Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a bolthole in the depths of the library, tucked away from towering shelves and spiralling balconies: buried in the labyrinth of the archive. A place far beyond the classics, miles down from the galactic encyclopaedias, just above the crypt of sentient scrolls. Isolated, even, from the grandiose distraction of the domed skylight that swirled perpetually with space, full of stars and gasses as creation flew by.

It was a private place, curated with the intention of solitude. A place which had dutifully fulfilled that purpose for some seven-hundred years. 

Until tonight.

Through baroque doors and around a short, twisty set of stairs, the Doctor's study hid like a well-kept secret in a castle. The grand leather armchairs faced each other, angled before the hologrammatic fireside. A pendent lamp moved gently with the creaking sway of the time machine, filament flickering ever so often, spreading deep warm shadows across the curve of the porous walls.

The room reminded Martha of her grandfather’s attic. Cramped and messy and lived-in, packed with broken things and odds and ends: the mismatched, magpie curios of a long and full life. Books reached to the ceiling and beyond, but none of the thousands here were written in English and none of their titles translated for her. Ancient tomes towered and dwindled like mountainous terrain heaped upon the floor, bindings frayed and peeling with age. Great dusty stacks of sacred knowledge were improvised as footrests and coasters and teetering side tables, holding unfinished novels, Post-it notes, faded tea rings.

Unlike the rest of the TARDIS, this secluded little chamber felt personalised. Intimate. It felt like someone’s home.

And tonight, unlike so many others, out of it carried laughter.

"It's now or never, Martha Jones." The Doctor leant back in satisfaction, a smug twitch playing at the corner of his lips. Both arms folded across his chest and his eyes fixed squarely on hers. "Your move."

They twinkled with the challenge behind his tortoiseshell specs. Soulful, fathomless, razor-sharp. Brighter than normal in the dim, bronzed glow of the room – like copper in the firelight.

Beautiful, Martha thought. A crushing kind of beautiful that made her breath catch and her soul ache. She was savouring the sight more than ever tonight, because not so long ago, those lovely eyes hadn't been his. They'd been lethal. Otherworldly. Flooded by the white-hot rage of a wrathful sun. Blazing, destroying, to a chorus of his own agonised screams.

Burn with me.

It was how she’d ended up here in the first place: on the heels of a nightmare plagued by those haunting words. Jarred awake, her head full of terror and heat and blistering death, Martha had taken to roaming the TARDIS’s empty, glowing corridors in her pyjamas, hoping a good wander would help get her mind off things. After a series of mindless turns and twists she couldn’t possibly recall, she came upon an archway which, unlike the rest of the TARDIS’s craggy, tunnel-like architecture, was not tightly sealed. The round door was rolled half open, lazily ajar, a dense gloom beyond it spilling shadows onto the light.

And she had long since learnt that open doors in a sentient vessel were never a coincidence.

Even so, in spite of the invitation, it still felt strangely like housebreaking as she tipped into the looming dark. She’d never quite grown used to the feeling of stepping into one world tucked inside another; the transition threw off something innate and hardwired in her brain, built for understanding only three dimensions at a time. In the space of a single step, she transported from the humming warmth of a spaceship corridor into the vast, towering shadow of a Victorian library. A place she’d never before seen, never knew existed aboard the TARDIS.

Breathtakingly grand, of course – he did so love to show off. A city of books and gleaming mahogany, ceilings and catwalks spiralling higher than she could fathom. It made her stop in her tracks, grasping the railing and leaning over, just to take in the overwhelming splendour of it all. But despite the kneejerk delight of the medical student within… something about the enormity of the library, the ringing emptiness of it, unnerved her. It was deathly silent inside. Cold in a way that made her feel unwelcome.

It felt like a forgotten place. Not haunted or creepy: just terribly, endlessly alone. Too great of a palace for just one man.

Pushing away the rise of emotion with a little shiver, Martha hugged her arms to her chest. She crept down winding stairs from the balcony she’d entered upon, her breath held so as not to disturb the tomblike hush – wincing as her flipflops flip-flopped louder than she’d like. At the bottom of the stairs there was a great ornate rotunda, a brightly-lit clearing in the forest of books. The heart of the library. She wandered into it, her small footsteps reporting noisily, slapping the polished floor. It appeared to be the only spot in the unfathomably large chamber that wasn’t cloaked in layers of dark and dust, and, curious, she craned her neck back with a squint to find the light source. When, seemingly out of thin air:

“Martha.”

She spun around, gasping a little, her stomach jolting with butterflies. To her confusion, the aisles immediately behind her were empty.

Then the voice came again. “Up here,” it said, and her eyes darted northward.

In his shirtsleeves and reading specs, sitting along the rungs of a ladder with a book splayed in his lap, the Doctor was looking down on her. Converse dangling, head cocked inquisitively, he seemed startled to see her. “You’re up early,” he’d observed, eyebrow raised as he glanced at a wristwatch he wasn’t wearing. “What’s the occasion?”

Then he peered over his frames to look down at her properly – and turned solemn in an instant.

“Martha, what’s wrong?”

When the tears welled, brimming over in a sudden overflow, Martha couldn’t do anything to stop them.

Of course, the Doctor reacted as he was wont, in the face of any kind of emotional outpouring. Alarmed, concerned, uncomfortable. Well-meaning, but ultimately a bit useless. He’d hurriedly dismounted from his perch to receive her, tossing his book aside, taking her by the arms and stooping to look into her eyes: worry flooding off him in waves, gaze flickering over her tensely as though he thought she might’ve been hurt. “What is it?” he said, brows drawn into a deep, troubled furrow. “What’s happened?”

A question so ridiculous only he could’ve asked it.

And it prompted the misadventure to unfold in her mind, in gutting, rapid-fire bursts. A young medic burned to death in her own infirmary, nothing but a soot stain on the corrugated wall. Erina’s last scream, crackling through the comms system. A woman ripped into the vacuum of space, the corpse of her dead husband in her arms – bodies drifting toward a sun in frozen embrace, revolving toward a galactic cremation.

She still saw the Doctor framed in a tiny porthole, silent and dire, imploring her with his eyes as he mouthed over and over again: I’ll save you. She still saw him in the stasis chamber. His white, frosted features wracked in agony. Icicles clumped in his eyebrows and hair, webbing across his colourless skin. It was that memory that’d woken her in such a state, hyperventilating, pouring sweat and tears. His eyelids scrunching tight around the light that razed behind them, body writhing in agony. The feel of her metacarpal bones crushing under the terrified force of his hand clinging to hers. The sound of his voice, gone high and fraught, broken and breathless – admitting to fear, to dread, to not knowing what happened next. His voice, screaming. Cracking, changing… agony giving way to menace.

I could kill you. I could kill you all.

Burn with me, Martha.

“Martha?”

She forcibly regained control of herself. Roughly shaking off the memories, scrubbing her eyes dry with her forearm and a hard sniffle. “It’s nothing,” she breathed, gulping hard. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

The Doctor let her go but made no attempt to look convinced. “Are you sure?”

She gave a brusque nod, swiping at the lingering tears and feeling herself burn with embarrassment. She turned around and, desperate for anything else to focus on, looked back up to the ceiling, attention fixing on the skylight above.

She felt the Doctor looking at her for a moment, studying her profile. For an instant she worried he was going to press the subject. Then he just sighed and followed her gaze upward, sticking his hands in his pockets. They both regarded the dome of the library in quiet for a few seconds.

It was the light source she’d wondered about. A kaleidoscopic dusting of nebulas, suspended in nothingness – the stippled light of long-dead stars inside the deepest, darkest, most ravenous black. To tour the universe was one thing, but to see it laid out like this before her, put into surreal perspective, nearer than ever and yet still so incomprehensibly far…

“It’s…” Martha shook her head and expelled a heavy breath in lieu of a sufficient adjective, breaking the silence after awhile. “It’s just…”

“Mm.” He offered a murmur of agreement, though she hadn’t finished the thought. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Terrifying,” she replied quietly.

“Tom-ay-to, tomato.” The Doctor looked down at her. “In my experience it’s rare you ever find one without the other.”

“Yeah,” she almost whispered, her breath hitching a little. And then she pointedly broke his deep, contemplative gaze, re-crossing her arms and licking her lips uneasily. “Erm, I… I didn’t know you were still up. Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Nah, you haven’t,” he dismissed easily, batting her concern away. “Course you haven’t. Mi casa es tu casa, and all that – library included.”

She gave a faint smile, eyes flicking to her feet. “Okay.”

“Though all bets are off if I ever catch you dogearing.” His head tipped forward and he gave her a rather serious downturned look. “That’s grounds for eviction, that is.”

Her smile twitched. “I’ll remember that.” Grateful for the change of subject, she nodded her head at the heavily creased and repeatedly folded-over paperback that he’d tossed on the velvet arm of a nearby wing back chair. “And I see we take tenancy laws very seriously here.”

“Hmm?” He followed her line of sight – before raising an eyebrow with good-natured sternness. “As I say, Martha, not as I do.”

“Fair enough. Your casa, your rules…”

“My hypocrisy. Exactly,” he finished, to her amusement.

She peeked at the title of his book. Then leant closer with a slight frown. “Hang on, is that really what you’re reading?”

“What?” he said, piping up a little in automatic offence. He scooped up the tattered paperback as though to protect it from her. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, it’s…” She repressed a little smirk. “I mean. Sort of on the nose, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Eh. Call it a guilty pleasure. We’ve all got ‘em, there’s no shame. Mind you,” his head rolled thoughtfully to one side as he thumbed through the pages, “it didn’t actually happen this way. I never could have in good conscience just left the Eloi there to be massacred by the Morlock. Our friend Herbert was quite generous with the creative liberties.”

Martha stared at him, both fond and exasperated. “You are not the protagonist of The Time Machine.”

The Doctor scoffed. “Well, of course not. Haven’t you read it? Pure self-insertion. All that indulgent nonsense about Weena – to this day she’s still complaining. But then, take repressed Victorian attitudes into the future…”

“You did not travel with H.G. Wells!”

He only gave her that lopsided smile: enigmatic and impish all at once. Then he leant his hip on the arm of the chair, crossing one ankle over the other and his arms in a nonchalant way. He held her eyes through his lenses and said rather kindly, “Was it a nightmare?”

The gentle question made her face drop and her heart skip. But the look in his deep eyes willed her, and she found herself nodding mutely.

“About today,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Again, she only nodded, biting her lip – but this time there was heat burning in her eyes, blurring over her vision.

The Doctor regarded her with concern. Then he asked, “Would it help at all to talk about it?”

Two tight, silent sobs wracked her body before she could stop them, tears tracking down the sides of her face. “No.” Her voice broke over the word, and she had to draw a quick, brittle inhale to steady herself.

When she failed to say anything more, he searched her eyes intently. “I never would have let anything happen to you, Martha.” He was as grave as he was soft. “You know that. There was no chance you were going to die in that pod. Or on that ship.”

She shook her head feverishly, and breathed, choked up, before she could stop herself, “But you could have.”

He frowned, and blinked a bit; as though this was a new consideration. “Yes,” he conceded, after a slight pause. “But… I didn’t.” Then there was a brilliant, mad grin – like the sun rising after an endless night. “Don’t you just love it when that happens?”

Fresh tears rolled hot down her cheeks and wiped the smile right out.

"I couldn't take it,” she whispered, her breath starting to come in hiccupping fits. "If something had happened to you today, I just – couldn't."

It was deafening, the real admission in the smallness of her voice. Anyone in the universe, without knowing who they were or what they did, could have picked up on the breathless, emotional undertones of that confession.

The Doctor, historically hard of hearing where her feelings were concerned, did not.

He went for the literal interpretation – promised her that the sun was gone, purged, never coming back. He told her she was safe. He offered her a reassuring smile. A vigorous, stilted, disturbingly fatherly pat on the shoulder (he never seemed to quite know how to touch her, outside of mortal peril).

And in the wake of the shallow comfort, she'd expected him to return to his ladder, or better yet, vacate the area entirely. Abandon the scene of the consolation with haste, and leave her there crying between the shelves.

But he hadn't. For once, he hadn't pretended nothing was wrong. Hadn’t vanished into the shadows of God-knows-where and left her to stew in her own turmoil. To his credit – and her endless surprise – he had seemed to sense that she needed more from him this time. That the paper-thin assurance of ‘you’re safe’ wasn’t going to cut it tonight.

The hug was engulfing. It was like every other great big Doctor hug she’d ever been on the receiving end of: warm, snug, all elbows and squishing, strictly from the waist up. But rather than heave her off her feet or swing her round, rather than turn it whimsical and hollow – he simply held on, patient and quiet. He didn’t shush her, or tell her not to cry, or say that everything was okay when it demonstrably was not. He just put his chin on top of her head and folded her into his chest, squeezing her like he could wring all the sadness out.

For the first time since she’d met him, it felt like he understood what she was going through. Or was trying to, at least. If nothing else, it felt like empathy, after so long of feeling that she was on her own.

More to the point, it stopped her crying, which she supposed was probably his only goal in the end.

After a bit, the Doctor let her go and looked down at himself. His eyes went to his shirt and tie. “Aw,” he said, a bit mournfully. “Look, you’ve got me all soggy.”

Martha gave a flinch and started to stammer a blushing apology – but she fell silent in surprise, inhaling sharply when he ran his thumbs under her wet eyes.

Her breath caught in her throat. It felt startlingly tender, and for a moment she couldn’t move, couldn’t think of anything to say.

Then he smeared a finger under her running nose.

“Doctor!” she spluttered, recoiling with a snort that was more shock than anything.

He grinned maniacally at her reaction. “Ah, that’s better! There’s that smile.”

“You’re disgusting,” she accused, still laughing despite herself.

“What? It’s just mucus, we’ve all got it. Bit of mucus never hurt anyone! There’s entire oceans of it on Altuptrus Prime. Keeps the respiration caves nice and lubricated, whole planet would be lost otherwise.” He paused then, looking down at her carefully, seeming to size her up. “I don’t suppose you want to go back to bed?” he ventured.

Martha shook her head immediately. She looked around and pointed out, sniffling, “I wouldn’t know how to get back from here, anyway.”

“Well, that won’t do at all.”

She blinked. “What won’t?”

“Can you walk in those things?” His attention had dropped rather precipitously to her feet.

Warily, she peered down to her own plastic flip flops, hastily donned to avoid the TARDIS’s freezing grates. “Why? Are we going somewhere?”

"Oh yes!"  It was loud, terrifyingly so, startling her a foot into the air. She grabbed her heart and glared at him. "Into the unknown! Weeelll, the unknown for you, at least. What do you say to a mandatory tour?”

She’d opened her mouth to make the point that there was no sense in asking her what she said if it was mandatory – right as he grabbed her arm and began to drag her down a dark, looming aisle of bookshelves without preamble.

“Don't think I've ever given you one proper,” he carried on, hauling her behind him so briskly she tripped over her sandals. “Long overdue, really, I should have showed you round the library ages ago! Can't have you getting lost in the periodicals and starving to death – come on, then, keep up, chop-chop! Allons-y! I'll show you the archives first. Oh, you'll love those, Martha. There's this slide…"

It had led here, in the end. His study. She'd never have known it even existed, had she not happened to notice the dark, grand doors camouflaged inside a bookshelf and wondered, "Where does that go?"

On any other night, he'd have satisfied her curiosity with a casual lie and dragged her away to some different attraction across the library. But perhaps something about their traumatic ordeal on the SS Pentallian had rattled loose a few feelings inside him as well, because he'd just sighed a little fondly and said, "Well, no harm in a peek, I s'pose.”

Of course, with her inquisitive nature and his affinity for storytelling, it became more than that. Her delight and amusement over his hoarded collection of trinkets led to an animated recounting of a few of the exciting tales behind their acquisition. The evening found her here, enjoying the rambling lull of his voice, sitting in front of the holographic fire on the lush Persian rug – flip flops off at his insistence, “No shoes, Martha, that rug’s older than your civilisation!” – curling her bare toes into the dark, lavish reds and blues and golds. Because the Doctor insisted upon conducting himself as though he were English, there was soon tea involved, seemingly conjured out of thin air: an obligatory hot mug pushed into her hands once she'd gotten comfortable. Before too long they were both on the floor, the Doctor on his knees next to her as he rifled through the otherworldly bric-a-brac on the bottom of his shelves and laughed at things he hadn't looked at in centuries.

That was when Martha had spotted the out-of-place Earth board game buried down there, papered in a thousand years of dust. And they'd had a good laugh over that as well.

Then the amusement waned, and as he held the dusted-off Scrabble box in his lap, he’d fixed her with a suddenly expectant look. A pointed, daringly arched brow.

"We can always go best two out of three, if you fancy." The Doctor was smirking openly now, a single self-satisfied eyebrow aloft. "I mean," he drawled, "maybe you are as good as you claim after all. One game's not really a proper sample size, is it?"

She rolled her eyes. "One game's plenty, thanks."

"Oh, ho!" His head tossed back with the laugh. "Someone's cocky, blimey! Now, now, Martha, don't be a sore loser. There's no shame in coming a close second. Let's just wrap this one up with a graceful concession and play another—"

"Oi!" She swatted at his hand before he could disturb their progress. "I'm thinking. Hang on a second, would you?"

"All right, all right. As you wish." The Doctor let go of an indulgent sigh and crossed his legs, settling against the base of the armchair with a lazy smile. "In your own time, Miss Jones.”

It felt good, pretending they were normal mates with a normal life and a normal kind of affection for one another. She was well aware she was only being afforded this privilege because of his own internalised guilt – because his recklessness today had made her cry. Because the day’s harrowing events had shaken him up as bad as her. She also knew full well that once he was no longer so disturbed, once the guilt waned to manageable levels, he would revert to his old ways of avoidance and deflection, his tried-and-true methods of pretending she didn’t exist outside of their usual daytime operating hours.

Still, this was the closest Martha figured she was ever going to get to him truly letting her in. This silly little interlude of play-normality, between two people who were anything but.

Most times, she found her love for him embarrassing. Something to be bottled-up, battered down and repressed at all costs. But other times – rare, quiet times like these – she could appreciate it for what it was. When they weren’t wrapped up in insecurity and resentment and shame, she could contain all the feelings he stirred up in her. She could meet his eyes and smile back. She could see the bigger picture, and be grateful in its clarity. Of all the times and places he could be, and all of the people he could be there with, this timeless, ancient, beautiful being… he was choosing to be here. With her.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe it would have to be.

The projected fire brazed in a frothy crackle beside them as she looked down to the flimsy cardboard they’d been squaring off over for half an hour. She pretended to consider her moves with a careful poker-face before glancing back up at him. She could see the fire reflected warmly in his lenses, in the dark of his pupils.

Again, almost unconsciously, she found herself admiring his eyes. Something about them was different in the low, intimate glow of the study. There was a light there she seldom saw. Something gentler, less guarded; nothing like the shuttered, hard-edged coolness she’d grown so used to. They were aglow with mirth, a hint of good-natured sympathy, as he observed her with that patronising amusement on his face. That little crook of his lips, the smirk he couldn’t quite seem to suppress.

Condescending git. God, she adored him.

"Nineteen, you said?” Martha asked as she reached for her tray.

He wiggled his eyebrows at her. "Nineteen."

“Right. Got it.”

She laid her tiles deliberately, and didn't look up at his customary high-pitched calling card of outrage.

"What?"

The Doctor launched forward onto his knees and almost capsized the entire Scrabble board, and her cuppa, in one go. "What!" he cried a second time, tearing his glasses off and squinting hard at the board. "What kind of rubbish is that?"

Martha bit her lip and failed to repress a tiny giggle as she slid the final letter across the plastic. "Sorry."

"'Asphyxy?' That's not even a word!"

"Yes, it is," she cackled, gleeful, toppling onto her side. "And it's twenty-five points!"

In rising disbelief, he inspected the game board, then lifted his eyes to hers sharply. “Did you cheat?"

She laughed again. “Oh, just admit it! You lost! I beat you!"

He clambered around the board on all fours and ordered harshly, “Sleeves, now.”

Still wracked with giggles at the absurdity of it, Martha obediently stuck out her arms to him. He shook one first, then the other. The lilac satin of her pyjamas fluttered.

A handful of wooden squares tumbled to the carpet.

The Doctor was aghast.

"Martha Jones!" he bellowed.

She burst out laughing all over again.

"In my defence,” she huffed once she caught her breath long enough to speak coherently, “I didn't even have to use them. You are rotten at Scrabble!"

“I am not!”

“I mean,” she pointed at the board with another uncontainable giggle, “what the hell is an ood? Like I said: rotten!”

He didn’t lose the severity, nor the betrayal, in his wide-eyed glower. "I can’t believe you’d cheat.”

"That's rich coming from you, Mister! I saw you putting vowels in your pocket before we started!"

He blinked very fast and spluttered a little, caught off-guard by the accusation. "I did no such thing, thank you!"

"No?" Martha lilted sweetly – and then, in a sudden, agile burst of movement, she lunged at him.

The Doctor recoiled, eyes widening as he reeled back sharply. “What are you doing?” he demanded, voice sliding up an octave. He fell back onto his rear and pushed away across the rug on socked feet as she pursued him. “What are you – stop it!"

She cornered him against the grating of the fireplace with a light clang, eyes bright with teasing menace. “Turn out your pockets.”

“What? No!”

“Well, if you haven’t got anything to hide…” Martha took the initiative herself, reaching for his trouser pocket and ignoring his creaky “Oi!” of protest. It was snugger than expected, warm with the heat of his leg – but before it could feel awkward, the smuggled handful of tiles was easily recovered.

She put on a look of scandalisation and gave a theatrical gasp. “Oh, for shame.”

He glared at her as she tutted in dismay. With snide flourish, Martha pulled the tiles out and tossed them on the rug with her own where they tumbled in a heap of incriminating As and Es. "How do you care to explain this, then, Mister Smith?”

"That was just… insurance, is all!”

She laughed outright. “Insurance for what? To make sure you didn’t lose to a lowly human?” She cocked her head with a mock pout, poking out her bottom lip. “How’s that working out for you, then?”

“I cannot believe you’d be so underhanded, Martha.”

“You were underhanded first!”

“Yes, but I’m allowed to be underhanded! You’re not supposed to…”

“What?” She lifted her chin. “Are you really going to ‘as I say, not as I do’ me?”

He scowled up at her for a moment longer. But eventually the expression softened at the sight of her triumphant delight. “All right, then,” he said, with reluctant finality.

“What?”

“Game’s yours. You win.” He smiled at her lopsidedly. “Very well-played, Martha Jones.”

She grinned wide, breath slowing. “Thanks.”

“I see I underestimated you.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she chuckled without thinking about it.

His brow furrowed slightly. And then he said in a low, rather pensive tone, “No, I don’t suppose it would.”

And suddenly Martha became conscious of the unusual proximity between them. It was a strange place to be, in the Doctor’s personal space; she’d gotten too close, forgotten herself in the fun. She could smell him, the pomade in his hair and the spice of his aftershave. She could feel the heat from the faux furnace juxtaposed against his very real body heat, radiating stronger than she’d ever felt.

Looking into his eyes so brazenly, she felt herself grow warm, hyperaware of the lengthening silence. Her smile started to slip, and as she heard her own heartbeat quicken, she feared the Doctor could hear it too. His expression betrayed nothing, entirely undecipherable – his eyes settled unmoving on hers, fixed with a startling concentration. Even in the firelight, suddenly they seemed dark. Startlingly so.

Unbidden, a flush of helpless arousal washed over her.

Martha abruptly drew away. She sat back on her heels, managing an awkward chuckle as she broke his gaze and shyly tucked her hair behind her ears. “Tell you what,” she said, clearing her throat. “I suppose I could be amenable to a rematch, but only if you promise—”

And then the Doctor sat forward without warning, gathering her into a hard, crushing kiss.

Chapter Text

A million times, a million ways, Martha had imagined this moment.

Never could she have known just how woefully her dreams would pale in comparison.

She gasped so hard she squeaked and clutched at his cuffs, nearly tumbling over – hanging on for dear life as their mouths collided.

The initial force behind the kiss was blunt, almost distraught; but at her muffled exclamation against his lips, the sharp and trembling note of alarm that forced out of her, suddenly the pressure eased. Suddenly he slowed, as if he’d remembered himself, as if he were cautious of hurting her.

Suddenly, there was a mindless, irresistible rhythm come to life between them, lips seeking, grasping softly, instinctually. He held her by the jaw, fingers stroking the hairs behind her ears and nape, the wisping curls her flat iron never quite tamed. Tracing the apples of her cheeks with his thumbs, following the ghost of the tears he’d warded off.

For a surreal stretch of time – for a spell that dragged much longer than that three-second, blink-and-you-miss-it ruse on the Moon – the Doctor kissed her.

And Martha let him do it. Had nothing even resembling the willpower to resist.

It was an unchoreographed, impulsive, reckless exploration: each slow, deepening press of their mouths an exponentially worse idea than the last. Every insistent slide of his lips more heart-stopping, more terrifying, than a freefalling plunge into a sun.

The intimacy was too much, too frightening. And sinking in it, suffocating in its thrall, it all came back to her: crashing back up like the tide flooding in.

Martha, Martha where are you? 

His voice, frantic and choked, ringing in her head.

I’m scared, he’d gasped, squeezing her wrists purple, I’m so scared. 

His screaming at the push of a lever, completely unrestrained, all pretence obliterated by total agony. Watching his spacesuited legs thrash and his body convulse as he went through hell by her hand. Digging her nails into her fist so hard blood rose, all to keep herself from ripping every plug out of the chamber, to root herself to the spot, to merely close her eyes tight and think over and over: I love you. I love you. God, please don’t let me kill you.

She whimpered, eyes squeezing tight against the sweltering, disorienting memories – but there he was, painfully real, pulling her up out of them. His lips were persistent, torturously soft, kisses lukewarm from the tea. Drawing her back into the moment, and into him. 

He'd never been so close to her before, and the scent of him enveloped her, that undefinable aura that lived on the suede of his coat and lingered in the wake of his hugs. He filled her every breath. Her every thought and molecule. 

It was too terrifying to be a fantasy, too painful to be a dream. And if she had adored him before – for what she felt then, in that moment, there were no longer words to suit.

His hands slipped from her face, all the way down, tracing her neck and arms on the descent before falling to her hips – his fingertips bunching the satin with a faint rustle, gripping to steady her when she started at the contact and gasped into the kiss. He was touching her, stroking light circles through her pyjamas, sensitising her skin as his fingers skimmed over the fabric. Lulling her into a half-drunken stupor with their gentle certainty, with his soft drag of suction on her bottom lip.

Martha heard her own voice as though from underwater, breathing an involuntary moan. Without any conscious intent, suddenly she was running her fingers up sideburns, grasping at the back of his disorderly hair, hands running thoughtless through the short strands.

Something like a rumble sounded from his throat.

It seemed right then, inescapably, that there was only one place it was going. One way this senseless little collision was going to end.

But then, of course – it didn’t.

It threw over them like ice water, dousing the fervour in a flash: a noise bigger than any Martha had ever heard. Thrumming the air violently, booming up her spine like a gong the size of a moon.

She gave a half-cry of shock. They started away from each other in sync – eyes widened to their limit, breaths mingling fast over the crackling of the hologrammatic hearth, the brass-tinged earthquake that had begun to toll around them.

“Whuh,” gasped Martha, hands clapping over her ears. The attempt at speech was a categorical failure, and she was forced to try again, mouth hanging open. “What… what the hell is that?”

“Not supposed to happen,” muttered the Doctor breathlessly, raking a hand back through his hair. His gaze turned to the ceiling. “It’s the Cloister.”

She squinted, utterly bewildered – brain struggling to regroup, higher functions scrambling to reengage. “What, like… for monks?”

“Bell,” he elaborated in a heavy sigh, looking back to her. “Cloister Bell. Basically, the temporal equivalent of a fire siren.”

Her mouth formed a small o. “That sounds… serious.”

“Yes, it is.” And he stared at her.

In the deep gaze she read intensity, frustration – but most devastatingly of all, heat. An entirely different sort than the terrors of their day had wrought.

A shiver coiled hard in her spine, an ache so penetrating it pressed her thighs together.

Then the Doctor blinked; his face twitched slightly, like someone had changed his channel.

“Yes,” he repeated, rather abruptly, “it is.” Then sprung to his feet, so unexpectedly it all but toppled her.

“Wha…”

“C’mon, up you get!” He grabbed her by the wrists and pulled her up to a standing position with, seemingly, no effort whatsoever. “No time to tarry.”

It took her a few false starts to get her legs to bear her weight. “Um,” she tried, closing her eyes briefly.

“Here.”

They opened, to the sight of her plastic flip flops in his grip, extended back to her.

