Fic: The Turn of the Universe (Martha/Romana II, NC-17)
Title: The Turn of the Universe
Author: ionlylurkhere
Pairing: Martha/Romana II
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 3000
Summary: Years after Martha leaves the TARDIS, another Time Lord finds her. But does Romana have an ulterior motive for tracking her down?
Warnings: angst; Looms
Notes: huge props to magicallaw for prodding me into dusting this off and finishing it. This is certain to be Russelled (it postulates a Martha departure that I sincerely doubt we'll see even in the broad brush let alone the detail), but I just don't care.
A shadow fell over Martha's table. A cut-glass voice from impossibly deep within it said, "Good evening. I'm told you're the person I'm looking for. Martha Jones?"
It was late, and Martha was tired. All she wanted to have a quiet drink and go home to bed. The regulars (and, so, telepathically, everyone on the planet) knew that this was the seat she used when she didn't want to be disturbed.
And yet ... No one here said "evening", they said "dreamshift". And between the ones who didn't believe in surnames and the ones who still insisted on using embarrassing honorifics every time they addressed her, no one called her "Martha Jones" either. Whoever this was clearly wasn't from around here. Which made them the first outsider to arrive here since Martha herself.
She turned to see who it was. A lady with porcelain skin and pale hair, like a china doll but not so fragile. And eyes that were ... that were ...
Martha looked into her eyes and saw universes.
* * *
Romana looked back and saw the damage that the Doctor had done. Not intentionally, at least not in this case, she decided. Just the singe marks on the wings of the moth that drew too close to the flame. The madness of the mortal who got the briefest glimpse of the god's true face.
But underneath all that she saw the wonder, still intact after all this time. "You're ..." Martha tailed off.
"Yes," Romana said with an infinitesimal smile. "My name's Romana. And as it happens, I'm not just a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords."
Martha spluttered. "Yeah, right. I can think of ..." she counted on her fingers "... at least four others."
"Renegades, all of them. The Doctor included." Romana straightened her back. "I am the last keeper of the true legacy of Rassilon."
"And then there's all those creeps in Mictlan," Martha continued, "though you probably don't count them either, do you? Wave your hands around and talk very fast about antiparallel space-time continua, retrospective reifications and things that never happened, except they did, kind of maybe sort of. That's what the Doctor did, anyway."
Romana shuddered at the memory of her own encounters with the Celestis, somehow still surviving in the pocket universe they'd evacuated to in the build-up to the War Before The War. If this human had gone through anything remotely similar it was no wonder she seemed so on edge. It was a wonder she seemed anything at all.
"Why are you here, anyway?" Martha demanded. "Crestopaloria IV's a long way off anyone's beaten track."
"I came looking for you." Martha's expression was sceptical. "The advances you've made here in recombinant meta-genomics are astounding."
"For a simple 21st century human who used to think of DNA as a double helix, you mean?"
"For anyone. Even, dare I say it, for my people."
Martha's eyes narrowed. "What do you want?"
"I can't keep Rassilon's legacy all by myself. Not indefinitely." She paused. "I'm going to rebuild Gallifrey."
Martha's eyes widened again. "And you want to use our recombination engines to populate it?"
"The idea is ... not without precedent."
"Why should I let you?"
Romana put as much earnestness and sincerity into her voice as she knew how. "Because you know, deep down, that this isn't how the universe is meant to be. It shouldn't be a fragile bundle of events, held together by frayed causality and fading hope, lurching from one crisis to the next. The universe is falling apart, Martha. The Doctor can't keep it all together on a wing and a prayer forever. Nor can I. But the Time Lords, as a whole, could. Just by being there, at the centre of time, watching."
"Didn't work out so well the last time, did it? What did you do in the Time War, Romana?"
Romana looked away. "All right, then. You should let me use your breeding engines because in exchange I'll give you the one thing you want most of all."
"And what's that then?"
"A lift home."
* * *
The lab was dark, and deserted except for a few robots maintaining their infinitely patient vigil over the Schrödinger experiments, tiny bubbles of normative probability bulkheaded against the planet's wild magic by arcane technology Martha didn't even pretend to understand. They were relics, well-preserved but inching ever closer to obsolescence; almost all the others on the planet had been decommissioned, the population only too glad to see the back of their terrifying saviours. Martha led Romana past them, suppressing a shiver as she thought about how close she, the Doctor and Donna had come to ruining everything based on their initial misapprehensions.
