Chapter Text
Back when the world had been made right again, Martha had fully intended on staying home with her family for a little while. Really, that was her entire plan. Lay low for a few months, finish up her studies, rid herself of the nightmares that tormented her every time her eyes blinked closed, even just for a moment… That was all she had in mind.
Then UNIT itself had phoned in with a hello, is this Martha Jones, would you like a job, and Martha had to accept because what else was she supposed to do? If she was honest, Martha wasn’t really a homebody, and UNIT seemed the closest thing to some excitement as she could get. The next-best adventure, in a way.
Martha had never brought up the fact that she never technically made it to doctor-hood. She held the title, though. She might’ve find it a little bit funny, but she never stopped to think about it too much. If she did, she always ended up feeling just a bit guilty about it. So, she brushed it off. She was Doctor Jones now, formalities be damned.
And the ironic thing was, her first true patient as Dr Jones? Well…
The task had been simple: clear out the nest of drug-selling Betelgeusans. Martha had been told to go because, well, it’s her job to go. Not because anybody had planned for the Betelgeusans to have guns.
Martha knelt over the officer on the ground, quickly rummaging through her kit.
“Sorry, I don’t think I remember your name,” she said, smiling a hopefully reassuring smile at him.
“Jones,” the man grit through his teeth. “I’m Private Jones.”
She could’ve laughed at that, but she was too busy digging for some tweezers.
“Well, Private Jones,” she said, “I’m Dr Jones.”
“I know,” he said. “I know… knew…”
“Why don’t you save your breath,” she suggested, not unkindly.
“No,” he insisted, “I have to…”
And Martha had met enough stubborn people in her life to know that she had better just let him say what he wanted. Anyway, handling the bleeding wound was by far a more pressing matter than whether or not she could get this man to shut up.
“I knew your cousin,” Private Jones said, “Adeola Oshodi. Back at… Torchwood… my girlfriend… they… were friends.”
Martha said nothing, dividing emotion from the situation as she continued to work.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I just want you to know… I’m sorry.”
“While that’s kind of you to say,” Martha said when she finishes wiping away blood, so that she can adhere the gauze to him, “is that really what you’d like to make your last words?”
“Haven’t got…” he panted, splicing in a grunt of pain, “…anyone else to say things to. Nothing to say.”
“Well, that’s just sad,” she said. “Guess it’s a good thing you’re not actually dying.”
He blinked up at her. “What?”
“It hit your shoulder.”
Private Jones managed to lift his head enough to glance at the gauze. He stared at it for just a moment, then let out a mortified groan and closed his eyes, letting his head fall back to the pavement. Martha laughed.
“Melodramatic,” she said.
He cracked an eye open and glared at her. She laughed again, sitting back on her heels.
“Seriously, though,” she said, sobering. “I’ve put some Alvean coagulation gel on it. You won’t bleed out. But we should still get you some proper medical attention. We don’t want that to get infected, now, do we?”
“No,” Private Jones agreed. “I don’t think I’d enjoy that very much.”
“I’ll slip you some painkillers,” she told him. “Make the ride back a little less unbearable.”
“Why, Dr Jones,” Private Jones said dryly as she pushed up one of his sleeves and stuck him with a needle. “Dealing drugs is unbecoming of a UNIT officer.”
She gave him a smile. “Well, I don’t know about officer. I’m a doctor. I can do what I’d like with these drugs.”
A small chuckle bubbled out of Private Jones’s lips. Then he closed his eyes again and settled, lying perfectly still as another uniformed officer called for their ride.
An hour later, and Martha’s first patient had become someone else’s nth patient, and Martha had to go see how many officials’ heads she had to clonk together to get them to order field agents to wear complete tactical gear on all missions, even the seemingly low-level, no-brainer, harmless ones. Especially those.
Little did she know, this wasn’t the last time Martha would deal with Private Jones. Oh, no. Far from that, actually.
Martha’s job was to sit and wait in the armoured vehicle while all the field agents went out and did… whatever it was they did for every mission. Shoot people with guns, she supposed. Why the Doctor (she assumed it had been the Doctor, anyway) had called UNIT to get Martha a job, she would never understand. Especially since… well, “The Year.”
A quick rapping of armoured knuckles jolted her from her thoughts. She glanced up at the officer, and he made a motion for her to lower the window. She did so slowly. There was a reason she sat in the car. Field work was dangerous, and while she was fully capable of handling herself in the face of danger, all field medics must sit in the car and wait until they were needed. Martha didn’t know how many UNIT had lost just sitting around, lying out in the open, waiting while bullets were being exchanged. She didn’t want to know. What she wanted is a higher ranking (and paying, to be frank) job, though she knew she wouldn’t get that. She was new and she never technically finished with her studies.
The officer made a motion for her to open her window faster, and Martha caught the immediacy of the situation.
“What is it?” she asked as the window zips the rest of the way down.
“Someone’s been shot,” the officer told her. “Poison dart, or something.”
“Call for medical backup,” she said, because nothing in her kit could save whoever the wounded officer turned out to be.
“Already done.”
She hopped out of the vehicle, gear in hand and urgency in her pace. The officer led her around the warehouses that they’d raided, towards the clearing in the back. Somewhere in her periphery she noted the would-be-overlords tied up by in the field to the right, guarded by heavily armed officers. She was not looking for the aliens, though; she was looking for the wounded officer.
When she saw the body lying on the ground and the officers hovering over it, she broke into a sprint. All that running with the Doctor had to do her some good, right?