She took them hesitantly, feeling like she was trying to think through treacle. “Erm, Doctor…”

“Might be dangerous.”

She paused, frowning. “What?”

“The Cloister Bell,” he said. “Usually is dangerous, when that thing goes off – means the TARDIS is innately disturbed by something. You don’t have to come along, if you aren’t up to it.”

“I’m… up to it, I just…”

“Sure?” He peered at her. “Didn’t get your normal eight hours.”

“Medical student,” she reminded him distantly, through a shake of her head. “Sleep deprivation’s kind of our thing. But I don’t…”

He grinned. “Brilliant,” he said, and took her by the hand.

“Doctor…”

He whisked off past the remnants of their fraud-riddled Scrabble match, towing her behind. Barely in her flip-flops, Martha followed at a half-stumble, tripping over books, staring at the back of the pinstripe suit in a kind of dawning bewilderment.

She could taste him on her lips, still. Her body hadn’t stopped aching.

Her mind was rebooting with a kind of frazzled, delayed panic.

What the bleeding hell just happened?

“Careful,” he said from the doors of the study, sticking his head in to watch her wobble up the curve of stairs, her hands grasping uncertainly at the rugged dunes of coral wall.

When she finally surfaced, and stepped back into the library, he threw the great embossed doors shut behind them.

At the deep, tomblike kerthunk of their close, Martha felt her heart drop right into her gut.

Somehow, she already knew she’d seen her last beyond them.

He led her back through the echoing gloom of the library, through the archives, down the slide, past the apothecary shelves of philosophic inhalants, the heavily-stuffed stretches of loose leaf poetry – the gust of their passing wafting sheets from the shelves.

Back in the starlit rotunda, back underneath the neon variegation of nebulas, the rapid, suctioned flip-flopping came to a sudden halt.

“Doctor.”

It was so tense it was nearly strangled, nearly hurled-up; utterly pleading.

Well ahead of her, halfway up the stairwell, he looked sharply over his shoulder, frowning down in question.

She stood planted in the centre of the gleaming atrium. A determined set to her shoulders, directly contradicting the fear in her eyes as she stood there, hands in fists: small, rigid, vulnerable as anything in her shiny-soft pyjamas.

“Why did you kiss me?”

The Cloister Bell tolled, faintly vibrating the room around them, the chairs and books and bodies within.

For a moment, he was unnervingly still. Leaning there over the balustrade, staring down at her steadily, looking so knowing and frightening and insurmountably old that she wished she wouldn’t have opened her mouth at all. Felt nothing but small and petulant, standing there under the weight of his even scrutiny.

There was a silence just long enough to unsettle, and the Cloister rang against it, outside of it, dull and deep and baleful. Calamitous, deafening: driving home in every peal the inconsequence of her heartache.

Her inconsequence to him. To the universe.

Peering down from on high, the Doctor tilted his head forward at her, staring meaningfully. Looking down on her in every sense of the phrase.

She felt like wilting, frozen there under the stars: doused in the shame, reeling in the indignation of it. Burned by that mild, half-smiling dispassion. The gentle, condescending reproach of that gaze.

Come now, it lulled, chiding; You know better than that.

That, she heard in echo, snapped so sharp and blunt it stung to the ends of her nerves and back, was a genetic transfer.

He’d had her whole body, every fibre of her being alight with need and tension, melting into desire and euphoria and all-consuming, mad, screaming love…

… and it was the same trap she’d fallen into, all over again.

It means nothing.

“Come along, Martha Jones.” He held his hand out over the guardrail, wiggled his fingers in beckoning, cavalier as ever. “We’re on call.”

Her feet moved as a means to an end. Simply a way to escape his line of sight, to remove herself from the moment.

When she joined him on the stairs, he rather casually snagged her hand in his.

Honestly. Nothing.

Outside in the corridor, he began to pull her left; seemed startled, when she tugged right. “Where’re you going?” 

“I can’t run in these.” She lifted a foot by way of explanation. “And I’m in my pyjamas anyway.”

“So? Doesn’t get more Arthur Dent than that. And it suits you!”

Her smile at the quip was faint, almost withdrawn, barely a flicker of her lips. “Yeah, well. I’ll only be a minute.”

“Don’t dawdle,” he warned her, letting go of her hand.

“Do my best,” mumbled Martha, turning away down the corridor.

He watched her disappear the way she’d come.

Since that moment, nothing had been the same.

Braced against the console, the Doctor stared into the blue-fuzzed reflection of the monitor, feeling numb as he relived it.

It was horrific. It was beautiful.

“It’s alive,” he’d whispered, gaze alight with the inferno.

Hanging on by a thread against the dark of space, he clung white-knuckled to the scorched hull of a cargo ship, transfixed in the open hatch. Somewhere faraway there were voices, distant speech warbling through the broken static of the intercom in his helmet. Pod remagnetised. Heat shield integrity lost. Airlock deteriorating.

He could no longer hear them past the blood in his ears.

The sun spewed and roiled, a violent blaze on black: a mass of swarming light in the endless cosmic deep. And it was mesmerising. His eyes filled with it, reflected its fury, the flame and vapour and haunting whorls of orange.

For just one paralysing instant – he could feel it staring back.

Two ancient entities regarded one another, as eternity recognised itself and sized its mirror up. The shadow of a man against the blazing eye of a beast.

Two formidable minds. One highly perishable body.

The experience was, without fail, the most violating the Doctor had ever suffered. Left him in scrabbling, desperate, inconsolable terror. Filled him with gnashing, visceral rage, so much pain and bleeding and hopelessness it made him want to scream.

Resistance, disturbing though it was, had been resoundingly futile.

Instinctively, he ripped off his helmet: and suddenly the world was spinning, whirling wildly, flattening. He fell hard to his knees, a tortured groan tearing from his throat, crawling blindly across the rattling, tread-plated floor. His eyes twisted shut and he gasped and growled at the pain, foreign thoughts flitting about frantic in his head, muddled and screeching and angry. There was heat scalding his veins, bubbling under his skin, inside his throat, and then – “Get out of my head!” – rushing and smouldering behind his eyelids, desperate to blaze free.

It was like no pain he had ever felt, the compulsion to open his eyes. He shuddered. He boiled. He prayed to die, over and over, willed his body to shut down before he lost control.

The sun ravaged his memories, desecrated every part of him, every close-held belief and intimate weakness. Left no stone unturned – not even his name. Ripping at his autonomy, trying to take hold. Its intent to kill blackening his impulses, turning his gut like a sickness.

He saw a young, rosy-faced woman with short cropped hair – screaming. Her pink skin flaking to ash, skull melting from the teeth out. Saw a curly-headed medic cowering with a clipboard, cornered, terrified: razed to meat and bones as the light hit her, as the heat of a star ground her down, charred the screaming skeleton to soot, scrubs and all.

And what he felt on these horrific memories was worse than anger. Worse than rage or vindication or even sadistic pleasure.

On seeing the murder of innocents, the Doctor felt indifference.

They were not executions, not revenge-killings nor retributive attacks. In spite of the pain, in spite of the rage: there was no hint of vengeance. No thought of retaliation or punishment.

There was very simple reasoning; an almost childlike calculus.

Humans were simply things. Things causing It immeasurable pain. Things which needed to stop.

The half hour of deathly, full-scale horror – reduced to something as unclimactic, as reflexive and innocuous, as swatting a nit at the sight of a sting.

The intruding force in his head had never known another species. Had never known emotion, nothing as peculiar as sentiment, not for a billion years; had never been given cause to feel before.

And the onslaught of being inside the Doctor’s psyche was so disorienting, so utterly and uniquely upsetting, that It struggled to overtake him. Crippled by death and loss and guilt, by the immeasurable whirlwind of emotion, the crush of raw feeling inside its chosen vessel. He had time to stagger to the infirmary, on a last-ditch plan. Time enough, desperate to hang onto something, anything solid, to reach out for Martha in his blistering delirium.

Through her own fear, she tried to comfort him, tried to be his anchor in the agony.

She’d done, he was now realising, rather too good of a job.

Comfort. To a billion-year-old sentience, which had seen eternity, yet never known the beautiful extreme of living it; it was a jolt. A rush.

A high.

The first feeling It ever felt. Inflicted by this tiny little fleeting thing, holding his hand, promising him she had him, that it would be all right.

In the end, she was right: though by his own admission he had cut it rather fine this time.

The rage churned out of his body, the blinding seethe of his eyes melting back to brown. For a moment, rolled onto his back, he had lay still, petrified, panting, feeling the heat bleed out of him. Waiting to feel the presence go with it.

Waiting. And waiting.

“It’s gone,” he’d murmured to himself. “It’s gone.”

It had to be.

And yet, he knew. Knew, right then, something was off.

It began when they shared their joyful, glowing reunion. When Martha appeared around a corner, saw him standing, blinking, alive – and got a running, squealing start.

Exhilaration, adrenaline, a devastating relief. Flung into his arms, heaved off her feet, she’d attached to him at the neck. He’d been giggling into her ear, giddy with the adrenaline, the simple triumph of being alive. And she held onto him just as tight, laughing just as breathless, every last bit as relieved and joyful.

There had been no discernible voice in his head, no overt awareness of a hostile intruder, of anything Else inside of him. Nothing alien, no twinge of evil or malice.

What the Doctor felt was much, much worse.

His only awareness had been of Martha. Not the usual awareness of her fright or her wellbeing, of her pain or remaining stamina – awareness of her person. Of the jasmine-sweet singe of her mechanically-straightened hair, the salty sweat and singular softness of her, wrapped around him in glee. A kind of fringe curiosity, washing over him. To hear that happy panting go thin and hoarse, to hear those girlish little giggles morph into sounds of a different persuasion, just as high and strained.

A rather unaccustomed urge to push her bodily into a corrugated wall, bury his face in that otherworldly scent, peel and pry at those painted-on jeans until…

His fist came down on the controls with such force something banged loose, a growl grinding between his teeth. In the console room, steeled by the tolling of the Cloister, the Doctor stared at his reflection, jaw tight, chest rising and falling angrily.

He’d been left to his own devices all night, in some kind of stiff, paralysed denial. After an hour spent in the sickbay, making use of every relevant diagnostic tool he could think of, with unremarkable results – no detectable psychic signatures rattling round his head, no abnormal vitals or heightened neurological activity – he’d holed up in the library. Hid himself away somewhere he knew he wouldn’t be found, on high alert, rattled by the creeping unease.

The TARDIS’s gentle attempts at reassurance went ignored; the data failed to calm him, failed to stop him biting his thumbnails to shreds. He’d been so nervous he hadn’t read a word, itching with the urge to look over his shoulder, trying in vain to rationalise his way out of the foreboding.

At any point, it could’ve taken the reins. Had a joyride right across the universe. Laid waste to eternity. And yet – nothing. Nada.

Not until Martha had wandered, sniffling, into the picture. Delivered directly to his hideout by a meddling time ship, likely intended as some sort of remedy for his nerves. Something to busy himself with, something to fix. A human in distress: an irresistable, historically effective distraction for him.

An intervention by the TARDIS – both well-intentioned and catastrophic.

He gave a large sigh, bowing his head.

Her tears. The proximity. Bloody Scrabble.

She was there in his mind’s eye, golden in the firelight of his study, smiling shyly in those liquid silk pyjamas that hung and slipped on every curve. She was a haze of expensive body wash and pheromones and human: gasping and whimpering as he grabbed her, kissed her, whole body molten and caramel like sugar on a skillet, so unsteady and fizzling and hot. And all at his behest.

Had it not been for the Cloister, the things he could’ve... would’ve…

“Stop it.”

He gripped the sides of the controls, leaning forward, gaze burning into the brown eyes staring back.

“You leave her alone,” he breathed into them, voice harshly forbidding.

And could’ve sworn he saw them smile in response.

The footsteps came rattling up the ramp not a moment later.

“What’d I miss?” said Martha, adjusting her headband. Back in street clothes, jeans and a low-slung blue top, she appeared ready for action.

He jumped a little at her sudden manifestation – shoving the monitor away, sending it swivelling wide around the console.

It did not escape her notice. She stopped short and frowned a bit. “You all right?”

“Looks like,” he said, backtracking around the console with a short clearing of his throat, “there’s a disturbance in a local timeline. Something strange in the Obscurion system, tangling up a temporal thread. Coincides with a distress signal from a passenger starship in that area. Odds are, that’s where we come in.”

“Right.”

“You ready to go?” He peeked at her exaggeratedly, head sticking around the central column.

With a sigh he could see but not hear, she extended one black boot. “As I’ll ever be.”

“Brilliant! Well, off we go, then. Locking on…” He tossed some levers and winded a crank furiously.

At the fling of the handbrake, the floor juddered, sending her stumbling against the console.

“Ugh!” she huffed, grasping on, narrowly reclaiming her balance. “Would you please be careful?”

“Oh, you’re used to it,” he dismissed, batting a hand, darting round the controls. “You know it’s a bumpy ride!”

The next jolt was enough to find Martha sprawled on the floor, and the Doctor not far behind her.

Her glare spoke volumes.

“Okay, bit… bumpier than usual. That isn’t me,” he muttered, clambering back to the controls. “Looks like she’s cottoned on, the TARDIS. Knows where we’re going, and wants no part of it.”

“What, since when does she have an opinion?”

“Since always,” the Doctor exclaimed. “Ordinarily she’s very polite about it, but when something really gets her on edge…”

The room jumped again, walls rattling. Still on the floor, Martha was all but shoved airborne, then deposited again on the grating rather harder than before.

“Ow!”

“Whoa, come on,” he urged. He stood up on his tiptoes and pressed the flat of his palm to the aqua, churning Time Rotor, splaying his fingers apart and stroking softly. “Easy, easy.”

From the floor, grasping her bruised knee, Martha was taken back, unbidden, to the study. To his hands spread apart on her hips, his fingertips ever so gently…

“Come on,” he said softly, rubbing the glass column in gentle, soothing circles. “I know it’s nasty, I know, you can do it…”

And miraculously, with a grind and a hearty clank, the TARDIS began to vworp; landing not a moment later with a big rattle and solid, reverberant thrum.

The Cloister Bell went silent at last, room still quivering with the force of its ring.

He gave the central column one last tender rub and said warmly, “Attagirl.”

Martha swallowed an irrational flush of jealousy. Resenting an appliance was a new low, even for her. She climbed to her feet tentatively and checked for injury.

The Doctor snatched up his coat and spun it on, all in one fantastic movement. He bounded to the doors and put his back against them.

“Ready?” His gaze sought hers.

She consciously avoided it, looking intently at the doors. “Ready,” she confirmed, following him up the ramp.

He nudged it open with a thumb and gestured her out first.

It was a mistake.

Because the moment she stepped out, with a flailing kick and a swift-muffled scream – Martha was gone.

The Doctor’s hearts stopped.

He shoved out of the TARDIS in mindless reaction, a flare of something red and utterly terrifying loosing in his veins.

But then he found himself stymied.

Martha had stopped kicking. Stopped fighting altogether. In fact, now, even with her back to him, he heard… laughter?

A man’s strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, leaving her feet dangling: a sight which did not sit well with him. He set his jaw and plunged his hands in his pockets.

When the arms finally let her down, he found himself eye to eye with her accoster.

Rugged, scruffily bearded and brilliantly blue-eyed; marked now with age, yet somehow as puppy dog as the day they’d met.

Riley Vashti looked at him with tears in his eyes.

“Thank God,” he breathed to the Doctor, all but buckled in relief. “You came.”

Chapter Text

“Riley Vashti!” pronounced the Doctor with his usual booming, pseudo cheer, extending a cordial hand to the man.

Having none of it, Riley hauled him into the next furious embrace, squeezing the Doctor with rather more force than was comfortable.

“I thought there was no way,” he was rambling, voice buried in pinstriped lapel. “No way you’d pick up my distress signal. Twice in one life, I thought, no bloody way. Felt stupid even for hoping.”

The Doctor frowned, arms held awkwardly to the sides, peering down at the top of the man’s head as he cradled him. “Hang on,” he said. “That was your distress signal?”

“Yeah, but they activated an EMP,” he panted, letting the Doctor go. His face was ruddy with exertion, eyes wide with panic, ringed in exhaustion. “Signal was barely up for a minute – Jesus, I can’t believe you found us.”

“They?” Martha grabbed his arm gently. “Who’re they?”

“Those bloody fucking pirates.”

“Oi!” the Doctor cut in sharply. “Oi! Young ears in the room!”

Riley looked puzzled, glancing between them.

“She’s barely pushing a hundred,” he scolded, glancing at Martha. “Unhear that.”

“Unheard,” she reported, with a good-natured eye roll.

Riley squinted at Martha in the gloom. “Doesn’t look a day older than when we met,” he chuckled.

It didn’t seem sporting to tell him she wasn’t, in fact, a day older than when they’d met – one of the many pitfalls of time travel, social niceties. Instead she just said, earnestly, warmly, “You look great, too. Been taking care of yourself, I hope?”

“Best I can, I s’pose…”

“Annnyway,” the Doctor turned their attention to him with the impatient drawl, “what pirates are we on about? Less swearing, more exposition.”

“They breached my vessel hours ago, and…”

“Your vessel? What, really?” The Doctor’s eyes lit up a hint. “You must be Captain Vashti now, eh?”

The man all but deflated at the words. “Some captain I am,” he groaned, miserably. “Letting my guard down like that. When they breached the shields… when they first boarded…” The scruffy man took a hard, bracing gulp, looking to his feet. “All those people, they… Christ. It’s all my fault.”

And then, rather without warning, he plunged his face into his hands and began to weep.

Martha tutted softly in sympathy and immediately drew him back into a hug. He sagged forward, clinging to her like a child in his grief.

She met the Doctor’s eyes briefly. His arms were folded tight over his chest, eyelids low, face long with irritable tedium.

“Not a word, you,” she mouthed harshly, stroking gently on the other man’s back.

He pulled two fingers across his lips, zipped them, and chucked the imaginary key back in the TARDIS, closing the door behind it.

She hid a smile as she went back to consoling Riley.

“It’s okay, love, it’s all right,” she said, in a rather lulling tone, one the Doctor had never heard her employ before. It was decidedly different than the one she used on the injured and ailing. This was gentler, deeper, almost… intimate.

It made his hands flex in his pockets.

He noticed, and consciously unfurled them, knuckles tinted white.

“Just tell us what happened,” Martha said softly. “We’re here to help.”

At her gentle urging, Riley managed to pull himself back together, heaving in a sniffle and scrubbing a sleeve over his eyes. “Don’t even know where to bloody begin,” he breathed, struggling for composure. “Probably better you just see it for yourself.”

“This your ship?” said the Doctor brusquely, looking round the cramped gloom. “I don’t like it.”

“This’s a broom cupboard,” Riley managed to chuckle weakly, going for the door. Before opening it, he paused, expression sobering. “I’ll need to be getting back to the control deck. Told them I was going to check the coolant supply, when I heard your engines.”

“Told the pirates?” the Doctor checked. At Riley’s muted nod, he scoffed, “Must not be very bright, if you pulled the old coolant supply over on them.”

“Thick as mince,” Riley muttered. “But they’ve taken hostages. They’re armed to the teeth, Doctor. And heartless.”

“My least favourite combination of things, fancy that.” The Doctor looked at him solemnly. “You go on, Captain. Don’t blow your cover down here.”

Riley gave a short nod. “The place you’re looking for,” he said quietly, “is the main carriage. That’s where they…” He breathed through his teeth. “Maybe you can make some sense of it.”

“We’ll check it out,” the Doctor said. “And then I’ll see what I can do about your little hostage problem.”

Immediately, Riley’s eyes went to Martha, breath hitching. “If they catch you…”

“Oh, she’s a seasoned vet. Don’t worry about her,” the Doctor dismissed. “Eats pirates for breakfast, that one.”

Martha gave him an exasperated look.

“We won’t be caught,” she assured Riley, patting his arm.

“Good,” he breathed. “Good.”

“Captain?” said the Doctor.

Riley looked at him, eyes wide and harried.

“Everything’s going to be fine.” He inclined an eyebrow. “Remember last time you saw me?”

Riley gulped. “God, I could never forget.” And his gaze flickered at Martha.

She looked at her feet bashfully.

The Doctor ignored it with tremendous restraint.

“Everything turned out just fine then, didn’t it?” he pressed.

“Five people died,” Riley retorted. “Nearly the whole crew.”

“Well… yeah. But for you everything turned out fine! I mean, look at you! Captain of your own ship, sailing the Seven Systems.”

Riley shook his head, a wary glint in his eye.

“Doctor, I’ve no bloody idea where you come from, or who you actually are…” His eyes went to the TARDIS. “But I know your heart’s in the right place. And I know that if we have any chance of getting out of this… well, you’re it.”

With that, he slid open the door.

“Be safe,” he pleaded, entirely to Martha.  Then he ducked out into the corridor.

“No pressure,” said Martha lightly, nudging the Doctor.

“Oh, pressure?” He pushed his shoulders back and cracked his neck. “Bit of pressure never hurt at all. Bracing to the senses!” He looked at her sideways. “Now, what’d you say to some good old fashioned cloak-and-dagger skulking?”

“Same thing I always say,” she answered readily, stepping forward and squeezing through the cracked door: slipping into the ship with a half-smirk.

Grinning, he followed her out. “Oh, I like you, Martha Jones.”

She saw firelit eyes, heard the soft growl at her fingers in his hair – blinked it away so hard it hurt.

“As well you should,” she muttered, clearing her throat.

He found her looking up and down the corridor in intrigue. It was a cylindrical, blue-tinted channel, impossibly smooth, cold globe lights running along its metal-plated walls as it curved away, gleaming, like a horseshoe.

“Blimey, that’s sleek,” she marvelled, turning her face up to the blue glow. “Proper space-age, isn’t it?”

“Still don’t like it,” grumbled the Doctor. He turned and set off, striding away in a seemingly random direction.

Martha wandered behind. It did occur to her to ask, amused, “Do you actually know where you’re going?”

“Never,” called the Doctor blithely over his shoulder. “But I’m not going the way Riley went. Ergo, away from the pirates. And towards the main carriage, probably. No chance his ship is large at all, not by the sound of those thrusters.”

She steered well clear of that particular assertion, swallowing on a dry throat. “Any idea yet why the Cloister brought us here?” she asked tentatively. “I mean, back to Riley?”

“S’nothing to do with him,” muttered the Doctor. “He’s a tangential link at best. Just nudged it onto the radar by existing here, I’d wager.”

“Okay,” she said, hedging, brow going up. “Is that it?”

“No. Somewhere close…” He breathed deeply. “Something’s disrupted the natural flow of time.”

“How’d you know that?”

He turned on his heel to look at her, back-pedalling easily. “Because I can feel it, Martha. Because it’s ingrained into me at an atomic level, in my guts. It’s literally part of who I am.” His eyebrow went up minutely. “And I can tell when someone’s been messing about in my house.”

She backtracked with a shake of her head. “Hold on. Wait. You mean…” Martha searched his eyes. “You can actually sense time?”

He gave her a squinting, puzzledly scrunched-up look. “Sort of implied in the title, isn’t it? Time Lords didn’t just call themselves that to sound important. Well – I mean, they did, because they were up themselves. But there was originally a point to it.”

“What does it feel like?” she ventured, fascinated. “And how does it work? Is it like, when an animal can sense a change in atmospheric pressure, and anticipate a storm?”

“More precise than that. I don’t just sense it, I know.”

“How do you know, though?” she pressed. “Physiologically? Is there a specific hemisphere of your brain which—”

“It’s not rooted in my body, it’s in my being. My particles. Instinct. How does a bird know it can fly, or a bear when to hibernate? How does a human know if they’ve eaten a dodgy kebab? It’s all just intuition. A sixth sense if you like.” He sighed. “Mostly, it’s just me feeling sick and on edge and like the sky is about to come crashing down on my head if I don’t find out what’s wrong and fix it.”

“So, it’s abstract, but manifests physically.” She gave this some thought. “Sort of like a sense of impending doom?”

“Exactly like that, actually.”

“Nausea, anxiety, arrythmias, cold sweats? The works?”

“Yep.”

Martha stared at him dubiously as they walked along the curving passageway. “I really can’t tell whether you’re having me on or not.”

“What would be the point in lying about something like this?” he chuckled.

“To make me look stupid later, when I believe you?” she said. “To get a laugh out of it?”

“Martha, I would never be so juvenile.”

“You once told me you could echolocate,” she retorted.

“All right, that was your own fault. That was obviously a joke.”

She shook her head. “So, you’re sensing time right now? As we speak?”

He nodded a brief and grim confirmation, sticking his hands in his pockets and turning back round.

“You’re not sweating or flushed,” she observed, coming to his side. “You don’t seem particularly anxious. And you don’t look any more doomed than usual.”

“Strong stomach,” he replied simply. “Plus, centuries of practise. For the TARDIS, it’s much more difficult; totally impairs her, this kind of disruption. S’why she didn’t want to land. She’s like a blind cat with snipped whiskers under these conditions, poor thing. Can’t tell up from down.”

“And what’s causing the disruption, again?”

“Let’s find out,” said the Doctor, easing the sonic from his breast pocket.

They had come to an arched, sealed door at the end of the corridor. A steel barrier which, if the access panel on the wall was to be believed, contained behind it Carriage A. It had a round porthole window, but she was too short to see through, even on her toes.

The buzzing sonic waved over the access panel, and the red bulb glitched green.

The doors glided apart.

Martha noticed it instantly, what was wrong. It would have been impossible not to.

On its face, the scene inside was undeniably bleak. The room resembled a passenger coach, only rather higher tech. Gleaming and round as the inside of a tin can, upholstered seats divided into sections, opening up into one long aisle down the centre. The left wall was blown open, metal scarred and peeling outward from the blast. Where the hole had been, some manner of thick, gooey pink sealant had messily deployed, filling the breach like a wad of hulk-sized bubble gum.

In the aisle, uniformed guards made up the majority of the dead. The nearest to Martha had a perfectly symmetrical hole charred through his lapel, the cavity inside blackened with the heat of some kind of energy weapon. It was easy to tell that the death had been fast; namely as the poor fellow’s eyes were still wide open, his mouth still widened in an unfinished shout.

But that was not the strangest bit. It was not what disturbed Martha the most.

What stopped her in her tracks, unnerved her beyond reason, made her blink harder and harder in sheer disbelief – it was the way the man had fallen.

Or, rather, hadn’t.

He had not yet hit the ground.

His body was flung back, his heels the only part of him in contact with the floor. The rest hovered at about a twenty-degree angle from the carpet; perfectly motionless. Suspended in mid-air.

Martha found herself hunting for wires, for a step stool, anything that explained the phenomenon before her eyes.

But then the Doctor breathed, “Oh, no way,” through his teeth. And she knew there was only one explanation.

He ventured into the carnage without looking back at her, stepping carefully over bodies, jaw clenched as he inspected the scene.

The more Martha looked around, the worse it became.

There were passengers, crowded in the back of the room; hunched down and laid flat behind their seats, flattened to the floor so thoroughly in their hiding she’d missed them at first glance. There were legs poking out from behind almost every seat in the back of the carriage. Small and large, all manner of clothing, skin colours and textures.

All of them, perfectly, stonily still.

Her gaze found one person in particular. A man in a suit, briefcase hugged to his chest – peeking out from around an armrest, his eyes winced in terrible anticipation, focussed on the dead guards.

She stared at him. He stared at the guards, unblinking. Martha waited for ten seconds; fifteen.

Nothing. Not even a twitch. Not a flicker of movement, of life.

He was a statue. Completely inanimate.

“No, no, no,” the Doctor was muttering, teeth gritted. The hands were in the hair, combing violently – and that never boded well. “Not now. Not here. It can’t be.”

“Doctor,” she said hesitantly. “What is… this?”

“Impossible,” he heaved. “They should be gone. They were all destroyed, all of them, everything. Unless…”

He fell terribly, unnervingly silent, staring at nothing in particular. Standing so still, blending in well enough with the static room, that Martha felt the sudden need to go to him, just to make sure he was still breathing.

She gingerly, nervously grabbed the cuff of his coat sleeve.

It was enough to snap him out of it; eyes flicking rapidly to hers.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?” she asked, voice soft, conscious of his agitation.

He drew a breath, and seemed to make an effort to get himself back under control. Then he said, “I’ve seen something like this before.”

“You have?”

“As far as I know,” he looked around darkly, face registering abject disgust, “there’s only one race in the universe clever enough, ruthless enough, to do this kind of damage to time.” His jaw worked in anger for a moment. “There was… a weapon. A long time ago. And this,” his hand swept roughly round the room, “this is what it could do.”

She cast about, not quite following. It was, eerily, like standing in a wax museum. “Doctor, I’m… not exactly sure what I’m looking at, here.”

