Hearth and Home
Title: Hearth and Home
Author: Persiflage_1
Characters/Pairings: Martha, Tenth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Season 3 up to Blink
Summary: Martha and the Doctor are trapped in 1969 - by his design
Disclaimer: I don't even own my brain any more, never mind Doctor Who!
Link: Hearth and Home by persiflage_1 (Characters: Martha, Tenth Doctor | Rating: PG-13 | Spoilers: S3)
Author Notes: This is a sequel to Heart's Desire and like that fic, I've written it for the lifeonmartha Journey of Martha Jones: Footsteps Project. I'm sure anyone who's read my fic will know by now that I'm more than a little obsessed with 1969 fic !
~~~~~~
"Where are we?" Martha asked, looking around the alley where she and the Doctor were sprawled in ungainly attitudes.
He shook his head. He knew, of course, since he'd deliberately landed them here, but he didn't intend to let Martha know that small fact. He got up, then reached down, pulling her to her feet and into a hug.
"You OK?" he asked quietly. "Time travel without a capsule is generally nauseating."
"Yeah. Feeling a bit dizzy and sick, but - Hang on, time travel? How do you know we've travelled in time?"
He turned her gently in his arms and pointed at the posters opposite advertising a record by The Beach Boys. "Bit of a hint," he said. "I think this is London in the sixties."
"Oh. Where's the TARDIS?"
"Back at Wester Drumlins," he answered. "We were flung back in time by the Weeping Angels." He released her from his arms, then took her hand and started to walk down the alley.
"The what now?" she asked, baffled.
"The statue we were looking at, it's called a 'weeping angel', although it's not really an angel, weeping, or even a statue. They're often called the Lonely Assassins. They're quantum-locked as stone if any living thing looks at them, but the minute you look away, even just to blink, they can move. They live off a person's potential energy: they zap you into the past where you live to death, whilst they consume the energy of all the days you might have had in the present. No mess, no fuss."
Martha shuddered violently and the Doctor put an arm around her shoulders. "It's going to be OK," he assured her.
"How can you say that?" she asked. "You know what our lives are like - how can you possibly know it'll be OK?"
"I'm a Time Lord," he answered, slightly evasively. "It's my business to know these things."
"So what are we going to do now?"
"We are going to find a teashop and have some tea, and then we're going to find some accommodation."
"Tea?" Martha asked, stopping dead in her tracks and staring at him in disbelief. "We're trapped in the past, without the TARDIS, and you want to get some tea?"
"It will help to settle your stomach," he told her.
"Oh." She took the hand he offered her and they walked out of the alley, onto a bustling street.
"There we are," the Doctor said, pointing across the road to where a blue awning hung over a window.
"Smith's Teashop," she read. She looked up at the Time Lord at her side. "Must be an omen," she said, grinning.
He grinned back, pleased that she was feeling up to teasing him and knowing she must be getting over her initial shock at their situation.
"Oh bound to be," he answered. "C'mon." He tugged gently on her hand and lead her across the street, into the teashop.
A few minutes later they were seated at a corner table with a large pot of tea and two slices of cake.
"Better?" he asked after she'd eaten half her piece of cake.
"Yes thanks."
"Good." He finished his own slice of cake, then drank some tea. "We're lucky we didn't arrive at night," he observed. "We'd have been stuck sleeping on a park bench or something."
Martha pulled a face. "I hadn't thought of that." She finished her tea.
"You fit to go?" he asked.
She nodded and followed him out of the teashop. "So, where do we start looking for rooms?"
"The corner shop's probably a good place to start," he said, "check the ads in the window."
"OK."
They found a corner shop, and the Doctor made a note of the addresses of the advertised rooms, then they set out to check them out. They hadn't walked very far before he spotted a pawn shop.
"We'll need some ready cash," he observed, "landlords are bound to want a deposit."
"Do you have anything to pawn?" Martha asked.
He gave her a grin. "With pockets like mine," he said, "I'm bound to have something, aren't I?" He didn't tell her that he'd purposely filled his pockets with items to pawn because he didn't want her to realise that he'd brought them here deliberately.
