The Art of Surviving [Doctor Who, Martha/Ten, R]
Wow, it's really been a while since I last posted fic, huh? And even longer since I posted Who fic. o_O Um. Sorry, y'all. Anyway: eeeh, I very much like this, which makes me all kinds of happy. :)
This is basically my way of saying Martha >>>> everyone. Or something. I mean that jokingly, of course, but one can never be sure that with wank exploding here and there and everywhere. Seriously, though, this is just my way of coming to terms with the season finale and now that I've gone and shown my insane Martha love, I have An Itch to write Doctor/Master. Go figure.
Title: The Art of Surviving
Word Count: 4300
Summary: Post LotTL, in which Martha goes on with her life, and the Doctor visits.
Author Notes: Betaed by the lovely mellafe. I'm quite fond of this one, actually. Then again, I'm pretty fond of Martha in any way, so.
The Art of Surviving
She comes home from the hospital one Thursday evening to find the Doctor sitting on her couch, eating her biscuits, and making side notes on her books. She stares for a bit, keys still in her hand, until he finally notices her.
“Ah, Martha, you’re back!” He says, taking off his glasses. “Finally, I was going out of my mind with boredom.”
He grins at her, and Martha can only blink.
“What are you doing here?” She finally asks, and the Doctor frowns.
“Can’t a mate drop in for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat?” he asks, and it’s her turn to frown, because it’s just not him, the king of evasion.
She raises her eyebrow, and he sighs. “Fine. I was lonely.”
Ah, that’s more like it. Martha snorts and goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He goes after her, glasses on and poking random stuff, occasionally muttering about marmalade jars and how incredibly inventive humans are. “No one to show off for?” Martha asks, half curious and half dreading the answer.
“Nah,” he says, still chewing some of her biscuits. “What with all of my latest companions leaving me, I reckon I should be on my own for a while.”
“Aha. And how is that working for you?” She asks as she steals one of her own biscuits from his hands.
“Shockingly depressing,” he says, eyebrows raised. “Who knew one needed the distraction so much?” He grins.
She grins back. “Yeah. Who knew.”
He stays for dinner, and then she throws him out because she has an exam to study for. It’s not until four days later that she realizes he stole all of her biscuits.
----
“I did get to meet some lovely people in the Titanic, though.”
“Sounds absolutely smashing.”
“Oh it was. You’ve no idea how.”
----
The day she passes her last exam and finally has a title to match his, she comes home to find a little cake on her kitchen counter, strawberry with chocolate icing, her favourite. She doesn’t remember ever telling this to the Doctor. The note says:
Congratulations! Always knew you’d do it - literally knew you’d do it - you age fairly wonderfully, by the way - but still. Well done, Doctor Jones.
She smiles, and shakes her head, and eats the cake, slowly, savouring it.
----
A screaming crowd outside an office building, and Martha goes in without thinking. There are fingerprints made out of blood and slime on the beige-colored walls, and by now she can tell an alien-related attack from miles away.
She stumbles against the Doctor as she turns around the corner, and he has to steady her before she falls to the ground.
“What are you doing here?” They both ask at the same time, and Martha realizes it’s such a silly question on her side because how could he not be here?
“Trying to save the world, of course,” she tells him, and keeps on running. She turns around to see him staring at her in awe, rooted in place. She hasn’t seen him in months, and she takes a second to take him in. There’s a hole in his right sneaker, and he’s holding some complex bit of machinery. He’s still the same, though. “Well, come on, hurry up, there are lives at stake,” she continues, and then he’s grinning manically (just like everything about him) and running forward to take her hand and drag her along.
“You, Doctor Jones, are truly a catch,” he says, looking at her but still running, and Martha feels so alive. They run through the hallways, and it oddly feels like the time they met on the moon and entirely different at the same time.
So they thwart an evil plan and save the planet and all that jazz, and afterwards, the Doctor even stays long enough for a cup of tea.
----
Jack asks her to come help him with a case, and she wonders just what could she possibly help him with until she meets the rest of his team and realizes what a gang of bumbling idiots most of them are.
“God, how can you stand it?” she asks Jack as they both watch Owen and Gwen yell at each other across the room for the fourth time in three hours.
Jack shrugs. “It sort of gets cute after a while, like, dunno, a puppy when it does something wrong. Or something.”
Martha stares at him, and decides he’s been spending far too much time with these people.
Owen’s a decent enough doctor, so she guesses that’s why they keep him around, but he’s as obnoxious as people can be, and working with him on the autopsy of a Judoon that washed off on the shore of a nearby lake is nothing if not hell. At the end of the day she sits in the briefing room with a cup of steaming coffee in front of her and massages her temples. Toshiko sits in front of her, offers her an aspirin. Martha accepts, thankful, and Toshiko smiles at her.
“Really, though,” says Martha after a bit, “you seem like a smart enough person, what are you doing here?” she asks, because by God but she can’t figure it out. Ianto, well, he’s very obviously shagging Jack (or… something. There’s something fishy in there but she’s too tired to try and figure it out), but Tosh she honestly can’t understand.
Tosh shrugs. “The pay is good,” she says. “And anyway, it’s sort of fun, some days. In any case, I just can’t imagine going back to a normal boring job after everything I’ve seen,” she says, and Martha nods because she can relate completely.