“Yes, you are,” he said lowly. “It’s exactly what it looks like.”

“You mean, they’re…” She shook her head. “They’re actually…?”

“Frozen.” The word was barely audible, uttered hard and blunt. “Frozen, in time.”

Looking back at the room, with this new input, disturbing details began to jump out at her.

There were tiny speckles of pink sealant, hanging in the air. Floating, rigidly still, in a freeze-framed Pollock. Some of the dead guards, upon closer inspection, seemed rather more alive still than Martha was at all comfortable with. Their faces contorted into petrified masks of agony, fingers grasping at the floor as though mid-writhe.

And then she saw her. A woman with bluish skin and small antennae. Pressed against a far corner, making herself as small as possible, eyes wrenched shut in terror: the carrier against her chest held so close Martha could barely see the tiny matching antenna peeking out the bundle of blankets inside.

It was like a paused recording, in three dimensions. The emotion on her face was so gutting, so starkly real, that a sickening thought occurred to Martha then.

“Doctor,” she said, voice quite slow, “please tell me they’re not still…”

“Conscious.” He bit it out furiously. “All of them.”

“Oh my God.” A hand went to her mouth reflexively, and she gasped, eyes darting back to the screaming, falling man. The hole blazed where his heart ought’ve been. “Conscious?” she shrieked.

“Yes, Martha.” His hands balled in fists. “Like being buried alive in a moment.”

“That’s…” Words failed her, in her revulsion. “Wouldn’t it be less cruel just to kill them?”

“Yes,” he said, lips barely moving with the word. “It would.”

“What kind of sick people would make a weapon like that?” she demanded, turning back to him.

And then saw the look on his face.

The anger, the remembrance.

The shame.

“Oh,” she breathed, stepping back: feeling both drawn to him and helplessly repelled all at once. “Doctor.”

“They called it the Time Reaver,” he said, so low it was almost toneless. “They were desperate, in the final days of the War. Desperate and paranoid and reckless. I tried to stop them, but…” He frowned hard, gazing into a space Martha could not see. “Not that it made any difference. I s’pose in the end it was all they could think to do. To figure out what was planned, before…” He gave a sigh. “Never was easy, getting information from a Dalek.”

She knew he had an immeasurable past; knew he had lived horrors so great and unimaginable they would crush her if he ever shared their true weight. Knew that what little he’d told her of the Time War in New New York was only the tip of the iceberg, that the true story went miles deeper and darker than what he could bring himself to share. And she only knew of the Daleks what she had seen in Manhattan – and from what she had seen, they were not a species to be pitied.

Even still… somehow those words from the Doctor, even as soulless of a justification as it was, made her feel a little bit strange. That he even felt the need to say them.

“You don’t have to explain,” she insisted quietly.

“It – it was never meant to be used this way,” he all but snarled, anger reigniting as he looked around. “Used on innocents, senselessly! Used, clearly, by an idiot!” His voice was raising as he moved down the aisle. “It hasn’t even been deployed properly.”

“It’s meant to be used for torture,” Martha surmised, a bit surprised at how even her voice came out. “Not killing.”

The surprise was reflected in his eyes just for a second. Then he shook his head. “Yes,” he said, “but – I mean, the actual mechanism of the device. It’s meant to work on the target, separate them out from local time. It’s clean that way. Whatever the hell’s gone on here – somehow it’s backfired. Separated local time from these people. Fractured the timeline into little tiny pieces!”

Martha cocked her head, and wondered, staring in mesmerised horror at the people around her, “Isn’t it torture either way?”

“One way is cruel, and sadistic, and a punishment nothing in this universe deserves. The other is all the same things – except it endangers everyone, and everything, on this temporal thread.”

“Everyone?” Her voice rose.

“Every person you see here,” the Doctor said, gesturing, “has had their own unique timeline created around them. Thirty, forty fractures in the skin of time.” His head shook. “Maybe one or two, and the TARDIS wouldn’t have picked up on it. But this much damage in one place and time?” His teeth worried his lower lip, eyes grave and distant. “It’s like pulling threads out a rope. Eventually, the whole thing comes apart.”

“What happens when it does?”

He met her eyes grimly, refocussing.

“Nothing.” The tone of his voice chilled her. “Nothing happens. And nothing will keep happening, forever, if I don’t fix this.”

“Right. So, avoiding… that.” She looked around hopefully. “Is this reversible?”

“Not in all of recorded history. It’s Time Lord engineering. One of the most sophisticated and well-protected pieces of technology ever produced.”

Her heart dropped.

Then he cocked an eyebrow at her.

“C’mon,” he said breezily. “I’m going to take a mallet to it.”

The grin was perhaps inappropriate, given the setting, but Martha couldn’t help it. Such a 180 it made her head spin – but he was like that, always from one extreme to the other, mercurial to the end. It was one of those qualities in him she so admired. That optimism, that drive. In the face of an impossible problem, hope still sprung eternal. One of the many reasons she loved…

The thought almost tripped her up, made her feel nauseous.

Jolted her back to the disquieting fact that less than an hour ago, he’d been kissing her ragged. Without explanation.

Though this was not exactly the time nor place for her inner soap opera, concerning that development. She wasn’t sure there was a time or place, actually, which was mostly the problem.

He took her hand and led her out Carriage A, back into the blue tube of a corridor.

“Now,” he said, going into the usual brisk, fists-in-pockets, pre-action pace. “Can’t go reverse-engineering anything without actually getting my hands on the Reaver, can I?” He sucked at his teeth in thought. “If I were a smuggled millennia-old weapon from the depths of the Time War, where would I hide?”

“The pirates must have it,” she said, as this seemed obvious to her.

He blinked, dramatically.

“The pirates. The piiiirates, of course!” he exclaimed, almost angrily, giving his head a two-palmed whack. “Forgotten all about the pirates! Good thinking, Martha, that’s why I keep you with me.”

She didn’t meet his gaze, warming up. “Well, that’s what I’m here for.”

He eyed her for a mischievous second. “What d’you say we commandeer this little vessel, Miss Jones?”

“What, from Riley?” she chuckled. “You want to out-pirate his pirates?”

“Aye,” he growled, in a swashbuckling drawl, striding down the corridor with a billow of his coattails, Converse squeaking. “Avast ye, landlubber!”

With exasperated affection, head shaking, she followed him.

The ship, as the Doctor’s unfortunate innuendo had correctly insinuated, was not at all a sizeable one. They were at the other end of the C-shaped corridor in less than a minute.

The Doctor said something about dramatic flair. Martha wasn’t sure what this entailed, until he went to sliding his stethoscope in big, windmilling circles across the tightly-sealed door to the control deck.

“What exactly are you doing?” she wondered.

“Making sure no one’s just behind it.” He unsheathed his sonic screwdriver. “Take three steps back and turn to the left for me, would you?”

The explosion was utterly magnificent. Blue sparks, bent metal, alarmed bellows from within.

Martha squealed, hands flying up to shield herself.

“Was that really necessary?” she exclaimed.

He sprung into the breached room, a flash of limbs and cape-like coat: with all the deathly, Earth-stilling gravity of a theatre kid getting his big break.

“Heave-ho, ye bleeding seadogs!”

All the hostages screamed, which only added to the general mayhem of the intrusion.

Three dark, hulking figures turned to stare at the Doctor in confusion.

Riley Vashti, sitting with the little motely crew of captives, squinted at Martha in bewilderment, eyebrows drawing together.

She had no answer for him.

“Ye hornswoggling scallyw—” The Doctor froze mid-sentence and stared across the room. “What?”

“What is the meaning of this?” boomed the figure in the middle of the three, lifting off its helmet in outrage.

And even without seeing the ugly, pitted, top-heavy sight of it, Martha could’ve placed that gravelly, huffing voice to the right species. It was burned into her psyche, such a formative part of her spacefaring experience.

Judoon.

“What are you lot doing here?” the Doctor sputtered. He looked to Martha in deflation. “And just when I was getting into character!”

The Judoon, predictably, lifted their guns at him.

“Identify yourself,” snarled the one in the middle.

“What’ve you done with the pirates?” he whined. “Don’t tell me you killed them, I needed something from them!”

That was when Martha noticed Riley, trying to catch her eye. Subtly shaking his head – expression dire. Eyes darting to the Judoon, then back to hers.

“Identify!” The blaster cocked, barrel glowing blue.

“Oh, all right, all right. Keep your battle armour on,” muttered the Doctor, patting himself down. “Somewhere in here…”

“Doctor,” she said softly.

“Now which pocket did I put it… ah, there we go.” He pulled out a leather billfold from his coat. “Right, then, I think you’ll find I’m entirely authorised to—”

“Doctor!”

He looked at her.

Saw the thinness of her lips. The tiny, frightened jerk of her head.

He looked back to the Judoon.

“Ohh,” he breathed, rocking on his heels. “Oh, right. Sorry.” He glanced to Riley. “Sorry,” he mouthed, wincing.

“You will identify,” barked the Judoon in the middle, clearly in command, taking two sharp steps forward and levelling its rifle at Martha. Her hands flew up instinctively, stomach swooping in fear. “Now!”

“Ah, ah,” chided the Doctor, eyes resting on the weapon. “Let’s not get carried away, all you had to do was ask nicely. I’m the Doctor and this is Martha Jones.”

At the calmly affable introduction, there was a palpable ripple of shock. The Judoon grunted in alarm, beady eyes widening, guns hefting higher. And ever so slightly, almost unconsciously: they all seemed to step back.

“Time Lord!” spat the commanding Judoon, like a slur.

“Ooh,” hummed the Doctor, brows lifting as he sauntered up and nudged Martha. “We’ve got a fan.”

“Looks like it,” she said uneasily. “Doctor?”

“Hm?”

“I thought you said the Judoon were police.” It was a hiss.

“Yeah, most of them. But corruption isn’t unique to humans, Martha.” He gave a scoff. “I mean, just look at how your police turned out.”

“Cease this dialogue,” ordered the Judoon.

“Right, sorry. Of course. Where are my manners, Officer?” He put on a rather amiable smile, clasping his hands at the small of his back and leaning forward. “I don’t suppose you might perchance know where I can report any illegal pirating activities, hmm?”

The word ‘pirating’ slipped through his front teeth at a stage whisper.

“Stand down, Time Lord,” snarled the rhinoceros. “You have no jurisdiction here.”

“Jurisdiction?” The Doctor’s voice took on an incredulous lilt. “What are you on about, jurisdiction? Since when is murder, torture, hostage-taking, theft, and destabilisation of a timeline in your lot’s jurisdiction?”

His voice steadily rose on each offence until he was at a proper, fists-balled shout, all three guns centred on him.

“Seize the human,” huffed the Commander.

Obediently, the two Judoon flanking him marched forward, glaring at Martha.

“Okay, okay, maybe we got off on the wrong foot,” said the Doctor, arm lifting in front of her body, hand landing on her hip and grasping there. “Oi, hold on a second!”

And it was a bit pathetic: to be in mortal peril, and yet her mind could only fixate on his hand planted on the front of her thigh. The way his fingers creased the denim.

The way they’d caressed her earlier.

The Judoon gave him a hearty shove and each took Martha by one of her arms, lifting her clear off her feet as they marched her away. She thought about resisting, but each massive hand swallowed up her bicep with ample room to spare. If they so much as squeezed – that was her humerus, shattered.

She let herself be towed away, feeling like a toy or a very small child. Her eyes held onto the Doctor’s, and she tried to soothe over the growing sparks of anger she saw in them with a little reassuring smile.

They deposited her with the other captives, dropping her not-gently to the floor. Immediately, the little huddle of terrorised crew members and staff made an instinctual shift to bring her into the fold. The gesture came in a moment of mindless fright; and yet it made her feel warm, that enduring humanity, this far across the galaxy and time. The reflex to protect one of their own.

Riley appeared at her side.

“Tell me he has a plan,” he whispered in her ear. He smelled like sweat and stress and hard-worked cologne, and Martha tried to pretend she didn’t notice. Blimey. One snog in the Doctor’s study and she was a live wire.

“He always has a plan,” she returned breathlessly. “Eventually. Just trust him.”

“I trust you,” he muttered.

The Doctor fixed his suit jacket and tie with deliberate pointedness, stiffly glaring at the Judoon.

“Martha?” he said, gaze never leaving them.

“All right,” she called.

He did not blink, eyeing the Judoon. “All right. Let’s have this out, then – what’s your name?”

The Judoon bristled and snarled at him.

“Oh, come on, we both know you have names. I’m guessing two syllables and sort of grunty, but feel free to prove me wrong. Let’s see. Er… Cynthia?”

“Fhoro,” said the commanding Judoon, grudgingly.

The Doctor gave Martha an unimpressed look that said, there you go, then. The urge to laugh was entirely inappropriate, and she averted her eyes out of necessity.

“Fhoro,” repeated the Doctor, eyebrow up. “Charmed. And your two associates – I presume, Bethel and Elouise?”

“Kojo,” grunted the one to the left.

“Mohro,” intoned the one on the right.

“You cannot make this up,” muttered the Doctor, looking to the ceiling as though searching for strength. “Right. Okay. Fhoro, Kojo and Mohro, rambunctious Judoon pirates. I’m wondering if any of you know,” he looked between each of them, head tipped forward, gaze haughtily downturned, “just off the top of your horn, what the punishment for desertion is under Judoon law.”

They stared at him dourly.

“Well don’t all jump in at once,” he scolded the silence. “I’m wondering if you also know what the Shadow Proclamation would do to you, if they got wind of how you’re sullying their reputation. Not to mention, big Chief Rhino Boy. Who, by the way, I’ve met – and let me tell you. No fun. Right old teddy bear, that one.”

“You have no means of dispatching authorities, outside of your vessel,” Fhoro observed calmly.

The Doctor stared at him hard. “Bet your life?”

“We are extensively trained on your tactics, Time Lord. You waste breath with your bluff.”

“Trained on my tactics, are you?” He rubbed his jaw, scrubbed a palm against his stubbled cheek. “That’s a tricky one. Okay – you got me. I’ll level with you. I’m talking rubbish here, just blowing hot air. Why don’t we make a deal instead?”

The Judoon were silent. Wary.

“You give me the Time Reaver,” he said, “and I’ll pretend like I never saw what you did with it. Also, just as a bonus, I might waive my right to testimony at your trial. And you know I’m an expert witness.” He gave a wink. “Total win for the defence, might chip a couple of degrees off that vaporisation ray. Now – what do you say?”

Fhoro bristled. “I say that arrogance is repellent, Time Lord.”

“You know nothing of the Reaver,” Mohro pitched in, growling. “Of its power.”

The Doctor’s eyes went so wide they boggled.

“So I meet the trigger finger at last!” he exclaimed. “It was you, wasn’t it? You, who butchered this timeline with one of the most dangerous weapons in creation?”

“Mohro, silence,” Fhoro snapped.

The Doctor gave an outright laugh. It was not his real, warm laugh – nor was it a particularly pleasant sound.

“Did you even aim it?” he chuckled. “Just kept squeezing the trigger and waiting to see the pretty lights, didn’t you? Bless.” He looked about. “Where is it, by the way?”

“That is none of your concern,” hissed Fhoro.

“Well,” said the Doctor with a dip of his head, voice sliding down. “Debatably….”

Martha noticed for the first time that, in addition to the Judoon’s rifles and sidearms, there was a boxy protrusion in the back of Fhoro’s waistband. It looked like a radar gun to her, and she bit her lip, desperately wishing she could get the Doctor’s attention without tipping them off.

“Time Lord, we have no quarrel with you.” It was Mohro again, voice booming with false bravado. “You would prefer to keep it that way.”

“Er, no,” allowed the Doctor, quite patiently. “Not how this works. I,” he pointed at himself, “don’t have a quarrel with you. But don’t you worry, Mohro, you’re getting there.”

“We have acquired this ship. We have acquired the Reaver. You have no business in either matter. If you take your human now and return to your vessel,” Fhoro bit out, “we will hold no ill will against you, Time Lord.”

“No, I don’t like the ring of that. How about,” he clasped his hands like a primary school teacher and pretended to think, “you give me the fourteen hostages and the Time Reaver, and also shove off Riley Vashti’s ship – and then I’ll be on my way with my human. Won’t even know I was here.”

“God, is he serious?” Riley breathed in her ear.

“Never knowingly,” Martha muttered back on reflex. “Just trust him,” she urged, meeting his eyes for a second.

“You will not have the Reaver,” Fhoro snarled.

“Sort of will, though, is the thing. Not to contradict you or anything.”

“It is an unwise proposition,” Mohro said, seemingly unable not to hop in, too hostile for his own good, “to put such technology back into the hands of its murderous forgers. Wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”

It was the first thing any of the Judoon had said that the Doctor reacted to in any perceptible way; and Martha winced as she saw the flush of his cheeks, the darkening of his eyes, rage that flashed like thunder.

“I would say it’s better than in the hands of some ragtag rebel Judoon, who couldn’t collectively think themselves out of a crayon box!”

Fhoro snarled and jerked his gun at the Doctor. “You denigrate us, Time Lord?”

“Glad we’re keeping up,” the Doctor snapped, rather harshly. “Imagine it’s hell on those synapses.” Then his eyes cut at Mohro and he took a step closer. “And watch who you’re calling murderous. After what you pulled in Carriage A, you don’t want to give me ideas.”

The threat made Martha’s eyes widen.

The Doctor made all sorts of veiled warnings, gave all manner of ominous advice – but that was rather more explicit than she was used to hearing out of him.

Worry began to churn in her stomach. Somehow, she could already sense this was not going to end how either side wanted.

“Kojo,” growled the commander. “Since he has refused to avail himself of it, go find the Time Lord’s vessel.”

The Judoon who as of yet had not uttered a word – clearly more the silent type – gave a clunky salute. “Commander,” he boomed, and trudged off toward the exploded doorway.

“Odds he gets distracted by a shiny thing, Martha?” called the Doctor. “I’m going sixty-forty. Seventy if it twinkles!”

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Riley muttered.

“I’m telling you to trust…”

Before she could finish the statement, Fhoro boomed, “Bring me his pet.”

Riley’s hand gripped around her wrist painfully tight. It was all she could do to swallow down the nervous lump in her throat as Mohro stomped over, huffing. She eased Riley’s fingers off her hand just as she was yanked up by the straps of her tank top, with such shocking force she heard stitching snap.

She yelped a little, stumbling. “Oi, watch it!”

She was dragged from the hostages and shoved alongside Fhoro, where the back of her neck was seized by a gloved hand bigger than her entire head.

All at once, the Doctor had stopped moving.

It was as though a symphony had fallen silent; a thousand opera glasses landing on her in sync.

“Oh, you don’t want to do that.”

There was absolutely no mirth left in his voice.

“Today of all days,” he breathed. “That is not what you want to do.”

“You rave so of our ignorance,” Fhoro rumbled, hauling Martha in front of him. She winced hard at the jolt, at the stink of the breath curling from behind her ear. “Yet take hold of its animal, and watch how the prattling Time Lord slows.”

“I can do more than that,” he uttered, eyes blazing well below zero. “Give me a reason.”

“We shall see,” Fhoro retorted.

“She hasn’t even done anything. What, you don’t even pretend with the laws anymore? Just killing from the get-go now, are we?”

From the shift of Fhoro’s massive body – and the subtle whirring that hit the air – Martha knew. He’d pulled the Time Reaver out.

“Oh, and I bet you think that was terribly clever,” sighed the Doctor.

“Merely the opening act,” Mohro sneered.

“Mohro, you’ve been to a concert? Don’t strike me as the sort!”

“You will learn, Time Lord,” Fhoro boomed evenly, “that whatever your dealings with Judoon in the past, we are of a different philosophy.”

And suddenly the hard, square lip of something that felt terribly like a gun shoved to the side of Martha’s head.

She cried out unwillingly, flinching in shock. “Doctor?”

“Oh, I saw your philosophy just fine in the carriage,” the Doctor growled. “Let’s try this again. Simple sentence: let her go. I don’t fancy repeating myself.”

“It is customary, by the rites of galactic execution, that the condemned be permitted last words. We will not deny her this privilege.”

“You promised!” Riley’s voice rung out furiously across the room. “You said if I surrendered you wouldn’t hurt anyone else!”

“The pet was not part of the initial terms of agreement.” Fhoro didn’t even look his direction. “Five,” boomed the Judoon, massive finger curling on the trigger.

“This is all well and cute, Fhoro, threatening the innocent, having a good chest beat. Do anything stupid,” his eyes seemed to flame, “and you and I are going to have a problem. And you do not want that, me having problems with you. Not today.”

“Three. Two—”

“I’m giving you a chance,” hissed the Doctor, teeth gritted. “One chance, you understand me?”

“One!”

Martha’s gaze locked on his – wide, frantic, blown with fear. “Doc—”

Riley pulled from his jacket a compact blaster and fired, weapon discharging with a whooshing, air-cracking surge.

Fhoro dusted off the singe mark on his breastplate, and regarded Riley with a disappointed grunt. “You embarrass yourself, Captain.”

He didn’t react.

Neither did the Doctor.

Both men wore identical looks; eyes that were simply numb.

Because there was not a flutter of a lash, not a twitch in the pupils, not a glimmer in the eyes of Martha Jones.

Chapter Text

The shine in her stare was frozen, stayed in the middle of a glint. Her chest lifted on the start of a breath. Lips set half-open – formed forever around his name.

The Doctor took a half-step forward, gaze locked on the petite monument.

“Amaze us, Time Lord.” Mohro could barely contain the smirk on his cracked, reptilian lips, rumbling the words with perverse glee. “Think yourself out of this.”

“You fucking monsters!”

It was Riley, as the emotion finally crashed over him, as the shock guttered out to spiralling rage. “Why?” he screamed at them, saliva flinging from his lips. “What for?”

The thin man in the pinstriped suit displayed no such gut-wrenching emotion. He merely stepped forward again, until he was toe to toe with the figure of the young woman.

The Judoon took a step back to bask in the full spectacle of their cruelty.

The Doctor put his hands on the little figure’s face, rather tenderly. He bent forward to stare into her eyes.

“Martha,” he said softly, “it’s me. Listen.”

The human stared through him, sightless, beautiful. It did not react to the pleading intensity of his words, his probing, deep gaze. It stood in the blink of a bygone moment, gazing fearfully at the place where the Doctor no longer was.

“Your pet cannot hear you, Time Lord,” Fhoro observed, sneering. “Surely you understand the mechanisms of your own people?”

The words didn’t reach him. The man in pinstripes seemed to be in some sort of peaceful trance, largely expressionless: his fingertips laid upon Martha’s face, gently pressing to either one of her temples.

Then at last, after an almost uncomfortably long time, he stood straight.

He looked the Judoon in the eye, one at a time.

“Have you no quips, Time Lord?” Mohro smirked. “Have you nothing more to say?”

“I…” The Doctor squared his shoulders and looked down, swallowing. He appeared to brace himself, to draw a deep, tremulous gust of air. “I say…”

The Judoon seemed to lean in, leering in their malice, waiting for the answer.

“Catch me if ye can, ye scurvy bilge rats!” 

And like that – the Doctor was gone.

The outburst was so unforeseen it took the Judoon almost a full second to react: booming in outrage and lumbering right after him, guns alight.

One second was more than enough.

The sonic in one hand, the other plunged into his pocket, he activated the access panel at the other end of the corridor. Then he took his hand out his pocket, reared back his good throwing arm, and heaved.

Without checking to see whether his pitch had hit its mark, he sidestepped into the broom cupboard and silently whisked the door shut.

About two seconds later, two Judoon came thundering down the passage in a fury, jackboots slamming the metal. “There!” bellowed Fhoro, and charged ahead toward the doors to Carriage A – just beginning to slide shut as something beyond flicked out of view.

Fhoro and Mohro crashed into the carriage like wayward dodgems, doors thumping together behind them.

Fhoro stared in disbelief at Kojo, on the opposite side of the room.

“Can’t seem to locate the vessel, Commander,” Kojo said solemnly. “My apologies.”

As the two Judoon puzzled, something whirred soft between their feet, and tapped at one of their sturdy boots.

Mohro looked down, and crouched to pick it up.

All three of them stared at the linty, skew-eyed, windup mouse toy, wheels rolling aimlessly in his glove.

Riley had no time to recover.

Not a moment after the Judoon tore after the Doctor – there was the blue box, whooshing and creaking into being in the centre of the control deck.

His crew began to cry out again, but he quickly insisted, “No, no, s’all right! It’s…”

The Doctor popped his head out the TARDIS.

“Right on time,” he chirped. “Lovely.”

“How did you…” Riley struggled to gather himself. “How… that fast?”

“Little bit of a cheat. Jumped back eight seconds to compensate, and – really haven’t got time to explain!”

He bounded to the semi-circle of blinking controls in only four strides, hands flying over levers, redirecting power flows, attacking the keyboard as though it were a long-time rival.

“Pretend I asked permission,” he called back over his shoulder. 

“Er, okay,” said Riley, still lagging a bit behind on the whole ‘jumped back eight seconds’ snippet of the whirlwind. He went closer, frowning at the Doctor’s actions. “Permission granted, but…”

He gave it a bit more thought.

“Permission to do what, exactly?”

“Carriage A sealed,” a feminine voice said in answer, rising from the computer.

“Pencils down!” The Doctor pushed off the desk straight into a rolling chair, leaning back in satisfaction. “Whew,” he whooped, spinning round, “that was proper fast! I mean, that’s good time even compared to… well, me.”

“Carriage A…” He put together the implications of this. “Hang on a minute. No way you trapped them in the passenger sector.”

“Oh, way I trapped them in the passenger sector.”

Riley all but jumped. Then gave a rather forceful whack on the Doctor’s arm.

“You… genius!” he shouted, whacking him again, jostling his body in the chair like they were a rugby team celebrating victory.

“Please,” the Doctor insisted modestly, righting his tie. “Tell your crew they can stop cowering now, Captain – they’ve got the all-clear.”

“It’s all right,” Riley passed on, grinning back at them. “They’re trapped now, those arseholes. They can’t get back in.”

There were hugs, sniffles, a handful of tears. The Doctor ignored all of it and returned to furiously typing.

“So,” Riley ventured, “what are you up to now?”

“You’re hovering,” the Doctor observed. “I don’t like hovering.”

“Because it looks like you’re jettisoning half of my ship, Doctor.”

“Oh, you can buy another ship, Riley. And frankly,” his eyes flicked up at him, fingers never slowing, “you could stand to. This one’s rubbish, I’ve been meaning to complain.”

“Never mind the fact I haven’t got credits to buy another ship,” sighed the significantly younger man, shaking his head, “I’m actually referring to the forty-three people in the room you’re about to jettison.”

“Frozen in time,” the Doctor dismissed, clicking rapidly. “Won’t know the difference.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“So… what, that’s it? That’s how you do things these days?”

This caught the Doctor’s attention. The typing slowed to a ticking halt, and he squinted up at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just… I relived that day a million times. Back when I was on the Pentallian.” Riley gave a shrug. “Wrote down every detail I could remember. And I know I remember you advocating for the thing that’d killed all my friends.”

The Doctor rolled back a harsh inch in the chair and glared at him. “I didn’t advocate—”

“I just, I mean – it seemed so beyond to you. When Kath wanted to kill it, you shut her down right there, out of hand. Wouldn’t even consider it. I s’pose I thought…”

Riley stopped talking, then, seeming a little embarrassed.

“Don’t know what I’m on about,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “You’ve just saved my life again.”

The Doctor seemed to look at him for a long time.

“What would you suggest, then, Captain Vashti?” He folded his arms across his chest. “I hope it’s not letting them out.”

“No, I don’t want to…”

“Because that’s a death wish. Judoon have a bizarre definition of pride. They will not forgive and they will not forget. There’s half a functioning neuron between the three of them, and it will slaughter your crew if it gets loose.”

“I’m not suggesting freeing them,” Riley insisted. “Just… couldn’t we dispatch the Shadow Proclamation, like you said?” There was unease in his eyes. “They’ll get taken out by their own squad. No risk to the passengers.”

“I dispatch the Shadow Proclamation and tell them what’s gone on here, they’ll send fifty missiles at this ship in a heartbeat and melt down every witness of the transgression to the last molecule. You think they’d risk this getting out? Are you thick?” the Doctor demanded. “Use your head!”

“Jesus, I was just saying!” Riley took a sharp step back, flustered. “If you want to kill them that’s your…”

“I’m sorry, did you not see what they did to your passengers?” His voice was raising. “To Martha?”

“That upset you, then, did it?” Riley snapped. “Cause I couldn’t bloody tell, the way you were—”

And so quickly it seemed impossible, the Doctor was out of his seat; the human man cornered harshly against the desk, a handful of his Henley caught in the Time Lord’s fist.