"True."
"Do you want to wait out here?"
She nodded and he went inside; Martha wandered on down the street to a bookshop and started browsing through the table of secondhand books outside.
When the Doctor walked out of the pawn shop and couldn't immediately see her he panicked slightly, wondering if something had happened to her. Then he spotted her outside the bookshop, engrossed in a book; she didn't even notice him approach until he put his hands on her arms and looked over her shoulder to see what she was reading, then she jumped.
"Blimey, make me jump, why don't you?" she said, startled.
"Well you were so engrossed, I don't think I could have got your attention without making you jump," he said. "Do you want to buy it?"
She closed the book. "No, it's not like I need to read a book about time-travel, when I live it."
He took the book from her before she could put it back on the table and looked at the price pencilled inside, then fished in his pocket and pulled out some coins. "You were obviously enjoying it," he observed, "since I crept up on you, so you might as well take it and finish it."
He kissed her forehead, then took Behold the Man into the shop, leaving her outside feeling surprised.
* * * * * *
Twenty minutes later, after trying four landlords, they finally found someone who was willing to rent them a small flat on a short-term basis. Mrs Henderson seemed positively glad, in fact, to know that there would be someone else in the house, as she was fairly recently widowed and missing her husband.
The Doctor had given her two weeks' rent in advance and she'd told them which of the local shops to patronise, explaining that Mr Jones was the best local baker, and Mrs Sweet the best local grocer, and so on until Martha felt as if she must have a London street directory stored in her head.
"Thank you, Mrs Henderson. I'm sure my wife and I will find everything we need."
Martha just managed to suppress a small gasp of shock, and felt him squeeze her fingers briefly, before he shook hands with their landlady. The old lady let herself out and the Doctor turned from the door to find his companion looking at him, arms folded across her chest and a quizzical look on her face.
"'My wife'," she repeated. "Did you forget to mention we were married?"
He crossed the hall to her and took hold of her shoulders. "This is 1969, Martha - she probably wouldn't have agreed to us renting the flat if she had thought we weren't married. Nice girls do not shack up with men, especially not men who aren't the same race."
She unfolded her arms and looked down at the floor, slightly embarrassed. "Oh. Sorry."
"It's OK," he said. "I should have said something before, but I was worrying about finding us somewhere to sleep. I promised to look after you, and I'm not about to break that promise."
She closed the distance between them and slid her arms around his body, inside his coat and suit jacket. "Thank you."
He wrapped his arms around her and they stayed there for a few minutes, just holding each other. The Doctor had realised that things weren't going to be quite as easy or straight forward as he'd imagined when he'd taken the impulsive decision to bring them here, and he hoped that he wouldn't end up regretting it.
"Right then, Mrs Smith, I think we need to see about getting some food in, don't you?"
"I should think so," she answered, grinning cheerfully up at him.
"Oh!" He let go of her and delved into his coat pocket. "You'll need this." He pulled out his hand and held it out to her, palm up, and she saw a gold band there.
"You carry wedding rings around with you?" she asked, surprised.
"Technically it's a biodamper. It disguises the wearer's bio-signature so that they can go undetected by anything scanning for that particular bio-signature." He took her left hand in his and slid the ring onto her wedding ring finger. "With this ring - " he began, grinning down at her.
"Don't." She said the word softly, but clearly.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, then pulled her hand up to kiss the ring and her knuckles. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking." He squeezed her fingers, then pulled her into another hug.
She returned it briefly, then pulled free. "Right, let's go and get some food." She moved past him to the front door, and he closed his eyes for a moment, then followed her.
* * * * * *
Two hours later, the cupboard and fridge were full of food, and Martha was preparing scrambled eggs on toast with sausages and baked beans, whilst the Doctor was setting the table for their first meal in their new home.