The moment she had pushed through the loose circle of officers, she dropped to her knees and dug through her kit. Antivenins, antitoxins… antidotes… she located them all before checking out her patient. She plucked the dart out of his neck and examined his vitals.
The man’s breathing was slower, as was his heartrate, but it took but a moment for her to realise why. She pressed her lips together and picked the dart back up.
“It was a sedative,” she told the officers gathered around her, waving the dart at them.
She couldn’t blame them, really. Tufted dart blown from the lips of an alien? More than likely to be poisoned. But she assumed the man’s situation hadn’t changed in any of the minutes it took for the one officer to retrieve Martha, and based on the area the dart had been in, it would have, had it actually been a poisoned dart.
“So… he’s… sleeping?” a Private asked haltingly.
“Pretty much, yeah,” Martha said. She started loading all her anti-whatevers back into her kit, then stood. “You got lucky. But someone’s going to need to carry him back to the cars.”
The officers looked amongst themselves, until three women stepped forward and picked up the downed man, one on each arm and the third holding his feet. The other officers dispersed, some to help wrangle the aliens to the vehicles, some to slowly trudge themselves back. Martha stayed with the three women and the knocked-out man, making sure they didn’t need additional help. Tactical gear surely didn’t make carrying people any easier.
They were halfway to the armoured cars when Martha finally realised who this was. She remembered those soft cheekbones and that button nose. Private Jones. She smiled to herself and kept walking behind him, catching his red beret as it slipped from his head.
Martha got the pleasure of sitting in the back of a vehicle with Private Jones, acting as a prop so that he didn’t keel over sideways. His head had rolled onto her shoulder, which would be uncomfortable as all hell for him tomorrow. He was rather tall. And it was bit of a stretch down to Martha’s shoulder. Not good for necks.
She tried to push him back upright, but it only served to lean him down more. With a resigned sigh, she accepted her fate.
This time, Martha was allowed to monitor the recovery of her patient—possibly as the “recovery” was merely just waiting for him to wake up. She sat by his bedside in the recovery ward, filling out her reports. She found herself muttering angrily under her breath. She never knew tranquilizer was this much of a pain in the arse to document.
“It is,” a sleepy voice said beside her. “Have to fill out form H-G-T12… then Tr-72a… and then get those cleared…”
Martha snapped the files shut and sets them aside.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” she said, leaning over him. “Are you awake?”
“Do I have to be?”
“If I’m to fill out the rest of form… H… G…”
“—T12,” Private Jones finished for her.
“How do you even know that?” she asked.
“I know everything,” he said enigmatically.
She scoffed. “Yeah, okay. Then how is it you didn’t know enough to duck?”
An abashed look bloomed on Private Jones’s face and he glanced away.
“I was trying to get Lieutenant Foster out of the way,” he mumbled.
“And you couldn’t just, oh, I dunno,” Martha said, “yell at her to move?”
Private Jones opens his mouth, then closed it again. He did that a few times, looking mildly reminiscent of a fish.
“I didn’t think about that,” he said eventually.
“No, I suppose you didn’t.”
He scowled and she smiled.
“I’ve filled out what I can,” she said, dumping the file folders and pen onto his chest. “Your turn.”
The scowl reversed into a vague look of surprise, but Martha got out of her chair (and takes a moment to stretch, because she had sat there for well over an hour now), then slipped away before Private Jones could call her back.
Martha applied for a promotion. She was better than a field medic. She knew that. No offense to field medics, but they were just barely above nurse level. She trained to be a doctor, not a nurse.
So, she applied and, to her glee, was offered the promotion.
To senior field medic.
Senior field medics had two positions. Some went out into the field and did legitimate field work. The rest sat back and looked over officers when they came back bruised and scraped after missions. More nurse work, really. Guess which one Martha got assigned to?
She took the promotion, anyway.
She also functioned as something GP-adjacent, which she didn’t mind, she supposed. She got an office. People came into that office and she checked them out. Sometimes, she sat there for hours, checking returned officers with minor burns, cuts, bruises, and bumps after a long and eventful mission. All the people with real injuries went right to the operating theatres or recovery rooms, and she tried not to feel bitter about it when she handed icepacks over to people with the tiniest lumps on their foreheads. She would still rather be a UNIT surgeon in the operating theatres or a UNIT geneticist in the labs or a UNIT anything else, but at least she wasn’t sitting in a vehicle, bored out of her mind and waiting for something to happen. (Which was bad because she was the doctor, so she shouldn’t hope anything should happen.)
But sometimes… oh, sometimes, it was fun. Because sometimes she got the most bizarre things that the recovery rooms didn’t know how to deal with, and the operating theatres couldn’t do anything for.
Take, for example, the giant beesting that may or may not have been a beesting.
She heard a tentative knock on her door and went to open it. There she found find Private Jones, of all people, standing outside her door, tall and awkward and looking like he would rather be somewhere else—anywhere else—but here.
“Private Jones,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
He pressed his lips together for a moment, blinked, then cleared his throat.
“Can I come in?”
Confused, she stepped aside, letting him slip through the small crack in the door. He glanced around the room, then went and sat on the examination table. He crossed his ankles, which nearly made Martha laugh. It’s very… polite. But he still hadn’t said why he was here, so she focused on that instead.
“Is something the matter?” she asked.
“Oh. Um. Yes.”
He then failed to elaborate.
“Well,” she said, “what is it?”
“I’ve been… stung…” Private Jones said.
“Stung?”
“By a wasp. Or bee.”
“They sent you here for a beesting?” she asked.