Jack originally calls her because she’s already dealt with this species, but Martha has the suspicion he just wanted to see her for a while. She’s missed him too, so she stays for all three days, using half of her holiday days from work, and it’s wonderful, working alongside him and getting to talk to someone else who’s seen the stars and the flirting, well, that’s incredibly fun too.
“There’ll always be an open position at Torchwood for you,” Jack says as he walks her to her car on the last day.
“Thanks but no thanks,” she says. “I’ve worked too hard for this title to just let it slip past me. And I’ve patients to go back to, anyway.” Jack smiles as if he knew what her answer would be from the beginning.
He kisses her lightly on the lips as goodbye, and she feels almost dizzy.
----
More often than not she’ll recognize someone she met during the year that never was, and then she’ll have to smile and wave it away and go on as if she hadn’t seen the person in turn pray for deliverance or cry over a dead spouse or hope against all odds or die protecting someone else.
It doesn’t even seem to matter that she spent most of that year abroad. They seem to be drawn to her for some strange reason, only now they’re not refugees or survivors, they’re exchange students and tourists and immigrants, in London for a while to casually meet Martha Jones (again).
It’s hard to pretend it never happened, not when she has a little scar on her left forearm and when Tish has a cigarette burn mark on her shoulder.
It’s hard to forget, as much as she wishes it wasn’t.
----
Her phone rings while she’s finishing lunch in the hospital’s cafeteria, and she’s still too focused in the everyday gossip that she doesn’t see who is calling. She puts a hand against her left ear to drown the sound of her coworkers’ voices around her.
“Hello?”
“Martha Jones?”
“Yes, this is her.”
“Hello, my name is Donna, and I just wanted to know something: Is it true that the Doctor was about to leave you for his evil ex-boyfriend?”
“Um,” Martha says.
That is one tricky question indeed. “Mmm, I suppose you could say so,” she finally says after a while, knowing that’s not even half of it, but not knowing what else to say.
“Thought so,” the Donna woman says, and hangs up.
Martha blinks, staring at her phone, and wonders what the hell just happened.
----
She sees the Doctor three days later.
“Oi!” he says with a frown the moment she opens the door, and her first thought is wondering what the hell is he doing bothering to knock on her door anyway.
“What?” She asks, and the Doctor points at a reddening spot on his cheek.
“Whatever did you tell Donna to make her slap me?” he asks, and she can’t help but chuckle.
“In her defense, you did sort of deserve it,” she says as she moves away from the door to let him pass. “I probably should’ve done it myself, though.”
“Well what is this, universal ‘let’s hate on the Doctor’ day? I thought better of you, Martha Jones.”
Martha shrugs and gets back to folding her laundry. He plops next to her on her couch and starts playing with her panties. She smacks his hands away and he glares at her.
“Where is this Donna, anyway? I have a feeling I’d like to meet her.”
“Oh, I dunno, somewhere close, probably abusing some other innocent bloke,” he says in that childish tone of his, still frowning.
“Always the victim, aren’t you?”
“Wish I were,” he says, and the mood goes gloomy. She’s only seen him like this a couple times, and she thinks she knows what it means by now.
“Tell me more,” she says, still folding socks and avoiding his eyes, “about Gallifrey.”
Instead of bolting, the Doctor stays, and tells her about orange skies and an Academy filled with incredibly bright, wide-eyed children and how he’d mocked them all in all of the possible ways.
----
The Doctor calls her while she’s at the pub with some friends, and she refuses to answer her phone until she’s back home. When she finally does, the Doctor sounds vaguely annoyed.
“Well, about time,” he says, and then he goes on and on about how desperately he needs her help with something.
“What could you possibly need my help for?” she asks, and then she knows she’s still somewhat drunk, because she’d never say that while sober.
“Well you have saved the world before,” the Doctor says as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and Martha can feel herself smiling.
So she goes and helps save a civilization and if the Doctor doesn’t like that much the way Donna and her bond over his multiple eccentricities, well, tough for him.
----
She’s the one that calls him the next time. Little children are dying in the pediatrics ward for no apparent reason, and it’s not until she runs some of the tests herself and finds a strange element in their blood she’s pretty sure shouldn’t exist in this century that she adds two and two.
“You really should see this,” she says over the phone, still clad in her lab coat and behind a pillar in the hospital. “I once read about this thing in this really weird book I found on the TARDIS, and it just shouldn’t be here.”
The Doctor is there in less than two hours.
It turns out to be something the Doctor has seen before, and it never ceases to amaze her just how many beings around the universe hold a grudge against the man.
It’s… odd, watching Donna and the Doctor get back into the TARDIS after the kids can breathe properly again and another apocalypse has been adverted. She almost goes inside herself out of force of habit. The Doctor hugs her on the threshold and Donna yells at him to hurry up from the inside and Martha has to wonder if all of his former traveling companions go through the same.
----
It’s a Saturday, her only day off, when he wakes her up by jumping on her bed while licking peanut butter off his fingers and talking a mile a minute.