They were both feeling tired after their shopping trip, and he intended to suggest that she have an early night, especially since she was starting her new job the next day. They'd seen that the local bakery was advertising for temporary help and Martha had immediately offered her services to Mr Jones, who hadn't hesitated, to the Doctor's secret relief. After their stay in 1913, he was far more aware of the way humans got hung up over the amount of pigmentation in someone's skin, and he'd been worried on Martha's behalf, but they seemed to have arrived in a fairly liberal area, and although a couple of people had given them odd looks, no one had actually said anything.
He helped her to serve up their meal, then pressed a kiss to her hair with a murmur of thanks, before sitting down to eat.
"What are you going to do with yourself, whilst I'm working?" she asked, after they'd eaten the first few mouthfuls.
"Well I'll need to build a temporal incursion detector, so that I'll know when the TARDIS arrives," he told her, "and that may take me a little while since I'll have to build it from 1969 parts."
"A temporal incursion detector?"
He nodded, mouth full of sausage, then swallowed. "It will tell me when something that doesn't belong in this timeline arrives here, and will be able to triangulate the coordinates for locating it."
"Oh!" She chewed in silence for a few moments. "I suppose that will be quite a complicated device, then?"
"Mmm, probably."
"Or not, if you're a Time Lord science geek."
He half-choked on a piece of toast at her words and looked up to find her grinning at him, eyes alight with amusement. "Horrible woman," he said, trying to look haughty, but aware that the corners of his mouth were twitching.
She held out a mug of tea, still grinning, and he accepted it, shaking his head. "You should be more careful of your husband's health, Mrs Smith," he admonished. "I am the one who's going to get you home again, after all."
Her laughter died swiftly. "I'm sorry," she said, sounding really remorseful.
"Hey," he said, sliding an arm around her shoulders. "It's OK. I was just teasing."
She leant into his body and sighed.
"Come on. Why don't you go and have a bath and go to bed, and I'll do the washing up?"
"I can do it," she protested.
"I know you can," he answered, "but you don't need to, you cooked after all."
"Well, I wouldn't mind a bath," she said slowly.
"Go on then." He gave her shoulders a squeeze, then got up and began clearing the table.
* * * * * *
The Doctor heard Martha go into the bedroom after her bath, and went to use the bathroom, then waited a few minutes before he knocked on the door.
"Come in."
He went in; she was sitting on the end of the bed, peering into the mirror that was over the small chest of drawers that held most of their clothes, and brushing her hair.
"I came to say goodnight," he told her.
She looked up, surprised. "Goodnight?" He nodded. "Aren't you coming to bed then?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I was going to sleep on the sofa," he said.
"Why? This is a double bed, after all, ie, it's made for two people."
He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. "Well yes, but, I just - you know - thought you'd prefer your own space."
She got up and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't be silly," she told him, "that sofa's not big enough for you to stretch out on, and you'll need your sleep as much as I do, if you're going to be building your timey-wimey thing."
She tipped her head back and looked up into his face.
"Timey-wimey thing?" he echoed, looking amused.
"You know, your temporal whatsit."
"Is that a technical term, Mrs Smith?" he teased.
"Definitely." She stood up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "Are we agreed then? You'll sleep in here?"
"If you're sure," he said. He didn't quite want to admit that he liked the idea of snuggling up with her.
"I am." She pulled off her bathrobe, revealing the pale blue pyjamas she'd bought that afternoon, and climbed onto the bed; he smiled, then pulled out his own pale yellow pyjamas and went into the bathroom to change.
When he returned he saw Martha was lying curled up on her side and he climbed into bed beside her, then asked softly, "May I?"
She looked over her shoulder at him, then nodded, and sighed contentedly when he immediately spooned up behind her.
"This is nice," she murmured.
"Yes it is," he agreed.
"Do you know what I missed most in 1913?" she asked after a few minutes.
"What did you miss most?"
"Touching you. Just, you know, holding your hand, or being hugged, or whatever. That was even more isolating than the racist remarks."
"I'm sorry." His voice was soft and regretful in her ear.