Private Jones nodded, his expression clearly stating that this had not been his choice.
“Right,” Martha said, holding in a sigh. “Let me pull up your records.”
She sat down on her desk chair, scooting it with her toes to the computer. She typed in “Jones” and hits enter, only to realise a second to late that many Joneses worked for UNIT. She peeked over her shoulder.
“First name?” she asked.
“Ianto,” said Private Ianto Jones.
“Oh. My boyfriend’s Welsh, too,” she said. She didn’t quite know why.
Private Jones smirked. “You have fine taste.”
“Thank you,” she said, grinning back.
Then she turned back around and tries the search again, this time for Jones, Ianto. She found the right files and clicked them open, scanning through them quickly.
“Okay,” she said. “No allergies?”
“No.” He eyed her strangely when she turned and stood up. “You didn’t have to pull up my file for that. You could have just asked me.”
“Standard procedure,” she told him.
“Well, I’m clearly not allergic to beestings,” he said pointedly.
“No, but you could be allergic to latex,” she replied, snapping the gloves onto her hand.
He blanched. “Is that… necessary?”
“Standard procedure!” she sang again. “Now. Where’s the sting?”
“It’s… um…”
Private Jones pulled a face.
“Well?” Martha asked. “Can’t treat it if I can’t see it.”
He heaved a long sigh, then pulled off the standard black UNIT undershirt, yanking his arms out of the long sleeves. Martha would not admit it, not ever, but she did take a peek at his physique. In the non-medical way. She also took a peek for medical reasons, but her gaze lingered for her own personal intrigue.
He didn’t have rock-hard abs, but then again, nobody did when they’re slouched over like that. She assumed they were probably firm enough from whatever workout regime UNIT puts its officers through, but they still retained that bit of softness. Perfectly normal, then. Perfectly healthy.
Right, now that she’d taken her unwarranted ogle, she had work to do.
“Where is it?” she asked, moving around to his back, as it evidently wasn’t on his front. “Oh. Wait.”
“Yeah,” Private Jones said as she stared at the lump.
“Might I ask how this happened?”
“Well, I was taking a shower,” he said, “and then there was this buzzing noise. I barely heard it above the water. And then I felt this… sharp pinch.”
“Pinch?” she asked, prodding the patch fading outwards across his skin from the centre of the lump. “Not a sting?”
“I mean, I guess it was like a sting,” he said. “But… well, my immediate reaction was ‘pinch.’ So. Yeah.”
“Huh,” she said. That was all she has.
“The others told me to come here. Is it really that bad?”
“Private Jones,” she said, “what colour do you think a beesting is?”
“I dunno. Red, I suppose.”
“Right. And you’d agree it’s most certainly not supposed to be green? Or purple?”
“What?”
Private Jones craned his neck around, trying to see what she was talking about. His eyes went wide, and his head snapped back around almost instantly.
“It shouldn’t look like that,” he said, rather correctly.
“No, it should not.”
She studied the green spot and purple patch and tried to make sense of it for a bit. Well. It was nothing like anything she’d seen before. Not even with the Doctor had she seen a reaction to a bug bite or sting like this. She poked the skin again, then frowned.
“Hm,” she said.
She turned and rooted through her drawers. They were clean drawers, very well organised, because some days she just sat there and organised and reorganised her room because she hadn’t anything else to do. In the top left drawer, she kept a scanner. One of the good scanners. Could scan anything, terrestrial or not. Was it the best quality? Top-of-the-line model? No, those went to the senior field medics in the field. But this one sufficed.
“What’s that?” Private Jones asked suspiciously as she turned it on.
“Scanner,” she said. “I can’t make heads nor tails of what that is, so I’d like just a little hint.”
It took a moment for the thing to prime, then she moved behind his back and held it over the lump.
“I always feel like it’s cheating,” he said as it scans. “Using the tech we find. It’s not ours.”
“Well,” she said, “we can either use it for something helpful, or we can let it sit in a box and fumble our way through things it could easily solve.”
“But is it our right, to have these things?” he asked.
“I don’t think it matters if it’s our right or not,” she replied carefully. “We do have them. That can’t be debated.”
Private Jones made a small noise of neither agreement nor dissent.
“Do you normally start philosophical debates with all your doctors?” she asked.
“Only the ones with good tastes,” he deadpanned.
She laughed. Then she remembered something and stopped.
“Weren’t you from Torchwood?” she asked.
Private Jones took a deep inhale through his nose.
“Yes,” he said, the good nature from before gone in a flash.
“Didn’t you use the stuff you found over there, too?”
“Yes.”
Martha noted his terse response and decided to drop it. She had her scans finished now, anyway.
“Alright,” she said, glancing over the readings. “It’s…”
“What?” he asked when she trailed off.
“Well, it’s a cyst,” she said.
“A what?”
“A cyst,” she repeated, though she knew that wasn’t what he meant. “It’s just green and purple and evidently caused by a bee-like insect.”
“Is it dangerous?” He turned his neck to see the spot again.
“No,” she said. “Just a normal sebaceous cyst. Other than the… you know.”
“What do we do about it?”
She shrugged. “I can lance it, I suppose.”
“And then what?”
“And then drain it,” she said.
Private Jones glanced up at her, a frown on his brow and moue on his lips.
“It’ll be quick and then it’ll be gone.”
He sighed. “Right. Let’s get it over with.”
She smiled at his attitude, then retrieved a small scalpel, a bunch of gauze, and something to numb the area. Private Jones acted the model patient; he sat stock-still the entire time, not daring to move an inch. Whether it came from restraint or fear, Martha couldn’t tell. But he only moved again when she finished taping the gauze to his back.