“This stuff is pretty similar to this wonderful dessert I once had in one of Jazer’s moons, oh, you should’ve seen that, although maybe you shouldn’t, because the second time I landed there it was all filled with toxic gases and what a way of treating a perfectly good planet is that, anyway? Well, at least I have the memories. And I know Jack does too, because he once told me this sordid tale about a Lanten, a Rabbi and a stripper, so I’m sure he’ll remember it fondly as well, even if he still brags about bigger and dirtier stuff.” A pause. “Do you reckon I talk too much?”
“Argh, shut up already,” Martha says groggily, and covers her head with the blanket. His never ending blabber lulls her back to sleep, and she dreams of China and the destroyed pagodas in the year that never was. The dream changes, and she’s strolling through purple grass.
When she wakes up, the Doctor is enraptured with something on the telly. She walks to the living room with her blanket around her like a toga, hair all over the place, and realizes he’s staring at some of her old recordings of complex surgeries.
“Wow,” he says with his mouth open. “It’s so… primitive.”
Martha sighs, and settles in for a long day.
----
The Doctor drops by when she’s busy trying to research new surgical procedures, and he keeps on pestering until she finally raises her eyes from her books.
“Will you stop bothering me any time soon?” she asks, and the Doctor takes a hand to his chest.
“You wound me, Martha Jones. I’m doing nothing of the sort.”
“Uh-huh. Where’s Donna, anyway?”
The Doctor looks sheepish. “She’s off with some family or friends or a boy-toy or someone. She said she needed a holiday from me.”
Martha laughs. The Doctor glares.
He finally stops fiddling with all of the multiple trinkets lying around Martha’s flat and turns around to look at her.
“Come with me,” he says, looking earnest. “Just for one trip.”
Martha raises her eyebrows. “Can’t. I’m busy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, come on, I’ll take you to meet all of the people that invented these procedures. That’ll be a much better study than just looking at all these blurry, decades-old pictures, won’t it?”
Martha is tempted. The Doctor comes closer, rests his hands on her desk and lowers his face until he’s almost nose to nose with her. “Just think about it,” he whispers, and it could almost be considered sultry. “Victor Alexander Haden Horsley, personally showing you the proper way to do a laminectomy. Are you imaging it? You should be imaging it.”
Martha bites her lip. The Doctor grins.
“I’ll even take you to Aster for one of their universally renowned ice creams afterwards. My treat.”
She goes.
----
There’s Faulkner and a Venusian revolt and a dance club in Lituania, 4075, after the ice cream, and the Doctor promises he’ll really get her to her own time within five minutes of their departure, and by then she’s having so much fun she decides to trust the TARDIS (because she knows she’d be an idiot to trust blindly in the Doctor’s navigational abilities) and just let go.
----
They have a fight while on a mostly aquatic planet, and she shouts and he shouts and the TARDIS beeps in the background, angry herself of being flooded after some navigation mistake. They end up recriminating far too much, Martha calling him on his aversion tendencies and his never ending angst and his mindless compassion for megalomaniacs, and the Doctor telling her how she couldn’t possibly even begin to understand and that she shouldn’t complain if she was the one that left him in the first place anyway.
He goes out of the TARDIS, stomping the door on his way out, and Martha is left standing there with water up to her ankles and the TARDIS humming in protest of the rude treatment.
She kicks the water around for a moment, and then she takes a deep breath and goes and sits and puts her feet up on the console in some sort of small revenge and starts reading one of the books on alien physiology she bought for kicks three planets away.
When the Doctor goes in again, he just walks along without sparing a glance at her and goes into the maze of hallways beyond the console room. She shrugs and refuses to think of it. He must do something, though, because the water is suddenly drained and all that is left is some bits of seaweed here and there.
He walks back into the console room a few minutes later with his shoulders hunched and hands behind his back and light steps, and it almost looks as if he was dancing. Once he’s close enough, she realizes he’s holding a pair of ice skates.
“Forgive me?” he asks with an apologetic smile and sad, wide eyes, and she can already feel her resolve fading away. “I do know I was a complete wanker,” he continues, and she raises her eyebrow and purses her lips and says Damn right, you were.
She apologizes too, after, because it’s only fair and he deserves to hear it too.
But then he’s dragging her forward to the doors and when he opens them she can see how the water outside has turned to ice, all of it, as far as the eye can see, and she has to gasp at the beauty of it. “What did you do?” she asks, awed.
“Oh, just some tinkering here and there, nothing serious. It’ll melt in a couple of hours and none will be the wiser.” He’s flippant again already, but she can see the tension on his shoulders, the way he he’s clinging onto her sleeve but manoeuvring so as to not touch her skin. He sounds almost nervous as he asks, “So, you like it?”
She smiles, and says, “I do,” because how could she lie? He helps her put on the skates, and then holds her arm when she almost goes down. She’s laughing, though, as he tows her along by both of her hands, and he’s laughing too, and it sounds so relieved. Later, once she gets the trick of it and circles the Doctor until she makes him dizzy, she gathers speed and outstretches her arms and closes her eyes and feels the wind on her face. When she opens them again, she sees the Doctor standing there with a smile of his own, watching her, and it feels like such an intimate moment although she’s not sure why.
So they skate, and don’t talk about the issue at hand because that’s what he does, what he always does, and she’s old enough to know people don’t change just because one wants them to.
----
He seems almost surprised when she asks him to take her home. I do have a life, you know, she says, and he looks almost hurt and she’s convinced he simply can’t get it, how the world (galaxy, universe) doesn’t revolve around him.