“Do not.” The words came so deeply they vibrated between his clenched teeth. “Presume. To know how I feel about Martha Jones.”

There was no fire in Riley. Whatever testosterone-driven impulse there was to defend himself, to retaliate against aggression; it was lost under the man’s unwillingness to engage in conflict. The very core of his personality, which seemed to be that of a born reasoner, not a fighter.

He relented immediately, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Right, that was… way across the line.”

To his astounding credit, he managed to hold the Doctor’s eye. Even if his breath was held the whole while.

“Bang out of order,” he managed, wincing, shaking his head with an exhale. “I’m sorry.”

The Doctor remembered himself with a slow blink. He saw blue eyes staring back at him, wide, terribly uncertain. Annoyingly puppy dog.

Consciously, frowning, he released the shirt, and took a step back from Riley Vashti.

“You were almost murdered,” he said.

Riley raked a hand through his hair. “I know, mate, I… thank you, I don’t know why I…”

“No, I mean – you were almost murdered.” The Doctor gestured him up and down. “You’re a powder-keg of adrenaline and trauma and cortisol.” He gave a thin, rather weak smile. “No need to thank me, Riley. It’s only natural, emotions are running… high.”

With that, the Doctor returned to his seat, wheeling back to the computer as though nothing had happened.

From Riley’s crew, there was a near-immediate exhale of relief, all of them having witnessed the spur-of-the-moment confrontation.

The Captain’s gaze fell on the pretty young woman in the centre of the room, that no one quite had the mettle yet to acknowledge. Hair pushed back from her face, skin perfect. Flawless, so many years after he’d first lain eyes on it. Hand raised to her throat, clutching against a pressure that no longer existed.

Her eyes fixed on one particular spot. Mouth formed around another man’s name.

He balled his fists at his sides.

“Do it,” he said, swallowing hard.

The Doctor glanced sidelong at him. “Pardon?”

“Jettison the carriage.”

The typing slowed.

“You sure?” the Doctor said.

“You said you needed that weapon, that… Reaver. No way to get that, unless…” He shook his head. “They won’t just hand it over.”

“No, they won’t.”

He was nodding now to himself, jaw set. “You were right. Do it.”

The Doctor gazed at him.

“And that’s an order from the Captain, by the way,” Riley added.

The Doctor said not another word. He only began to tweak settings and type commands at his original fervour.

As he launched back into the process, Riley said, “Doctor?”

“Mm.”

“If you do get this Reaver back… can you use it to save my passengers?” He hesitated a beat. Then, he steeled himself. “Can you use it to save Martha?”

The Doctor pushed back his chair and met his eyes intensely.

“Nothing in this universe will stop me trying.”

“Alert: Sector A jettisoning,” the robotic female voice warned.

He abandoned the keyboard at once, swivelling round and vaulting from the chair with that lurching, off-putting, snapped-spring energy Riley was reluctantly becoming used to.

“You going somewhere?” he wondered with a frown.

“Just making sure our friends don’t pull any fast ones at the door. Unless you think they’re rhino-proof?”

“Er,” said Riley, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I, um… did get a discount, at the spaceyard.”

“Uh-huh. Back in a tick.” He dashed off once more; then doubled back suddenly. “Don’t wander off. Probably need your help.”

And with that unhelpful warning, the Doctor was gone from the control deck.

Riley felt his crew regarding him, curious and hesitant, uncertain. He looked back to them, met their questioning gazes. Gave a bit of a sigh and put his hands on his hips.

“Mutual friend,” he said by way of explanation, head jerking at Martha.

A resounding murmur of “Ah” travelled through the group.

One long, bendy corridor away, the Doctor peered into a room of caged bulls.

“Spot of trouble?” he called pleasantly.

Fhoro’s big, wrinkly face whipped around at the light-hearted taunt. He stormed into the middle of the room, horn gleaming.

“We are trapped,” he boomed.

“No,” breathed the Doctor, grasping his cheeks in mock-horror.

“You are a pest, Time Lord!”

He rather took his time as he strolled up to the door, hands pushed deeply in his pockets. “Am I?” he hummed, giving a little bounce of his knees, seeming delighted by the accusation. “What, lil’ old me?”

“You do nothing but prove yourself weak.” Fhoro held up the crushed mouse toy damningly. “There is no honour in deception.”

He cracked a grin. “Whole lot of fun, though, you’ve got to admit.”

“What is your plan, Doctor?” Kojo questioned harshly. His large head was beginning to swivel to and fro, the wrinkles in his face deepening in alarm as it occurred to him, clearly for the first time, where he and his compatriots had been cornered. “Why have you sealed the carriage?”

“Another bluff,” spat Fhoro.

“Commander,” Mohro glanced to him warily, “are you certain?”

“You question me, Mohro?”

“Time Lord,” demanded Kojo, marching up to the door, blocking the view of the inside. “Can you not hear me?”

Eyes expressionless, brows upraised, the Doctor gazed steadily at the tiny wet nostrils and massive snout filling the porthole. “Hear you just fine, Kojo, buddy. Mind budging over?”

He did not. “What is the meaning of this detention?” Kojo demanded, all nose. “Judoon have no quarrel with you.”

“Oh, you missed a bit, mate.”

“I was gone not two minutes!”

“Don’t look at me,” said the Doctor, brow furrowing at a dubious slant. “Look at trigger happy and Negative Reinforcement over there. Pity they sent the smart one on the field trip.”

“You will – you will kill these humans, these passengers,” he fumbled. “Should you expose them to a vacuum, they will…”

“Come on, Koj,” the Doctor chided. “Give it a rest. Don’t you think I understand the mechanisms of my own people?”

“Silence, Kojo,” snapped Fhoro in disgust, shoving him out the way. “You grovel and dishonour yourself. Murder is against the code of the Time Lord. There is no precedent.”

“Now, big bad pirate that you are, Fhoro, you must’ve heard.” The Doctor put on a crooked smile, and revived his cartoonish growl. “Dead men tell no tales.”

Fhoro snarled in anger, large teeth baring. It was, admittedly, rather more authentic. “Nothing more than pathetic posturing. A gutless threat.” He glowered at the Time Lord through the porthole. “Threats are the contingency of a coward. Judoon have no fear of threats!”

The Doctor made a wide-eyed, disarmingly impressed face, lips downturning whimsically.

“Carriage jettisoned,” informed a robotic, feminine voice politely over a tannoy, and the floor began to rumble. “Depressurising.”

“The sector has been jettisoned, Fhoro,” Mohro rumbled, head swivelling swiftly between his commander and the man standing in the doorway. “It would appear—“

“Do not do this, Doctor!” Kojo launched himself back at the door. His enormous weight crashed against it. The solid seal of the airlock didn’t so much as rattle; the impact of the horn simply bounced off the space-grade Perspex. “Do not!”

On the opposite side of the glass, head lazily inclined, the Doctor didn’t blink. He let his forehead thump against the window, fringe flattening against it as he stared inside. Eyes bright, detachedly fixed.

“Depressurising in ten. Nine.”

“Perhaps,” said Mohro, voice raising, “we trade the Reaver for—”

“We trade nothing,” snarled Fhoro. “You are spineless, Mohro.”

“I brought no harm to the human!” Kojo thundered, spittle frothing from the rough, craggy snout, gloves scratching at the porthole. “I bear no responsibility! I should not be condemned—”

“And you, Fhoro, are a fool!” Mohro bellowed. “Can you not see past principle—”

“Depressurising in six…”

“I see only your weakness. I will not be tricked by a duplicitous, rambling ape! You will yield, Doctor!”

“Depressurising in four…”

“What of your oath?”  Kojo flung himself into the door with a wild, deafening roar, hands beating against it, small eyes bulging with desperation. “What of your mercy?”

Mohro lunged at his commander with a snarling grunt, head tucked down in the fashion of a charging bull as he dove for the Reaver.

“I ask forgiveness,” heaved the Judoon, clawing madly at the glass, “I will atone, I will—”

Carriage A jettisoned into space with a dry, shuddering clunk.

And then, resoundingly, there was silence.

Against it, footsteps stumbled on metal, rubber soles squeaking in the drowning quiet.

His back slammed into the curve of the wall as he staggered backward. Chest straining, shoulders heaving, breathing so hard it whistled.

“What did you do?” the Doctor gasped.

Alone in the corridor, flattened against the wall, he trembled. His hands extended from his body, as though they did not belong to him.

“Why?”

Had he any more air, it would’ve been a harrowed cry. As it was, the word hardly registered – hoarse and shrill and completely despairing.

And in answer: he saw her. Her fixed eyes, her frozen lips, the fear turned solid on her face.

“Martha… what is it about Martha? What do you want with her?” His voice broke in fury, incomprehension, the anguish of it all. “I don’t understand what you could possibly…”

Her breath against his in the firelight. Her moan ringing soft off the shelves in his study, fingers knitting, dragging in his hair…

“No,” he heaved. “You can’t. You can’t.”

But he could.

A trainer kicked the metal wall, hard enough to reverberate around the corner and back again. “He begged for mercy, he was terrified! You didn’t have to kill him!”

Silence. Just his own breath, ringing in his ears. His own voice echoing back to him.

The Doctor braced his hands against the wall, head bowed, and just stood that way. Breathing. Burning.

Alone.

Chapter Text

“What happened?” said Riley, anxiously receiving him at the entrance of the control deck.

The Doctor gave him a wearied look.

“Well, I think it was Professor Plum in the drawing room with the penknife – but I could always be mistaken.”

“Bloody hell,” he breathed. “Are you always like this?”

“Yes,” reported the Doctor harshly, without stopping. Then, irritably, as he bypassed Martha’s motionless form, “Sorry.”

“You said you’d need my help,” Riley pointed out, trailing behind him. “What with?”

“First.” The Doctor went to the TARDIS door and shoved it open. He looked to Riley’s crew, who had begun to mill about rather more comfortably, now that they were no longer being held at rhinoceros-point. “You lot,” he said, and pointed with his thumb. “In.”

They froze.

The Doctor looked to Riley in enormous frustration.

“You all heard the man,” said Riley, voice turning a hint stern.

Slowly, grudgingly, they began to make their way toward the TARDIS, regarding it warily.

The Doctor rolled his eyes so remarkably hard it was a small miracle they didn’t stick.

“Riley,” he said. “You get Martha. Bring her in the TARDIS.”

Riley looked somewhat stricken by this order, and shifted his weight. “Are… are you sure?”

“Why would I ask you to do it if I weren’t…” He stopped, thinning his lips, visibly controlling himself. Breathing deep. “Yes, Riley, I’m sure.”

“But can I, y’know… touch her?”

The Doctor stared at him, eyes hard, mouth very slightly open. “You what?”

“I mean since – since she’s frozen,” Riley stammered. “I’m not sure if she’ll…”

He shook his head in irritation. “Time is frozen around her. Down to the nanometre, I’d reckon. She’s not frozen in it.” He gave a sigh. “The Time Reaver was broken. Inverted its functionality somehow. Which, for our purposes, is a blessing in disguise. Otherwise she’d have gone through a billion years of nothingness by the time we were finished having this conversation, and whether or not I could save her would be moot because she’d be a vegetative shell.”

Riley hesitated.

“So I can touch her,” he said.

“Yes, Riley, you can touch her. Think of it like… she’s in a second skin. All you’re doing is moving around her bubble. She’s not aware of it.” He ushered the final crew member into the TARDIS, and with a last look over his shoulder, muttered, “Just… please be gentle.”

With a solemn nod, Riley reached out and took Martha by the biceps. He flinched a little in surprise as his hands came into contact with her arms. “Oh, that’s… weird.”

“What is it now?”

“Sorry,” Riley said, gathering himself. “I just… I don’t know, I didn’t think she’d still be soft.” He frowned a little. “I didn’t think she’d move.”

“Time is fluid, not static. You can poke it around a bit. Now come on,” the Doctor sighed. “And when you’re in – close the door behind you.”

He bounded up the ramp to the controls and immediately began to calibrate them. It was an act of divine intervention that no one interrupted him to say it was bigger on the inside. He heard the whispers, of course – but a direct observation might’ve just sent him over the edge.

Carefully, tenderly, Riley Vashti lifted the body of Martha Jones and carried it into the TARDIS: gentle every step of the way.

The moment he’d set her down on her feet and obediently closed the door, a grating, wheezing thrum creaked to life. He recognised the sound itself; but not the terrifying, heart-stopping jolt that accompanied it.

“Shit,” he gasped, and grabbed Martha without thinking, clutching her upright as the entire room quaked.

His crew squalled and tumbled to the floor, crashing to the grating in a crescendo of heavy thwangs.

“Welcome aboard,” called the Doctor.

“And you had the bloody nerve to go after my ship?” Riley said, voice coming out in a strangled laugh.

After a moment, the violent rollicking settled. Riley gingerly let go of Martha when it did, not quite certain it was over.

“None of you get sick,” said the Doctor sternly, pointing at the green-looking crew. He went down the ramp to where Riley still stood.

“You ever heard of stabilisers?” the human managed, still a bit dizzy.

“I like to feel my transport, thank you. No need to hide behind the newest doodah and whatsit.”

As the Doctor came up beside him, their arms brushed in the cramped doorway.

Riley almost pitched over the railing he started so hard.

“Blimey!” He yanked away in shock where his bicep had grazed the Doctor’s. “You’re… hot!”

The Doctor arched a mild brow. “Flattered, Riley, but I’ve got a bit of baggage.”

The Captain scoffed and tentatively extended his palm out, letting it hover over the Time Lord’s forearm. He was as alarmed as he was astonished when his fingertips began to pinken and sting under the resultant heat.

“Are you quite finished?” the Doctor said, sighing.

“Are you all right?” Riley demanded. “You supposed to be that temperature?”

“I could ask you the same thing, all clammy and squelchy. Though that would probably be quite rude of me. Can’t imagine Martha would approve.”

“Look, no offence,” he said, uncertainly returning to the doorway; careful to keep as much space between them as possible. “Just scared the hell out of me. And stung, to be honest.”

“Sorry about that.” The apology was curt.

“The hell’s that suit made out of, anyway? Flame retardant?”

The Doctor deigned not to answer. He reached for the door handle. “You don’t have to help with this bit. Could be… upsetting.”

“Mate, between you and the day I’ve had? At this point I think there’s nothing left to upset me,” Riley chuckled.

“Suit yourself,” said the Doctor, and pushed the door open.

The gasp the other man drew was striking and horrible.

“I know how it looks, but they’re fine,” the Doctor told him. “Look. Frozen in time. Skin still flushed, all nice and preserved, see?”

The TARDIS floated idle in space, hovering at the junction where half of Riley’s ship had jettisoned. In the midst of darkness, forty three people drifted aimless, like some manner of ghastly artistic installation: all suctioned out of the carriage in varying poses, expressions, states of life and death.

“I wasn’t looking at them,” heaved Riley.

There was also, just by the open door, three deformed and bloated shapes in dark fatigues. Crystallised skin protruding from pressure-formed cracks in their armour, bulges and bubbles of ice-solid flesh warping limbs beyond recognition. The only clue to what they had been: the horns. Bright, gleaming, lightly frosted over.

“Oh,” the Doctor said, offhandedly. “That.”

“Yeah,” Riley choked. “That.”

“Well, might as well get it over with now.” He raised an eyebrow and looked to the man at his side. “Fetch me my mallet, would you?”

Riley did not ask why. Some things, he was learning, were better left unquestioned.

Upon returning with the dented, scuffed-up sledgehammer he’d found beneath the organic control node, he was dismayed to find the Doctor with an umbrella in his hand, held sharp-end first – using the hook of the handle to drift one of the Judoon closer. “Please tell me you are not bringing that inside.”

“No, of course not. Get icicles everywhere.”

The frozen, lumpy mass that had once been Fhoro bumped against the doorjamb of the TARDIS. The only way Riley could tell its identity, naturally, was from the gun-shaped lump iced solid in his clutch.

“Mallet,” prompted the Doctor, like an attending requesting his scalpel, tossing the umbrella aside and sticking out his hand.

Swallowing uneasily, Riley handed it over.

And he wasn’t exactly certain what he thought was going to happen next.

The first crunch was particularly objectionable.

“Oh, fucking hell,” Riley groaned, instinctively jerking his head away. “Jesus, that’s… brutal.”

The crunching continued. “Cost of doing business,” the Doctor muttered between blows – holding the frozen Reaver with one hand and the hammer with the other, chipping away like a sculptor.

After several moments of intent and utterly shocking chiselling, he pulled the Time Reaver inside. One good lob at the floor, and the ice shattered, breaking away to reveal the weapon in pristine condition.

“My God,” Riley whispered.

“If you’re going to get sick, Captain,” the Doctor said, “please don’t do it over the mechanics.”

“I’m… fine.” The man pushed down a very hard swallow and seemed to shake himself.

“No shame in it,” he assured him. “It’s not easy, this.”

Coming from the man who’d not thirty seconds prior malleted the hand right off a body, Riley found the assertion somewhat lacking.

“I really am fine,” he croaked. “Just… ugh.” He again tried to shake the feeling off himself.

“Good, because I need you to bring all of your passengers inside.”

He blinked. “Wha – come again?”

“The same way you did Martha. Gentle. Just guide them in, put them wherever. I’ll have the TARDIS orbit the area so you can get everyone.”

“And what will you be doing?”

The Doctor bent forward and picked up the Time Reaver.

“The impossible,” he said. “What else?”

The Time Reaver sat on the TARDIS’s console, cables and wires of all colours blooming from its heart like the tendrils of a flower. The TARDIS was not pleased about this fact, and shuddered ever so often, groaning sickly, to which the Doctor softly soothed her and asked her to hang in there.

Forty-three people scattered about the console room. One by one, he aimed the reverse-engineered weapon, and undid its damage.

Some came back screaming, others crying. Others unfroze, but did not come back at all. One child thought they’d been dreaming. The Doctor was mistaken more than once for an angel.

It was gruelling, emotionally devastating work. Every last one of the uniformed guards begged him to save them. For most, he hadn’t even the time to lie and pretend he could.

Riley scrubbed tears and occasional snot from his face. The Doctor did not mock him, this time; only took over when he could not go on, warned him not to overextend himself.

Forty-three passengers. Forty-three knots in Time, unwound.

The TARDIS grew healthier and healthier. Before long, they could send off each passenger to the infirmary, Riley’s crew as their guide, to receive nutrient packs, further medical attention, and much-needed rest.

“Why do her last?” Riley wondered, tone muted, as they gathered up a pile of bloodied bandages – remnants from the final guard they’d treated. “I mean, I get not first, just in case. But after that…?” He folded his arms, shook his head.

“It’s completely daft,” said the Doctor, with little inflection. “But I just have this feeling…”

He sighed, rather hard, and trailed.

Riley clapped a firm hand on his shoulder. “It’s not daft,” he said. “I’ll be in the infirmary.”

The Doctor gave a barely perceptible nod.

Riley took a few steps away. Then hesitated. The Doctor’s brow furrowed as he watched him.

He seemed to summon a swell of courage, and turned back around then.

“Okay, look – I know that I don’t know you all that well,” he said, rather quickly. “And if this is out of line just tell me to piss off, all right? But…” The blue eyes wandered his face. “Are you all right, Doctor?”

He tilted his head very slightly. “Course I’m all right.”

“You’re not, you know… ill, or anything?”

And it took everything in him not to tense. Not to give anything away.

“Do I look ill?” he said dryly. “From hot to infirm. It’s a whirlwind with you.”

“If you need help,” said Riley, seeming uncomfortable, “if there’s anything I can do…”

“I’m perfectly fine, Riley.”

“Right. Okay.” The bearded man gave a tight smile. “Well, I’ve got to see how everyone’s holding up.”

“On you go, Captain.”

Riley set off for the infirmary without a backwards glance.

The Doctor watched him go, stomach unsettled.

If Riley Vashti, who’d known him all of five hours and forty-two minutes could tell something was wrong…

How had he ever thought he could hide this from Martha?

His eyes moved to her, almost unwillingly. She stood in the middle of the TARDIS’s ramp, in the exact spot Riley had left her. Feet set apart, eyes wide with fear, gazing into the past.

He picked up the Time Reaver one last time and forced himself into motion.

Standing before her, finger on the trigger, the barrel level with her torso – the Doctor hesitated. He couldn’t help it.

“Sorry it took me a bit,” he said quietly. “To get to you. There were people hurt. Kids. Figured you’d want me to help them first.”

They were surrounded in quiet, the unobtrusive hum of the TARDIS. Her gaze stared through him, fixed, unseeing, mouth open on the first syllable of his name.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Martha.”

The admission was soft, almost shamed, half-whispered in the empty console room – low enough that it barely resonated from his chest.

“But I don’t know,” he breathed. “It wants…” He inhaled through his teeth, gave a shake of his head. “What if you’re safer this way?”

The panic in her eyes shone back at him. The desperation.

“What if you’re better off, where it can’t get to you?” His eyes roamed her face absorbedly, then, as though trying to find an answer. As though trying to will her to look less frightened. “Not forever, just until… until I figure out…”

He closed his eyes and exhaled.

What if she were safer, in hell?

He was cracking up.

The Reaver fired as it always did, with no fanfare whatsoever, no light. Only a steady clanking of gears, a rhythmic, clock-like churn from within. A rustle of air that seemed to draw at her outer fringes, pull at the outline of her very being, until:

“—tor!”

Martha shouted back into another place – another time. She stumbled forward from the force of resisting, and instantly found herself enveloped in someone’s arms.

The mystery of whose was short-lived.

“It’s okay,” the Doctor’s voice promised, speaking muffled into the top of her hair. He squeezed her, all but smothered her against his chest, tossing the Time Reaver to the side and sweeping her up as she spluttered and gasped. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’ve got you.”

She pulled her face out of the pleasant-smelling warmth of his shirt and tie, craning her neck around sharply, looking for the Judoon at her side. It had stood there for what felt like years, looming in her peripheral vision.

But she found only the sight of the TARDIS’s orange, craggy interior. The Judoon was gone. So was the rough grasp on her neck, the sharp pressure against her head.

“What…?” she tried, squinting.

“The Reaver,” he said heavily. “They got you. I’m sorry.”

Of course – she had known this. She’d had many hours of utterly nothing to do, standing in one moment, entirely conscious. For hours she had stared into the Doctor’s angry eyes at a distance. Imagining she could reach him, just by staring hard enough, imagining she could talk to him through the gulf of silence and stillness. Imagining she could hear his voice, telling her to be calm, promising she would be all right.

In a few seconds, she was able to shake off the shock of resumption, to reacclimate to the existence of sound and motion and time.

Then she was able to lift her arms up around the man holding her, all elbows and polyester and apologies: and squeeze him back for all she was worth.

“How much did I miss?” she croaked. It felt like she’d been shouting for age, or breathing sand, trapped in the middle of a word.

“Erm,” the Doctor started. And she loved it. The hedging, the little bit of guilt, like he was caught making trouble.

Only a matter of hours, and somehow she’d managed to miss him desperately.

“Not… much,” he replied at last, casually evasive.

“The Judoon?” she questioned, checking over her shoulder again.

“Sorted.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t worry.”

She pulled from the hug a bit, but he didn’t take his arms off her – not that she particularly minded. Her face tilted up and she found him looking at her intensely. No longer glaring or hard with anger, though; his features were almost strangely soft as he regarded her, contrasting the sharpness of those eyes. Those proper, bottomless pools. The smudging of freckles, the slightly crooked nose...

Oh, she loved him. It was miserable.

“You all right?” he said lowly.

She tilted her head sideways, brows drawing together slightly. “Was just about to ask you the same thing, mister.”

He frowned. “Martha, you’ve been suspended in time for five hours.”

She gave a dry, frazzled chuckle. “I know. It was bloody awful. But…” She shrugged. “I’m fine. I mean, it’s not like I was hurt or anything. And at least I knew what was going on.” Then she looked up at him earnestly, searching. “What about you? You fine, too?”

“Yeah.” It was so soft it was almost mouthed. “Fine.”

A little furrow creased her brow. “Doctor…”

“I’m sorry,” he cut in, grasp tightening on her.

She blinked. “What for?”

“Running off at the mouth. Getting you shot.” His voice came out tight, clipped on the words. “Had they not been so keen to show off their new toy, it would’ve been an… entirely different kind of weapon, Martha.”

She had, in her many hours of temporal entombment, considered this. That the same gun that put a hole in a man’s heart could’ve been fired against her head. But she offered him the same conclusion she’d eventually come to herself: “It doesn’t matter. It was the Time Reaver, right? So no point in hypotheticals. And it isn’t your fault, what they decided to do.”

“I provoked them.”

“You provoke everyone, Doctor,” she exhaled, smiling fondly. “You can’t stop being you because the Judoon don’t like it. It’s okay. I don’t blame you.”

“No,” he murmured, almost mournfully. “No, you never do.”

And in a move that utterly took her breath away, he leant all the way down to rest his forehead on hers.

She might as well have been struck again by the Reaver, as unbreakably still as she went.

Air hitched helpless in the back of her throat as the tips of their noses came not a centimetre apart. She could feel him inhaling deeply, almost raggedly, could feel her fine hairs moving with the in-out of his breath. His features were lost to a blur, so close up – but she could tell his eyes were closed.

For a moment, they stood frozen that way in the glow of the console room, the Doctor folded over her, cradling her in his arms, stooped to bring his face to hers.

“Martha…” His voice was faded, deeper than she was used to, the sigh warming the meagre space between them. “…Martha, I need you to stop me.”

She could barely speak, barely find the mettle to respond.

“Stop you doing what?” she whispered.

Seconds passed, and he didn’t respond, didn’t move.

Then his lips found the corner of her mouth.

Martha made every effort to restrain herself. It was in vain. The day was unbelievably fraught, her nerves were scrambled, the Doctor was there – and on the second drifting, off-kilter press of his lips, a faint shudder of breath slipped from her throat, the faintest, weakest of moans.

He took forever to get there. Planting wandering, warm kisses across her bottom lip, at the sides of her mouth, the soft skin all around. Her eyes hung lidded, barely open, drinking in the smudgy distortion of his face as it edged closer and closer to abandon.

When the kiss finally found her squarely, she was breathing so heavily, so slack-mouthed there was no hope of it remaining chaste.

Her body rocked back with the force of it – and her hands ran up to his biceps, squeezing through the suit jacket, nails digging in with the hard, longing pull of suction between them.

Her eyes shut tight and she groaned softly.

Everything in her came apart when he did the same.

There were two or three clunky, unsynchronised steps back to the railing; then suddenly her bum was against it, and all of the Doctor was against her. All at once.

She grasped blind at his shoulders, letting herself be swayed with it, tilted back by the force of his lips, the probing desperation in every press and pull. Drowning in the scent and feel of him all over again, as a tender moment turned reckless, as the knee of her jeans inched up the side of pinstriped leg. His arms wound tighter around her, large hands sliding to the small of her back, grasping at the smooth dip of spine where top diverged into denim – where waistband became hips and rear. Tinges of breath gusted into each other’s mouths, mounting in frequency, in force: on the dangerous, quivering precipice of moans.  

Right there, everything could’ve changed between them.

But then she heard his voice.

Heard it properly, through the lust, through the uniquely disorienting haze of Doctor. Registered, with dwindling cognizance, the soft, urgent, almost pained whines dragging from his throat.

She felt his leg pushing hers apart, a Converse trainer intruding between her boots. Felt the warm and slick of his mouth, demanding more from her, harder, the desperate, intentional prodding of tongue.

Her hands found his shoulders, and in a bolt of clarity, Martha gave him a solid push.

He broke from her with a hotly expired breath, panting through his mouth, wide eyes locking onto hers in startled question. “Wha…”

“You told me to stop you,” she breathed, chest heaving.

Some five hours ago, Martha would have had nothing even nearing the resolve to push the Doctor away from her. And when he was finally expressing the sort of sensual curiosity in her she’d so feverishly craved for months, at that.

Five hours ago, she would’ve gone to a tremoring, breathless puddle.

Five hours ago, he might’ve had her right there up against the railing – TARDIS occupants be damned.

But the Martha that stood in the TARDIS now, panting up at him, was not the one he had turned to absolute mush in his study. Slightly, imperceptibly, yet undeniable all the same: this was a different Martha.

One that already had some vague inkling of the untouchable high of what it was like, to be kissed and touched by the Doctor.

One that remembered, clearer than anything, how impossibly she’d been burned – shattered – when it was all said and done.

It was branded into her mind, that moment. The way he’d looked leant upon the grand stairs of the library, gazing lazily down at her; such crushing nonchalance in the eyes she so loved. As though he were almost amused, by the quiver of her voice and pain in her eyes. As though he couldn’t believe she’d be so silly as to demand why.