“There we are,” she said, patting a shoulder. “You’re all set.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Come back if it turns any other funny colours.”
“Alright,” he said slowly.
She entered all of today’s events into his records while he slipped his shirt back on. She still labelled it as a “beesting” because she didn’t know what else she would call it. She added “sebaceous cyst,” obviously, and the purple and green colouration, but then she didn’t know what else to say. She’d input the scanner readings and that would be about all she could do.
“You can go,” she said when she turned around and found him still sitting there, watching her with an uncomfortable look.
He nodded, relief flooding his face as he stood.
“Thank you, Doctor Jones,” he said smoothly.
She laughed. “Oh, please. I’m Martha.”
“I know, but—”
“But I’ve dismissed you and am no longer acting as your doctor.” She pointed to his back. “I just drained a cyst of yours, I think you’re allowed first-name basis now.”
A small smile flicked his lips upwards.
“Thank you,” he repeated.
Then he ducked out of the door.
The start to her third week in her new office went excruciatingly slow. No routine physicals, no scheduled missions. Nothing to reorganise, because she’d just done that yesterday. She had not one single useful thing to do.
She had just started debating the effects of possibly developing an addiction to Tetris when her door burst open. She looked up, surprised, as a small crowd of people entered the small room: two of them supporting a third, bloody person. She got to her feet instantly, all thoughts of childish computer games dropped in favour of true doctoring as she inspected the supported person.
“You again?” she asked, bewildered.
Private Jones’s face appeared equally as shocked, his mouth hanging open in a stunned pout. They stared at each other for a moment, then Martha ushered Lieutenant Fowler and Private Phipps to the examination table.
“What’s happened?” she demanded as they deposited Private Jones onto the table.
“Training accident,” Lieutenant Fowler said.
“Got sliced,” Private Phipps said.
Martha looked to Private Jones, but his face had scrunched up in pain as he took deep breaths in and out, pressing a hand against his bleeding side.
“How the hell—” She cut off and shook her head. “Never mind. Just… step out, please.”
Lieutenant Fowler and Private Phipps shared a glance, then shrugged and disappear from view. Martha turned to Private Jones again and studied the damage.
“I’m not going to ask why you didn’t wear your tactical vest,” she said severely as she peeled the shirt away from his side, “and I’m not going to ask why you came here, but I will ask: how did this happen?”
“Throwing knives,” Private Jones grit out. “Crank… missed.”
Martha now wanted to ask how Private Crank could miss so horribly, but she had a job to do. First, said job was in making sure the bleeding slowed down, because in no way could she sew that right back up. The blood would make her fingers far too slippery.
When Martha was younger, her mother made her learn all sorts of skills. Baking, cooking, drawing, embroidery… At the time, they’d seemed foolish, pointless, and a waste of her time, but when she’d been better than anyone else at sewing a patient up, she realised how helpful many of those skills had become. Useful enough that Private Jones was stitched up in no time, really.
She gave a final swipe over the wound, cleaning up the last of the blood. She plastered a bandage to it.
“There,” she said.
She helped Private Jones sit upright from leaning back on his hands. His bloody fingers went to the bandage, but she slapped the hand away.
“Don’t play with it,” she said. “You’ll open your stitches. If I have to sew you shut again, I’ll make sure to sew your hands to your sides so they can’t touch it again.”
He held his hands up in surrender.
She stood and washed her hands in the sink, then filled a small dish (the one usually meant for the patients that come in heaving their guts up, but she didn’t need to mention that to Private Jones.) She helped him clean the blood off his hands, then dumped out the water and set the bowl aside to be later sterilised.
“I suppose I could check out your shoulder and back while you’re here,” she said.
“They’re both fine,” he said, though he let her lift up what remained of his tattered shirt.
A tiny scar stretched across his back where the “beesting” had been, and a slightly larger one where the bullet had hit his shoulder. But both had healed well, and she lowered his shirt back down after an approving nod.
“Looks good,” she said. “Hopefully, this one will heal up just as nicely.”
He nodded slowly, observing her with a careful gaze.
“I asked them to bring me here,” he said eventually.
“What?”
“You said you wouldn’t ask why I came here,” he said. “I didn’t want to go into surgery for a stupid cut.”
“That was more than a cut,” she told him.
He shrugged the shoulder of his good side. “Still. I figured… you were my best bet. And you have good tastes.”
“Think I’ll give you special treatment because you’re Welsh?” she joked.
He smiled. It was soft and barely there, but it was still a smile.
“I’ll give you something for the pain,” she said after a moment, “then go home. Get some rest. I’m submitting a report about Private Crank.”
His nose scrunched up.
“I am,” she reiterated. “However this happened, it was due to sheer negligence.”
He still didn’t look pleased about this, and it made Martha wonder if it was like teasing at school. Don’t get the bullies in trouble, or they’d only bully harder when they’d been reprimanded. Well, as far as she knew, Private Crank wasn’t a bully, and if he was, then throwing knives at someone was a step too far, and he needed to be reprimanded.
She gave him something to relieve the pain and told him to come back if he needs anything else. He thanked her and made to leave.
“Private Jones?” she said as he’s about to step out.
He turned and stood still, as if awaiting orders. Well, it would make sense, wouldn’t it? Sometimes she forgot UNIT was a paramilitary organisation. She didn’t know how she forgot, but she did sometimes. Probably because they holed her up in this damn office all of the time.
“Try not to get injured again,” she suggested.