----
Martha’s walking down the street on the way to the cinema and enjoying the small talk of a first date when the Doctor quite literally jumps in front of them. She has the suspicion he’d been hiding in the small alleyway to her left.
“Martha! Fancy meeting you here!” It’s so very obvious this isn’t a fortuitous meeting that she can’t help but raising her eyebrows. “Could I have a word,” the Doctor says as he drags Martha along, and then continues with, “why, thank you, it won’t be a minute,” this time addressing Mark, who looks somewhat confused of having his date stolen away from him by a man that came out of nowhere wearing a suit and sneakers.
“What is it now?” Martha asks, somewhat annoyed, because Mark might be somewhat dull, but he’s awfully sweet and she’s been told he can do some frankly amazing things with his tongue and really, but the Doctor should stop thinking he can just barge in at any time he sees fit.
“That can’t possibly be your date, can he?” the Doctor asks, and Martha blinks.
“And what if he is?” She says, wary of his tone.
“Well clearly, he’s not good enough for you, I mean-look at him, it’s so easy to tell,” he says, and this might be one of the strangest conversations she’s had with the Doctor.
“Wait a bit, you’re saying you’re here just to make sure I don’t go out with that guy?” It sounds incredibly stupid. And the Doctor can tell, because he takes a hand to the back of his neck and opens and closes his mouth like a fish for a minute.
“…Maybe?” he finally says.
“I hope you do realize how ridiculous you sound.”
“Well, I was going to invite you to go on a little trip, but if you do insist on going out with such an insipid specimen, go right ahead,” he says, and he’s so obviously using emotional blackmail she wants to shout at him.
“Oh, for the love of-we’re not pets, Doctor, you can’t just keep us close to you by promising shiny things, all right?” She’s gesticulating wildly, like she only does when she’s really angry.
His frown deepens. “I don’t--”
“Oh, but you do,” she interrupts him, and takes a deep breath before speaking again. “Not everything is about you, believe it or not.”
She walks away and smiles up to the confused Mark and tells him that yes, everything’s quite all right, and she doesn’t turn around, but she knows that if she did, she’d see him standing there, hands in his pockets, staring at her in silence.
----
She’s not entirely surprised to see him leaning against her wall when she goes inside her flat, but she is surprised when he presses her against the door and kisses her, a hand on her hip and the other flat on the wood next to her shoulder. She kisses back because she wants to know, wants to see whether all that time of glances his way were worth it.
She thinks about pushing him away, about throwing him out, but then he’s pushing himself closer to her and she can’t think straight anymore. He kisses her as if he wanted to devour her, swallow her whole in search for something to complete him. She gives almost as much as she’s given, but she’s nowhere as needy as he is (not in any way, not in need for attention, or company, or affirmation), and she feels somewhat overwhelmed as he bites her just below the earlobe, as he brushes his hands against her breasts.
“Why now?” she asks, but he just shrugs and helps her as she struggles to get him out of his jacket. Martha is panting, and as she mouths the Doctor’s neck she can feel both of his pulses erratic under her tongue. The look in his eyes almost scares her in its intensity, and it makes a chill travel down her body and it becomes a tingle becomes a moan out of her throat and the Doctor chuckles.
She shimmies out of her jeans, and the Doctor toes off his converse. He brushes a hand along the length of her spine, and she wants to melt.
“Not thinking about that date of yours anymore, are you?” He says, thickly, and she gets a small jolt of shame because no, she hadn’t thought of Mark since the moment she opened the door. And then at the same time it’s creepy, because she knows the Doctor isn’t jealous, this goes far beyond it, and when she speaks again it sounds too honest.
“Goodness, you do want everything to be about you, don’t you?” she says, breathlessly, and he purses his lips but doesn’t contradict her.
Almost apologetically, the Doctor kneels in front of her, licks his way down her thighs, pins her hips to the wall with his hands, and she can feel herself grow heady.
They don’t make it to the bed.
----
Afterwards, she asks again, Why now? and he says Why not? and she keeps on asking but he kisses her so she’ll shut up and she does, but she doesn’t forget, because how could she.
He’s not in love with her, she knows, at least not in the way John Smith was in love with Joan, and she’s not in love with him either, but she does love him, and she is intrigued by him, and she figures that’s enough of a good reason to fall into this potential mess.
----
“This is unhealthy, you know,” Martha says, waiting to get her breath back. She’s lying on her back on the grass of some forgotten civilization thousands of years into the future, trying not to think of the contradiction before it makes her head ache. She’s looking up into the sky, into the four yellow-tinted moons that shine over their heads. The grass makes her bare skin itch.
“What is?” The Doctor asks, nudging her leg with his big toe. He’s already getting dressed, and she has the suspicion he thinks of his clothes as a second skin.
“You, offering sex so I’ll stay.”
“It’s not like I don’t enjoy it,” he says with a shrug.
“Still. Pretty unhealthy.”
“Will you, then?” he says. “Stay.”
It’s her turn to shrug. “For a while,” she says, and it must be enough, because the Doctor is grinning brightly at her and she can feel herself doing the same, mirroring him.
One day she’ll have to give him up, she knows, or he’ll have to give her up, or both, but that day is not today, and she basks in that knowledge as she stretches and looks up into the tiny fragment of universe above her.
