now, it did.
Nay, come, let’s go on together.
catsfiction
CHARACTERS: Jack, Martha, Tenth Doctor, the Saxons
SPOILERS: LOTTL
RATING: G. A few swear words.
xp'd to
dwliterotica
dwfiction and Teaspoon
DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction based on characters and situations owned by the BBC. No personal profit is intended.
CREDITS: First I'd like to thank everyone who responded so positively to my last story. The illustration is by
cazthehobbit
A kind of companion piece to "The Fall of a Sparrow", this looks at the emotional fallout from LOTTL from Jack and Martha's perspective.
With all my love I do commend me to you:
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Hamlet Act 1 Scene V
Four-wheel drive wouldn’t take them any further and the teleport would get them noticed. The two of them stood propped against the vehicle, fighting off tiredness and staring up at the stony, winding path, already losing definition in the rapidly fading light.
Martha wrapped her arms around her and hopped around to offset the chill of the biting wind. “He is not bloody going through that on his own,” she declared.
Jack didn’t need to ask her what she was talking about. The two of them had spent an agonizing day watching the Doctor wearing himself out dragging branches and kindling up a Welsh mountain in the middle of nowhere, refusing all offers of help. They’d not slept for days and they’d only managed to track down the TARDIS by calling in a lot of favours and using some very non-contemporaneous GPS technology. If he’d seen them, he wasn’t acknowledging it. Probably he hadn’t. There was only room for one person in the Doctor’s universe right now.
“I don’t see how we’re gonna stop him,” said Jack. “We tried the legal argument. We tried the Lucy argument. Far as he’s concerned, this body doesn’t belong to anyone but him.”
“He’ll be bringing him out of the TARDIS any moment.” Martha’s voice was a flat monotone, all the colour leached from it by exhaustion and despair. “Jack, we can’t just leave him. He could do anything. He’s the worst case of PSTD I’ve ever seen.”
Jack shrugged, but his shoulders went on looking tight under his coat and Martha wasn’t fooled.
“He could do anything anyway,” he sighed. “And the awful thing is, he probably will. Why d’you think I’ve spent the last two days in session with UNIT and what’s left of the Cabinet?”
“I thought that was to arrange a state funeral without a body?”
“Not just that.”
“Lucy ought to be here,” Martha said, angrily. “Or at least she should have had the choice.”
“Oh come on. She shot him.” Lucy was on suicide watch at a private clinic in the Swiss Alps. Her family were being debriefed by Valiant survivors. Jack was on standby with a Retcon usage licence, should they decide to go that particular route.
“She needs closure more than anybody,” Martha said.
Jack looked over and pondered putting out a hand to comfort her. He’d never been the kind to hold back from physical contact with a good-looking potential partner, but there was something almost robotic about Martha’s appearance at the moment. It only went skin deep, but it was all she had. That illusion of control - not a hair out of place, not a streak of dirt anywhere. How the hell had she done it? She’d been on the run in a wasteland for the last twelve months.
He didn’t know how she’d managed to stay so well-groomed, but he was pretty sure he understood why. Sometimes the big things were so inconceivable, you needed to put the smaller ones in their place to hold yourself together.
On the Valiant, they’d not had that option. They’d not been part of events. For the Doctor, that had been the hardest thing of all to bear.
He’d cried out a lot in the nights. One name, and it hadn’t been Martha’s.
“We have to let him do this,” said Jack. “It’s the only way he’ll ever move on. The way he sees it, he’s the last, he’s responsible, it’s all his fault.”
“That’s crazy,” Martha argued. “If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine. I showed him the bloody watch…..”
Jack sighed. “You can play that kind of game all the way back to the Big Bang, and what good’s it gonna do you? Some of it he brought on himself. There were things he did, back when he was with Rose and he thought nothing could touch him. And I don’t just mean running out on me.”
Martha’s hand came up and combed through her hair. She looked very, very tired. “You know what was the hardest thing for me?” she said, resting her palm against her forehead. “All the mixed messages. I didn’t know if she was dead, or whatever. He tried to get off with me. I don’t care what anybody says about him being an alien and not knowing the effect he has on people. He bloody pulled me, Jack, and he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “The old rebound thing. You deserve better. He never was too good at figuring out what was happening to him emotionally. And Rose…….well, she was very young. Young and scared of losing him.”
Martha pulled a face. “Oh c’mon. You weren’t even around - not once he turned into Mr Come To Bed Eyes.”
“I work for Torchwood. I know the history. He got cocky. Remember Harriet Jones? He brought her down with six words. Pulled apart the timeline he’d predicted himself, just to make a point. If anybody let in Saxon, it was him.”
Martha shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “D’you think Harriet Jones’ll make a comeback?”
“Could be,” said Jack. “If this coalition sticks and they manage to keep the UN Task Force out, she might have a chance.”
“And I wonder where he’ll be by then?” Martha speculated.
Jack hoped she didn’t know him well enough to recognise the shiver of fear that went through him at that question. His Time Agency background had given him a feel for these things - the risk management and the consequences of a foul-up. He knew what the Doctor was capable of. Knew that, already, he’d been back and watched Rose a few times. He’d never admitted it, that wasn’t his way. But when he’d confessed to doing it himself, there’d been that look of recognition in the Doctor’s eyes.