She remembered not a word of it passing his lips, not so much as a heated glance or a flicker of remembrance in his eyes, not the whole while they were on Riley’s ship. Remembered him carrying on like nothing happened. Like the whole interlude in the firelight had been some passing lark he’d already forgotten.

She had been given five hours, by force, entombed in time and her own mind, to ruminate on these somewhat traumatic experiences.

And it reflected behind her eyes, all of that tense, bottled-up contemplation. Shone out in their close inspection of the Doctor, in the guardedness and caution she wore as she did so.

“You feeling all right?” she panted warily, fixing her shirt.

He let go of her, frowning. Took a deliberate and measured step backward. “We’ve, erm,” he scrubbed a hand over his face, hand pulling from nose to jaw, “we’ve got company.”

“Right,” said Martha, rather slowly.

“Riley Vashti. His crew. All the passengers.”

She managed a slight nod. “Good thing you told me to stop you, then,” she said, breathing out heavily. “Could’ve, you know… scandalised our guests.”

“We can’t have that,” the Doctor muttered, so low it barely registered.

“So,” she slipped out from between the railing and his body rather nimbly, bending to pick up the Time Reaver, “you did it, then. Reversed it.”

“Yeah, I did.” His hands went to his pockets.

“I knew you’d figure it out,” she mused.

“Yeah?” he said, brows going up tiredly. “That makes one of us.”

“All the passengers are un-frozen, then? Or have you just done me?”

“No, everyone’s back.”

“Good,” she said, seeming relieved. “That’s how it’s done in triage.”

He gave a very subdued smile. “Figured you’d say something like that.”

“Anyone still hurt?” And like that, she’d shifted gears; eyes going serious, the shyness in her posture retreating.

“None seriously,” he reported. “All the serious injuries, well…”

At the trailing of his voice, she gained a frown. “Didn’t make it.”

“Energy weapons are nasty business. I did what I could. Still,” he pushed his hands in his pockets, forcing his voice lighter, “the minor injuries probably wouldn’t mind a going-over from a proper doctor. I mean, now that I’ve one on hand.”

“Haven’t finished my exams,” she reminded him, with a bit of a chuckle.

“Well don’t tell them that. We get a stethoscope on you, they won’t know the difference.”

She smiled slightly. “Where are you keeping everyone, exactly?”

“Infirmary. Hard to wander off from there.”

“You’ve got an infirmary,” she chuckled. “Of course you have. Don’t s’pose you’ll help me find it?”

“Might as well make you a map at this point,” he said, and took a step forward. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

“You can fill me in on all the Judoon-pirate hijinks on the way, yeah?”

Reaching for her hand on instinct, the Doctor stilled – pausing halfway there, staring at his own outstretched palm and seeming a bit thrown.   

With a tilt of her head, Martha readily closed the distance, lacing her fingers through his. “All right?”

She was surprised when he squeezed her hand. Even more surprised when he said, rather suddenly, “Martha?”

“Yeah?” She blinked up at him.

For a moment, she’d no idea what he would say, no clue whatsoever what would come out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“For the, erm…” His eyes skittered away from hers, flicking at the railing where she’d been previously pinned.

Martha felt her cheeks grow warm inside. And, well – she had wanted acknowledgement, hadn’t she?

“Oh,” she said, quite softly. Hoping he couldn’t see the blush standing out on her darker skin. “That’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “And… earlier. That wasn’t, either.” She saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat slightly. “In the library.”

“Oh,” she repeated, a bit tighter.

“That’s… not why you’re here, Martha. Not why you’re with me.” The brown eyes seemed to plead with her. “You’re my mate. And I don’t want things to get… you know. Complicated.”

Well, why’d you bloody do it, then?

It threatened to burn a hole right through her. All she wanted, desperately, was an answer. Even the tiniest hint as to why she had been ignored for months on end – and now he couldn’t seem to keep away from her. Had he experienced some sort of breakthrough, on the Pentallian? Had the ordeal ignited in him a previously non-existent libido? Was she just the closest thing to hand, riling him up at inopportune moments?

“Well,” she started evenly, drawing a breath.

“No, no – you don’t have to say anything. It’s on me, all of it. I know that. I just… I wanted to give us a clean slate. And to say I was sorry.”

Right then – she wanted to berate him. Properly, loudly, the way she could never bring herself to dress him down. To demand how he could possibly spit out all those bloody words and never utter a single meaningful thing to her at all. To know why he insisted upon the maddening, juvenile, bloody squirrely secrecy of it all. To ask how he genuinely, sincerely believed a damn sorry would settle the score, fix the damage.

She wanted to tell him no matter the urge, no matter the intensity, he should’ve known better than to bring her into it. Known better than to muck about with her heart, when it was already ripped to pieces on the daily. Wanted to ask if he knew just how inappropriate what he was doing was, how cruel and manipulative. Don’t you know you’re just making it worse? Don’t you know you’re killing me?

Don’t you know I love you?

Do you even care?

But Martha just bit her lip. Battered it down. Smiled at him, like always.

“S’all right,” she said gently. “Don’t mention it.”

Chapter Text

Riley Vashti, his crew, and forty-three passengers were let off at the nearest spaceport.

Martha watched, hugging herself in the TARDIS doorway, as the space-cargo docker turned captain gave the Doctor a hearty, slap-on-the-back hug. The two men exchanged words for a moment, seeming to have forged some manner of slapdash camaraderie in the latest crisis.

She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that, knowing what she now knew.

Something exchanged hands – from the distance, she couldn’t make out what. And then the moment she’d been dreading arrived: Riley’s attention, quite noticeably, meandered to her.

She shifted uncomfortably in the doorway, trying not to look like she’d been watching them, glancing away to where spaceships docked for repairs, all manner of shuttles and rockets lined down the length of the pier, asteroids drifting peacefully in the space overhead.

Fortunately, Riley made no attempt to approach her; clearly having picked up on her body language, in the few short words they’d shared in the TARDIS. He spoke for a moment longer with the Doctor, and then turned away for good.

Hands in pockets, coat flapping, the Doctor walked back down the dock to where the TARDIS sat.

“Time we were off,” he said, giving her a light, thin-lipped smile.

“What’d you give him?” she wondered, stepping back into the TARDIS.

“Just a local raffle ticket.”

It took her a moment to parse the implications of this. Then she looked at him in disapproval.

“Doctor.”

“What?” he said tiredly, coming into the time machine and closing the door behind him. “He needs another ship, Martha. The last one… well.”

“Yeah, and whose fault was that?”

“Martha.”

“You told me he jettisoned the lot! Do you really think it’s wise, to reward him for murdering the Judoon?”

He spared her a sidelong glance as he shrugged out his coat. “I think you’re being a bit hard on him.”

“He’s a murderer,” she stated, exasperated. “And I’d thought we were meant to be against that sort of thing.”

“He did technically save forty people, you know. Including you. That’s got to count for something.”

“No, you saved those people,” she retorted sharply. “He just wanted – revenge.”

He tossed his coat over the coral arm of a support beam. “It’s unlikely we’d have got the Reaver otherwise.”

“You would have found another way,” she dismissed, stubborn. “You always find a better...”

“Not always,” he corrected her, on an impatient sigh. “Sometimes our only choices are bad ones. You’re almost a doctor, you ought to understand that.”

“Doesn’t mean we start handing out raffle tickets for killing people!”

He sighed deeper. “Right – I am not the universal arbiter of morality, Martha. And neither are you, for that matter.”

Her cheeks flushed and she glared up at him.

“What?” he repeated, voice harder this time. “Would you have preferred that I waste time lecturing him? Put him in timeout to think about what he’d done, while lives were at stake?” 

She folded her arms and scoffed, looking away pointedly – unable to hold his bright, penetrating gaze.

“Do what you want,” she said, suitably annoyed. “I don’t have to approve of it.”

“No, you do not.”

And that set her on edge, good and proper.

Not that it had taken much, since the entire ‘what you’re here for’ conversation, which had left Martha feeling rather belittled and not insignificantly incensed by the complete and unfathomable nerve of him. The audacity to remind her of the score, when he was the one who’d gone and ruined everything in the first place like a handsy teenager…

“So.” His trainers clanked up the ramp onto the platform. Reaching the console, he rather casually flipped a lever, and began to orbit around it. “How about… the dwarf planet Epian? We go now, we’ll catch it before it falls into Eternal Night.”

Even his hearts didn’t quite seem to be in it. It came across quite unenthusiastic to her – as though he wanted her to say no.

At least they were on the same page there.

“Actually,” said Martha, as politely as she could humanly manage, “I think I could do with a bit of rest, now.”

“Eh?” He cocked his head around the Time Rotor, giving her a surprised look. “Thought you were a medical student!”

“Still human,” she managed, trying not to grit her teeth.

“Ah, well. Can’t be perfect. Off you pop, then. Normalise that funny little circadian rhythm.”

I hate you, she thought.

“I’ll see you,” she said, and gave a little smile.

“Sleep tight.”

“Mm-hm.”

With otherworldly restraint, she said nothing else, and turned on her heel to retreat to her temporary bedroom.

One of the few downsides to life on the TARDIS was the singular inability to slam doors. They all rolled and slid with mechanical, clockwork grace, locked and unlocked by hi-tech touchscreen panels, automatically chugging and cranking their way open and closed when pressed. It was possible to manually roll them, but not forcefully, and not fast.

And so Martha patiently waited for hers to seal, clunking and clicking away, before she finally let the tears come.

From the very start, she hated that there were tears. Hated that she had been reduced, in her brilliance, in her capability, to crying over a man. Hated that she couldn’t even begin to temper the storm of gutting emotion he churned up in her, so pungent and ringing it made her sick to her stomach.

She hated, most of all, that she could not hate him.

She kicked her boots off as hard as she could, trying to dent the coral slope of the wall. They bounced off harmlessly, which only made her angrier. In a haze of sniffling and righteous fury, she pulled off her top, her jeans, ripped off her headband and hurled it.

The harder the crying grew, the more desperately she tried to keep it silent; and that set her off all over again. That even now, even as terribly as he’d treated her since the Pentallian – and, truth be told, well before then – she was still trying to preserve his feelings. Trying to save him any twinge of guilt, by not letting him hear her cry.

Love like this felt like a punishment, and Martha still wasn’t quite sure what she’d done so wrong.

She utterly submerged herself in the shower. Stood under the spray and resisted the urge to scream and beat at the walls. Lathered her soap up like a normal, civilised person, scrubbed from head to toe. She washed herself rather violently, as though she could remove his touch, his lips. Abrade them from her memory, scald them away forever.

But she couldn’t. There they were, in taunting, striking technicolour, unfolding behind her eyes over and over again.

His hands – ancient hands – on her body. Grasping her hips, bunching her pyjamas. His mouth, sucking languidly on her bottom lip, kissing her into an outright stupor…

She all but growled, flinging her sponge down and burying her face in her hands. Forget it. Just forget…

The soft, trailing kisses from the corner of her lips down, meandering ever so slow to her mouth.

Martha, I need you to stop me.

The feel of his body pinning her to the TARDIS’ railing, the gorgeous strain of his voice, so close to a whimper as he kissed her harder, kissed her like he was drowning, tongue desperately seeking hers. As his strong leg pushed right there, just between her thighs…

Martha swore, once, rather colourfully, leaning her back against the tile wall, breathing out heavily into the steam. Then she let her head fall back, and trailed a hand up the slippery inside of her leg.

It was an indulgence she allowed herself sparingly in the TARDIS, but one she felt she had earned today, that felt deserved. That she might just implode if she didn't get.

Under the memories, realer, more devastating than any fantasy she could ever conjure up – it took barely anything to get her there. Two fingers, a thumb in the right place, and she was shuddering, cursing in soft hisses; coming so hard she could’ve buckled under the force of it.

Fortunately, she did not, because an in-shower concussion would’ve been rather trying to explain to the Doctor.

After the desperate, billowing power of the release, she managed to stop crying. She felt somewhat less demolished, somewhat more rejuvenated. She spent a good long half-hour pampering herself: moisturising her hair, using the expensive facial cleanser Tish had bought as a Christmas gift, trimming her toenails, smoothing her body in her favourite scent of lotion.

She found herself regarding the lilac silk pyjamas she’d hastily discarded, post-Scrabble, and after a moment of disgust, tossed them into the laundry bin with extreme prejudice. Then she found some soft, comfy shorts and an old, well-worn t-shirt, and climbed into the impossibly plush bed that built into the TARDIS wall, extending into her room like an organic pool.

It was the sort of day she might’ve stayed up torturing herself with memories, playing every word, every action over and over again in her head. But today, she merely rolled into her pillow, and slipped, effortless, exhausted, into the dark.

I could kill you.

I could kill you all.

Her eyes snapped open, breath catching hard.

She lurched half-upright, eyes squinted, chest rising and falling rapid from the fading strains of the nightmare.

Martha wasn’t sure how long exactly she had been asleep; but there was a stiffness in her limbs and gunk in the corners of her eyes that suggested the nightmare had disturbed her just towards the end of her REM cycle. Which was just as well. She wouldn’t have it bothering her any sooner. Especially not as she knew it had, without a doubt, contained the Doctor.

All of her nightmares contained the Doctor, after all. The one that’d used to plague her, where she went to sit her exams and couldn’t find a single ruddy pencil; that one had died about the same time she’d started getting shot at on a daily basis.

She gave a great, stretching yawn, spine arching until it popped. Then she wiped her eyes, licked her lips, and climbed hazily from bed. Brushed her teeth and let her hair back down out of its silk covering.

The door whispered open, rolling away to let the soft aqua-orange glow of the corridor in. She padded out in her flip-flops, still working the tension out of her shoulders and back. The entire way to the galley, she wasn’t focussed on anything in particular; only the cup of water she was heading for, and what book she was going to delve into once she’d obtained it.

But when the door to the galley rolled open, and she turned the light on – she found herself standing in its archway, frozen.

Dumbfounded.

“Doctor?” she ventured, a bit flatly, staring at the sprawl of arms on the table.

He reacted sluggishly to the address. Arms suddenly folding in, face lifting slowly from where it’d been planted on the blue lino.

“Mmph,” he said groggily. Eyes squinted hard, barely open against the glare, a hand lifted protectively to his brow as though someone had turned a spotlight on him. “What?”

Martha stared in disbelief. Breathing in, taking in the haphazard scattering of what looked like… wine bottles.

“Have you been – drinking?”

It was as strange as any question she’d ever put to him.

He didn’t so much respond as much as he merely grumbled, burying his face back into the nestle of his forearms.

Bare forearms, to boot. He wore nothing but a plain burgundy t-shirt and his blue pinstriped trousers. She could even see his exposed toes, peeking out under the table.

“Okay,” Martha said, hedging. Then she shook her head slowly, pushing past the surprise, and walked hesitantly into the galley.

As she ran the cold tap and held a cup underneath, she very much tried not to focus on the incoherent mumbling issuing into the table behind her.

She turned the tap off, and took a sip. Drank half the cup. Hesitated, and stole a glance back at the Doctor.

And was surprised to find him sitting entirely upright, eyes low, staring at her.

“Martha,” he said, the syllables scratchy with disuse. “S’that you?”

Bloody hell, he couldn’t tell?

“Yes,” she replied, sipping from her cup. Took an opportunity to look him over again, eyes flicking guiltily to the bare arms. His hair was uniquely atrocious, half-matted, half-standing on his head like a storm of quills. He had an unusual all-over flush about him, most prominent at his cheeks and ears. The usual tortoiseshell reading specs, sitting decidedly crooked on his face.

Drunk. Without a doubt.

“Good,” he mumbled, almost to himself, nodding. “Good…”

She waited for him to say something else. He didn’t: promptly contorted by an enormous, tight-eyed yawn. He blinked slow and hard as he recovered from it, smacking his lips, looking rather dazed.

Martha glanced at the table and the floor around him. Raised an eyebrow at the collection of elegant, red long-stemmed bottles. She counted five, three upright, two rolling on their sides by his feet – not including the one across from him on the table, its bottom half still tinted with liquid.

“I hope you didn’t drink all of those tonight,” she said, sighing measuredly.

He pushed his chair back, scraping the floor rather suddenly, looking around himself in bemusement. “All of what?”

She set her water down with another, louder sigh, and went to pick one of the empty, overturned bottles up. The Doctor watched her intently, peering at the glass closely, eyebrows up in intrigue as though he’d no idea what might be behind it.

Martha inspected the label, but found it didn’t translate; the selfsame swirling and concentric golden circles across its front she’d seen in the library, titling the books in his study. Curiosity mounting, she gave the lip of the bottle a tentative sniff.

And almost choked, yanking away, dropping the thing on the table with a hard clank as she spluttered.

“God, what is that?” she gagged, burying her mouth in her elbow.

“You okay?” he asked, sitting forward.

“Is your liver, is the question!” She looked at him in worry, now – she couldn’t help it. “You put all of that in your body?”

“All of what?”

“Jesus, you’re pissed,” she whispered, closing her eyes – searching for any kind of strength.

Then she opened them, resolved.

“Come on, Doctor.” She grabbed his wrist gently.

“Come where?” He rose from his chair at her light tug, unsteady on his feet, towering over her as he stood.

“I’d say to get your stomach pumped,” she sighed, “but as I don’t know if I could do that without killing you, you need some proper sleep.”

“Oh,” he muttered, frowning. “Okay. If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You’re the Doctor,” he said – then snorted, clearly having amused himself with the quip.

She wished she had a breathalyser on her, right then. His blood alcohol content must have been utterly ungodly at that moment.

The Doctor bumped into her a little as she guided him out the galley. He felt unusually warm, hovering close at her side, his steps out of sync and tripping over her flip-flops slightly. His normal crisp, evocative scent, the one that drove her mad – it was nowhere to be found. He smelled, quite frankly, like engine coolant. Like the terrible, acidic whiff from that bottle was seeping from his pores.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why it is you suddenly decided to start a drinking habit,” she said with a sigh, as she made the trudge back to her bedroom, hobbling Time Lord in tow.

“Erm,” he answered, squinting and scratching at his hair. Rather than walk in a straight line behind her, he swerved very slightly from side to side, bare feet slapping noisily on the grating. “I reckon – well, reckoned, four-hundred and eight… no, sorry, nine minutes ago – that if I can’t think, then… stands to reason, it can’t think. Can’t do anything… y’know. Not good. So.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “There.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Doctor.”

“No,” he protested. Then, relenting, “Well…”

Her bedroom, fortunately, was not far from the galley. She stopped at the door – “Right here, Doctor,” she called, exasperated, as he wandered straight past – and pressed the panel. Then, feeling rather like a childminder instead of a space traveller, she guided him inside.

“What’re we doing here?”

He’d halted a few steps in, looking around puzzledly.

“You,” she answered, tugging on his wrist again, “are going to sleep. I’ll try to make sure you don’t die while you’re at it.”

He didn’t move, frowning at her dim room.

“Come on, Doctor, budge up,” she said. “Just go lie down.”

His eyes moved to hers, brow furrowed on an incline. “With you?”

“With—” She felt herself flush in a jolt. “No, not with me. I’ll be reading. In the chair.”

“I think…” He closed one eye and looked up with the other, nose scrunched in what appeared to be deep thought – though, sloshed as he was, Martha had her doubts. “I don’t think I’d mind, terribly, actually.”

“You’re just saying words, now,” she chided him. “Go on, lie down.”

He took three steps to the bed, and sat on the edge with a bit of a bounce. “Hm,” he muttered, and ran his hand in an arc over the slightly wrinkled bedspread. “Smells like you.”

Clearly, alcohol obliterated what little filter the Doctor did manage to have.

“Erm,” said Martha. She was sure if the ceiling light had been on, he’d have seen her changing colour. “Yeah, it’s where I sleep.”

“It’s lovely,” he told her, with a little bit of a lopsided smile.

“Right,” she said, robotically. Not processing that. Not one bit. “You go to sleep, then.”

He swung both his legs up onto the bed and planted his feet on it, knees bent, still sitting upright.

Satisfied that he’d soon be resting, Martha turned to inspect her bookshelf. There was a stack of paperbacks she’d brought from her flat, and she selected one at random.

Upon turning back around, she found that she was being observed. His arms resting on his knees, hugging them loosely, his head tilted as he stared at her.

The silent scrutiny made her uncomfortable, the lack of expression on his face giving her an odd frisson. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said, quite amiably. “Just… you.”

“Uh-huh,” she sighed, tone flat. “Me.”

“You ever think…” His head cocked the other way, teeth digging into his bottom lip contemplatively.

“No,” she drawled. “It’s radio silence in here.”

The Doctor gave another snort, a bit of a giggle, and flopped back on her bed then, splaying his arms out to the side. “You’re clever.”

Though she was still massively perturbed with him, Martha found herself reluctantly endeared by the whole spectacle. He was, she had to admit, a rather charming drunk. And it was indisputably fascinating, to see such a well-guarded fortress of a man tipsy; the laser brilliance and wit pared down to rambling ingenuousness.

“Yeah, I am,” she agreed mildly, crossing her room for the chair. She folded herself into it and pulled her feet up under her body. “Do I ever think, what?”

“Nah,” he mumbled at the ceiling, quite lazily, shaking his head on the pillow. “Shouldn’t say.”

“Well then stop waffling, and go to sleep.”

“Yessir,” he sighed. “Ma’am.” Then his head lifted a bit to glance at her, as though checking which.

She gave a shake of her head. “Take off your glasses. You won’t like it if you break them.”

He obeyed the instruction with unsteady hands, folding up the specs and tossing them at her bedside table, taking down her vitamin bottle.

She had expected him to roll over and pass out atop the sheets, but to her mild dismay, he tugged them back and crawled underneath her duvet – planting his face right in her pillow as he got comfortable. Though, she supposed, it was his home; she was the guest. Not that snoring into a guest’s pillow was exactly standard practise, but…

“Smells nice,” he reported, almost indecipherably muffled.

“Go to sleep, Doctor,” she said.

“Mm-hm. Think I could…”

He lasted about a minute, before he went silent, and breathed deeply. Asleep again, knocked out good and proper, as he’d clearly been in the galley before she found him.

Martha did her best not to focus on the sight of that wild hair on her pillow, or have any untoward thoughts surrounding the image. Instead, she opened up her book, and willed herself to focus on it.

The universe granted them a resounding two hours of peace, of quiet and recovery – before promptly and heinously shedding any pretext of benevolence, and returning to its old ways with a vengeance.

“Martha…”

She woke again, gasping, pitching forward in the chair at the deep, eerie groan of her name. The forgotten paperback flapped to the floor with a rustle of pages that frightened her more than it ought’ve.

“Martha… no… leave her…”

It took her a moment to come around to what was happening.

In the dim of her bedroom, the distinct shape of a body writhed under her bedsheets. Thrashing against the dark, twisting and struggling in the half-light.

“Leave her… please!” His voice broke, raising sharply in fear, sending a spike of reflexive adrenaline through her. “Please don’t, please!”

Still mired in a haze of lingering sleep, she pushed to her feet without thinking, crossing to the bed in a stumble. “Doctor?”

“Don’t!” he cried hoarsely, kicking, arms locked around her pillow. “Get out of my head! Stop!”

The words gutted her.

Get out of my head.

He was dreaming about the Pentallian.

“Doctor, wake up.” She knelt on the edge of the bed and grasped his shoulders. He tugged and jerked against her hold, crying wordlessly again. “It’s just a dream, love, it’s gone.”

“You can’t… can’t have her… get out!”

“Doctor!” She gave him a firm, jostling shake.

He gasped, posture stiffening, head jerking up from the pillow. His eyes launched to hers – she all but froze at the sight.

They were strangely bright, in the darkness. Gleaming up at her, wide and frenzied: aglint with the unmistakeable sheen of tears.

She felt everything in her dissolve at the sight.

As soon as he started to sit up, she’d wrapped him in a cradling, cheek-to-cheek embrace: squeezing him as tight as she could muster.

“It’s okay,” she promised tenderly. One arm wrapped around his neck, her hand cupping the back of his head. Her body teetered with the force of his violent reciprocation, his arms clamping desperate around her waist as he shook all over.

“It’s okay, you’re safe,” she whispered against his ear, feeling his breaths trip and labour. “It’s gone.”

“No.” It was cracking, inconsolable, slurring into the crook of her neck as his chest heaved against her. “It’s not, it’s not.”

“You were only dreaming,” she soothed, daring to softly stroke at the dishevelled spikes of hair. His torso felt hot against hers, the nape of his neck damp in sweat. “It was just a dream. It’s over.”

The Doctor drew several more shuddering, fragile breaths, his fingers digging into her t-shirt. She waited a few seconds for him to calm, then tried to pull back to see his face.

And found, unequivocally – she couldn’t. Couldn’t move even an inch. He was holding on too tight.

“…Doctor?”

“I’m scared,” his voice croaked, breathless, roughened in the dark.

It hit her right in the heart. Tore her back, without warning, to that hellish bout of torture in the stasis chamber, to his screaming, helpless agony.

“Don’t be,” she whispered back. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

There was an impossible tightening of his arms, and with a lift and a forward drag, without even a whisper of effort, the Doctor hauled her into his lap.

“Oh.” She inhaled abruptly, knees planting on either side of him, digging into the bedclothes for balance. “Erm,” she breathed, swaying, startled.

“Don’t leave me,” he pleaded into her neck, rocking her back and forth in his grip. “It’s coming back, it’s going to come back…”

“I’m not going anywhere. Promise,” she insisted – sensing that her efforts to comfort him were falling short, beginning to doubt he was even fully aware of her. “If you’ll just let me get in properly, I can stay until you fall back…”

“Martha!” She stopped, alarmed, at the harsh, hiccupping raise of his voice. “You don’t understand, why don’t you understand?”

“What do I need to understand, Doctor?” she asked, softly patient.

“It’s in me. It’s in me, and it wants…” His breath shuddered out. “God, it wants…”

She opened her mouth to quite gently suggest he try to complete his sentences – right before, with no semblance of warning, he rolled them both to the side.

A half-voiced squeak was what ultimately came out, the air knocking roughly out of her. She had no time to react before a leg threw over her body: suddenly finding her hips trapped between alarmingly strong thighs. Any chance of escape vanishing right before her eyes as they closed around her and gripped like a vise.

“D…” She couldn’t even form his name, positively reeling from the shock.

“Martha.” The brown eyes were lidded, pupils thoroughly blown – mouth slack with surprise, like he’d no clue in the world how she’d gotten there against him.

Like he’d rather die than let her go.

This could have, hindsight being what it was, been avoided. She could’ve taken him for a kip in the library, instead of her bedroom. Could’ve thrown something at him to wake him rather than climb on the bed. Could’ve simply left him in the galley where she’d found him hours ago, surrounded by that bloody poison, and perhaps stopped caring so obsessively about a fully grown man’s melodrama.

But no. She’d done what she always did, and now she was in it. Again.

His body curled tighter, the whole of him seeming to flex around her, caving in – no hint of inhibition left in those eyes to stop him. And her brain nearly shut down upon registering the solid ridge against her belly. Bent under the seams of pinstripes, digging unimaginably stiff into her appendix as his full weight slowly rolled on top of her.

As it did, he scratched at the pillow under her head, and moaned so hard Martha fairly heard her own eulogy.

His hips rocked against her, an undeniably intentional motion – the distinct pressure of an erection grinding along her thigh, then hip, as a breathy, “Oh, God,” strained from his mouth. Choked enough to sound pained, his eyes half-closing at the sensation.

It struck her – quite incongruously, given the immediate context – that she’d never heard him actually implore a deity before. Prompted her to wonder if Time Lords even had gods, or if it was just a human turn of phrase, nothing but an idiom he’d picked up on Earth.

Though – probably irrelevant just now, that.

Martha tried, harshly, to tamp down the wildfire in her stomach; to bury all the rising, chorusing, uncontrolled whispers of need that surfaced at those words. The shuddering snippets of all her best-loved fantasies, tearing through her addled brain – all of which ended pinned to this bed under this man, breathing, feeling…

“Doctor,” she stumbled, eyes pressing closed against the sight of his desire-clouded stare. “You’re drunk.”

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, mouth finding the hollow of her clavicle, tongue dipping under the oversized neck of her t-shirt.

Even as her brain fought, her body was going right towards the light.

“You’re drunk,” she repeated firmer – much nearer to the condemnation she had first intended. “You’re – you’re emotional. Not in your right mind, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, Martha, I know.”

There was a hint of teeth at the top of her breast, and the whimper that forced from her held as much anguish as it did arousal. Her body reflexively tried to arch – the effort was futile, in the hot, clutching prison that was the Doctor.

“I know,” whispered the voice down her shirt, the body pressing down on her, rocking her into the bed, “you want this.”