(The Doctor points and says Look, there’s Earth! and she can’t help but smile.)
This is basically my way of saying Martha >>>> everyone. Or something. I mean that jokingly, of course, but one can never be sure that with wank exploding here and there and everywhere. Seriously, though, this is just my way of coming to terms with the season finale and now that I've gone and shown my insane Martha love, I have An Itch to write Doctor/Master. Go figure.
Title: The Art of Surviving
Word Count: 4300
Summary: Post LotTL, in which Martha goes on with her life, and the Doctor visits.
Author Notes: Betaed by the lovely mellafe. I'm quite fond of this one, actually. Then again, I'm pretty fond of Martha in any way, so.
The Art of Surviving
She comes home from the hospital one Thursday evening to find the Doctor sitting on her couch, eating her biscuits, and making side notes on her books. She stares for a bit, keys still in her hand, until he finally notices her.
“Ah, Martha, you’re back!” He says, taking off his glasses. “Finally, I was going out of my mind with boredom.”
He grins at her, and Martha can only blink.
“What are you doing here?” She finally asks, and the Doctor frowns.
“Can’t a mate drop in for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat?” he asks, and it’s her turn to frown, because it’s just not him, the king of evasion.
She raises her eyebrow, and he sighs. “Fine. I was lonely.”
Ah, that’s more like it. Martha snorts and goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He goes after her, glasses on and poking random stuff, occasionally muttering about marmalade jars and how incredibly inventive humans are. “No one to show off for?” Martha asks, half curious and half dreading the answer.
“Nah,” he says, still chewing some of her biscuits. “What with all of my latest companions leaving me, I reckon I should be on my own for a while.”
“Aha. And how is that working for you?” She asks as she steals one of her own biscuits from his hands.
“Shockingly depressing,” he says, eyebrows raised. “Who knew one needed the distraction so much?” He grins.
She grins back. “Yeah. Who knew.”
He stays for dinner, and then she throws him out because she has an exam to study for. It’s not until four days later that she realizes he stole all of her biscuits.
----
“I did get to meet some lovely people in the Titanic, though.”
“Sounds absolutely smashing.”
“Oh it was. You’ve no idea how.”
----
The day she passes her last exam and finally has a title to match his, she comes home to find a little cake on her kitchen counter, strawberry with chocolate icing, her favourite. She doesn’t remember ever telling this to the Doctor. The note says:
Congratulations! Always knew you’d do it - literally knew you’d do it - you age fairly wonderfully, by the way - but still. Well done, Doctor Jones.
She smiles, and shakes her head, and eats the cake, slowly, savouring it.
----
A screaming crowd outside an office building, and Martha goes in without thinking. There are fingerprints made out of blood and slime on the beige-colored walls, and by now she can tell an alien-related attack from miles away.
She stumbles against the Doctor as she turns around the corner, and he has to steady her before she falls to the ground.
“What are you doing here?” They both ask at the same time, and Martha realizes it’s such a silly question on her side because how could he not be here?
“Trying to save the world, of course,” she tells him, and keeps on running. She turns around to see him staring at her in awe, rooted in place. She hasn’t seen him in months, and she takes a second to take him in. There’s a hole in his right sneaker, and he’s holding some complex bit of machinery. He’s still the same, though. “Well, come on, hurry up, there are lives at stake,” she continues, and then he’s grinning manically (just like everything about him) and running forward to take her hand and drag her along.
“You, Doctor Jones, are truly a catch,” he says, looking at her but still running, and Martha feels so alive. They run through the hallways, and it oddly feels like the time they met on the moon and entirely different at the same time.
So they thwart an evil plan and save the planet and all that jazz, and afterwards, the Doctor even stays long enough for a cup of tea.
----
Jack asks her to come help him with a case, and she wonders just what could she possibly help him with until she meets the rest of his team and realizes what a gang of bumbling idiots most of them are.
“God, how can you stand it?” she asks Jack as they both watch Owen and Gwen yell at each other across the room for the fourth time in three hours.
Jack shrugs. “It sort of gets cute after a while, like, dunno, a puppy when it does something wrong. Or something.”
Martha stares at him, and decides he’s been spending far too much time with these people.
Owen’s a decent enough doctor, so she guesses that’s why they keep him around, but he’s as obnoxious as people can be, and working with him on the autopsy of a Judoon that washed off on the shore of a nearby lake is nothing if not hell. At the end of the day she sits in the briefing room with a cup of steaming coffee in front of her and massages her temples. Toshiko sits in front of her, offers her an aspirin. Martha accepts, thankful, and Toshiko smiles at her.
“Really, though,” says Martha after a bit, “you seem like a smart enough person, what are you doing here?” she asks, because by God but she can’t figure it out. Ianto, well, he’s very obviously shagging Jack (or… something. There’s something fishy in there but she’s too tired to try and figure it out), but Tosh she honestly can’t understand.
Tosh shrugs. “The pay is good,” she says. “And anyway, it’s sort of fun, some days. In any case, I just can’t imagine going back to a normal boring job after everything I’ve seen,” she says, and Martha nods because she can relate completely.