She turned over to face him. "It's OK. I know it wouldn't have been appropriate, with me working as your maid. And besides, John Smith had no reason to hug me, when he barely knew me. I just hadn't realised how much I'd grown used to the hugs and such, until they weren't available."
She closed her eyes, embarrassed to have made such an admission; she'd told herself that she was getting over her crush, but apparently she wasn't as over it as she'd thought.
"Martha, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little contact now and then." The Doctor's quiet voice cut through her embarrassment. He ran a hand down her arm, then back up, under her sleeve, his cool fingers sliding over her warm skin.
She opened her eyes, looking at him in surprise.
"OK?" he asked softly and she nodded.
He pulled her closer and wrapped an arm around her, then began tracing patterns across her back with his right hand. Martha closed her eyes again and felt herself relaxing at his touch; she was half asleep when the Doctor slid his hand under her pyjama top and began stroking circles in the small of her back.
She opened her eyes and gave him a sleepy look. "That feels nice," she murmured.
"Good."
He bent his head and kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes again, smiling. He dipped his head further and kissed the tip of her nose, and she gave a quiet chuckle. Then he kissed her on the mouth and her eyes flew open again in surprise.
"What - " She started to ask, but he laid a finger across her lips.
"Shh." He moved his finger and kissed her again, pressing his lips firmly against hers. After a moment of tension and shock, she relaxed again and he immediately brushed his tongue across her lips.
Martha's eyes were wide with astonishment, but she didn't hesitate when he drew his tongue across her lips a second time, opening her mouth to him. He immediately slid his tongue into her mouth, stroking the tip across her tongue and teeth.
The kiss was firm and intense, and Martha felt as if her insides were melting as pleasure began to coil through her belly and loins; eventually she had to pull away to breathe and she found the Doctor giving her the most tender look imaginable.
"Are you all right with this?" he asked softly. She nodded. "Then prepare to be ravished, Mrs Smith." He gave her a wicked grin, then began kissing her again as his hands busied themselves in getting her out of her pyjamas.
Her last coherent thought was that maybe being stuck in 1969 won't be so bad after all.
Author: Persiflage_1
Characters/Pairings: Martha, Tenth Doctor
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Season 3 up to Blink
Summary: Martha and the Doctor are trapped in 1969 - by his design
Disclaimer: I don't even own my brain any more, never mind Doctor Who!
Link: Hearth and Home by persiflage_1 (Characters: Martha, Tenth Doctor | Rating: PG-13 | Spoilers: S3)
Author Notes: This is a sequel to Heart's Desire and like that fic, I've written it for the lifeonmartha Journey of Martha Jones: Footsteps Project. I'm sure anyone who's read my fic will know by now that I'm more than a little obsessed with 1969 fic !
~~~~~~
"Where are we?" Martha asked, looking around the alley where she and the Doctor were sprawled in ungainly attitudes.
He shook his head. He knew, of course, since he'd deliberately landed them here, but he didn't intend to let Martha know that small fact. He got up, then reached down, pulling her to her feet and into a hug.
"You OK?" he asked quietly. "Time travel without a capsule is generally nauseating."
"Yeah. Feeling a bit dizzy and sick, but - Hang on, time travel? How do you know we've travelled in time?"
He turned her gently in his arms and pointed at the posters opposite advertising a record by The Beach Boys. "Bit of a hint," he said. "I think this is London in the sixties."
"Oh. Where's the TARDIS?"
"Back at Wester Drumlins," he answered. "We were flung back in time by the Weeping Angels." He released her from his arms, then took her hand and started to walk down the alley.
"The what now?" she asked, baffled.
"The statue we were looking at, it's called a 'weeping angel', although it's not really an angel, weeping, or even a statue. They're often called the Lonely Assassins. They're quantum-locked as stone if any living thing looks at them, but the minute you look away, even just to blink, they can move. They live off a person's potential energy: they zap you into the past where you live to death, whilst they consume the energy of all the days you might have had in the present. No mess, no fuss."
Martha shuddered violently and the Doctor put an arm around her shoulders. "It's going to be OK," he assured her.