Kneejerk hurt rose to the tip of her tongue, all ready to fire.

And then he said, so breathless and rough she hardly understood him: “I need it.”

The shock almost throttled her. She faltered, gaping, synapses misfiring as his head pulled up.

He stared down at her, breathing hard, her head cradled between his elbows. His eyes sought hers desperately in the dark. “I – I can’t fight it, Martha,” he breathed. “I tried. I can’t. I need—”

His attention settled heavy on her mouth, lips parting.

Her ears were ringing.

To say she was of two minds was inaccurate – at that point Martha was of no minds, nothing remotely left behind of her sensibility and intellect.

She was, instead, of two hearts. One that beat wildly, threatening to burst from her chest with the tension – one that screamed, do it, do it, like the devil on her shoulder gone crazed, feral with the surreal temptation, hovering so painfully within reach.

The other had stopped entirely.

The unfinished assertion was raw. Jagged and hard-edged, falling from his lips so unpractised and inelegant it couldn’t be anything but truth. From his very depths, he meant it – whether he’d intended her to know or not.

He needed her.

And it sounded like it was tearing him apart.

The terrible, rejected hurt within her: it positively churned. It felt empowered, vindicated by the revelation. By the knowledge that all the angst, all the pain: it could all abound here, with so little provocation.

He was drunk, of course – but he was also a man. One stronger, it seemed, than he’d ever let on. There were undeniable realities to this situation, to the power dynamic it existed within. Hard facts that absolved them both.

It could be written off. Just a mistake. Just the heat of the moment.

It means nothing.

“It’s all right,” the Doctor lulled, leaning close, almost out of breath. His hands brushed over her hair, framing her forehead – his eyes drawing hers in, like he was trying to will the indecision out of her. “It’s just – me. Just us. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Her gaze shied from his; it was all the answer required.

“You can have it, Martha. All of it.” She felt him grind against her again, slow and hard. Felt his breath shudder out softly. “Just… say the word,” he whispered, “and I’ll give it to you…”

It was a perfect storm. He was uncharacteristically keen; she was preternaturally willing. There was confusion, desperation: so much grey her veins ran with it.

And if she could let go of her nagging conscience for just one second, she could have everything she wanted. Could have the impossible, the unattainable. She could finally, finally win something, after so long of losing everything to him. Her heart, her pride, her self-esteem.

That’s not what you’re here for, Martha.

She could finally be something else, than a ragdoll to his every passing whim. Something else than a stand-in. A passenger. A novice. Temporary.

One trip, then back home.

You’re not replacing her.

The Doctor had used her, from the moment they’d met.

And it still didn’t matter.

Want, need, winning and loss, pain and rejection; they were only moments. Love was a special sort of purgatory – and Martha felt forever ensnared.

“Doctor,” she said, strainingly soft. “You need to get off of me.”

The agitation was visible in every part of him. “Martha…”

“No, I mean it. This isn’t happening. I’m not going to fight you, so budge—”

Smothered. Well and truly, as his mouth pushed down against hers, panting, fumbling.

Trying to kiss her out of it, trying to shake her resolve – naturally. It was the sort of response that made perfect sense, in a drunken brain.

But there was no delicious tinge of spice, no heady warmth and sweetness to lull her to madness, as there had been on the two previous unsolicited snogs. Rather in spite of the alcoholic haze steaming from his pores – nothing about the kiss was intoxicating.

The Doctor tasted, in a word, awful. So pungent and industrial and face-pinchingly bitter that she almost gagged again.

“Mmrph!” she cried, and forced her mouth away from his, whipping her head to the side, eyes winced – nearly watering with the potency. He might as well have been drinking lighter fluid, the way it burned her mouth. “Ugh, God!”

The intensity of her response was enough to reach him, even as thoroughly legless as he was.

“Martha?” Worry registered instantly; eyes and ears perking, at the sound of her discomfort. Some loose fragment of sanity coming back to him, as his full-body grip on her unclenched.

She rolled from under him, finally able to free herself, and spat frantically into the bin near her bed, trying not to heave.

“Martha?” she heard, rather harried. His weight creaked across the bed, a hand landing on her shoulder.

“All right,” she dismissed, gulping for air, trying to wave him off. “I’m all right, I just…” She blinked her eyes hard, seeing spots dance before them. Felt her stomach give a little dizzying turn, her head buzzing.

“Oh, no,” he breathed rather suddenly. “Martha – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think...”

He was grabbing her by the biceps, then, stumbling out of the bed. She was distantly aware of being urged across the carpet, herded into her own bathroom.

As it turned out, he got her there just in time.

She went to her knees and lost the contents of her stomach in the toilet, in violent and short order.

“Ohh, I’m sorry,” the Doctor was groaning, pacing, hands raised to grip his hair. “Stupid, stupid…”

Martha wiped her eyes first, then her mouth, before pulling the lever and sitting back on the tile in a daze – already feeling impossibly recovered. Like her body had swiftly, successfully rejected a toxin – almost as though he’d quite literally poisoned her.

She tilted her head to look up at him, questioning. Which was unwise; namely as being on the floor put his groin at her eye level, and the blue pinstripes were as unforgivably figure-hugging as ever.

Her mouth came back open a little bit, eyes glazing.

“Where’s…” His attention, rather more innocently, was on her vanity, fumbling around her hairbrushes and flat iron. At last he found the toothbrush holder, and came over to her, cradling it delicately with both hands like a peace offering.

She accepted, staggering to her feet, taking it back to the sink to retrieve paste.

“I didn’t realise,” he said to her, fretfully, “I’d completely forgotten that it would…”

He glanced down at the toilet briefly, and got a strange look on his face. He put a hand out against the wall, suddenly seeming off-kilter.

Through the vigorous foam of her brushing, Martha glanced at him sideways.

“You all right?” she managed, garbled, frowning.

“Fine, I’m… fine. I…” His hand fell to the tank on the back of the toilet, face going a bit pinched. “I… oh,” he breathed. “Oh, right. Oh dear.”

And the Doctor followed in her footsteps, promptly crouching where he stood – starting to sober up the hard way, with a soul-churning gag.

As Martha leant on the sink, watching with a wince, reliving the last bizarre five minutes or so… something strange crept back into her consciousness.

A niggling awareness. Like a brush on her shoulder, a nudge in her mind; a peculiar tingling that seemed to say: look again.

She had been looking for answers in every corner to explain the Doctor’s outrageous behaviour. And now, with the context of tonight: there was one staring her right in the face.

It’s coming back, the Doctor had said.

It’s in me.

Suddenly gripping her toothbrush rather too tightly, she stared at the troubled man half-buried in the toilet, heart ringing in her ears.

It’s coming back.

His dream – the Pentallian. The sun. “It’s gone,” she had promised him; still in the anguish of the nightmare, she had presumed the miserable ‘It’s not’ to be nothing but residual fear and panic. But thinking it over again...

Scrabble. His firelit eyes. His uncannily cold hands… warm on her body.

And then the TARDIS, after he’d brought her back from the Reaver: Martha, I need you to stop me.

As though he couldn’t be trusted to stop himself.

Each time, the way he’d seemed to jolt back into control, disoriented, uncomfortable; and rather suddenly put off of her, in spite of how keen he’d seemed during the advance.

His unexplained drinking. When she’d asked to know why, slurred and incoherent though the answer had been, one part of it stood out to her.

If I can’t think, then it can’t think.

His voice, crying out in sleep, cycled through her head. He’d said her name. Begged: leave her.

Get out of my head.

You can’t have her, he’d said.

It’s in me, and it wants…

Her toothbrush hit the sink.

Chapter Text

It seemed an eminently human phenomenon, the hangover of a Time Lord.

Relocated to her bedroom, Martha bundled in her green fluffy bathrobe, body folded into her chair. From the perch she kept a watchful eye on the proceedings in the en-suite. She’d vacated the bathroom to give him a bit of privacy in his turmoil, but could still see past the rolled-open door – see where the warm, sculpted corals of the bedroom gave way into cold, shiny tile.

Could still see, upon them, the Doctor: in the clutches of a raw and unrelenting misery.

Strange as it was, it was about as normal as she’d ever beheld him. In a t-shirt, sat on a bathroom floor, retching up a lung and a half into the bowl: the fits of hard, shuddering, rim-clutching expulsion interspersed with lulls of faint, slurring incoherence. Like a party girl reeling at the end of a wild night, swearing off alcohol forever and blaming it all on her no-good ex.

Of course, the wound was the very definition of self-inflicted. But Martha felt sympathy for him regardless. She’d gone first, and though brief, the bout of sickness had been dreadful. And that was after ingesting nothing more than trace remnants of the stuff, second-hand. Whatever he had been chugging in the galley was clearly all kinds of radioactive; she could hardly imagine the kind of hell he was going through, six bottles deep.

Watching his back heave through his shirt, forearms gripping at the porcelain like a life raft, she supposed the unfortunate onslaught did come with an upside. Namely, the fact that between the smells and sounds producing from her bathroom, neither one of them was even remotely turned-on anymore.

Which felt bizarre, impossible merely to think. That the Doctor had been, even for a second, physically aroused in her presence. That she had witnessed it; felt it against her, sure as anything.

That, in the end – it’d had absolutely nothing to do with her.

Because of course it hadn’t. Who had she been kidding?

The sun. The Pentallian. It was as head-scratching of an explanation as any – but just mad enough, just unhinged enough, to make perfect, sparkling sense in the world of the Doctor. He had not been, all of a sudden, overcome by a spectacular and irrepressible desire for the eternally-overlooked Martha Jones, no: he was just out of his bloody mind. In the most literal sense of the phrase.

She bristled with questions. Puzzled over the fact that he seemed so much like himself – in the moments, at least, when he wasn’t going deep-voiced and bedroom-eyed, trying to snog her senseless. She wondered how he wasn’t glowing and sweating and a thousand degrees.

Wondered, more than anything, how exactly it was she was still alive.

The ordeal on the Pentallian had done a number on her, and rightly so. It had been a brutal outing for them both. The trauma of it was still fresh, and she remembered clear as day what he’d been like, overtaken by that sun. Growling, heaving, trembling on the brink of unspeakable violence. The kind, peaceable Doctor, infected perversely by the urge to kill. The burning words still rang in her subconscious, so snarling, so terrifyingly certain it made her feel a bit ill even to recall them.

I could kill you all.

And yet, against all odds – she wasn’t dead. Hadn’t been burned or menaced or threatened whatsoever. He had expressed nor betrayed not a single violent impulse to her. Been nothing but his ordinary mild-mannered self… except for the times when he very much wasn’t. When he looked at her like he could see through her skin, right down into her soul; like he could read every desirous thought and impure urge she’d ever had in his presence, right on her face.

Like he was utterly relishing the sight.

She pulled in a deep, steadying breath, drawing her hands up over her face and smoothing down her hair.

The toilet flushed, water swishing and pipes rumbling, returning her attention to the bathroom.

At another intermission in the torture, the Doctor crumpled. Panting heavily, he rested his cheek on the seat of the bowl with a hoarse grunt and uncomfortably re-arranged his legs on the floor. His eyes were closed, fringe plastered to his forehead with perspiration, the exertion of purging dampening the front and back of his t-shirt in dark rings.

He looked sickly, small, and in desperate need of a hug. And perhaps intravenous fluids. Martha wanted to hold him close, let him lean on her, promise it would be all right. In the same breath she wanted to take fistfuls of that sweat-soaked shirt and throttle him by the neck – to demand to know why he hadn’t just told her. Why the hell he’d keep something so utterly monumental as a secret, when it could’ve cost her life and limb.

Instead of allowing either forceful impulse to surface, she simply checked, voice tentative, “Is your stomach settled?”

“Please,” he groaned, head hung forward, “don’t jinx it.”

She tutted softly, sighing, head leaning to rest on her shoulder as she gazed at him. “You really did yourself in, huh?”

“Mrmm,” he grunted, and crawled out of sight.

She heard the water run at her sink, and hoped he wasn’t messing about with any of her things. Hoped he had the good sense not to use her toothbrush; although, cohabiting with an extra-terrestrial, one could never be too sure.

There was the sound of swishing, then spitting, under the ambient rush from the faucet. A brief silence, during which she worried her thumbnail between her teeth and tried to collect her thoughts.

All too soon, before she’d even gotten halfway through her bulleted list, the Doctor appeared in the round doorway, leaning heavily against its slope.

For an uncomfortable moment, they stared at each other, lingering on opposite sides of the room – neither seeming quite sure what to say.

Martha straightened her posture and cleared her throat, bracing herself.

And then he spoke, rather wearily.

“We need to talk.” His shoulders dropped. “Have done, for a while now.”

Her mouth closed on the spot, lips shutting with a soft snap as she blinked at him. He’d beat her to it – and those words out of the Doctor sent a bolt of fresh cold right down her spine.

“Right,” she managed, recovering from the surprise. “Erm, I reckon we do, yeah.” She bit her lip and stood from the chair, smoothing the flaps of her robe uncertainly. “Well…”

“First off, Martha, before anything else – I owe you an apology.” His eyes settled on hers, deep and dire – more penetrating than she’d ever felt. “I’m sorry. For everything. From the bottom of my hearts.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, a bit exhausted. “Apology accepted, Doctor, but…”

“None of this is your fault. And it’s… unfortunate, all round, really. Course,” he sighed and rocked on his heels, “I take full responsibility. I ought to have been firmer with you from the start. Completely on me, that the wires got crossed.”

Martha paused, lagging behind a second. “Er… sorry, what?”

He took a deep breath and fixed her with a tired look.

“You’re not here to be my girlfriend, Martha.”

And if he’d have pulled a pistol out and shot her right then – she’d likely have been less shocked.

She felt gouged. Exposed. Tacked in place under the burning lens of a microscope. Felt like he’d peeled back a layer of her skin with the words, doused her in boiling isopropanol.

“Wha…” Her breath almost got stuck, tripped up in her lungs. “…what?”

“And again – it isn’t your fault, that things got confused. I mean, I wasn’t clear. Maybe you feel I led you on. But this,” he gestured broadly between them, “this isn’t happening. It just isn’t. It never will.”

All ready to lay into him for keeping the sun a secret from her, primed with her lecture on how irresponsible and insensitive the omission was – and there he was, talking about their relationship. Out loud. With words.

Or, more accurately: there he was, dissecting their relationship. Flaunting its hopelessness. Putting a lighter to it before her eyes.

“And I could do the whole bit, all that it’s me, not you tosh; I could tell you it’s Rose, or that I’m not ready, or a million other things. But frankly – you’re too clever for that. See right through it. You don’t need me to explain it to you. You know why it can’t work. You’ve got to stop pretending you don’t.”

She couldn’t speak. Had her train of thought suddenly, ruthlessly dispersed, bullet points and all.

His head tipped to the side. “But if it helps to hear me say it, to know you’re not mistaken: here you go. I’m nine hundred years old.” His gaze was dark, unwavering. “And you’re a blink of my eye, Martha Jones. Smoke in a windstorm. I know I play it well – but I’m not human. I’m not like you. I don’t think like you, I don’t feel like you. I am worlds apart from you. Fundamentally other. Nothing I could give you, Martha, would ever be enough.”

“What are you doing?” she whispered, shakily, voice so small it barely registered. “Why are you…?”

“And you know that, deep down. You know how absurd it is, just the notion of us.” He gave a mild sigh. “And these last few days, that I haven’t been myself – I’ve only made it worse. We’ve crossed a line. And I thought… well, I hoped. But there’s no coming back from it, I’m afraid. I s’pose… sooner or later, it’d always have come to this.” His eyes held hers across the room. “But you really were brilliant, you know that?”

“I don’t understand.”

The Doctor tilted his head forward and gave her a downturned look – as kind as it was condescending. “Yes, you do.”

And if this was what it felt like to have one’s heart ripped out – no wonder that sun had done what it did.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She stood there in stiff silence, letting the waves of numb run over her.

“Same night we left, I think,” he said softly. “After Professor Lazarus’s gala. Wouldn’t want to leave anyone worrying where you’d been, after all…”

“Just – just stop it,” she breathed, taking a step forward.

“I can help you pack up your things, if you like. Or I could shove off to the console room. Whatever you—”

“Doctor, just stop!”

Her voice rung against the walls, raised, thin and desperate.

He sighed and pushed his hands in his pockets, crossing his feet at the ankles and gazing at her squarely.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” she said.

“Martha, we don’t have to do this.”

“Tell me you’re not actually trying to throw me out, because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself.”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” he said, very evenly. “There are rules, and it is quite clear—”

“You could have just told me about the sun!” she shouted, marching up three harsh steps toward him. “Was that so bloody hard? We’re meant to be a team! You’re not supposed to keep it from me when there’s a living sun inside you! Driving you mad!”

His eyebrow went up, rather pointedly.

“The sun?” he inquired, eyes narrowing, head cocking. “What are you on about, the sun?”

“The one that possessed you. That you said was still possessing you!”

The Doctor looked to his feet and gave a low sigh, as though gathering strength to soldier on in speaking with a particularly slow child.

“Martha,” he said, gently patronising – in a tone that implied the dear. “I was having a dream.”

She felt herself growing frustrated, and began in her agitation to pace. “No, you said – you said it was still in you. That it was coming back!”

“Yes. Dreams. Funny things. The wonder of the subconscious mind.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “You must’ve heard of them.”

Her cheeks began to grow hot. “So, what – you’re saying there’s no sun left inside you?”

“You were there when they vented the engines. In fact, I’m certain I had you order them to do it. Are you feeling quite all right?”

And that was it. That, she couldn’t abide.

“Say whatever you like about the way I feel,” she said lowly, hands clenched to fists. “Condescend to me for caring. Tell me I’m nothing to you in the scheme of things. Kick me out for something I didn’t even start. Fine. Do all of that. You’re well within your right.” She drew a deep, seething breath. “But do not try to insult my intelligence, Doctor.”

“I’m doing nothing of the sort.”

“Then what the hell has gotten into you?” she demanded. “You’re not possessed, but God knows you’re acting like it! You don’t even seem to notice I exist for months on end, you look right through me, and now all of a sudden…”

He looked to the ceiling in a long-suffering way that seemed to say, here we go. “Martha, please.”

“No, Doctor, you please. Please explain to me why you were compelled to hold me down like a randy teenager and try to sweet-talk your way into my knickers!”

He regarded her with a suppressed sigh, all the stoic resignation of a disappointed teacher. “I’d rather we get through this with dignity intact, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, would you?” she snapped, tone acidic. “Because you weren’t so fussed with dignity when you were humping me a minute ago, were you?”

“Right,” he said, exhaling. “I’ll let you get it out. Go on, have a good screech.”

“You seem to have an awful lot of ideas about what I’m here for, when you’re too drunk to pretend otherwise.”

“I want you when I’m mentally incapacitated,” the Doctor translated, brow wrinkling. “I do hope we’re not wearing that as a badge of honour.”

“I don’t recall you drinking over Scrabble,” she hurled. “Or after the Reaver got me. What I do remember is you, stone sober, nearly bending me over the railing!”

“And are we pretending, in this alternate universe where I’m hopelessly enamoured with you,” he asked, rather indulgently, “that you wouldn’t have lived for every last second?”

Her breath caught, heart skipping.

“Are we earnestly,” he wondered, bare feet padding silent on the carpet as he strolled closer, “genuinely trying to convince ourselves that you’ve a single objection to anything I might do to you?”

Her eyes closed, breath trembling. This can’t be happening.

“Because I don’t remember you complaining, Martha.”

His voice inched closer.

“I remember you,” she could feel the warmth coming off him now, “crumbling. Like wet sand. Just going to pieces in the palm of my hand.”

“Why…”

“What does it matter, why? The answer will never be what you want to hear. You know it meant nothing either way.”

“Why are you doing this?” It was hardly more than a whimper.

“Because I have to,” he said simply. “It’s better for us both, in the long run. Safer. Kinder. You’ll see that one day.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and her hands went to cover her face. She couldn’t fight it, couldn’t stop them, steeped so deep in the humiliation she might never surface again.

“Don’t do that,” he chided, eyeing her warily. “Oh, come on, Martha…”

His hands came up to grasp her biceps, and she slapped them off, violent as she’d ever touched him.

“Get out,” she sobbed.

“There’s no need—”

“Just get out!”

He sighed deeply.

She never saw him leave; just heard the door trundling and clunking shut behind him.

The Doctor managed to stumble down the corridor just in time.

It was nigh on impossible to slam doors on the TARDIS, but in his urgent desperation he damn near managed it, shoving the rolling disc so hard the time machine gave a disgruntled shudder on impact: one which seemed to amount to a startled and perturbed, excuse you.

By that time he was already on his knees over the toilet – much too preoccupied reintroducing the final bottle of priceless Gallifreyan wine, to muster a belated apology.

The room was spiralling. His insides were going outside in terrible, punched-in-the-gut gags. He felt hot and restless, dizzy and wrong-side-up: like he was staggering through a hall of mirrors inside a particularly unwelcoming ring of hell.

And he deserved it, he thought. Every moment of it.

Because he’d broken her heart.

Which had needed doing, of course. It was the only way he had been able to ensure It would never get to her.

There was, in Its insidious fixation, some sort of disturbed, feral possessiveness of Martha. A violent aversion to seeing her hurt, threatened, upset.

When the Judoon had frozen her in time, it had flooded him with such incredible rage he hadn’t been able to think. To breathe. Had scarcely managed functioning, until they were dead, jettisoned into the vacuum of space; more or less executed at his hand. It had taken him over with the sole intention of punishing them as severely as possible, wielding his intellect as a battering ram, destroying them completely and totally for even daring to endanger Martha.

And the aftermath of that had been horrific. Absolutely gutting.

Enlightening.

The longer the sun was inside him, the more It learned from him. But it went both ways. The Doctor learned about the sun, the presence, with every new action It compelled him to take against his will, every emotion he shouldn’t have felt and impulse he didn’t recognise.

Where the frightening and uncomfortable desire for Martha had come from, he had no idea still; he was loath to even contemplate that it had arisen from some buried part of his subconscious. But how the sun understood punishment, could even grasp the loose concept of vengeance – he was absolutely certain It had learnt from him. From his memories, his morals and principles.

Whether the instinct to defend Martha originated from It, or was some kind of twisted perversion of the Doctor’s own protectiveness of her; he couldn’t tell. But what it revealed was utterly crucial.

It had a weakness.

Billions of years old, as ancient as Time itself – and somehow, It harboured a soft spot for Martha Jones.

It did not just want her. Although, It did, and so deliriously at that it robbed him of all conscious control. Which should’ve been a recipe for disaster – yet, he had not done anything unspeakable. Had not tried to force himself on her, in spite of her blessed level-headedness in heated moments. When she said stop, It stopped, without question, without resistance.

And as the Doctor strongly doubted that a billion year old sentient star could grasp the nuance of consent – he was left only to assume it was that protective instinct. That could not see her hurt.

It was the first step in any good plan, identifying the weak points of the enemy.

The fact that the Doctor and the sun happened to share the same Achilles’ heel… well, that had proved quite the chore to strategise around.

It had not at all helped that Martha had decided to have some time to herself in her bedroom, which had resulted in soap-scented steam trickling in the corridor; steam that smelled so potently and deliciously of feminine arousal he’d halfway collapsed upon walking squarely into it.

The lust had been outright primal. So shocking and embarrassing and unaccustomed to his senses he had, of course, been obligated to unearth the Thousand-Year bottles from the winery, and chug until his thoughts were too blurry to continue featuring graphic envisionings of his poor human companion. Until his trousers no longer fit strangely. Until – most importantly – he no longer had any desire whatsoever to kick down the door and find her, wet and dripping and soft behind its tantalising depths, to climb into her shower fully-clothed, corner her against the tile, drag his mouth down the slick, trembling expanse of her caramel body until, until...

Well – yes. The Thousand-Year draughts had been a godsend, to that end.

Though he was now wishing he had found a less unforgiving outlet, to supress his dissolute thoughts. Hand shaking, he reached up to flush the toilet, and then braced his elbows on the seat, fists digging into his eye sockets as he gasped for breath.

During his drunken musings, before passing out in the galley; he had put the plan together, bit by bit, piece by piece.

Simply explaining the problem and dropping her off home while he fixed it – that wasn’t feasible. The minute It was back in control, he knew It would just bring him back to her. Lie, probably, again, about the sun being purged. Continue its ham-handed bloody efforts to wear her down, the clumsy, overbearing, butchered approximation of seduction. Surely she’d hold out for a bit… but not forever. And he couldn’t begrudge her that. After all – this regeneration was a bit of a belter, unfortunately, she could hardly be blamed.

But the entire notion of it sickened him. If the Doctor was inclined to make a romantic gesture – not that he ever was, mind, but were he inclined – it would involve no less than a fifteen course meal under the birth of a nebula. He had never wooed, out of the sheer tedium inherent in such an endeavour – but he was most definitely the wooing sort. He liked, in theory, the spectacle of it. The theatre. Dined, wined (though he couldn’t bear to think about wine just now), romanced under the stars. All as a tasteful prelude to… well, less tasteful ventures.

He was not the sort to drunkenly mount an individual he fancied, and try to – as Martha had so aptly and stingingly put it – hump them into agreement. Like a bloody dog in heat, It’d been.

The notion of her giving into her feelings and allowing something to happen between them, of her thinking it meant something when it wasn’t even really him; it was a nightmare. He didn’t quite know what to do about Martha’s feelings, but he had absolutely no desire to hurt her any more than he already obliviously had. He couldn’t stomach the notion of letting it get what it wanted, and was trying to criminally obtain. Stealing his mind, his body, his autonomy. Taking advantage of his best friend.

And so – he had to utilise its pressure point.

He had to get rid of Martha Jones.

And he knew it couldn’t end amicably, not for now. If he left her with smiles and sniffles, the bloody thing would be landing the TARDIS outside her flat, in her bed within the hour. There had to be no chance that Martha would allow him to be with her; he had to completely eliminate it as an option in her mind.

Short of matching chastity belts, or doing himself in and hoping for one of the more grandfatherly incarnations, there was only one way forward.

He had to be cruel.

Had to break her heart.

It was the second time in a day he’d violated his oath. He didn’t know how to feel about the fact that this hurt much worse than what he’d done to the Judoon.

As he leant over the toilet, panting, he could still see the disbelief in her eyes. The complete, stock-still astonishment, as she stood there in her little green robe, looking so entirely crushed it ripped his hearts out. Looking so innocent. So completely steamrolled. It was like stepping on a dog’s tail, like kicking a baby seal, breaking her heart. A cruelty so vivid and unprovoked, it was totally indefensible.

And of course, she’d figured out what was wrong with him. He’d underestimated her yet again. She knew about the sun; and he’d had to lie to her. To gaslight her into thinking she was wrong.

If she knew he was still inhabited by its consciousness, any inappropriate behaviour could be dismissed as It, not him. He had to make sure there was no chance. Had to stop her from loving him.

And it’d all but killed him.

He found himself vomiting, again, without any time to brace for the onslaught.

The Doctor often thought his relationship with Martha would be much more effortless, more streamlined, had they not faced the dilemma of her rather intense devotion. Of her constant, quiet longing, pervading every silence, every innocent gesture and friendly jab. It was like a third passenger, always in the room; he’d found himself wishing more than once that it would go away, and let him just exhale.

But to actually feel it leave, to see the warmth and light go out of her eyes, to be the one who had so brutally snuffed it out… it was worse than anything he could’ve imagined.

Why are you doing this?

She’d pleaded with him to stop. He hadn’t, not until he’d made her burst into tears. Until he’d taken what dignity she had left.

At the image of her head buried in her hands, replaying behind his eyes, a terrible weight seemed to press down on him, to lodge against his windpipe. A sickly heat, covering his skin, roiling his gut. He groaned and mashed his fists harder into his eyes, holding them there to hide the welling behind.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, croaking, the words barely there.

She deserved none of it. She was confused and hurt, caught in the middle of all of this madness for no reason. And now he had to take her home.

Even if he found a way to purge the sun – he might not ever be able to undo the damage he’d done, in so little time. She might not believe him, if he tried to explain. She might not care.

He had lost her.

At the hard certainty of the thought: a wave of something new surfaced inside him.

Panic.

“It’s your fault,” he heaved, disgusted. “Your fault. None of this would’ve happened, if you had just gone.”

He felt himself sweating. Heard his breath, beginning to rasp in and out.

“I told you, you can’t have her,” he groaned. “That’s not how this works. You can’t just take…”

He broke off into a moan, clutching his head, a wave of vertigo striking him down sideways. He landed awkwardly on his elbow, gasping. “Give it up,” he snarled. “She’s gone.”

His skin seemed to vibrate, with the heat coming off it. His head felt light, thoughts growing scattered and distant.