Jack originally calls her because she’s already dealt with this species, but Martha has the suspicion he just wanted to see her for a while. She’s missed him too, so she stays for all three days, using half of her holiday days from work, and it’s wonderful, working alongside him and getting to talk to someone else who’s seen the stars and the flirting, well, that’s incredibly fun too.
“There’ll always be an open position at Torchwood for you,” Jack says as he walks her to her car on the last day.
“Thanks but no thanks,” she says. “I’ve worked too hard for this title to just let it slip past me. And I’ve patients to go back to, anyway.” Jack smiles as if he knew what her answer would be from the beginning.
He kisses her lightly on the lips as goodbye, and she feels almost dizzy.
----
More often than not she’ll recognize someone she met during the year that never was, and then she’ll have to smile and wave it away and go on as if she hadn’t seen the person in turn pray for deliverance or cry over a dead spouse or hope against all odds or die protecting someone else.
It doesn’t even seem to matter that she spent most of that year abroad. They seem to be drawn to her for some strange reason, only now they’re not refugees or survivors, they’re exchange students and tourists and immigrants, in London for a while to casually meet Martha Jones (again).
It’s hard to pretend it never happened, not when she has a little scar on her left forearm and when Tish has a cigarette burn mark on her shoulder.
It’s hard to forget, as much as she wishes it wasn’t.
----
Her phone rings while she’s finishing lunch in the hospital’s cafeteria, and she’s still too focused in the everyday gossip that she doesn’t see who is calling. She puts a hand against her left ear to drown the sound of her coworkers’ voices around her.
“Hello?”
“Martha Jones?”
“Yes, this is her.”
“Hello, my name is Donna, and I just wanted to know something: Is it true that the Doctor was about to leave you for his evil ex-boyfriend?”
“Um,” Martha says.
That is one tricky question indeed. “Mmm, I suppose you could say so,” she finally says after a while, knowing that’s not even half of it, but not knowing what else to say.
“Thought so,” the Donna woman says, and hangs up.
Martha blinks, staring at her phone, and wonders what the hell just happened.
----
She sees the Doctor three days later.
“Oi!” he says with a frown the moment she opens the door, and her first thought is wondering what the hell is he doing bothering to knock on her door anyway.
“What?” She asks, and the Doctor points at a reddening spot on his cheek.
“Whatever did you tell Donna to make her slap me?” he asks, and she can’t help but chuckle.
“In her defense, you did sort of deserve it,” she says as she moves away from the door to let him pass. “I probably should’ve done it myself, though.”
“Well what is this, universal ‘let’s hate on the Doctor’ day? I thought better of you, Martha Jones.”
Martha shrugs and gets back to folding her laundry. He plops next to her on her couch and starts playing with her panties. She smacks his hands away and he glares at her.
“Where is this Donna, anyway? I have a feeling I’d like to meet her.”
“Oh, I dunno, somewhere close, probably abusing some other innocent bloke,” he says in that childish tone of his, still frowning.
“Always the victim, aren’t you?”
“Wish I were,” he says, and the mood goes gloomy. She’s only seen him like this a couple times, and she thinks she knows what it means by now.
“Tell me more,” she says, still folding socks and avoiding his eyes, “about Gallifrey.”
Instead of bolting, the Doctor stays, and tells her about orange skies and an Academy filled with incredibly bright, wide-eyed children and how he’d mocked them all in all of the possible ways.
----
The Doctor calls her while she’s at the pub with some friends, and she refuses to answer her phone until she’s back home. When she finally does, the Doctor sounds vaguely annoyed.
“Well, about time,” he says, and then he goes on and on about how desperately he needs her help with something.
“What could you possibly need my help for?” she asks, and then she knows she’s still somewhat drunk, because she’d never say that while sober.
“Well you have saved the world before,” the Doctor says as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and Martha can feel herself smiling.
So she goes and helps save a civilization and if the Doctor doesn’t like that much the way Donna and her bond over his multiple eccentricities, well, tough for him.
----
She’s the one that calls him the next time. Little children are dying in the pediatrics ward for no apparent reason, and it’s not until she runs some of the tests herself and finds a strange element in their blood she’s pretty sure shouldn’t exist in this century that she adds two and two.
“You really should see this,” she says over the phone, still clad in her lab coat and behind a pillar in the hospital. “I once read about this thing in this really weird book I found on the TARDIS, and it just shouldn’t be here.”
The Doctor is there in less than two hours.
It turns out to be something the Doctor has seen before, and it never ceases to amaze her just how many beings around the universe hold a grudge against the man.
It’s… odd, watching Donna and the Doctor get back into the TARDIS after the kids can breathe properly again and another apocalypse has been adverted. She almost goes inside herself out of force of habit. The Doctor hugs her on the threshold and Donna yells at him to hurry up from the inside and Martha has to wonder if all of his former traveling companions go through the same.
----
It’s a Saturday, her only day off, when he wakes her up by jumping on her bed while licking peanut butter off his fingers and talking a mile a minute.
“This stuff is pretty similar to this wonderful dessert I once had in one of Jazer’s moons, oh, you should’ve seen that, although maybe you shouldn’t, because the second time I landed there it was all filled with toxic gases and what a way of treating a perfectly good planet is that, anyway? Well, at least I have the memories. And I know Jack does too, because he once told me this sordid tale about a Lanten, a Rabbi and a stripper, so I’m sure he’ll remember it fondly as well, even if he still brags about bigger and dirtier stuff.” A pause. “Do you reckon I talk too much?”