That soft smile returned. “I’ll try.”
“Good.”
She turned to her computer, ready to start a report, but she looked back up in surprise when she heard a soft “Martha?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. Really.”
She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face.
“Yeah, of course,” she said.
He stood there for a moment longer, making that weird thin-lipped almost-smile that some people made, then nodded and slipped out of the door.
Her smile remained glued to her face as she returned back to her work.
Martha applied for another promotion her second month. She couldn’t take this office anymore. It consumed her alive. Even when she went home to Tom at night, this constant nagging of you’re-not-doing-enough sat in the back of her skull.
To her honest-to-god surprise, she was accepted for the promotion. Maybe she’d had intervention again. Not only had she become an actual doctor by technicality, but she had also been promoted twice so early on in her career for no legitimate reason. This had to be the doing of someone in higher power. Or someone that UNIT owed. She knew one person who fits both of those. She didn’t call him to ask. She suspected he wouldn’t answer, anyway. He never did.
But she was a senior field medic now—one of the ones who got to do real field work. And she felt absolutely elated. Doctoring and adventure? That was what she needed, now. That was what her life was supposed to be.
“Are you sure?” Tom asked. “This seems… dangerous.”
“Please,” she scoffed. “I’ve been in far more dangerous situations than anything UNIT can throw me into.”
Tom gave a sceptical hum and folded his arms, but he said nothing more. Wouldn’t matter if he had argued to the moon and back, anyway. Martha had already accepted the promotion.
Her first mission was to a chemical plant in Warrington. She was to determine if they were or were not testing on cloned human beings, posing as a simple health inspector. She got one officer to take along with her, posing as her assistant.
When she reviewed the list of suggested names, she had to laugh at one of them. She chose him without a second thought.
“Lieutenant,” she said appreciatively as Special Agent Lieutenant Ianto Jones walked up to her the day of the mission. “Congratulations on your promotion.”
“Doctor,” he replied smoothly. “Congratulations on your promotion.”
That still felt weird to Martha. Doctor Jones? Lovely. Still gave her chills, sometimes. Doctor? Hm… that made her feel like a certain someone.
“I hope you’re going to keep yourself nice and safe this trip,” she said.
An eyebrow flickered up. “I’ll remind you my job is to keep you safe.”
“How about we make it both of us?” she suggested. “It’ll hardly do me any good, trying to gather information, keeping myself and you safe, and trying to stop you from bleeding out on the floor all at once.”
“I suppose,” he said, one side of his mouth straying upwards.
He looked strange, in that suit. It seemed somehow both made for him and not. It… well, it suited him. But it almost didn’t make sense. This was Lieutenant Jones, meant for UNIT operative gear. Although, she could appreciate the way the red highlighted his appealing features. Between this tie and his usual berets, red clearly was certainly Lieutenant Jones’s colour.
“You look nice,” she told him.
“As do you.”
She had to admit that, while the pencil skirt did kind of ride up and the heels killed her feet, she did look rather stunning. She just hoped she didn’t have to do any running today, because things would get somewhat tricky.
“Thank you,” she said. “Shall we?”
She gestured to the unassuming company-looking car that UNIT had dished out for the purposes of this mission. He made a look of distaste, but he followed her to the vehicle regardless.
“So,” she said as Lieutenant Jones started the long drive to Cheshire. “Promoted twice, then?”
“No, just the once.”
She glanced at him. “But I thought—”
“I’ve been in training to be an agent since I joined,” he said. “They wouldn’t accept me right away.”
“How come?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t have the skillset. I used to be a PA.”
She studied him briefly. She had read his file. Recruited right out of the ashes of Canary Wharf because he had literally nothing left. No job, no girlfriend, nothing. But she didn’t say a word, because she knew nobody liked this sort of pity. She herself was personally glad most of her file was restricted and classified. She could only imagine the looks she’d get if they weren’t… (not to mention all of the confusion some officers would have in being told that they had not only aided but followed the past Prime Minister—an alien—into his reign of terror).
“They said I had ‘a keen eye for detail’ and whatever else,” Lieutenant Jones continued, “so they’d train me. It just happened to take a year.”
“Is that how Private Crank got your side?” she asked.
Lieutenant Jones flipped the indicators on before he made a turn, but he said nothing as they rounded the corner.
As it was both of their first missions, it obviously went sideways. They got the information they need (the plant was obviously running on cloned human test subjects—that wasn’t even a secret. All of it lay right out there in the open, as soon as they walked in), but their covers were blown the moment Lieutenant Jones suggested they find the site the plant grew and kept their clones.
Martha sprained her ankle. She knew that skirt and those heels would kill her. She had to have Lieutenant Jones half-drag, half-support her to the car as they made a hasty escape.
“Think they’ll fire us?” she gasped after she took a wrong step.
Instead of responding, he set her down against the wall of the building, pulling a gun from his—
“How the hell did you fit that there?” she asked, shocked.
“I’m bendy,” he said.
She wanted to ask him what in god’s name that meant, but he had already dashed back towards the door. She didn’t know what for, but she heard some shots ring out. Tensing against the wall, she hoped with all the hope in her that those shots came from Lieutenant Jones. Or maybe not. Well, she hoped they didn’t hit Lieutenant Jones.
Lieutenant Jones was only gone for a short while before he returned. Maybe a few minutes, tops. Still long enough for Martha to demand where he’d gone.
“We have to go,” he said, hauling her back to her feet.
“What? Why?”
“Come on,” he urged.