He could… he could smell something burning.

The Doctor looked down hazily at himself, and registered the sight of his clothes smouldering with some alarm.

Ah.

It was the last thought he had before the world rippled to black.

Didn’t see that coming.

Chapter Text

As a child growing up, Martha Jones had been very much like other little girls.

The incisive wit, the analytical bent and top-of-the-class brilliance – that had all come much later. In the formative days of her youth, Martha had not, to the initial horror and despair of Francine Jones, displayed any disposition to be unusually precocious or scientifically inclined. She’d walked at an ordinary age, spoken, read; reached all her milestones at the very same time as all the other children.

Like lots of little girls, she had been intrigued by the frilly, the dainty, the utterly inconsequential. She’d adored dress-up and dolls and elaborate tea parties. She played princesses with her sister, and, like all children who play pretend, imagined herself in the diamond slippers, donning the gown, riding a chariot. Winning the heart of a dashing prince. Lots of little girls imagine themselves as the heroine of a romantic fairytale, destined for a happily-ever-after: Martha Jones had been no different.

And of course, upon growing older and learning the ways of the world, such castle-in-the-sky notions were hastily disabused. Reality asserted itself, as it was wont, in lonely adolescent crushes and good-for-naught boyfriends, stagnant love lives and flourishing divorce rates.

But even in spite of that harsh reality – Martha, like plenty of other little girls who grew up, always held onto a tiny piece of the fairytale.

Which was against her nature. She was a born sceptic, dismissive of superstition, wary of religion. A scientific woman at heart, not given to fanciful beliefs: someone who upheld observation and hard data over any manner of longing or faith. Yet still, long after she grew up, long after her evolution into an intellectual creature – she could never entirely shake her inner romantic.

And it was fine, because, well, who could it hurt? It was a harmless bit of delusion. The whimsical idea that everyone had their own prince just over the horizon, primed to swoop in and rescue them from the dead-end job or failing relationship: it was a quaint, magical little comfort in the back of one’s mind. A sweet, normal, eminently human lie to tell oneself, just to get through that particularly slow day, to rustle up a bit of spare dopamine in a low moment.

The Prince was never meant to be real.

And therein lied the problem with the Doctor.

Someone tells a cynic: the fairytale is real. The Prince exists. His chariot awaits.

”Fancy a trip?” he says.

It was not a sequence of events the human mind was equipped to process; not, at least, without a regular course of antipsychotics. It was beyond serendipity. A passing glimpse of Neverland.

And the cynic falls in love with the Prince, because he’s a prince, and, well – what else would any thinking person do? Clever, compassionate, fit as all hell. Shows you all creation, free of charge. Smiles like the rising sun. Practically made for falling in love with.

The fairytale is real, and they’re living it.

But there’s a catch. Always a catch.

Because they are not the Princess. And they never will be.

Her princesses had never looked much like her, anyway.

To Martha, it made a kind of perfect, agonising sense. You meet the last of a proud and scarily advanced alien civilisation; he’s exactly your type, from the trim tailoring to the dirty trainers right down to that torturously pullable coif; he pursues you, veritably hunts you down from your place of work to a seemingly random street corner, dropping all manner of flirtatious hints and the most devilish of smiles. You go against every ingrained instinct within you, take the biggest risk of your life, leave everything in the world you know – run away with this dashing, lovely stranger who saved your life.

And of course it comes out: he doesn’t want to ravish you, no. Simply not the ravishing sort. Fancies himself a proper gentleman, so genteel it borders on sexless, and isn’t that just bloody rubbish. Could’ve been getting inguinal bruises and rug burns for your trouble – but no, let’s go see Shakespeare, doesn’t that sound like good wholesome fun?

Of course he’s just lonely, and broken, and looking for something, anything in the universe to distract from the pain. Of course you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, looking borderline clever in front of him. Of course his entire planet has been massacred. Of course he already has a girlfriend (or whatever the hell she was), and she’s unreachable (whatever the hell that meant).

Of course it didn’t work out.

Martha fell in love with the Doctor, because of course she did; just the kind of catastrophically stupid thing one did, under these extenuating circumstances. The Doctor didn’t love her back, because of course he didn’t: he was a walking tinderbox of celestial trauma, terminally repressed, threatening to go up in flames at the mention of a name or a place.

And the Doctor had been right. Because everything he’d said, all those hard truths he’d seen fit to level her with… she’d already known them. Every last one.

She’d known she was being overly optimistic. That she had been blinded by love, in her thinking one day he might see her properly. She’d long since accepted that no one actually met the Prince and got a happily ever after; that the Prince always had a wife and three children, a drinking problem, undiagnosed halitosis and a secret family in Aruba. The cynic in her had always been keenly aware, that falling in love with an alien would end in ruin.

It was unworkable, a simple non-starter. Even if every obstacle in their way was removed, even if he did see her, even if she was granted the unholy blessing of the Doctor giving her rug burns – there was to be no proper relationship. No commitment. It was not the sort of thing that was even remotely feasible, when the players in question were a nine-hundred-year-old god, and the pretty little thing from Earth he’d found to hang off his arm at the moment. At least, before she was killed terribly, or lost to time. Or before she wised up and bolted whilst she still had legs to do so.

The writing had always been on the wall. There was no having a relationship with the Doctor. Her love – it was doomed from the outset.

She knew as much.

And yet knowing was useless, at the end of the day.

Knowing did nothing to stifle the pain.

The cynic in her, strange as it was, felt a little bit vindicated. Felt a kind of simmering schadenfreude, that it had been right all along. That obviously any hopes she’d had were rooted firmly in nonsense, in preposterousness. That she almost deserved to be crushed, demolished on the spot, for being so idiotic as to put the yearning in her heart over the reason in her head.

But in the moments after he left – in the moments spent in harsh, heaved, disbelieving sobs – it was not the cynic, that ruled her.

It was a broken little girl. Who’d just watched her fairytale wither to ash.

She let herself cry. Let herself have it out, once and for all, hard and ruined and raw, sobbing so hard she did not recognise her own voice. Letting out all the pain he’d caused. All the angst she’d borne. All the hurt and the disrespect. Let herself embrace the self-pity like never before: let herself rage and roil over just how utterly, viciously unfair it all was.

Martha, Francine Jones would say, irritated, disappointed. How many times do I have to tell you? Life…

“Isn’t fair,” she spat, to her empty room. “I know.”

When it was over, she found herself curled on the floor in a fluffy pool of bathrobe, leaning on the wall for support. She felt the coral vibrating softly under her cheek. Lulling, almost soothing in its faint motion.

She sniffled hard and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Sat straight, and gave the wall a pat.

The TARDIS did not take sides; and for that, she was eternally thankful.

After five minutes or so, gathering herself, employing a meditative breathing technique: she stood up, at last. Recovered her dignity, her poise.

She cast off the bathrobe, the shorts, and replaced them with denim and leather – her ordinary, well-worn streetwear. There was a comfort in the getup, a kind of anchoring certainty. The Martha that last wore this jacket and these jeans: she was a confident woman, an adventurer. Someone who only had vague, pop-culture flavoured notions of heartbreak. Had never truly seen its black, chasmic depths, had never looked into its hateful dark with her own eyes.

A medical student who believed there was no such thing as a conscious cardioectomy: who hadn’t yet known the agony, of having her beating heart excised in the space of a breath.

You’re a blink of my eye, Martha Jones.

Dressed, standing before her mirror, she took a deep and controlled breath. Pressed her hands flat to her thighs and stared at herself hard, until the welling pressure in her throat receded for the last time.

“Get ahold of yourself,” she told the woman in the reflection.

And so she did.

Meticulously, robotically: she went about the task of packing up one life to return to another.

The numbness that overcame her while doing so was not particularly surprising. She traced it to a phenomenon she’d observed working late nights in the A&E, tending to the wounded in particularly severe automobile accidents. She had spoken to patients impaled by engine parts and car doors, to those with crushed or severed limbs; and overwhelmingly, in the face of those horrific injuries, she had found the victims eerily, almost vacantly calm.

They’d talk to her about the circumstances of the accident, speaking in even, casual tones while she worked to transfuse blood back in their body or prep them for an amputation. Some even had the gall to try and chat her up. They would ask about other passengers in the vehicle. Plot their legal strategies, right there, vowing to sue the other driver out of house and home for cutting them off.

A natural stress response, induced by astronomical levels of adrenaline in the blood stream: granting a false, chemical tranquility, in the wake of unspeakable trauma.

Martha had never before been quite so grateful for a neurotransmitter.

She felt unruffled. At peace. Her mind was clear as she dedicated complete, forensic concentration to the mission at hand – ensuring she left nothing of herself behind in the spare bedroom, bestowed to her once upon a very different time.

Into the duffle bag she unearthed from the back of the cupboard went clothes, her hair supplies, books and makeup. She packed her socks and her soaps, went on an expedition to turn up every last hair tie.  

As she cleared the bedside table, sweeping away her alarm clock and vitamins, her attention fell on the tortoiseshell frames still folded up there, tossed carelessly on the surface. All she could do was stare at them for a long moment, eyes following the amber flecks in the darkness.

You know how absurd it is, just the notion of us.

You know it means nothing either way.

With pursed lips, she lifted the reading specs between pinched fingers, holding them carefully by the nose bridge. Then she returned to her bag and slid them to the bottom, tucked safe under a jumper and her fancy purple dress.

She continued to pack, methodically. Not another tear fell. Not a moment was spent reminiscing. The pain had come and gone already: she’d run out of the energy for grief. She felt like an automaton, like someone had found her off switch as she moved about the room.

After fifteen minutes of drawers slamming and zippers zipping, the bedroom and bathroom were empty. The space was warm and orange, craggy and quiet: like a cosy cave at the bottom of the sea. Barren, impersonal, exactly as it had been when she was first introduced.

Martha took a final look at it, waiting to see if she would feel anything.

When she didn’t, she stowed her bag on her shoulder and switched off the light.

On the walk down the corridor, she found resolve. Tempting though it was: there was to be no more shouting. No more arguing or anger. There was no longer a point.

She would not be ungrateful, of course – Joneses were not raised that way. And so, on the way, she prepared polite gratitude for him. Solemn and steady words, standing pre-memorised in the back of her mind.

She would thank him, genuinely. Then she would make her departure. Walk away, as though they’d shared a cab.

As though they hadn’t saved each other’s lives, time and time again.

As though she weren’t leaving half her soul with him.

Martha took a deep breath and marched the last few steps into the console room. She secured an impassive expression. Contemplated looking into those dark, deep eyes for the last time, and felt no particular jolt, no pain or uneasiness at the thought.

Epinephrine. Like manna from heaven, it was.

Bracing, head held high, she trudged up to the TARDIS’s round, rattling platform…

… and found it echoingly, resoundingly empty.

Martha stopped short, frowning. Crouched a bit to peer through the grating of the floor, checking that he wasn’t nestled down there, tinkering beneath the controls.

No sign. No noise.

“Doctor.”

Equipment hummed. The room was quiet.

Irritated, she dropped her bag at the top of the ramp with a heavy thud. She looked around, hands on her hips.

What was this? A power play? Making her wait for his arrival, as some sort of final, twisted assertion of dominance?

“Wanker,” she muttered, rolling her eyes.

Sighing roughly, she wandered forward, leaving the bag to circle around the controls. Taking in the sight of the central column, glowing and pulsing and fluid, churning softly. She gave the scuffed LCD monitor a little tweak, pushing it to the side a bit. After a lingering moment, a hint of hesitation – she peeled one of the sticky notes from the frame, covered in circular scribbles, and took it to her bag.

She wasn’t exactly proud of the little spontaneous fits of kleptomania; but it wasn’t as though travelling with the Doctor came with a gift shop at the exit. She just felt she needed… something. Something tangible, something she could hold, to make this all seem real in a week’s time. In a month. A year.

She swallowed hard and looked back to the room. Dingy and steampunk and beautiful. The metal and the coral and the wild jungle of wires, stringing it all together like so many vines. Like the inside of a tree, engineered by a mad scientist.

Without warning, her eyes stung with salt, and she hastily ducked her head, swearing softly and scrubbing her forearm across her face.

Bloody hell. Getting emotional over an appliance. She was losing it.

The TARDIS thrummed faintly, roundels glowing. She looked around at them, giving a distant shake of her head. “I think I will miss you, though,” she mused, sniffing, eyes wandering up to the ceiling. She put her hand on the railing and caressed the grooved, warm metal. “You always were good to me.”

And it hit her like lightning.

A young, rosy-faced woman with short cropped hair – screaming. Her pink skin flaking to ash, skull melting from the teeth out. A curly-headed medic cowering with a clipboard, cornered, terrified: razed to meat and bones as the light hit her, as the heat of a star ground her down, charred the screaming skeleton to soot, scrubs and all.

She gave a shrill, disgusted cry, snatching her hand back, stumbling at the bellowing force of the macabre images that had just blown through her, the slamming, crashing power of them.

“What the hell?” she gasped, shaken.

For a moment, she was frozen, chest rising and falling quickly, regarding the railing like it might come to life and attack her.

But when nothing else happened, very, very slowly, breath quivering, Martha reached out again. Her fingers hovered just a centimetre from the metal. And then she touched—

A visual-audio assault, rapid-fire. Water. Rain. Flames. Screaming, so much screaming, his screaming. A sun in empty space. Golden. A brilliant blaze on black.

The inferno, reflected in her eyes.

“Oh my God,” Martha heaved, tugging away so harshly this time she fell back against the opposite rail. “The sun!” She looked around, frantic, unsure of quite who she was speaking to, desperately seeking a response all the same. “It’s the sun!”

The TARDIS seemed to breathe around her, bolts shuddering, weight-bearing metals giving a long and lamenting groan. It was a sound she had never heard the mechanics produce. Ghostly, dark – a hollow, tortured keen.

And suddenly she felt drenched in a cold, wringing sweat. Weighed down by nauseous panic as all the pieces slotted together in her mind: and formed a picture, clear as day.

He’d lied.

Lied to her, through his teeth.

Gutted her as a means to an end.

It was all by design. The confrontation. His sudden, uncharacteristic bluntness, the coldness and the cutting. The way he had piled on, breaking her slowly. Disastrously precise. More and more insidious by the word.

And had it been puppy love, a schoolgirl crush, a passing infatuation – perhaps it would not have cut so deep. Perhaps she could have, in the moment, seen through the callousness, recognised the calculation.

But she was galaxies beyond a crush. Had been, for so, so very long now.

It was a plague, how she loved him. A love so terrifying it resonated throughout her very being: love that made him as much a part of her as her bones or breath or cells. It was love that did not flutter or sing – love that stabbed and seethed and sickened, that crawled under her skin and raged with its ferocity. She hated that she loved him. It felt like a sickness or a curse, that no cure in the universe could shake.

And he had given her deepest, most intimate fears a voice. His voice. Confirming point-blank that he knew she loved him; and that, no, as a matter of fact, he did not particularly care. That it was nothing more than an irritant, a spanner in the works. An affront to his rules. A nuisance to be promptly resolved by putting her out on the side of the road and carrying on as though they’d never met. Like she was nothing. Just a pet with behavioural issues, being rehomed as a matter of convenience.

He had taken her unshakeable adoration and hurled it, mocking, right back in her face. Churned up every intrusive thought and raw, bleeding insecurity, just to veritably bury her underneath their lethal weight.

The entire exchange had been, in a word, cruel.

And for all his warts, for every quirk and shortcoming and fatal flaw… that was not the Doctor. He was a very many things, she had learnt – but never, ever, that.

He was, at his core, the polar opposite. Stubbornly, cripplingly kind. It was why she’d fallen into such desperate and turbulent love. Why those eyes had such a devastating hold over her.

Kind to a fault.

I’m sorry. For everything. From the bottom of my hearts.

It had been a ruse. A ploy. A trick to throw her off the scent. To force her out of harm’s way.

And damn it all to hell – it’d almost worked. He’d bombarded her with everything he had, and she’d been so enveloped in the rubble and confusion, such a mess of heartbreak and self-pity, that the deception had flown right by her.

An entire blooming sun had taken up residence inside him. And his bloody inspired solution: to manipulate the only person in the universe around to help, and remove them from the equation.

Unconscionably stupid, melodramatic, self-sacrificing…

“Wanker!” she shouted, and turned on her heel.

As Martha hurried down the ramp, boots clanging all the way, there was a subtle shudder of the TARDIS that could have been reproach or agreement. Vents wheezed urgently at her as she passed, huffing as though suffocated, hissing at her heels.

“I’m on it!” she snapped at them, thrown into a frenzy.

There was no easy way to locate a Time Lord within the massive vessel. She attacked this problem by the brute-force expedient of slapping her hand against every wall panel, whisking open doors like a madwoman – sticking her head in and dashing to the next the second there was no sign of occupancy.

Three workshops, a storage cupboard, an observatory, four spare bedrooms (including her former one) and a bowling alley went by, before, with a tornado of doors tossed open in her wake – she finally stumbled upon the rather innocuous little bathroom.

Before she even reached it, there were hints of wrongness in the approaching corridor, that turned her stomach and heightened her dread. The soft wisps of white-grey smoke, floating along the floor. The heavy, ash-thick odour of something burning, hanging like fog, wafting in tendrils through aqua light – forming a smog that only grew denser and more oppressive, the closer she drew.

When she finally reached the smoking door, she burst inside, hitting the panel so hard it nearly malfunctioned.

What greeted her – she could’ve never anticipated.

“Oh my God!” she shrieked, clinging to the doorway, gaping at the blackened, sizzling heap on the floor.

For a moment that could easily contend for the worst in her life: she thought that was it. That she was too late.

For just a fraction of a second, everything in her could’ve died with him.

And then the heap shifted. It writhed. Sort of… gurgled.

Martha’s heart restarted fitfully, skipping.

The black, curling char that had greeted her: it was not flesh, she realised. It was fabric.

The Doctor’s clothes, burning right off him. She could see the rags still smouldering, fibres glowing faintly red, melting into bare skin like dying embers. Patches of bright, pink-singed pale underneath, writhing with his spine under the peeling scraps as he slurred and choked with the pain.

“Jesus Christ,” she heaved, and fumbled into action.

By a stroke of unfathomable luck, there happened to be a shower cubicle in the particular bathroom he’d decided to barricade himself in. As she hurried past him, it felt like edging around a live burner, scooting by an open fire: a terrifying heat rippling from his body on the tiles.

Whimpering a little with the panic, Martha threw on the cold tap at full blast. She stood on her toes to yank down the handheld sprayer, and nearly ripped the thing off its neck, tugging the hose out as far as it could stretch.

With so much pressure there was a hearty recoil, water burst from the showerhead. It drenched the man, the floor, the toilet and the wall: hitting its mark like a firehose as she tried to put the Doctor out.

He started, slipped, and slammed flat on his front, face-planting on the tiles and moaning weakly at the shock.

It did feel a hint like violence, spraying him from all angles as he twisted on the spot, unable to escape, choking in bewilderment on water. But she was determined to see every last terrifying bit of flame put out, and didn’t relent, focussing where the damage seemed worst. As the water battered him, his clothes began to peel away like sooty slop, one scorched scrap at a time. First his t-shirt, then the upper half of his trousers.

It spoke volumes about the grisliness of the emergency, that Martha didn’t even register that there didn’t seem to be any sort of undergarment beneath what had once been blue pinstripe. She cared about nothing but getting him fully extinguished – spraying until he had nothing on, until there was no hint of burning, until he was left sprawled in an ashy, grey-black puddle of what had once been clothing.

She shut the water off, threw the sprayer into the shower and more or less skidded toward him, sliding across the tile on her knees and soaking her jeans to the skin.

On his side, sodden and shaking and utterly drenched, the Doctor barely responded to the clutch of her hands on his too-hot shoulders, rocking limply with the impact as she clambered up to him.

The upturned side of his body was completely naked: and there were wounds. Angry, gleaming splotches where the clothes had caught hotter, where dermis had blistered and split. The burns were not mild. They were large, ugly and scarring, and her breath gave a terrible hitch just looking at them.

Had she been even a minute slower…

“You complete idiot,” she hissed, feeling herself well with a burst of furious, irrepressible emotion, vision blurring over hotly. “How stupid could you be?”

“I-I… c-can’t…” His voice barely came out, deep and slurring. “I… w-wha…”

She pressed two fingers to the side of his throat, wincing a little at the warmth. The twin pulses underneath the skin galloped, nearly vibrating at the speed they raced, bulleting at lightspeed. He was in shock.

Worse, much more pressingly – he was scalding.

“God, you’re burning up,” she breathed, sitting back on her heels, mind racing. “I’ve got to cool you down. Erm…”

Trembling, grunting, the Doctor struggled to roll onto his back, eyes dragging open to find her.

And Martha’s breath stopped. Her body tensed all over.

The eyes were radiant.

Half-lidded, gazing up at her like crescent moons, his irises so stark they were nearly amber – seemingly lit from within as he stared at her blurrily.

“Y-you’re,” he said, teeth chattering.

“Shhhh,” she urged, voice shaking. “Don’t try to talk.”

“… came b-back,” he slurred, brows drawing together in a furrow.

“Of course I came back, you plum. Oh, my God.” With difficulty, she forced herself to look away. “Do you think you can make it in the shower?”

He turned his head slightly, and seemed to regard the destination through those low-beam eyes. His fringe was plastered flat to his head, the scruff on his chest matted and soaked through – and Martha found herself astonished that he even still had hair, that it hadn’t caught and gone up in smoke, as hot as he’d been before she sprayed him.

“S… sc… s’cold,” said the Doctor, grumbling, having come to a decision on the shower.

“That’s the point,” she told him, and pulled on his shoulders – the only part of him that had not sustained damage. “C’mon, we have to go. Careful.”

She winced when he sat – did so even harder when he tried to get up on his knees, knowing the burns must’ve been stinging like hell as his shins stuck to the tile. “Careful,” she pleaded, as he staggered on his hands and knees, trying to guide him in the right direction.

In an awkward, stumbling, half-standing lurch, she got him splayed mostly inside the cubicle.

“Ohh,” he groaned, face contorting as his back made contact with the tile, trying to roll onto his side again. “S… s’bad.”

“Yeah, it’s bad,” she whispered, pushing his long legs into the shower, up against his chest. “I’m sorry.” She stood and grabbed the showerhead. “It’s going to be cold, so just brace—”

“Wait!”

The coherence of the demand startled her. “What?”

“We can’t,” he panted, suddenly sitting upright. “The destabilised acceleration into hyperspace – it’s not safe! You’ll kill us all!”

And suddenly, clumsily, he was trying to stand – to take the showerhead from her.

Jesus. He was delirious. His brain was cooking.

“Doctor, please,” she begged, feet sliding on the tile as she struggled to wrest it back from him. “I’m trying to help you!”

“I can’t let you do this!” he said, so commanding, so himself that it jarred her.

Fortunately, half-burnt to death, he did not have his usual strength: she managed to yank the sprayer away, and took four rapid steps out of the cubicle. Before he could pursue her, she hit the lever.

The water got him again. Again, he slipped, and fell, giving a pained oof and trying to huff the water out of his nose. She wished she had a tub, something to soak him properly in, something to dump some ice in. The TARDIS’s severe water pressure was normally a godsend, after a hard day of running and sweating. Right now, it was torture – especially as it was pelting the Doctor’s ravaged skin, prying at the raw wounds.

He tried to curl himself up, tried to retreat from the spray, but there was nowhere to go. When he moaned in pain, she almost lost her resolve entirely.

“S-s…” he tried, arms held up to ward off the frigid onslaught, “s-stop… p-p… plea…”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she told him breathlessly, trying to aim for his uninjured shoulders – wishing he’d stop squirming about so much.

She sprayed him, drenching him for a full two minutes. To his credit, even half-dead, he never stopped fighting: rolling, trying to climb from the shower, slipping, falling, getting sprayed in the face whenever he got a bit too close to getting her.

Once he was well and truly soaked, and she saw him start to shiver, she turned off the water and returned to him.

She was appalled to find his temperature had not changed; to find steam rising from his bare skin, as the droplets turned to vapour.

“Shit,” she whispered, holding her palm at a distance from his bare chest – feeling the air in front of it swelter.

“W-why?” the Doctor spluttered, miserably, luminous eyes barely open.

“Doctor,” she said, steadying him by his arms, “I need you to focus for me, for a second.”

“W-why… s’cold, and you…”

“I’m sorry for spraying you, but I really need you to answer something, okay?”

Whether he merely had a built-in response to the prospect of answering a question, or the desperation in her voice spoke to some buried part of him, she didn’t know – she was just relieved that he stopped his rambling, and looked at her foggily.

“Good,” she breathed. “Good. Can you tell me,” she searched his face to make sure he was still listening, “if the infirmary has a stasis chamber?”

“A…” She saw his brow knit, gears churning.

“Like the one from the Pentallian.” She swallowed so hard it hurt. “The one I froze you in.”

“You… f-froze me…”

“Does the TARDIS have one of those?” she asked. “Because I think we have to do it again.”

He seemed to just stare at her, for an uncomfortably long time.

“You came back,” he said.

“Yes, Doctor, we’ve been over that. You’re going to die if I can’t cool—”

She barely had time to react before wet hands were clutching her arms, dragging her bodily into the cubicle; squishing her up against his dripping, naked form.

“Doctor!” she squawked, struggling.

“I missed you,” he mumbled, rather pitifully.

“I never even left!” she protested; feeling her clothes grow unpleasantly heavy and freezingly damp as she tried to wriggle free. “You didn’t have time to miss me!”

“You did leave.” His face buried in her shoulder, and he seemed to shudder. “I can’t lose you again.”

“Doctor, I need you to focus…”

“Promise me,” he breathed, voice growing choked. “Promise me I won’t lose you again, Rose.”

Martha went still in her efforts to free herself. Her stomach turned over and seemed to sour.

“Promise me!” the Doctor pled, squeezing her to him tighter.

She manoeuvred her legs toward the wall of the shower. And then, bracing, she dug the heels of her boots against the tile: and gave a hard, forceful shove, pushing off the wall with her feet.

She slipped out his wet arms with a pop, landing on her bum and sliding a bit.

He reacted in distress, gasping and reaching out. “Where are you going?”

Martha stood, righting her sopping wet clothes with as much dignity as she had left. “To the infirmary,” she said, rather grimly. “To look for a stasis chamber.”

“Well, what are you doing that for?”

“Doctor, stand up.”

He didn’t. He folded his arms like a sullen child. “You didn’t promise me,” he said.

The urge to shout I’m not her scalded, hotter than even he did. I’ll never be her. Stop wishing I was.

Rather than do anything to further inflame the situation, Martha gave a tedious sigh.

“I promise,” she said flatly.

The Doctor rumbled, dissatisfied. “You didn’t mean it.”

You’ve got to be kidding. “You follow me to the infirmary, you get a real promise,” she said. “Not a second before.”

He gave a deep sigh, as though making an enormous concession. And then, on wobbling feet, he pushed himself up to his full height.

She refused to look below his chest, sticking out a hand. “Come on,” she said.

He took it without hesitation: twining his fingers with hers, clasping her palm tightly. Martha tried not to feel sick with the jealousy, that he never held her hand that way.

She guided him, limping, out of the shower, to the bathroom door. As they entered the corridor, she braced herself for a long and difficult walk.

And was pleasantly startled to find, right across the hall: the wide, circular entry of the sickbay. Denoted, she recalled him explaining, by the faint green moon imprinted on the door.

“Thank God,” she sighed, and looked to the ceiling. Thank you. “Come on, Doctor.”

She was irritated to find resistance when she went to pull him forward. She turned around to chide him, bracing for another negotiation.

But there was a rather strange look on the Doctor’s face as he regarded her. His eyes, she couldn’t help but notice, were rather less intense now: verging on their normal ordinary brown.

“Martha,” he said.

It startled her, the proper address. It was quiet – rather mournful. A little hitch in his voice.

“Yeah?” she said, frowning.

“You came back.”

There was, she recognised, lucidity in it. A kind of sorrowful heaviness she was all too accustomed to hearing.

She felt his palm in hers; and perhaps it was her imagination, but it wasn’t quite as hot as it’d been when she’d first taken it.

He was cooling down. Slowly, but surely. Being entirely naked certainly couldn’t hurt the process.

She allowed a mild sigh, heartrate slowing at last. “Yeah,” she said, dully. “I reckon I did.”

He looked past her to the marked door, and exhaled. Seemed to deflate. “You shouldn’t have.”

“What?”

“Should’ve left me there.”

Martha shook her head. “Well, thank the TARDIS. At least someone thought to keep me in the loop.”

“I don’t deserve you,” he muttered.

And she just hated it, that he could take all her anger like that.

“Yeah, well,” she said, a little heavily. “Tough. You’ve got me, so.”