When the TARDIS had arrived on Crestopaloria, the robots had been vital to the people's survival, rebuilding them painfully every morning after the mutagenic terrors of the night. At first, they'd taken the screams as a sign people were being tortured, not rescued. But now Martha's work had allowed the people to rebuild themselves into a metastable form, one that flowed with the strange tides of quantum probability that washed across the planet without losing their individual identities. She, like the Doctor and Donna, had been immune -- some side effect of TARDIS travel, or so the Doctor said.
She wondered what else had changed about her, as a result of her journeys in space and time. Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing.
They reached the far end of the lab and the recombination device. The product of years of work, years in which she'd been woken every morning by the agonised cries of the Remaking. The single artefact that had turned Crestopaloria from a nightmare world into a dreamlike paradise. She had thought that that was enough, that she had done her bit. Now Romana said her invention could save the universe.
"Amazing, that you were able to build such a thing here." Romana was stroking its smooth metal sides in a gesture horrifyingly reminiscent of the way the Doctor used to handle the TARDIS. "I wonder if the probability fields helped somehow." Romana caught Martha's expression. "Not that that would have been any major effect. All down to you, Martha, absolutely."
"So ...?"
"It's exactly what I need. Seed it with Time Lord biodata and it would weave wonders. Oh, such wonders, Martha ..." Romana's voice drifted away into soft breaths as she disappeared into private thoughts.
* * *
Romana's eyes stayed fixed on the recombination chamber. For all that it would upset Martha to be told, she had reinvented the Loom. Crudely, certainly, but some of the details were so exact as to make it an inescapable conclusion that she had been guided by something, some combination of this planet's unique conditions and whatever strange effect it was that bent the timelines to reproduce Time Lord artefacts.
Romana had found such things throughout the history of the universe, in dozens of unlikely contexts. Panatropic networks on Xeraphas. Timeonic fusion devices in the armouries of the Wrarth. Dimensionally transcendental chambers on Manussa (even if the locals did think it was all done with mirrors). Sometimes she thought of it as a higher order conservation law that even she could barely sketch the parameters of. Other times she felt it was as though the Time Lords were too big an idea to be forgotten completely. As though the universe itself wanted Gallifrey to be rebuilt.
But Romana's mission had long since expanded from her initial desire to be the agent of that restoration. That was really only the largest example of her desire to repair all the things the Doctor had broken, to tidy up the messes he left behind and called "better". The planets. And the people. People like Martha. That was what she needed to address now.
"So, how did you end up here?" she asked her.
"I came with the Doctor, in the TARDIS. Obviously."
Romana felt the urge to respond in kind, meet sarcasm with sarcasm, rising within her; an easy, familiar habit. She resisted it. "I meant, why did you stay?"
* * *
Why had she stayed? It was a good question, and one she had asked herself many times in the early days and long, hallucinogenic nights. The planet could not affect her directly, but somehow it conjured visions, of all that she had left behind, that she had lost forever. So she had her answer down pat now, had spent so long convincing herself of it that she was sure she could convince anyone else. "Because the people here needed help. Help I could give them. It was the right thing to do."
"So, not all planets can be saved by reversing the polarity and inciting an overnight revolution after all," Romana said.
Martha felt her lips pulling themselves into a smile. Why was that such an unfamiliar sensation? "He's still out there somewhere, isn't he?"
"Somewhere." It was Romana's turn to smile slightly.
"Have you seen him?"
"I have," she said. "It didn't go well."
Romana clearly didn't want to go into details. "So how does this work? You take the blueprints and build your own? I can easily download the data structures for you ..."
"I'm afraid I'll need to take the working model. It needs to have arisen from a real timeline. Otherwise it wouldn't be history-proofed. Could be disastrous in the event of any future temporal hostilities. I'm sure you understand."
"But you can give it back, right?" Martha said. "Time travel. Go away and spawn a thousand thousand Time Lords and then bring it back here the moment after you left."
"But you don't need it any longer. The dream plague is cured. You cured it."
"Who knows what might happen in the future? We might need it again. And think of the potential for it to help on other-- Oh. That's what this is about. You want a monopoly on the technology."
"It would seem wise not to allow the less-- less friendly species of the continuum access to its workings. The Sontarans, for instance, could go from pest to menace if they upgraded their cloning vats with this sort of technology."