She leant on him again, trying a strange combination of hopping and running as she attempted to keep up with him on their mad dash to the car. He let go of her the moment her door opened, sprinting around to his own side. She clambered in, slowly and clumsily, as he slammed his door shut. She didn’t want to jostle her ankle too much.
“Hurry,” he said, and his tone had her complying, ankle be damned.
“What’s going on?” she asked as he starts the car.
“We need to get away from here as fast as possible,” he said. “We don’t want to be here when the device goes off.”
“You put a bomb in the building?” she shouted.
“Not a bomb, no,” he said calmly, as he began turning the car around. “Just something to scramble their systems. Shut the entire place down. Stop the production until UNIT can do something about it themselves.”
At first, she wanted to ask where he hid that, too. She didn’t. Best not to know, sometimes.
“So we need to get out of here before the gate before it locks us in,” he said. “In twenty seconds.”
“How are you going to—Jesus!”
Martha had to grab onto her seat and the dashboard as Lieutenant Jones sent the car shooting forward, rocketing its way through the long drive to the gates. The gates close just as they zoomed through, barely making it past. The gates slammed closed behind them; however, Lieutenant Jones did not stop there. He kept speeding well past the gate, burning rubber as they swerved left and right at his uncontrollable speeds.
A good couple minutes pass before Lieutenant Jones slowed down to a normal speed. Martha’s heart raced at an incredible rate, and she had to actively work to pry her fingers from the fabric of her car seat.
“Where the hell did you learn to drive?” she demanded. “The Action Hero School of Driving?”
He glanced at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Drive to Warrington,” she instructed. “We’ve got a hotel there. Would’ve spent the night there if our cover wouldn’t have been blown.”
He took her directions, this time driving like a normal human being and not some madman with a death wish. Her ankle was plenty tender by the time they reach the hotel. She again had to lean heavily on him, so they played the act of overly-cute newlyweds, the kind that couldn’t keep their hands off each other even for one second. The receptionist gave them an odd look, but they managed to get their room without a fuss.
She sat down on the bed the moment they enter the room. He helped her prop her ankle up on a pillow.
“I’ll need something cold,” she said. “Like an icepack.”
“Don’t think we have one of those.”
“Not even in the medical kit?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nope. There’s a bottle of Paracetamol.”
She groaned. She should’ve checked that kit. What kind of field doctor was she? Never mind—she could do nothing about it now. She’d have to think of something else.
“Can you make a run to the store and grab me some frozen peas?” she asked.
He nodded, grabbing the keys to the car. She sank back onto the bed as he made to leave, maybe to take a nap or just to rest for a while. But the moment he got to the door, he stopped.
“What brand?” he asked.
She sat back up and stared at him, bewildered. Did he really think she cares what kind of bloody peas she iced her ankle with? Evidently, it would seem he did, as he gazed back placidly.
“Tesco value is just fine,” she said.
He nodded again, then disappeared out the door. She shook her head and relaxed out on the bed once more.
Martha got her nap, because she was shaken awake almost a half an hour later. The first few moments of consciousness lack coherency, so she asked Tom what he was doing.
“Not Tom,” said Not Tom. “I have your peas.”
She blinked the rest of the way awake.
“Lieutenant Jones,” she said, finding him bending over her.
“Special Agent Jones,” he corrected. “Here.”
He offered her a bag of frozen peas. She took it, stared at it for a moment, then remembered her throbbing ankle.
“Could you get me a towel?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“None of that,” she replied, waving him off playfully.
He smiled slightly, then disappeared to grab her a hand towel. She got up and inspected her ankle. Oh. Not good. Not entirely bad, no, but definitely not good.
“Thanks,” she said, wrapping the towel around the bag of peas. “I’ll pay you back later.”
“Please,” he scoffed. “It’s all of eighty-eight pence."
“Still,” she said.
She placed the makeshift icepack onto her ankle and let out a sigh. It didn’t bring instant relief, but it did help.
“So,” he said. “Is it true what they say?”
“About what?”
“‘Doctors make the worst patients,’” he quoted.
Well. She could think of a specific doctor that made to be possibly the most difficult patient ever.
“Depends,” she said.
“On?”
“Whether or not I’m allowed to whine about it,” she said.
He rolled his eyes.
After they had ordered some pizza that never arrived, they decide it was late enough to sleep. Lieutenant—Special Agent Jones insisted he slept in the chair. She tried to get him to sleep in the bed with her (but not with her, obviously), but he continued to decline until she felt too tired to argue anymore. It did mean she got to laugh at him the next morning when his neck was tight and sore.
They drove back to London, Martha looking after her ankle as she also skimmed over the data they had collected (a.k.a. the four blurry pictures she had managed to capture on her mobile). Well. It was enough that UNIT would dismantle the chemical plant in a few days, brick by brick, but it wasn’t enough that they wouldn’t get yelled at.
“Well,” Special Agent Jones said the moment they step outside of their meeting. “That went…”
“Terribly?” she offered.
“I was going to say ‘disastrously wrong,’” he said, “but ‘terribly’ works.”
“At least they didn’t fire us,” she said. “Or demote us.”
“That wouldn’t be good,” he agreed.
She nodded and he nodded, and this seemed to be the natural end to the conversation. They stood there a moment longer, then he nodded once more as a farewell and stepped off.
“Special Agent Jones?” she called, turning around.
He stopped and looked back at her.
“Still haven’t given you the eighty-eight pence,” she said.
He shook his head. “Keep it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Peas are free for anyone with good tastes,” he said, smiling lightly.
Then he ducked his head, turned, and left.