“I’m glad,” his fingers curled tight around hers, “I’ve got you.”

There was a catch in her breathing at the words.

“I… I don’t need to freeze you anymore, do I?” Her eyes searched his nervously, taking in the signs of normality.

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

“Did the shower work?”

“No. You came back.” He gave a deep, sombre sigh. “You gave it what it wanted.”

Her eyes widened in dismayed realisation.

“The sun,” she breathed. And then: “What did I give it? What does it want?”

The Doctor just looked at her, an impossible sadness in his eyes.

Chapter Text

It was something of a rite of passage, finding one's place on the TARDIS.

Everyone had one, of course. All of the curious souls who had graced its corridors for any significant amount of time had, as a matter of course, discovered their favourite niches of the interminable time machine. Even the hardest to please were eventually taken by something. Nietzsche, for one, had been a particularly tough nut to crack; but even that dour old misery Friedrich couldn't resist a good invigorating lap round the swimming pool.

The Doctor himself always found it interesting, to see which personalities were drawn to what environment. Rose – she’d fallen hard for the full-scale theatre, its plush seats and perfect, buttery-hot popcorn. For Sarah Jane, the botanical gardens had been love at first sight. Jack had taken to the sauna, cheeky thing; Grace maintained a soft spot for the Eye of Harmony. Leela had developed something of a full-blown addiction to the rock-climbing room. K-9 of course had an enduring fascination with the garage.

He'd fielded compliments and gushing over the safari range, the conservatory, the racetrack and the ballroom and the deep-sea scuba simulator. Even the console room alone had won a few hearts.

But very few ever gave thought to the more utilitarian sectors of the vast spaceship. The galley, the bedrooms; they were all function, no frills.

One such area was the infirmary. As a space only ever visited in times of extreme duress, almost no one in their right mind stopped to appreciate the room itself, the well-polished finish of the tile that they were bleeding on. It took a particular character, and occupation, to have any strong reaction to a room as sterile and thoroughly unexciting as the sickbay.

In the entire time he had been travelling, in fact, only two human beings had ever expressed any admiration of it.

The first was one Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan: who had, in his stoic determination, taken to quite literally crawling the floors to unearth every mystery the room contained, declaiming every subsequent discovery he made ‘nonsense’ or ‘balderdash’, rumbling incredulously about devilry and witchcraft at disgruntled intervals, accusing the Doctor more than once of dabbling in the occult.

(He had discovered the poor chap napping under the MRI machine like a child about an hour later, drooling, nose-deep in wiring.)

The second was sitting less than a foot away from him. She was, all things considered, handling it with rather more tact than Harry had.

“Wow,” Martha uttered softly, for the third time.

“You can’t,” said the Doctor patiently, rather calmly, “take any of this back to Earth.”

“I know,” she insisted. “It’s just… just…”

She sighed heavily, eyes glazing a bit as she stared at his vitals.

“Martha.”

“I know, I know.”

She wore wonder beautifully, Martha. It was what had drawn him to her in particular, in a sea of cleverish residents – why she stood out as a star among the rest. That singular, raw, bursting wonder. Childlike in its earnestness, ravenous in its desire to know more. The look on her face that softly awed, even as it consternated: that puzzled and dissected and deliberated, all the while that it marvelled. That hungered for understanding and context on encountering  perplexity.

He’d seen that quality in her from the start. The very first moment he’d laid eyes on her. It was why he’d let her listen to his hearts, that day in the Royal Hope. An indulgence which could come at incredible personal cost, if he took a chance on the wrong person – which could find him somewhere out the back end of beyond, being sawed apart in a bunker in Nevada and tacked open like a butterfly.

But Martha, she had not disappointed. She’d been everything he hoped and more. Those dark eyes widening, lips just slightly parting. Her startled gaze, rising to search his, dilating ever so subtly as her stethoscope slid across his chest.

Are you having trouble locating the heart, Miss Jones?

Could’ve thrown him under the bus then and there. Had no reason whatsoever to protect him, to withhold any freak-of-nature discoveries from her supervisor. He was, to her, nothing but an ordinary patient.

And yet – she did. Protected him. Kept his confidence without a second of hesitation, at her own expense.

He'd unequivocally not been looking for any sort of companionship when he met her. He was too bruised, too raw, too dangerous – turned down by Donna Noble for all those very good reasons. He was frightening and reckless and off-the-wall, and after the incident beneath the Thames, he’d known full well he had no business bringing anyone else in the TARDIS. Pulling an unwitting victim into the raging maelstrom of his freshly-sustained grief.

But for better or worse, Martha slipped past his defences. Just sort of wormed her way into the empty place at his side. Before he’d known what hit him she was circling the TARDIS, inspecting the walls, demanding to know how it did that. How does it work? What makes it go?

Such a desperately curious mind… oh, he couldn’t help himself.

But, of course, he’d put conditions on it. One trip, then back home. He couldn’t be trusted for any more than that. Could be her cabbie across the universe, for a night or two; that was it. Just a trip to say thanks.

She was never meant to be anything more than a quick diversion. A brief intermission in the ongoing tragedy of his life.

That was what he’d intended. And that was how he’d treated her.

From the moment Martha Jones had gravitated into the Doctor’s orbit, he had overlooked her. Underestimated her. So focussed on the shadow who she wasn’t, he’d never properly seen her light.

And so what was now transpiring – it felt like a kind of grand irony, on behalf of the universe.

It almost seemed an appropriate punishment, that when he found himself overwhelmed by a cosmic entity, faced with one of the most frightening and treacherous adversaries he had encountered in all his lives… unlike every other foe he had known, it did not want riches or glory, calamity or conquest.

There was only one thing in the universe It seemed to have any interest in obtaining.

Something that remained, in spite of his best efforts, dangerously within reach.

And as she licked her bottom lip idly, face alight with awe, the Doctor was forced to ball his fists, clench his jaw – tighten every part of himself right down to his toes, to keep from reacting.

Don’t even think about it, you.

“It’s just… wow,” she breathed.

The enormous sprawling cavern was a succession of increasingly extravagant impossibilities. A mishmash of equipment and processes that were familiar and comforting to Martha – stainless steel, alcohol swabs, a centrifuge, things that gleamed and said medicine – juxtaposed sharply with pure, unadulterated science fiction. Contraptions and concoctions so unfeasibly advanced they seemed to her more like magic than any kind of practical science.

He was sitting in one of six pods in the brightly illumined room, the bed deeply inset into the organic curves of the wall. Within the nook gleamed a holographic screen, all manner of comprehensive information concerning its present Time Lord occupant scrolling slowly across the blue tint. Every data point about the Doctor’s physiology she could’ve ever wanted, laid out before her in clear text – translated from the swirling, intricate glyphs of his native language to plain Earth English, courtesy of a few reluctant keystrokes.

Left heart, one-hundred and six BPM; right heart, one-hundred one. A soft, desynchronised beep sounding in tandem with each rhythmic spike of the EKG. Blood alcohol zero-point-four-six, a consequence of his earlier intoxication. Kidney function: optimal. Antibody levels, bone density, oxygen saturation, cellular regeneration rate…

And even internal temperature. Which was, according to the readout, critically elevated. Ten degrees above operational range.

“I mean, it’s just… everything." She sat perched on a metal rolling stool before the bed, inspecting the information in eye-darting admiration. “How does it work?”

“And take all the fun out of it?” he said, with exhausted wryness. “Don’t think so.”

His hair was askew, bare feet planted wide on the floor – hands clasped, forearms braced on his knees as he stared down at the electrodes clinging to his naked chest. Or, at least, what had appeared to Martha to be electrodes, as she’d carefully applied them around the hair on his pectorals. The extensive data they provided was well beyond anything detectable by human technology – and it had her mesmerised.

Until the Doctor prompted, with a bit of a sigh, “Ready when you are.”

Which drew her back, not entirely willingly, to the task at hand. The small, highlighter green tub full of bubbles sitting in her lap, a small moon embossed on its lid.

“Er,” she said – trying, with difficulty, to shake off the wonder, the urge to hurl a thousand and a half questions at him. “Um, right. Sorry.”

“Not at all.”

She cleared her throat and wheeled herself closer. “Could you turn round?”

He did, the sterile sheet underneath him crinkling as he twisted to face away from her, folding one knee up on the bed.

A pair of earth-toned cotton trousers hung loose on his hips, unearthed from the depths of the sickbay to recover his charred-away dignity. When he had emerged from wherever it was the plain garment was stored, his upper body had been gleaming in a thick, shiny substance of some sort: evidence of a hasty attempt to tend his own wounds.

“Can’t reach my back,” he’d muttered, looking rather uncomfortable – offering the container to her a little awkwardly. “Mind giving us a hand?”

And as much as Martha was cross with him for withholding the truth, lying outright about the sun, making the whole ordeal so much more convoluted and painful than it needed to be… she couldn’t deny him her help. Not when he looked like that, damp and despondent and shirtless, eyes averted in something like shame.

She loved him, and was, as an unfortunate result, all but hardcoded to take care of him in his times of need. No matter what he’d done, no matter how it hurt her.

“Will it sting?” she asked, as she unscrewed the lid.

“Nothing I don’t deserve.”

Given his behaviour in the past hour, she was not inclined to disagree.

Her eyes focussed on his back. The pale expanse had been suitably ravaged: ragged, ugly burns melted into his flesh as a result of the overheating and subsequent burning incident in the bathroom. She sucked a soft breath through her teeth as she inspected the blistered, bleeding, rageful wounds.

But as her stool rolled closer, something strange caught her attention.

She leant in, frowning. Blinked a couple of times, to make sure she wasn't seeing things, squinting at the sloping edges of each burn.

“You’re already healing,” she stated, rather puzzled.

There were the definite beginnings of scabbing, darkening the edges of the wounds. Which to her seemed impossible, as it’d been twenty minutes at most. On any human, a sear this acute would’ve been wet and raw still, fresh as the moment it was inflicted.

The Doctor flexed his shoulders with a wince, exhaling slightly. “Yes," he confirmed wearily. "That stuff's just a shortcut. Skips all the flaky and itchy business – at a price.”

“And what is this stuff?” She peered curiously into the jar.

“Martha, you can’t…”

“Take it home,” she finished, eyes rolling. “Yeah, I know. I just want to know what it’s called.”

“Well – it doesn’t have a proper name. Just sort of… goop.”

Her brow went up. “Goop?”

“Yeah. Goop. That’s what Rose called it.”

Her lips thinned. “Right.”

“It’s a very basic recipe. Peptides and collagen and a whole bunch of nanogenes. Aloe-infused. Bit of cucumber. Cobbled it together one weekend after a meteor shower gone wrong. Works wonders, if you can get past the burning.”

She gave a nod. “Reckon it’s those… nanogenes that’ll burn, then. Whatever they are. Do I need a glove?”

“No. Only affects broken skin. Nanogenes, they’re a little bit sentient.”

“A little bit… what?”

“You need to put it on thick for it to work,” he continued. “Don’t worry about me.”

And if only she were capable. Her life would be a damn sight easier.

“All right,” she said, with finality, and plunged her fingers into the mixture. It did feel, she was reluctant to concede, rather goopy to her senses. “Deep breath, then.”

He took one, and held it.

The first glob landed in the very middle of his spine. She was careful to spread it evenly, heavily, gliding her palm over the tense planes of his back.

And it felt strange, most definitely, to touch him this way. Wrong. Almost unsettlingly intimate. It was one thing when he was naked and clutching her, utterly incoherent, one degree from death; the contact had been the very last thing on her mind in that moment. But now, in the quiet, cool and calm of the infirmary, smoothing gel onto the parts of himself he couldn’t quite get at, feeling him breathe under her touch, the faint ripple of his muscles as he shifted: this was rather different indeed.

It wasn't just her attraction that made the interaction uncomfortable, either. Because cycling endlessly in Martha's head, on a loop of self-torture, was the confrontation in her bedroom.

Knowing the true intent behind his words did little to lessen their actual sting – because he had still chosen them. Spoken them, knowing the impact. He had known how deep he could hurt her, and had done it anyway. Her heart and soul – they had been secondary. Collateral.

In that uncomfortable clarity, she almost found that she didn't even want to touch him. The entire feel of their rapport had become uneasy, more desperately fragile than ever; guilt and hurt and unspoken pain in every meeting of eyes, every quiet word. Certain dynamics had been acknowledged between them, harsh truths verbalised. Words uttered that could never be taken back, nor forgotten.

The disconnect between mind and body was irritating, and Martha found herself resentful of the butterflies in her gut, the little flips and jolts of warmth. Clearly her hormones had yet to receive the memo.

"Martha?"

She fought a blush. "Yeah."

"Is it drying yet?"

She inspected the area she'd already finished, gently fingering the hardened edge of the gel. "Er, yeah. Like... glue. Is it meant to do that?"

"Yes. In a minute, peel it off."

She did as she was told. After the ointment had dried entirely, turned marble-hard and clouded like epoxy, she used the edge of her thumbnail to pry up one edge, and gently started to peel it off him.

"You're kidding," she murmured, when she saw what was underneath.

The hardened cast shed off in strips, like an old bandage. And one minute later, his salve-treated skin was whole again: entire back healed to a faint pink, just a tinge of a flush where embers had eaten away at his flesh.

“Thank you,” he exhaled, and gave a stretch, testing the new skin. "Ow."

Without even thinking, she reached a hand out and stroked his spine. Shaking her head slowly at the soft, smooth line of it, the gentle bumps of his vertebrae under her fingertips.

“That’s bloody amazing,” she breathed.

There were patients in the Royal Hope who were permanently, unrecognisably disfigured from their encounters with fire; people who spent their lives coming in for skin grafts and transplants, who might just kill for a miracle gel like that. He was beyond lucky to have such a life-changing element at his disposal. So consumed by her amazement, she barely realised what she was doing, running her hand up and down his back.

Until the Doctor shivered. Starkly. Noticeably. She even heard his breath catch a little.

As though scalded, she snatched her hand away from his bare torso, stool creaking awkwardly with the force of the recoil. “God, I’m – sorry.”

“S’all right,” he muttered. He tentatively turned back round, avoiding her gaze.

“I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s fine, Martha. And for what it’s worth, you’ll get there in time with nanogenes, humans.” He braced his elbows against his thighs and hunched forward with a haggard exhale. “But not yet. Sorry.”

She regarded his resumed slumped posture with a soft sigh, setting the jar of salve aside.

“Not much of a drinker, are you?”

“Rrrngh,” he lamented. His fingers raked at his fringe in frustration. “Haven’t done it in centuries. Vividly remembering why.”

“Certainly tasted like it’d been sitting around for a century.”

She said it mindlessly; didn’t process the implications of the offhand remark until his body tensed, shoulders inward.

“I’m sorry.”

Martha felt herself growing unduly irritated by the phrase. “You can stop apologising, Doctor," she said tiredly. "Now, have you got anything for hangovers in this place?"

“Human-specific,” he dismissed. “Won’t work.”

“You haven’t got anything for yourself?”

“Takes quite a lot, to overwhelm my metabolism. Which is why it could've done much worse than just make you sick, if you hadn’t…” A rather loaded pause.

“Not on you,” she said. “You weren’t… yourself.”

“About... that. Martha, I…” He rubbed his forehead, hard, and lapsed into a heavy sigh. "Honestly, don't know where to start."

Martha sat back on the stool and drew a deep breath. "Well," she said, mildly. "The beginning couldn't hurt."

"I... it..." He was shaking his head.

And it was somewhat unnerving to witness the Doctor, who had such a prolific way with words, at an apparent loss for them.

"All right," she said, folding her arms. "Can you answer me this, at least?"

He looked up at her, eyes wary, ringed in exhaustion.

"When did it all start?"

The Doctor seemed a bit puzzled. The soft, rhythmic beep of his hearts-rate sped up a little.

"You were… there," he reminded her, uncomfortably. "You cheated at Scrabble."

Martha felt herself warm up. "I mean the possession, Doctor."

"Oh. Right. That." He leant back on one hand, rubbed the back of his neck with the other. "Well. Suppose it’d be more accurate, just to say it never stopped."

"How do you mean?"

"Once it took me over, on the Pentallian..." He swallowed. "There's a part of It that never left."

"And you knew this as soon as we left?"

She made no attempt to keep the accusation out of her voice.

He winced a little and dropped his eyes. "I... suspected. I should have told you."

“Well, why didn’t you tell me, Doctor?” She gave a soft, tempered sigh. “Would’ve saved me a world of worry, you know.”

Heartache. Hoping. Agony.

“I suppose… I thought… if I acknowledged it... gave voice to it...” He let out a deep, frustrated huff, seeming stymied. His gaze fell to his feet. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

It was rather rare he admitted outright to not knowing things. Martha, unsure what quite to do with it, sighed again.

"Right," she said heavily. "Here's another one for you, then: how much danger, exactly, am I in? I mean, are you going to try to kill me or something?"

The question seemed to jar him. He stiffened in startlement, eyes widening. “What?”

“Or, I suppose, the sun,” she ventured, looking at him curiously. “If it’s still in you… whatever happened to the murderous rampage? You know, all the,” she drew as much growly bass from her chest as she could muster, “burn with me, stuff?”

There was the tiniest of cracks in the Doctor’s morosity. A little flicker of amusement at his lips.

“Did you… did you have to do the voice?”

Martha gave a half-smile. “Yeah. For, you know… authenticity.”

He gave a dry, weak chuckle and scratched the crown of his head. “Course,” he chuckled, exhaling. “Well, fortunately – if you can even call it fortune, I s’pose… it doesn’t want to kill you.”

“Then what was all that about on the Pentallian?”

“When it first came into my mind, Martha…” He breathed out deeply and gave a slight shudder, just at the memory. “It was screaming. In so much pain, so angry and frightened. It was like an earthquake in my psyche, its presence. But now…” He closed his eyes briefly, brow furrowing. “Now, it’s barely there. Like a whisper. Buried so deep I’d never even know about it, if I weren’t a trained telepath. The only time it ever surfaces, ever interferes…”

He swallowed, then, quite uneasily, as his eyes opened back up and caught hers.

“What?” said Martha, properly bewildered. “For a snog?”

He looked down, flinching.

“You’re kidding,” she deadpanned.

“I’m sorry.”

She put her hands on her knees and resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Right. Okay. Do we have any ideas, as to how exactly this entity goes from indiscriminately homicidal, to fancying me?”

He looked rather awkward, but did not challenge the analysis. “Well, for one thing,” he muttered, “it wasn't homicidal. Not... at first.”

Her brow nearly touched her hairline.

“I mean,” he said, at the expression on her face, “homicide, that wasn’t the intention. As I understood it… it had no malevolence toward anyone it killed. No emotion toward any of the crew.”

“It cremated them alive,” Martha pointed out, rather blandly.

“It wanted the ship unmanned, so it could draw it into orbit and reabsorb the fuel. Getting rid of the crew was just… a means to an end. You’ve got to understand, to it, humans were…” He shrugged faintly and gave a half-hearted shake of his head. “Like… I dunno. A virus.”

She considered this. “A virus?”

“Yeah. Like, an infectious sort of…”

“I know what a virus is, Doctor.”

“Well, at a certain point, it’s all a matter of scale. Of course, it’s uncomfortable and frightening to think about, that to something, somewhere, you’re a germ. But when you look at what happened through that lens…”

Martha raised an eyebrow rather slowly. “Are you defending what it did?”

“I’m doing nothing of the sort. What it did to those people was indefensible. They’d no way of knowing they were doing any harm, and they died pointless, cruel, hideous deaths. But…” He gestured broadly. “Again, Martha… I mean, you’re almost a doctor. You prescribe an antibiotic to someone with strep throat – I’m not going to accuse you of premeditating bacterial murder.”

“So, you’re saying it did nothing wrong.”

“I’m saying the entire moral construct of right and wrong does not exist within its frame of reference. It’s so much bigger than that, Martha. Bigger than you, or me, or anything we believe or think. Billions of years old. I can’t even fathom it.”

“So why is it so bothered with me, then?” she demanded. “If I’m nothing but a speck of dust to it?”

The Doctor’s gaze left hers again, and she saw his cheeks colour faintly.

“That,” he said, rather quietly, “I do not have an answer for.”

“This is ridiculous. I thought you knew what it was feeling, what it was thinking?”

“Like I said. It’s quiet now. Which, in many ways,” he grimaced, “is much worse.”

“And you’re absolutely sure it doesn’t want to kill me. Sure it’s not just… playing possum?”

“It’s not playing possum, Martha. It doesn’t want to kill you for the same reason you don’t keep taking an antibiotic once you’ve gotten over the infection. You don’t need to worry. I know what happened on the Pentallian was terrible, but… well, treatment looks an awful lot like evil, from the wrong end of the penicillin.”

“I can’t understand that,” she said. “It was – what, fifteen minutes, between the sickbay and dumping the fuel? How does a living sun go from barely perceiving we exist, and trying to eradicate us like an infection – to deciding it’s so invested in me that it tags along in your mind? In fifteen minutes?”

“I…”

“Don’t know, I know,” she waved him off, “I’m just riffing. And – it makes no sense. I mean, the fancying. It’s a star. What does it know about fancying someone?” Her head shook in outright bemusement. “A billion years old, you said – why would it even care?”

“I keep asking myself the very same thing,” he admitted. “So many things, it could do and have. It could destroy, endlessly, right across time. Could see the whole of the universe – or end it on a whim. And I know that, so it knows it too. It knows everything I’m capable of, Martha.”

She pushed down a swallow. “That’s... terrifying.”

“Yes. It is. And yet, knowing that, the only thing it seems to hold any interest in, is…” He scrubbed a hand over his face.

She blinked. “Me.”

The Doctor breathed out, seeming exhausted. “You.”

“Well, that’s just… nonsense.”

“I wish I were kidding,” he said lowly.

“So it doesn’t want to burn me anymore, then.”

“Martha,” he said, voice lowering pointedly, “you’ve seen what it wants with you.”

She felt herself go warm and prickling all over at the deliberate drawl of the words, and again swallowed with difficulty.

“How can a sun,” she asked, head shaking in bewilderment, “want that?”

“I don’t know. My best guess? You dumped the fuel. You gave the order. You saved it, in a sense. I can only think that it – it created some sort of… attachment to you, somehow. Which is manifesting in me, now, in… unpredictable ways.”

“But why would it stay in your head, when we gave it back what it wanted?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how do we get it out of you?”

“I don’t know, Martha.”

She looked at him in exasperation, and said, rather impatient, “Is there anything you do know?”

Normally such a demand would incur his irritation, a razor-sharp retort. Now, the Doctor merely looked to the floor, looking unusually chastised, strangely docile in the face of her annoyance.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

God, he was a bit useless like this.

Martha thought it all over, palms pressed flat to her thighs.

"What do you mean, at first?"

He blinked. "Sorry?"

"You said it wasn't homicidal at first,” she pointed out, brows drawn together.

The look on his face was vaguely ill, then.

"There's something I haven't told you," he said, rather direly.

Martha just managed to suppress the harsh roll of her eyes.

"You, not telling me something?" she said dully. "Now that’s unlike you.”

He looked rightly shamed, and lowered his eyes. "Before I tell you, Martha, you have to know, I never meant for…” The Doctor drew a halting inhale. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I swear to you, I swear on my life, I could not control it. The things I did, that I’ve… been doing, I couldn’t…”

“Doctor,” she cut in, patiently. “I know.”

His eyes were intense as they held hers, shining with desperate solemnity. A stare graver than any he’d ever fixed her with. "You do?"

“First time you were possessed by the sun, you got lasers for eyes and threatened to melt me. Of course I know you can’t control it.”

He breathed deep and held her eye.

"It was me," he said softly. "I killed the Judoon."

She wasn't exactly sure what she had been expecting, but it had most definitely not been that.

For a moment, Martha didn't speak. She just sat there, frowning, trying to process.

"Okay," she said, quietly, after several seconds. "Okay, erm... why?"

"Inside of me, it's been... learning. Evolving, in a sense, I think. And when Fhoro got you with the Reaver..." He drew a breath and thinned his lips. "Well. It... shall we say, took exception to that."

"It killed the Judoon?" she puzzled. "The sun?"

"It was me, Martha. It used me to do it."

"Then why in the hell would you tell me it was Riley?" She felt a pang, remembering how coldly she'd treated the man.

"I didn't want to. It did. It's clearly learnt enough through our interaction, and about you, to know you wouldn't take kindly to it if I told you I'd murdered three people in cold blood."

"You did it... It did it... because of me?"

He sighed defeatedly. "Yes. It was plain vengeance. You appear to be... awakening rather a lot in It. But I was the hand that pulled the trigger. I can't even remember if I tried to stop it, I was so..."

"No way I'm letting you make that your fault," Martha said, harshly. "You would never do a thing like that, not unless you’d absolutely no other choice. It used you to kill. Went against everything you believe in." And as frustrating as it was, she felt her heart ache for him. Just knowing how terribly it must've been eating him inside. "It is not your fault."

He pressed both palms to his forehead and took a shudderingly deep breath. "I just... I feel so... powerless. It's like I'm out to sea, when it's in control. Forced to watch as it does what it likes with my mind, my body... like I'm drowning, in all that it feels..."

She leant forward, head shaking, and breathed, "Why would you try to send me away? At a time like this?"

"I can't let it... have what it wants. I can't let it get to you," he said roughly.

"What do you mean, get to me? It's not going to hurt me. It's killing for me, Doctor! What do you think it would do if you sent me away?" The pieces were rapidly connecting in her mind. "No wonder it was burning you! Are you insane, trying to play chess with something that's controlling your body?"

He looked down to the green solvent in her lap. "Martha, I cannot allow it to..."

The pause stretched, deeply uncomfortable.

"What?" she said, eventually, voice rather terse. "Did you really believe that if you told me what was going on with the sun, I would... sleep with you? Knowing you had no ability to consent? Do you think that little of me? You think I'm that desperate?"

"Martha, don't you understand – I've no idea if it's going to keep giving you a choice!"

The words rang around the infirmary.

"We've already had close calls," he spat. "I've no idea how much patience a living sun has! We can't just sit around hoping that it'll be consistent in its behaviour – it's a celestial body, for God's sake! I don't know how it thinks! What if it decides, all of a sudden, it doesn't care about your wellbeing anymore? What if that's just a bit of me, rubbing off on it? What if it resolves to get what it... wants, regardless of what you want? It's all I can think about, Martha. That it is going to violate you. That it's going to—"  He drew a harsh breath through his teeth, cutting himself off, eyes shutting. "The things it's making me think about..."

She felt a flush of heat down the front of her body.

"The Judoon was bad enough," he whispered. "But I would not be able to live with myself if I..."

"We can figure this out," she said firmly, reaching forward to grab his hands. "We can get this thing out of you, Doctor."

"I don't know," he breathed. "I don't know where to even start."

"That's what I'm here for." She held his eyes, fingers lacing with his. "And I'm not going anywhere, you got that?"

He gave a nod, uncharacteristically passive, and squeezed her hands.

"Martha?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry about... tonight."

She almost laughed. "Which bit, exactly?"

"Trying to get rid of you. It was all I could think to do to keep you safe, but..." He looked away and swallowed so hard she could hear it. "The way I spoke to you..."

"You were trying to save me from a worse fate." Her tone was even.

"Yeah, but that doesn't... excuse it. I was out of line."

"Yes," said Martha, stiffening a bit where she sat. "Yes, you were."

"I'm sorry."

She looked at him for a long moment. And then she said softly, “No, Doctor, I don’t think you are.”

He blinked, stared at her in surprise.

“We both know full well you’d do it again, if you thought it might still work. Say whatever you needed to say, to try and save me. To get me out the line of fire."

“Martha, you must know I didn’t mean…”

“But you did,” she broke in, letting go of his hands. “And that’s why it worked, isn’t it? Because you meant it. If the TARDIS hadn’t shown me what it did… I wouldn’t be here right now. And you’d be…”

The pause she left was pointed.

"But we're meant to be a team," she said. "So no more of that. No more self-sacrificing rubbish. We're in this together. From here on out. Got it?"

Again, he lowered his head in a nod. "Yeah."

"Now," she said, pushing back the stool. "There has got to be some way to get rid of it. I mean, nothing’s completely invulnerable. Someone, somewhere in the universe must be able to help. Someone must know something, anything, about how to deal with this. An expert. Yeah?”

“I’m a trained telepath, Martha. I’m a Time Lord. I should be able to purge it myself. But if I can’t shake it, the chances that anyone else can…”

“Well, could it hurt to try?” she asked. “I always tell my patients, never hurts to get a second opinion.”

He took a deep breath, and his gaze ventured past her then, staring into somewhere she couldn’t see.

“There’s only one place in the universe I can think of.”