“Argh, shut up already,” Martha says groggily, and covers her head with the blanket. His never ending blabber lulls her back to sleep, and she dreams of China and the destroyed pagodas in the year that never was. The dream changes, and she’s strolling through purple grass.
When she wakes up, the Doctor is enraptured with something on the telly. She walks to the living room with her blanket around her like a toga, hair all over the place, and realizes he’s staring at some of her old recordings of complex surgeries.
“Wow,” he says with his mouth open. “It’s so… primitive.”
Martha sighs, and settles in for a long day.
----
The Doctor drops by when she’s busy trying to research new surgical procedures, and he keeps on pestering until she finally raises her eyes from her books.
“Will you stop bothering me any time soon?” she asks, and the Doctor takes a hand to his chest.
“You wound me, Martha Jones. I’m doing nothing of the sort.”
“Uh-huh. Where’s Donna, anyway?”
The Doctor looks sheepish. “She’s off with some family or friends or a boy-toy or someone. She said she needed a holiday from me.”
Martha laughs. The Doctor glares.
He finally stops fiddling with all of the multiple trinkets lying around Martha’s flat and turns around to look at her.
“Come with me,” he says, looking earnest. “Just for one trip.”
Martha raises her eyebrows. “Can’t. I’m busy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, come on, I’ll take you to meet all of the people that invented these procedures. That’ll be a much better study than just looking at all these blurry, decades-old pictures, won’t it?”
Martha is tempted. The Doctor comes closer, rests his hands on her desk and lowers his face until he’s almost nose to nose with her. “Just think about it,” he whispers, and it could almost be considered sultry. “Victor Alexander Haden Horsley, personally showing you the proper way to do a laminectomy. Are you imaging it? You should be imaging it.”
Martha bites her lip. The Doctor grins.
“I’ll even take you to Aster for one of their universally renowned ice creams afterwards. My treat.”
She goes.
----
There’s Faulkner and a Venusian revolt and a dance club in Lituania, 4075, after the ice cream, and the Doctor promises he’ll really get her to her own time within five minutes of their departure, and by then she’s having so much fun she decides to trust the TARDIS (because she knows she’d be an idiot to trust blindly in the Doctor’s navigational abilities) and just let go.
----
They have a fight while on a mostly aquatic planet, and she shouts and he shouts and the TARDIS beeps in the background, angry herself of being flooded after some navigation mistake. They end up recriminating far too much, Martha calling him on his aversion tendencies and his never ending angst and his mindless compassion for megalomaniacs, and the Doctor telling her how she couldn’t possibly even begin to understand and that she shouldn’t complain if she was the one that left him in the first place anyway.
He goes out of the TARDIS, stomping the door on his way out, and Martha is left standing there with water up to her ankles and the TARDIS humming in protest of the rude treatment.
She kicks the water around for a moment, and then she takes a deep breath and goes and sits and puts her feet up on the console in some sort of small revenge and starts reading one of the books on alien physiology she bought for kicks three planets away.
When the Doctor goes in again, he just walks along without sparing a glance at her and goes into the maze of hallways beyond the console room. She shrugs and refuses to think of it. He must do something, though, because the water is suddenly drained and all that is left is some bits of seaweed here and there.
He walks back into the console room a few minutes later with his shoulders hunched and hands behind his back and light steps, and it almost looks as if he was dancing. Once he’s close enough, she realizes he’s holding a pair of ice skates.
“Forgive me?” he asks with an apologetic smile and sad, wide eyes, and she can already feel her resolve fading away. “I do know I was a complete wanker,” he continues, and she raises her eyebrow and purses her lips and says Damn right, you were.
She apologizes too, after, because it’s only fair and he deserves to hear it too.
But then he’s dragging her forward to the doors and when he opens them she can see how the water outside has turned to ice, all of it, as far as the eye can see, and she has to gasp at the beauty of it. “What did you do?” she asks, awed.
“Oh, just some tinkering here and there, nothing serious. It’ll melt in a couple of hours and none will be the wiser.” He’s flippant again already, but she can see the tension on his shoulders, the way he he’s clinging onto her sleeve but manoeuvring so as to not touch her skin. He sounds almost nervous as he asks, “So, you like it?”
She smiles, and says, “I do,” because how could she lie? He helps her put on the skates, and then holds her arm when she almost goes down. She’s laughing, though, as he tows her along by both of her hands, and he’s laughing too, and it sounds so relieved. Later, once she gets the trick of it and circles the Doctor until she makes him dizzy, she gathers speed and outstretches her arms and closes her eyes and feels the wind on her face. When she opens them again, she sees the Doctor standing there with a smile of his own, watching her, and it feels like such an intimate moment although she’s not sure why.
So they skate, and don’t talk about the issue at hand because that’s what he does, what he always does, and she’s old enough to know people don’t change just because one wants them to.
----
He seems almost surprised when she asks him to take her home. I do have a life, you know, she says, and he looks almost hurt and she’s convinced he simply can’t get it, how the world (galaxy, universe) doesn’t revolve around him.