Asking was a courtesy, Martha realised. "I don't really have a choice, do I?" she said.
"I'm afraid not," Romana replied. "But the offer's still open. I can take you back to 21st century Earth. Or any other time period you'd like."
"I don't want to go home, Romana. Or anywhere else. This is my home now, for better or worse. I've built a life here. I have responsibilities I can't run away from. But ..."
Romana made an encouraging expression.
"... there is something I want that you can give me."
"Oh?"
"I would like to ... feel it again. The turn of the universe."
And then she kissed her.
* * *
Romana took a few seconds to puzzle out the ethical calculus of the situation, even as her lips parted in response.
If she gave Martha what she wanted, would it help? Could it? Or would it be a sticking plaster, the removal of which would make the underlying pain even worse? Did she even have the right to make that choice for Martha? She thought not. But was that just an excuse to avoid making the decision? Or worse, to give in to her own desires? Her mind lapsed into total incoherence as the physical sensations of Martha's lips and hands -- when had there been hands all of a sudden? -- overwhelmed her. The decision was made, but she could not honestly say how.
Romana moved her hands up to hold Martha's head and returned the kiss more actively. Then her hands found Martha's back, stroking down from her shoulders to her hips. They reached inside her jacket and under her top to touch bare skin, soft and warm and unfathomably real. Martha's lips pressed deep into Romana's as her fingers fumbled with the buttons on Romana's high-collared jacket, scrabbling their way down her neck, her collar bone, her sternum until they cupped her breasts. Martha guided them over to one of the medical beds on either side of the recombination device, lying on top of Romana and kissing her again, deeply.
As Romana traced delicate patterns on Martha's chest above her, her senses came fully to life. Martha's biodata blossomed at her fingertips. Her past lay open -- unremarkable beginnings, then the strands took the familiarly wild twists and turns that came with travelling the Vortex, then an ugly knot of paradox followed by a brief return to linearity before another tangled whirlwind deposited her here. And hints, dim and imperfect, of her future, of a story whose final chapter was not yet written, that there was more to come than another thirty years of looking after this one place, however noble that might be.
And as her awareness stretched out in five dimensions, Romana felt too an attenuated echo of the dreaming sentience of the proto-Loom behind her, waiting patiently to fulfil its potentiality. The recombination device was literally pregnant with possibility, its mind filled with the desire to reproduce. Romana knew now how the decision had been made; the Loom's subtle telepathic influence was doubtless responsible for the reflection of its desires in her and Martha's own minds. Probably. (Her awareness began to relocalise, as Martha opened her shirt to reveal bare flesh.) Possibly. (Martha's mouth engulfed one breast.) Not that it mattered now. (The very tip of Martha's tongue snaked out to flick across her nipple.) Not that it mattered in the slightest.
* * *
Martha felt Romana's skin, soft and cool: her fingers on Martha's breasts, her breasts under Martha's tongue. As Martha teased Romana's nipples into full arousal, she felt her hands move away, and then a solitary finger slipping down to her crotch, insinuating its way between her flesh and the cotton of her knickers. She gasped, and renewed her licking, making long, uncoordinated strokes with her tongue, abandoning technique to instinct, her conscious mind subsumed under the welter of sensations elicited by Romana's steady motion, all the way up the lips of her cunt, a single circle around but never quite touching her clit, and back again and again and again and ...
After an immeasurable interval marked only by the increasing speed of Romana's movements, she came with a cry that was practically a scream. Her head fell back onto Romana's chest as she took deep breath after deep, shuddering breath, her body slowly recovering from what she was fairly sure was the most incredible orgasm of her life.
"You enjoyed that, then?" said Romana archly.
All Martha could do was nod.
"Good to know."
"Don't worry, I'm going to repay the favour."
"Oh, that's not why I was asking."
"Of course not."
As Martha fully regained her senses, she reached out and began stroking Romana's breasts again, then licking them. She moved down Romana's body, never quite breaking the contact between lips and skin. She swooped down to Romana's navel, then back up to the other breast, then down one side, past her ribcage to the soft expanse of her smooth belly, and finally to her already wet pussy and hardening clit, which she began to lick, stroke after methodical stroke.
* * *
Romana's consciousness collapsed down entirely, concentrating itself into a single point between her legs as the action of Martha's tongue on her clit intensified. She allowed her self-control to slip for a moment, let a single moan escape her mouth. More than enough encouragement, she could tell, for Martha to carry on doing exactly what she was doing. She stroked Martha's hair gently, brushed it away behind her ear, and fondling her cheek with her thumb.