"How can you say that?" she asked. "You know what our lives are like - how can you possibly know it'll be OK?"
"I'm a Time Lord," he answered, slightly evasively. "It's my business to know these things."
"So what are we going to do now?"
"We are going to find a teashop and have some tea, and then we're going to find some accommodation."
"Tea?" Martha asked, stopping dead in her tracks and staring at him in disbelief. "We're trapped in the past, without the TARDIS, and you want to get some tea?"
"It will help to settle your stomach," he told her.
"Oh." She took the hand he offered her and they walked out of the alley, onto a bustling street.
"There we are," the Doctor said, pointing across the road to where a blue awning hung over a window.
"Smith's Teashop," she read. She looked up at the Time Lord at her side. "Must be an omen," she said, grinning.
He grinned back, pleased that she was feeling up to teasing him and knowing she must be getting over her initial shock at their situation.
"Oh bound to be," he answered. "C'mon." He tugged gently on her hand and lead her across the street, into the teashop.
A few minutes later they were seated at a corner table with a large pot of tea and two slices of cake.
"Better?" he asked after she'd eaten half her piece of cake.
"Yes thanks."
"Good." He finished his own slice of cake, then drank some tea. "We're lucky we didn't arrive at night," he observed. "We'd have been stuck sleeping on a park bench or something."
Martha pulled a face. "I hadn't thought of that." She finished her tea.
"You fit to go?" he asked.
She nodded and followed him out of the teashop. "So, where do we start looking for rooms?"
"The corner shop's probably a good place to start," he said, "check the ads in the window."
"OK."
They found a corner shop, and the Doctor made a note of the addresses of the advertised rooms, then they set out to check them out. They hadn't walked very far before he spotted a pawn shop.
"We'll need some ready cash," he observed, "landlords are bound to want a deposit."
"Do you have anything to pawn?" Martha asked.
He gave her a grin. "With pockets like mine," he said, "I'm bound to have something, aren't I?" He didn't tell her that he'd purposely filled his pockets with items to pawn because he didn't want her to realise that he'd brought them here deliberately.
"True."
"Do you want to wait out here?"
She nodded and he went inside; Martha wandered on down the street to a bookshop and started browsing through the table of secondhand books outside.
When the Doctor walked out of the pawn shop and couldn't immediately see her he panicked slightly, wondering if something had happened to her. Then he spotted her outside the bookshop, engrossed in a book; she didn't even notice him approach until he put his hands on her arms and looked over her shoulder to see what she was reading, then she jumped.
"Blimey, make me jump, why don't you?" she said, startled.
"Well you were so engrossed, I don't think I could have got your attention without making you jump," he said. "Do you want to buy it?"
She closed the book. "No, it's not like I need to read a book about time-travel, when I live it."
He took the book from her before she could put it back on the table and looked at the price pencilled inside, then fished in his pocket and pulled out some coins. "You were obviously enjoying it," he observed, "since I crept up on you, so you might as well take it and finish it."
He kissed her forehead, then took Behold the Man into the shop, leaving her outside feeling surprised.
* * * * * *
Twenty minutes later, after trying four landlords, they finally found someone who was willing to rent them a small flat on a short-term basis. Mrs Henderson seemed positively glad, in fact, to know that there would be someone else in the house, as she was fairly recently widowed and missing her husband.
The Doctor had given her two weeks' rent in advance and she'd told them which of the local shops to patronise, explaining that Mr Jones was the best local baker, and Mrs Sweet the best local grocer, and so on until Martha felt as if she must have a London street directory stored in her head.
"Thank you, Mrs Henderson. I'm sure my wife and I will find everything we need."
Martha just managed to suppress a small gasp of shock, and felt him squeeze her fingers briefly, before he shook hands with their landlady. The old lady let herself out and the Doctor turned from the door to find his companion looking at him, arms folded across her chest and a quizzical look on her face.
"'My wife'," she repeated. "Did you forget to mention we were married?"