He felt sorry for Martha. Hell, that didn’t begin to cover it.
Reluctantly, he pulled himself back to the moment they were living through right now. “So, what are we gonna do?” he asked.
“Hike up, if he won’t admit we’re here and let us in the TARDIS. It’s nothing to what I’ve done this past year.”
“Better get going, then,” Jack said. “We’re losing the light.”
“We’ll have the firelight,” Martha reminded him.
**********
The goodbyes in Millennium Square were excruciating. Right up to the bitter end, Jack kept hoping there’d be something acknowledged, something honest said, about the reality of what they’d lived through. They needed each other, dammit. He had to go back to what passed for normal in his crazy existence, head up a team that didn’t remember the worst year of his life.
Several times, he was on the point of asking Martha to stay with him, but his conscience wouldn’t let him. He knew from bitter experience that he could function alone with his memories. The Doctor was more powerful, more vulnerable and far more deeply in denial. He needed a minder and only Martha was volunteering for the job.
Besides, there was his team. They mattered, even though every time he’d referred to them, the look in the Doctor’s eyes had suggested that they were nothing more than a hobby to him. One day he’d do it once too often, the patronising bastard, and Jack just might punch him in the face for it. Hell, it wasn’t as if he was prepared to hang around and help out. Someone had to do it.
And that someone always seemed to be him.
He didn’t know why he’d made that dumb joke about the Face of Boe. Probably just a lame attempt to lighten the tone. It was complete hogwash, the whole tale, and he’d just felt like being the one to spin a line for a change. Later, Martha had called him and he’d admitted as much.
“He asked for it,” she said. “Taking your time hopper off you like that. Who the hell does he think he is?”
“The Last of the Time Lords. Anyway, I’ve another back at the Hub. You should come over sometime.”
“Bet he knew that, too. Why can’t someone be honest for a change?”
Jack drummed on his desk. He looked around him, at the familiar walls of his office, the nearest thing he had to a home, and thought about all those years of waiting for the Doctor, until the waiting became an end in itself, and he didn’t stop to think about the meeting him again. Even whether it would solve anything. He just happened to need a reason for living, and that was the best he could come up with at the time.
They were all out there right now, his team. His quasi-family. Ianto with the coffee and the stopwatch routine, Gwen with the big, ‘Tell me everything’ eyes, Owen with the battle armour of sarcasm and dark horse Tosh, apparently so much happier with screens than people. It seemed a lifetime since he’d noticed in surprise how elegant she looked in her 1940s outfit in that Cardiff dance hall with the first “Vote Saxon” posters lurking outside in their contemporary timeline. Yeah, he’d missed them. Desperately at times. But now he couldn’t talk to them, and he missed Martha even more.
“So how is he?” he asked Martha.
“How’s who?”
“The Doctor, of course. Who else?”
There was a pause and he knew what she was going to say before she spoke. “I left,” she said, at last. “I’ve a life here. My family. My medical training. I couldn’t get near him; it was worse than ever, and I’d wasted too much time already.”
She couldn’t be feeling that clinical about it. Not really. A rush of anger caught him unawares - his harsh judgement of himself masquerading as harsh judgement of someone else who’d made the same decision.
“Christ, Martha! The state he was in! Was that really a smart thing to do?”
“He seemed fine when I left him. Even managed to thank me.”
“He always seems fucking fine. That means nothing. I thought you were gonna stick around!”
“Why?” she snapped. “Because I’m the woman? Because it’s my job? You didn’t.”
“I have my team……” He knew the weakness of the argument, but he said it just the same, just keeping the conversation moving at any cost.
“For God’s sake, Jack! He’s a time traveller! The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“But, Martha……” His voice trailed away. He knew he wasn’t being fair. Yeah, he’d waited a hundred and forty years and that was long enough, but it had been his choice. Nobody had asked him to do it, least of all the Doctor. He’d delegated. He’d counted on her loyalty to let him off the hook.
“I’ve done enough,” she said. “I went on the run for a year.” Her voice wobbled. “I’ll never be able to talk about the things I saw. And do you know what he said when we said goodbye? ‘You saved the world. You were good.’ Good!”
Jack closed his eyes and sighed a deep sigh. Dinner at the lovesick café for two, please.
“Okay,” he conceded, at last. “I’m sorry. You did all you could, I know that.”
“I keep waking up in the night,” she said, after a pause. “Mum won’t talk about it. None of them will. They went through enough, they don’t need my memories on top of it. And you know what the really mad thing is? I won’t tell them, because I’m scared it’d make Mum hate him even more. Sometimes I wish I could hate him, Jack. It would make it easier.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. Over the phone, he could hear her crying.
“Wanna come over sometime?” he offered, after a few minutes.
“Okay,” she replied, when she could speak again.
Jack put down the phone and felt - not exactly anticipation, but a certain inevitable relief. This felt right. It might not tomorrow, or the day after when she arrived in Cardiff, or in a year’s time, but right now, it did.
Nay, come, let’s go on together.