She watched him for a moment, mystified. Then someone called for her. Colonel Mace… he’d defended them in their briefing. Said their work was, while a bit rushed and overly-dramatic, ultimately good. Maybe she could bend his ear and get herself a few more missions…
Martha’s next case came not even a week after.
“I’d like to see what you can do about the Erikson team,” Colonel Mace told her.
“Why?” she asked, baffled. “Isn’t Doctor Erikson doing the Erikson team?”
“He quit,” Colonel Mace said.
She stared at him.
“The case, not UNIT,” Mace clarified. “God, no. Heaven only knows how much of a shitshow that would be.”
“Why’d he quit?”
“For no reason of importance to you,” Mace said, without malice. “The important thing is—do you think you can take it?”
“I… dunno,” she said honestly.
“It’s just overseeing the small drug squad. And it’ll only be for a short while, I assume.”
“Who’s on the team?” she asked.
“You see… the thing is…” Mace pulled an uncomfortable face. “Well, one of the officers quit with Erikson.”
“You’re telling me I’ve got a team of two?”
“We can give you another,” he said. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Who are the remaining two?”
“Private Jenkins and Private Smith.”
Martha tried to put a face to either of them. She didn’t know who Private Jenkins was, and she knew a few Private Smiths. Two of them would be alright to work with, but the other one… well, she hoped it was one of the alright two.
“Can I make a request?” she asked.
“For what?” Mace asked.
“The replacement.”
Mace frowned. “Do you have someone in mind?”
She gave him her candidates. One flew over with ease, but they were her alternative. Mace asked why, and she told him her first option. Mace baulked at it.
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not?” she asked. “He’s good! You know he’s good! And we’ve worked together before!”
“You lost useful evidence together before,” he amended.
“We still got enough! It was our first time out!”
“No,” Mace repeated. “It’s waste of resources. We don’t have special agents to throw around like that.”
“If you won’t assign him to the squad,” she said, “then I won’t lead it.”
He tilted his head slightly, studying her.
“Is this your ultimatum?” he asked.
“Yes.”
If she was going to be running this shitshow of a team, she had better have someone she liked and trusted on it. And Special Agent Jones was the closest thing she had to either.
Mace surveyed her for a moment longer, then deflated with a sigh. “Fine.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
He grumbled something to himself as he left. Oh, well. She could win his favour back later.
She met her team the next morning. Private Smith was indeed one of the good Private Smiths—thank god for that. She could finally put a face to Private Jenkins. He seemed sweet. And, to her utter delight, her request for Special Agent Ianto Jones had gone through. Martha would thank Colonel Mace for it some other time.
He greeted her with a half-cocked eyebrow, the tiniest hint of a smile playing on his lips.
“Heard you asked for me,” he said.
“Well, what can I say?” she replied. “I’ve just got good tastes.”
The parroted phrase made his smile just the smallest bit wider.
“Drugs, though?” he asked, back to business. “Not what I’m trained for.”
“Listen,” she said. “Doctor Erikson quit halfway through finding where that deadly hallucinogen comes from. I need people to help me finish that.”
“Yes, but me?”
“Why not you?” she said. “You’re the spy. You should be able to suss it out.”
“I’m not a spy,” he replied, but she could tell by the way his face tinged just how much he fancied it.
“Besides, you’re here anyway. Might as well do a good job.”
His eyebrow reverted to its arched position. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
He put a hand on the holster of his gun, then slipped past her to join the small team. She watched him go.
Guns. She had grown used to them. Still didn’t carry one herself. Colonel Mace did. Special Agent Jones did. Privates Jenkins and Smith did. The Doctor wouldn’t approve of any of them. Good thing he wasn’t here, she supposed.
The case Erikson had left wide open for her had very little information. She could tell why he quit it. Absolutely nothing useful came from the files, save for a few autopsies of the people the drug has killed. She sent Jenkins after a few leads with the families (he seemed a nice enough kid; he wouldn’t ruffle too many feathers) and Smith after some semi-classified files. She wanted to put Jones on scouting missions—or that was what she called them in her head, anyway—to the sites where the bodies had been found. But he had other ideas.
“I thought I told you the case files were useless,” she said, leaning over him as he read through them.
“Maybe.”
She frowned down at him. Maybe?
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Clues.”
She stood up again, rolling her eyes. Sometimes, she wondered why she even bothered with some certain people.
Jenkins returned that night with no evidence, Smith came back empty-handed, and neither Martha nor Jones had found anything in the files. They tried again the next day—Jenkins going to find more families, Smith searching for new classified files, and Martha and Jones still pouring through what little they already have.
For a week this went on. A whole week. Martha could see why Erikson quit; the thing was a nightmare of a case. Nothing could be done. Whatever this drug was, wherever it came from, they could not trace it back to the source.
“I’ve traced the hallucinogen back to its source,” Jones said one day.
Martha looked up from the tiny flower she had been doodling on the corner of a note.
“What?”
He picked up a file, scanned it, then pointed out a small footnote on one of the files to Martha.
“Says here that all of them were once test subjects for experimental drug trials.”
“What?” she demanded again. “No, that can’t be. That would have been a correlation between the victims. I would’ve seen it.”
“If they were all the same experimental drug, maybe,” he said. He tapped the line. “They’re all different drugs, ranging from hair growth vitamins to kidney treatments. And they were all taken at widely different times.”
“Okay…” She still wished she would’ve seen that, though she couldn’t change that now. She could mope about it later, but now they had a job to do. “What about it?”
“Have you heard of a pharmaceutical company called ‘Deneb Foundations?’” he asked.