He crossed the hall to her and took hold of her shoulders. "This is 1969, Martha - she probably wouldn't have agreed to us renting the flat if she had thought we weren't married. Nice girls do not shack up with men, especially not men who aren't the same race."
She unfolded her arms and looked down at the floor, slightly embarrassed. "Oh. Sorry."
"It's OK," he said. "I should have said something before, but I was worrying about finding us somewhere to sleep. I promised to look after you, and I'm not about to break that promise."
She closed the distance between them and slid her arms around his body, inside his coat and suit jacket. "Thank you."
He wrapped his arms around her and they stayed there for a few minutes, just holding each other. The Doctor had realised that things weren't going to be quite as easy or straight forward as he'd imagined when he'd taken the impulsive decision to bring them here, and he hoped that he wouldn't end up regretting it.
"Right then, Mrs Smith, I think we need to see about getting some food in, don't you?"
"I should think so," she answered, grinning cheerfully up at him.
"Oh!" He let go of her and delved into his coat pocket. "You'll need this." He pulled out his hand and held it out to her, palm up, and she saw a gold band there.
"You carry wedding rings around with you?" she asked, surprised.
"Technically it's a biodamper. It disguises the wearer's bio-signature so that they can go undetected by anything scanning for that particular bio-signature." He took her left hand in his and slid the ring onto her wedding ring finger. "With this ring - " he began, grinning down at her.
"Don't." She said the word softly, but clearly.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, then pulled her hand up to kiss the ring and her knuckles. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking." He squeezed her fingers, then pulled her into another hug.
She returned it briefly, then pulled free. "Right, let's go and get some food." She moved past him to the front door, and he closed his eyes for a moment, then followed her.
* * * * * *
Two hours later, the cupboard and fridge were full of food, and Martha was preparing scrambled eggs on toast with sausages and baked beans, whilst the Doctor was setting the table for their first meal in their new home.
They were both feeling tired after their shopping trip, and he intended to suggest that she have an early night, especially since she was starting her new job the next day. They'd seen that the local bakery was advertising for temporary help and Martha had immediately offered her services to Mr Jones, who hadn't hesitated, to the Doctor's secret relief. After their stay in 1913, he was far more aware of the way humans got hung up over the amount of pigmentation in someone's skin, and he'd been worried on Martha's behalf, but they seemed to have arrived in a fairly liberal area, and although a couple of people had given them odd looks, no one had actually said anything.
He helped her to serve up their meal, then pressed a kiss to her hair with a murmur of thanks, before sitting down to eat.
"What are you going to do with yourself, whilst I'm working?" she asked, after they'd eaten the first few mouthfuls.
"Well I'll need to build a temporal incursion detector, so that I'll know when the TARDIS arrives," he told her, "and that may take me a little while since I'll have to build it from 1969 parts."
"A temporal incursion detector?"
He nodded, mouth full of sausage, then swallowed. "It will tell me when something that doesn't belong in this timeline arrives here, and will be able to triangulate the coordinates for locating it."
"Oh!" She chewed in silence for a few moments. "I suppose that will be quite a complicated device, then?"
"Mmm, probably."
"Or not, if you're a Time Lord science geek."
He half-choked on a piece of toast at her words and looked up to find her grinning at him, eyes alight with amusement. "Horrible woman," he said, trying to look haughty, but aware that the corners of his mouth were twitching.
She held out a mug of tea, still grinning, and he accepted it, shaking his head. "You should be more careful of your husband's health, Mrs Smith," he admonished. "I am the one who's going to get you home again, after all."
Her laughter died swiftly. "I'm sorry," she said, sounding really remorseful.
"Hey," he said, sliding an arm around her shoulders. "It's OK. I was just teasing."
She leant into his body and sighed.
"Come on. Why don't you go and have a bath and go to bed, and I'll do the washing up?"
"I can do it," she protested.
"I know you can," he answered, "but you don't need to, you cooked after all."
"Well, I wouldn't mind a bath," she said slowly.
"Go on then." He gave her shoulders a squeeze, then got up and began clearing the table.