Just as Romana's arousal rose to a new plateau, she felt Martha's weight shift slightly, a series of little adjustments and fiddlings until suddenly there were two fingers snaking their way inside her, crooked upwards to find the sensitive patch of nerve endings on the front wall of her pussy. Combined with the continuing strokes of Martha's tongue, she quickly felt herself rising above the plateau to a new level of complete ecstasy.
As Romana climaxed, she felt her body go limp, eyes dilating, legs and arms simultaneously heavy as lead and light as air. Martha's head slumped motionless still between her crotch, giving occasional flicks with her tongue to drive her absolutely wild, sending aftershocks spasming through muscles she was no longer sure still existed.
After a minute or so, Martha climbed back up to kiss Romana passionately. Romana returned it eagerly, gratefully.
"So, Romana," she said, drawing out her name as if embarrassed to say whatever was coming next, "I don't suppose you've got a sonic screwdriver?"
"As a matter of fact, I do."
At this news, Martha's eyebrows did something impossibly sexy, and Romana simply had to kiss her again.
* * *
Romana was seated opposite Martha in the bar, the first person to occupy that chair in many a long year, tucking into her breakfast. Martha was fairly sure she was only doing it to be polite, didn't really need the nutrition. She knew she was good, but she doubted she was enough to make a Time Lord hungry.
"I take it you'll be going soon?" Martha asked.
Romana didn't respond directly. Instead, she said, "I appreciate your sentiments on the matter, I admire your sense of responsibility, but the people here don't need you any more, not as they once did. You're a figurehead, now, an inspiration. A living legend. But the power of a legend isn't dimmed by its object's absence. If anything it's enhanced."
"Oh, I know that well enough," Martha said, thinking back to her year of storytelling. So long ago now, but the memories so immediate, the scars of seeing the scarred Earth still vivid.
"My offer still stands," Romana said. "I can take you home."
"Don't take me home, Romana," Martha said. She swallowed, summoning up the courage to say the next words. "Take me with you."
Romana smiled, dazzlingly. "I'd been hoping you were going to say that."
Author: ionlylurkhere
Pairing: Martha/Romana II
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 3000
Summary: Years after Martha leaves the TARDIS, another Time Lord finds her. But does Romana have an ulterior motive for tracking her down?
Warnings: angst; Looms
Notes: huge props to magicallaw for prodding me into dusting this off and finishing it. This is certain to be Russelled (it postulates a Martha departure that I sincerely doubt we'll see even in the broad brush let alone the detail), but I just don't care.
A shadow fell over Martha's table. A cut-glass voice from impossibly deep within it said, "Good evening. I'm told you're the person I'm looking for. Martha Jones?"
It was late, and Martha was tired. All she wanted to have a quiet drink and go home to bed. The regulars (and, so, telepathically, everyone on the planet) knew that this was the seat she used when she didn't want to be disturbed.
And yet ... No one here said "evening", they said "dreamshift". And between the ones who didn't believe in surnames and the ones who still insisted on using embarrassing honorifics every time they addressed her, no one called her "Martha Jones" either. Whoever this was clearly wasn't from around here. Which made them the first outsider to arrive here since Martha herself.
She turned to see who it was. A lady with porcelain skin and pale hair, like a china doll but not so fragile. And eyes that were ... that were ...
Martha looked into her eyes and saw universes.
* * *
Romana looked back and saw the damage that the Doctor had done. Not intentionally, at least not in this case, she decided. Just the singe marks on the wings of the moth that drew too close to the flame. The madness of the mortal who got the briefest glimpse of the god's true face.
But underneath all that she saw the wonder, still intact after all this time. "You're ..." Martha tailed off.
"Yes," Romana said with an infinitesimal smile. "My name's Romana. And as it happens, I'm not just a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords."
Martha spluttered. "Yeah, right. I can think of ..." she counted on her fingers "... at least four others."
"Renegades, all of them. The Doctor included." Romana straightened her back. "I am the last keeper of the true legacy of Rassilon."
"And then there's all those creeps in Mictlan," Martha continued, "though you probably don't count them either, do you? Wave your hands around and talk very fast about antiparallel space-time continua, retrospective reifications and things that never happened, except they did, kind of maybe sort of. That's what the Doctor did, anyway."