“Deneb? As in, the—”
“Star? Yeah.”
“Is that where all the experimental drug trials originated?”
“Yep.” He popped the ‘p,’ zooming his chair from his desk to Smith’s unattended laptop.
“And… it’s alien?”
“I’d assume so,” he said, rapidly typing away at the keyboard. “Especially if the head of the company looks like—”
He spun the laptop around, showing Martha a picture of a man that wasn’t… quite a man. Not with vibrant purple eyes like those.
“—that,” he finished.
“So… how does this work out?” she asked. “They all died from drug poisoning. From a hallucinogen they took recently. What does that have to do with these experimental drugs?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it’s the only correlation we have. My best bet? They got addicted to something during the trials.”
“Hm,” she said.
Of course, the four of them couldn’t just take down an entire drug company. No, they needed a whole brigade, here. But they got to go. Martha was allowed to take the lead, as she became the head of the drug squad.
“Is it bad that this is exciting?” she asked Jones on the drive over.
He paused inspecting his pistol to cast her a sidelong glance, his eyebrow raised.
“Well,” he said, putting the gun away. “I’m not expecting any resistance, but you never know, with purple-eyed aliens who kill people under the guise of a helpful pharmaceutical company.”
Her face dropped. Well.
“Then again,” he added, “it is always a bit of a rush.”
She nearly rolled her eyes as he gave her a small smile.
Now, if she was completely honest, she had really thought it would’ve gone down easy. But, as things could never be such, somebody had alerted Deneb Foundations. At least twenty purple-eyed Denebians stood awaiting them, armed to the teeth with guns and… more guns. Sometimes, Martha understood all too well why the Doctor detested the things.
Martha got shoved aside a lot, as she did not have a gun of her own. Half “get out of the way” and half “protect Martha!” She really didn’t know which she hated more.
She did her rounds, like she had done when she’d first joined UNIT. Patch up a cut here, staunch the blood flow there, press ice on bruises everywhere. Most officers were generally unhurt, but… well, she couldn’t find Jones anywhere.
“Hold this,” she told Jenkins, throwing him an icepack.
“What for?”
“Just… find someone who needs it.”
She packed up the rest of her kit and headed off.
“Special Agent Jooones,” she called as she wandered down some halls. “Special Agent? Lieutenant? Jones?”
Nobody answered her.
“Ianto,” she finally snapped. “I swear to god, if you don’t answer me, I’ll sew your fingers together when I see you next.”
It felt like it took forever to find him, but she did. He was near an office halfway across the building from where she had started.
“Ianto!” she yelled.
He turned around.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
His lip was split right open, blood dribbling lightly onto his chin. A small spot adorned his cheek, which would no doubt bloom into a freshly purpled bruise. A man (or not-man—probably a Denebian, for all she knew) rested on the ground behind him, sporting a bloody nose and most likely a major concussion.
“Ran out of bullets,” he said when she gawped at him.
“So you beat him up?”
“Was a fair fistfight,” he protested meekly. “His skull just wasn’t thick enough.”
“What’s that?” she demanded.
She picked up his hands and held them up in the air, knuckles facing her. They… did not look good. They were bruising faster than Ianto’s cheek, and one of them had cut open. Or maybe it was the blood from the other guy. Either way, it needed to be cleaned.
Martha dropped the hands and pointed downwards. He rolled his eyes, but she adamantly and sternly pointed to the floor again.
“Sit,” she said.
He sighed and sat down. She nodded appreciatively, then knelt down beside him and opened up her med kit, pulling out wipes to disinfect and plasters to, well, plaster.
“You came looking for me,” he said after a while.
“Of course I did, you idiot,” she said. “Had to make sure you were still alive.”
“Thanks.”
She glanced up at him. He looked earnest. Pitifully so. It made her wonder, somewhat sadly, if he had ever been left behind. She hoped not.
“Here,” she said, handing him a small patch of gauze. “Stick that on your lip.”
He did so obediently. He made a face as the gauze stuck instantly to the blood and the tackiness of his lips, but he kept it there.
“I have good taste,” she said. “Remember? Can’t leave the Welshmen behind.”
He snorted, still pressing the gauze to his lip.
“And now, I get to test you for a concussion,” she said, and he groaned.
Despite their win with the Deneb Foundation, Martha and Special Agent Ianto Jones were booted from the drug squad.
“Erikson wants the job back,” Colonel Mace explained, mildly apologetic.
“I’m sure he does,” she scoffed. “Right after we finish up his case with a great deal of success? Why wouldn’t he want it back?”
Mace, rather intelligently, ignored her. “And I’m going to let him have it.”
“But why? We were doing so well!”
“Neither you nor Special Agent Lieutenant Jones are needed for the drug squad,” Mace said. “You have other things that are more important. Things you need to do more.”
Now, she doubted that very much, but it seemed that arguments would get her absolutely nowhere. Not with this. So, she conceded her loss and handed the job back over to a sneering Erikson’s power-hungry hands, then waited for her next assignment.
And, if she was honest, this assignment… might have actually been better than a small drug squad. More undercover work. A chance to redeem herself. That, and—
“What are you doing here?” she asked as Jones showed up by the car.
He shrugged. “You needed somebody else. Couldn’t let you go in alone.”
“Really?”
“Us Joneses have to stick together.”
“Well, alright then, Special Agent Lieutenant Ianto Jones.” (Which was actually a mouthful, really.) “Let’s get started.”
“Let’s,” he agreed.
She kept grinning as they got into the car.