* * * * * *
The Doctor heard Martha go into the bedroom after her bath, and went to use the bathroom, then waited a few minutes before he knocked on the door.
"Come in."
He went in; she was sitting on the end of the bed, peering into the mirror that was over the small chest of drawers that held most of their clothes, and brushing her hair.
"I came to say goodnight," he told her.
She looked up, surprised. "Goodnight?" He nodded. "Aren't you coming to bed then?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I was going to sleep on the sofa," he said.
"Why? This is a double bed, after all, ie, it's made for two people."
He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. "Well yes, but, I just - you know - thought you'd prefer your own space."
She got up and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't be silly," she told him, "that sofa's not big enough for you to stretch out on, and you'll need your sleep as much as I do, if you're going to be building your timey-wimey thing."
She tipped her head back and looked up into his face.
"Timey-wimey thing?" he echoed, looking amused.
"You know, your temporal whatsit."
"Is that a technical term, Mrs Smith?" he teased.
"Definitely." She stood up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "Are we agreed then? You'll sleep in here?"
"If you're sure," he said. He didn't quite want to admit that he liked the idea of snuggling up with her.
"I am." She pulled off her bathrobe, revealing the pale blue pyjamas she'd bought that afternoon, and climbed onto the bed; he smiled, then pulled out his own pale yellow pyjamas and went into the bathroom to change.
When he returned he saw Martha was lying curled up on her side and he climbed into bed beside her, then asked softly, "May I?"
She looked over her shoulder at him, then nodded, and sighed contentedly when he immediately spooned up behind her.
"This is nice," she murmured.
"Yes it is," he agreed.
"Do you know what I missed most in 1913?" she asked after a few minutes.
"What did you miss most?"
"Touching you. Just, you know, holding your hand, or being hugged, or whatever. That was even more isolating than the racist remarks."
"I'm sorry." His voice was soft and regretful in her ear.
She turned over to face him. "It's OK. I know it wouldn't have been appropriate, with me working as your maid. And besides, John Smith had no reason to hug me, when he barely knew me. I just hadn't realised how much I'd grown used to the hugs and such, until they weren't available."
She closed her eyes, embarrassed to have made such an admission; she'd told herself that she was getting over her crush, but apparently she wasn't as over it as she'd thought.
"Martha, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little contact now and then." The Doctor's quiet voice cut through her embarrassment. He ran a hand down her arm, then back up, under her sleeve, his cool fingers sliding over her warm skin.
She opened her eyes, looking at him in surprise.
"OK?" he asked softly and she nodded.
He pulled her closer and wrapped an arm around her, then began tracing patterns across her back with his right hand. Martha closed her eyes again and felt herself relaxing at his touch; she was half asleep when the Doctor slid his hand under her pyjama top and began stroking circles in the small of her back.
She opened her eyes and gave him a sleepy look. "That feels nice," she murmured.
"Good."
He bent his head and kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes again, smiling. He dipped his head further and kissed the tip of her nose, and she gave a quiet chuckle. Then he kissed her on the mouth and her eyes flew open again in surprise.
"What - " She started to ask, but he laid a finger across her lips.
"Shh." He moved his finger and kissed her again, pressing his lips firmly against hers. After a moment of tension and shock, she relaxed again and he immediately brushed his tongue across her lips.
Martha's eyes were wide with astonishment, but she didn't hesitate when he drew his tongue across her lips a second time, opening her mouth to him. He immediately slid his tongue into her mouth, stroking the tip across her tongue and teeth.
The kiss was firm and intense, and Martha felt as if her insides were melting as pleasure began to coil through her belly and loins; eventually she had to pull away to breathe and she found the Doctor giving her the most tender look imaginable.
"Are you all right with this?" he asked softly. She nodded. "Then prepare to be ravished, Mrs Smith." He gave her a wicked grin, then began kissing her again as his hands busied themselves in getting her out of her pyjamas.
Her last coherent thought was that maybe being stuck in 1969 won't be so bad after all.