Romana shuddered at the memory of her own encounters with the Celestis, somehow still surviving in the pocket universe they'd evacuated to in the build-up to the War Before The War. If this human had gone through anything remotely similar it was no wonder she seemed so on edge. It was a wonder she seemed anything at all.
"Why are you here, anyway?" Martha demanded. "Crestopaloria IV's a long way off anyone's beaten track."
"I came looking for you." Martha's expression was sceptical. "The advances you've made here in recombinant meta-genomics are astounding."
"For a simple 21st century human who used to think of DNA as a double helix, you mean?"
"For anyone. Even, dare I say it, for my people."
Martha's eyes narrowed. "What do you want?"
"I can't keep Rassilon's legacy all by myself. Not indefinitely." She paused. "I'm going to rebuild Gallifrey."
Martha's eyes widened again. "And you want to use our recombination engines to populate it?"
"The idea is ... not without precedent."
"Why should I let you?"
Romana put as much earnestness and sincerity into her voice as she knew how. "Because you know, deep down, that this isn't how the universe is meant to be. It shouldn't be a fragile bundle of events, held together by frayed causality and fading hope, lurching from one crisis to the next. The universe is falling apart, Martha. The Doctor can't keep it all together on a wing and a prayer forever. Nor can I. But the Time Lords, as a whole, could. Just by being there, at the centre of time, watching."
"Didn't work out so well the last time, did it? What did you do in the Time War, Romana?"
Romana looked away. "All right, then. You should let me use your breeding engines because in exchange I'll give you the one thing you want most of all."
"And what's that then?"
"A lift home."
* * *
The lab was dark, and deserted except for a few robots maintaining their infinitely patient vigil over the Schrödinger experiments, tiny bubbles of normative probability bulkheaded against the planet's wild magic by arcane technology Martha didn't even pretend to understand. They were relics, well-preserved but inching ever closer to obsolescence; almost all the others on the planet had been decommissioned, the population only too glad to see the back of their terrifying saviours. Martha led Romana past them, suppressing a shiver as she thought about how close she, the Doctor and Donna had come to ruining everything based on their initial misapprehensions.
When the TARDIS had arrived on Crestopaloria, the robots had been vital to the people's survival, rebuilding them painfully every morning after the mutagenic terrors of the night. At first, they'd taken the screams as a sign people were being tortured, not rescued. But now Martha's work had allowed the people to rebuild themselves into a metastable form, one that flowed with the strange tides of quantum probability that washed across the planet without losing their individual identities. She, like the Doctor and Donna, had been immune -- some side effect of TARDIS travel, or so the Doctor said.
She wondered what else had changed about her, as a result of her journeys in space and time. Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing.
They reached the far end of the lab and the recombination device. The product of years of work, years in which she'd been woken every morning by the agonised cries of the Remaking. The single artefact that had turned Crestopaloria from a nightmare world into a dreamlike paradise. She had thought that that was enough, that she had done her bit. Now Romana said her invention could save the universe.
"Amazing, that you were able to build such a thing here." Romana was stroking its smooth metal sides in a gesture horrifyingly reminiscent of the way the Doctor used to handle the TARDIS. "I wonder if the probability fields helped somehow." Romana caught Martha's expression. "Not that that would have been any major effect. All down to you, Martha, absolutely."
"So ...?"
"It's exactly what I need. Seed it with Time Lord biodata and it would weave wonders. Oh, such wonders, Martha ..." Romana's voice drifted away into soft breaths as she disappeared into private thoughts.
* * *
Romana's eyes stayed fixed on the recombination chamber. For all that it would upset Martha to be told, she had reinvented the Loom. Crudely, certainly, but some of the details were so exact as to make it an inescapable conclusion that she had been guided by something, some combination of this planet's unique conditions and whatever strange effect it was that bent the timelines to reproduce Time Lord artefacts.
Romana had found such things throughout the history of the universe, in dozens of unlikely contexts. Panatropic networks on Xeraphas. Timeonic fusion devices in the armouries of the Wrarth. Dimensionally transcendental chambers on Manussa (even if the locals did think it was all done with mirrors). Sometimes she thought of it as a higher order conservation law that even she could barely sketch the parameters of. Other times she felt it was as though the Time Lords were too big an idea to be forgotten completely. As though the universe itself wanted Gallifrey to be rebuilt.