----
Martha’s walking down the street on the way to the cinema and enjoying the small talk of a first date when the Doctor quite literally jumps in front of them. She has the suspicion he’d been hiding in the small alleyway to her left.
“Martha! Fancy meeting you here!” It’s so very obvious this isn’t a fortuitous meeting that she can’t help but raising her eyebrows. “Could I have a word,” the Doctor says as he drags Martha along, and then continues with, “why, thank you, it won’t be a minute,” this time addressing Mark, who looks somewhat confused of having his date stolen away from him by a man that came out of nowhere wearing a suit and sneakers.
“What is it now?” Martha asks, somewhat annoyed, because Mark might be somewhat dull, but he’s awfully sweet and she’s been told he can do some frankly amazing things with his tongue and really, but the Doctor should stop thinking he can just barge in at any time he sees fit.
“That can’t possibly be your date, can he?” the Doctor asks, and Martha blinks.
“And what if he is?” She says, wary of his tone.
“Well clearly, he’s not good enough for you, I mean-look at him, it’s so easy to tell,” he says, and this might be one of the strangest conversations she’s had with the Doctor.
“Wait a bit, you’re saying you’re here just to make sure I don’t go out with that guy?” It sounds incredibly stupid. And the Doctor can tell, because he takes a hand to the back of his neck and opens and closes his mouth like a fish for a minute.
“…Maybe?” he finally says.
“I hope you do realize how ridiculous you sound.”
“Well, I was going to invite you to go on a little trip, but if you do insist on going out with such an insipid specimen, go right ahead,” he says, and he’s so obviously using emotional blackmail she wants to shout at him.
“Oh, for the love of-we’re not pets, Doctor, you can’t just keep us close to you by promising shiny things, all right?” She’s gesticulating wildly, like she only does when she’s really angry.
His frown deepens. “I don’t--”
“Oh, but you do,” she interrupts him, and takes a deep breath before speaking again. “Not everything is about you, believe it or not.”
She walks away and smiles up to the confused Mark and tells him that yes, everything’s quite all right, and she doesn’t turn around, but she knows that if she did, she’d see him standing there, hands in his pockets, staring at her in silence.
----
She’s not entirely surprised to see him leaning against her wall when she goes inside her flat, but she is surprised when he presses her against the door and kisses her, a hand on her hip and the other flat on the wood next to her shoulder. She kisses back because she wants to know, wants to see whether all that time of glances his way were worth it.
She thinks about pushing him away, about throwing him out, but then he’s pushing himself closer to her and she can’t think straight anymore. He kisses her as if he wanted to devour her, swallow her whole in search for something to complete him. She gives almost as much as she’s given, but she’s nowhere as needy as he is (not in any way, not in need for attention, or company, or affirmation), and she feels somewhat overwhelmed as he bites her just below the earlobe, as he brushes his hands against her breasts.
“Why now?” she asks, but he just shrugs and helps her as she struggles to get him out of his jacket. Martha is panting, and as she mouths the Doctor’s neck she can feel both of his pulses erratic under her tongue. The look in his eyes almost scares her in its intensity, and it makes a chill travel down her body and it becomes a tingle becomes a moan out of her throat and the Doctor chuckles.
She shimmies out of her jeans, and the Doctor toes off his converse. He brushes a hand along the length of her spine, and she wants to melt.
“Not thinking about that date of yours anymore, are you?” He says, thickly, and she gets a small jolt of shame because no, she hadn’t thought of Mark since the moment she opened the door. And then at the same time it’s creepy, because she knows the Doctor isn’t jealous, this goes far beyond it, and when she speaks again it sounds too honest.
“Goodness, you do want everything to be about you, don’t you?” she says, breathlessly, and he purses his lips but doesn’t contradict her.
Almost apologetically, the Doctor kneels in front of her, licks his way down her thighs, pins her hips to the wall with his hands, and she can feel herself grow heady.
They don’t make it to the bed.
----
Afterwards, she asks again, Why now? and he says Why not? and she keeps on asking but he kisses her so she’ll shut up and she does, but she doesn’t forget, because how could she.
He’s not in love with her, she knows, at least not in the way John Smith was in love with Joan, and she’s not in love with him either, but she does love him, and she is intrigued by him, and she figures that’s enough of a good reason to fall into this potential mess.
----
“This is unhealthy, you know,” Martha says, waiting to get her breath back. She’s lying on her back on the grass of some forgotten civilization thousands of years into the future, trying not to think of the contradiction before it makes her head ache. She’s looking up into the sky, into the four yellow-tinted moons that shine over their heads. The grass makes her bare skin itch.
“What is?” The Doctor asks, nudging her leg with his big toe. He’s already getting dressed, and she has the suspicion he thinks of his clothes as a second skin.
“You, offering sex so I’ll stay.”
“It’s not like I don’t enjoy it,” he says with a shrug.
“Still. Pretty unhealthy.”
“Will you, then?” he says. “Stay.”
It’s her turn to shrug. “For a while,” she says, and it must be enough, because the Doctor is grinning brightly at her and she can feel herself doing the same, mirroring him.
One day she’ll have to give him up, she knows, or he’ll have to give her up, or both, but that day is not today, and she basks in that knowledge as she stretches and looks up into the tiny fragment of universe above her.
(The Doctor points and says Look, there’s Earth! and she can’t help but smile.)