But Romana's mission had long since expanded from her initial desire to be the agent of that restoration. That was really only the largest example of her desire to repair all the things the Doctor had broken, to tidy up the messes he left behind and called "better". The planets. And the people. People like Martha. That was what she needed to address now.
"So, how did you end up here?" she asked her.
"I came with the Doctor, in the TARDIS. Obviously."
Romana felt the urge to respond in kind, meet sarcasm with sarcasm, rising within her; an easy, familiar habit. She resisted it. "I meant, why did you stay?"
* * *
Why had she stayed? It was a good question, and one she had asked herself many times in the early days and long, hallucinogenic nights. The planet could not affect her directly, but somehow it conjured visions, of all that she had left behind, that she had lost forever. So she had her answer down pat now, had spent so long convincing herself of it that she was sure she could convince anyone else. "Because the people here needed help. Help I could give them. It was the right thing to do."
"So, not all planets can be saved by reversing the polarity and inciting an overnight revolution after all," Romana said.
Martha felt her lips pulling themselves into a smile. Why was that such an unfamiliar sensation? "He's still out there somewhere, isn't he?"
"Somewhere." It was Romana's turn to smile slightly.
"Have you seen him?"
"I have," she said. "It didn't go well."
Romana clearly didn't want to go into details. "So how does this work? You take the blueprints and build your own? I can easily download the data structures for you ..."
"I'm afraid I'll need to take the working model. It needs to have arisen from a real timeline. Otherwise it wouldn't be history-proofed. Could be disastrous in the event of any future temporal hostilities. I'm sure you understand."
"But you can give it back, right?" Martha said. "Time travel. Go away and spawn a thousand thousand Time Lords and then bring it back here the moment after you left."
"But you don't need it any longer. The dream plague is cured. You cured it."
"Who knows what might happen in the future? We might need it again. And think of the potential for it to help on other-- Oh. That's what this is about. You want a monopoly on the technology."
"It would seem wise not to allow the less-- less friendly species of the continuum access to its workings. The Sontarans, for instance, could go from pest to menace if they upgraded their cloning vats with this sort of technology."
Asking was a courtesy, Martha realised. "I don't really have a choice, do I?" she said.
"I'm afraid not," Romana replied. "But the offer's still open. I can take you back to 21st century Earth. Or any other time period you'd like."
"I don't want to go home, Romana. Or anywhere else. This is my home now, for better or worse. I've built a life here. I have responsibilities I can't run away from. But ..."
Romana made an encouraging expression.
"... there is something I want that you can give me."
"Oh?"
"I would like to ... feel it again. The turn of the universe."
And then she kissed her.
* * *
Romana took a few seconds to puzzle out the ethical calculus of the situation, even as her lips parted in response.
If she gave Martha what she wanted, would it help? Could it? Or would it be a sticking plaster, the removal of which would make the underlying pain even worse? Did she even have the right to make that choice for Martha? She thought not. But was that just an excuse to avoid making the decision? Or worse, to give in to her own desires? Her mind lapsed into total incoherence as the physical sensations of Martha's lips and hands -- when had there been hands all of a sudden? -- overwhelmed her. The decision was made, but she could not honestly say how.
Romana moved her hands up to hold Martha's head and returned the kiss more actively. Then her hands found Martha's back, stroking down from her shoulders to her hips. They reached inside her jacket and under her top to touch bare skin, soft and warm and unfathomably real. Martha's lips pressed deep into Romana's as her fingers fumbled with the buttons on Romana's high-collared jacket, scrabbling their way down her neck, her collar bone, her sternum until they cupped her breasts. Martha guided them over to one of the medical beds on either side of the recombination device, lying on top of Romana and kissing her again, deeply.
As Romana traced delicate patterns on Martha's chest above her, her senses came fully to life. Martha's biodata blossomed at her fingertips. Her past lay open -- unremarkable beginnings, then the strands took the familiarly wild twists and turns that came with travelling the Vortex, then an ugly knot of paradox followed by a brief return to linearity before another tangled whirlwind deposited her here. And hints, dim and imperfect, of her future, of a story whose final chapter was not yet written, that there was more to come than another thirty years of looking after this one place, however noble that might be.
And as her awareness stretched out in five dimensions, Romana felt too an attenuated echo of the dreaming sentience of the proto-Loom behind her, waiting patiently to fulfil its potentiality. The recombination device was literally pregnant with possibility, its mind filled with the desire to reproduce. Romana knew now how the decision had been made; the Loom's subtle telepathic influence was doubtless responsible for the reflection of its desires in her and Martha's own minds. Probably. (Her awareness began to relocalise, as Martha opened her shirt to reveal bare flesh.) Possibly. (Martha's mouth engulfed one breast.) Not that it mattered now. (The very tip of Martha's tongue snaked out to flick across her nipple.) Not that it mattered in the slightest.
* * *
Martha felt Romana's skin, soft and cool: her fingers on Martha's breasts, her breasts under Martha's tongue. As Martha teased Romana's nipples into full arousal, she felt her hands move away, and then a solitary finger slipping down to her crotch, insinuating its way between her flesh and the cotton of her knickers. She gasped, and renewed her licking, making long, uncoordinated strokes with her tongue, abandoning technique to instinct, her conscious mind subsumed under the welter of sensations elicited by Romana's steady motion, all the way up the lips of her cunt, a single circle around but never quite touching her clit, and back again and again and again and ...
After an immeasurable interval marked only by the increasing speed of Romana's movements, she came with a cry that was practically a scream. Her head fell back onto Romana's chest as she took deep breath after deep, shuddering breath, her body slowly recovering from what she was fairly sure was the most incredible orgasm of her life.
"You enjoyed that, then?" said Romana archly.
All Martha could do was nod.
"Good to know."
"Don't worry, I'm going to repay the favour."
"Oh, that's not why I was asking."
"Of course not."
As Martha fully regained her senses, she reached out and began stroking Romana's breasts again, then licking them. She moved down Romana's body, never quite breaking the contact between lips and skin. She swooped down to Romana's navel, then back up to the other breast, then down one side, past her ribcage to the soft expanse of her smooth belly, and finally to her already wet pussy and hardening clit, which she began to lick, stroke after methodical stroke.
* * *
Romana's consciousness collapsed down entirely, concentrating itself into a single point between her legs as the action of Martha's tongue on her clit intensified. She allowed her self-control to slip for a moment, let a single moan escape her mouth. More than enough encouragement, she could tell, for Martha to carry on doing exactly what she was doing. She stroked Martha's hair gently, brushed it away behind her ear, and fondling her cheek with her thumb.
Just as Romana's arousal rose to a new plateau, she felt Martha's weight shift slightly, a series of little adjustments and fiddlings until suddenly there were two fingers snaking their way inside her, crooked upwards to find the sensitive patch of nerve endings on the front wall of her pussy. Combined with the continuing strokes of Martha's tongue, she quickly felt herself rising above the plateau to a new level of complete ecstasy.
As Romana climaxed, she felt her body go limp, eyes dilating, legs and arms simultaneously heavy as lead and light as air. Martha's head slumped motionless still between her crotch, giving occasional flicks with her tongue to drive her absolutely wild, sending aftershocks spasming through muscles she was no longer sure still existed.
After a minute or so, Martha climbed back up to kiss Romana passionately. Romana returned it eagerly, gratefully.
"So, Romana," she said, drawing out her name as if embarrassed to say whatever was coming next, "I don't suppose you've got a sonic screwdriver?"
"As a matter of fact, I do."
At this news, Martha's eyebrows did something impossibly sexy, and Romana simply had to kiss her again.
* * *
Romana was seated opposite Martha in the bar, the first person to occupy that chair in many a long year, tucking into her breakfast. Martha was fairly sure she was only doing it to be polite, didn't really need the nutrition. She knew she was good, but she doubted she was enough to make a Time Lord hungry.
"I take it you'll be going soon?" Martha asked.
Romana didn't respond directly. Instead, she said, "I appreciate your sentiments on the matter, I admire your sense of responsibility, but the people here don't need you any more, not as they once did. You're a figurehead, now, an inspiration. A living legend. But the power of a legend isn't dimmed by its object's absence. If anything it's enhanced."
"Oh, I know that well enough," Martha said, thinking back to her year of storytelling. So long ago now, but the memories so immediate, the scars of seeing the scarred Earth still vivid.
"My offer still stands," Romana said. "I can take you home."
"Don't take me home, Romana," Martha said. She swallowed, summoning up the courage to say the next words. "Take me with you."
Romana smiled, dazzlingly. "I'd been hoping you were going to say that."