Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Setting/Spoilers: For the entirety of DW Series 3 only.
Beta: A huge thank you to topaz_eyes over on LJ, who kicked this fic into shape and made it readable again with her thorough (and thoroughly amazing) beta skills.
Notes: This is essentially my love letter to Martha, four years or so late. (Appropriate enough for a latecomer to fandom.) It makes perfect sense to me that she would be scattered across time and space in various forms and likenesses, as S3 actually advocates, so the list of things I reference that deserve specific credit goes like this: "Ode to a Nightingale," by John Keats. The Greek tragedy of Philomel and Procne, by Ovid et al. "Martha, My Dear," by the Beatles. Sonnet 130, by Shakespeare.
I. The Storyteller
One night among many, Martha spoke:
Once upon a time, the Princess of Athens journeyed to visit her sister, the Queen of Thrace. The two rejoiced to see each other. But one night during her stay, her sister's husband pursued her into a secluded wood, attacked her, and cut out her tongue to silence any accusations she might level against him. But though tongueless, the princess told her brother-in-law: The air of Heaven will hear, and any god, if there is any god in Heaven, will hear me. She wove her story by other means, and her sister wept with anger when she learned what had happened, though she was powerless to do anything. So the princess fled on foot, and, running fast as the King of Thrace pursued her, her feet took to the air, and her body grew small, and her arms grew broad and slender with light coloured feathers. So she sang for the rest of her days in a language foreign to her.
"That's enough of stories; I'll tell you something real," Martha said, and began in earnest.
While they were stuck in 1969, Martha often lamented to the Doctor that they hadn't been stuck in even 1968, because as it was, she'd already missed the last live Beatles concert.
(That wasn't the real issue at hand, of course, but Martha wasn't about to articulate it.)
"How about I take you to the moon landing?" the Doctor said, barely looking up from his tinkering on his timey wimey whatsits.
"We've been twice already," Martha said, annoyed with herself when it came off more sullen than she'd have liked. She looked away.
Moments like this were dangerous. She couldn't help thinking that she'd already paid her dues. She'd already been stuck in the past. She'd already been demeaned and abused because of the colour of her skin. She'd already played caretaker to an oblivious Doctor. Their life here was still and quiet and monotonous, with plenty of time for cold fear to start to creep in, until time itself felt like it had stretched, yielded, folded, relenting to her baser emotions.
Maybe her melancholy was deeper tonight, or maybe he'd just grown more perceptive of her for a minute; either way, the next thing Martha knew, the Doctor had taken her hand, and he was telling her to change.
"Something twirly," he said, miming it with the fingers of his other hand. "Maybe that dress you got last week, the blue one. Well go on, we don't have all night!"
Surprised, if sceptical, Martha furrowed her eyebrows at him, but went to change. It sounded promising.
He took her to the Tottenham Royal, which was bursting with people and laughter and music. Martha had to prove her age to a very unamused bouncer – thank God for psychic paper – and the Doctor teasingly told her to take it as a compliment.
She hung back and watched for a few dances to try to get the hang of a few. But at the start of the third set, looking like an absolute grinning loon, the Doctor grabbed her hands and pulled her onto the floor, her pleated skirt flaring pleasantly around her thighs as he twirled her once. When she heard what the song was, she couldn't help but laugh too, throwing her head back with the sheer absurdity of it.
"Martha, my dear, you have always been my inspiraaaatioon," he warbled at her, his eyes lit up. "Please… Remember me, Martha my looove…"
She swatted his shoulder, laughing. "That's not the line, you nutter."
He shrugged, still grinning. "Does it matter?"
There was a world the Doctor had taken her to right after she'd boarded the TARDIS for the first time as an actual resident. She was still wearing her plum-coloured dreamy dress and her pretty pumps, he was still wearing his tuxedo, and she couldn't help but think that they did make a very handsome couple. It was night on Procne when they peeked outside the doors, the last strains of another party dying down in the arboretum they'd landed in. The night was pleasant, all cool breezes and floral scents, the sounds of wildlife all around, and she took the arm he offered her. Despite her exhaustion, Martha felt elated, almost as though she were floating above her body, disassociated from the physicality of movement.
There was a zoological garden not far from here, the Doctor had said, and would she like to go?
She'd been sceptical of how much they would be able to see, but she'd agreed.
She'd not been disappointed. There were flowers and other flora of all colours and sizes, kinds she'd never seen. Birds and butterflies were flying around the aviary's dimmed space. She wandered around wide-eyed and smiling, watching as a bird alighted on a nearby branch and began to trill and whistle and finally, incongruously, croak. Martha drew closer to examine it more closely, unconsciously furrowing her brow. The bird cocked its head.
"Nightingales," said the Doctor softly in her ear where she'd paused. "Funny things, they are. More often taken as a symbol of the poet than the lover. Superhuman in their mastery of poetry, yet not human at all. The whole thing is silly; birds don't speak, they sing. Well, there are some birds that do. Well, it's a sort of squawky language. Well… Anyway. What a divide. What a dichotomy. Poets are a funny lot."
Martha didn't give him the satisfaction of letting him see her jump or shiver. "It's nearly dawn," she said, nodding to the glow on the horizon outside the aviary.
"So it is," he'd replied absently, and picked a thornless rose from a bush nearby and tucked it behind her ear. He'd looked at her for the first time like he could truly see her.
This is the moment, she'd thought, or near enough. His gaze was piercing, and the weight fell unexpectedly heavily on her shoulders. It was not an appraisal, nor was it a judgment, but there was an understanding in his eyes that both pleased and terrified her. It was as if he were seeing her in her entirety, from her beginning to her end, outside the constraints of time, and in ways Martha could not yet possibly see for herself.
That night she drifted into sleep, dreaming of fables constructed by night and by mind that she didn't remember in the morning.
II. The Story
"You've had companions that could absorb the time vortex!" the Master exclaimed, half incredulous, half derisive. "This one's useless."
The Doctor thought of Rose and the unnatural fire swirling in her eyes as she wielded an agency not her own, and looked now at Martha, her own dark eyes glinting with everything they hid so safely away, tucked in folds around her heart and mind, and a hint of a triumphant smile preempting her lips upward.
All eyes were on her now as she took centre stage, commanding it effortlessly and deliberately. He'd not seen this woman in over a year. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, he wanted to say; or This is the moment. This is one of a thousand moments.
(Later, Martha told him a story aboard the TARDIS, just before she left. "He never looked at her twice," she said, commanding her own destiny with a strength he'd loved in her from the beginning. He didn't even try to stop her.
"I've spent all these years training to be a doctor," she said. "Now I've got people to look after."
His eyes were on her as she left with a smile, his hearts clenching with a mixture of pride and melancholy. He'd never not seen her.)
It took a few days for the magnitude of what had happened with Shakespeare to sink in.
"Oh my God," she said abruptly at breakfast, dropping her spoon. "I'm Shakespeare's Dark Lady. Oh my God."
The Doctor was smiling at her amusedly. "I had wondered if you were going to downplay it the way you did initially."
"My roommate at uni wrote a paper on the Dark Lady," Martha said, staring at her coffee. "People study me. I am immortalised in a series of the world's most enduring poems. Oh my God."
"Brilliant, isn't it?"
Martha looked up at his gleeful tone. The Doctor was grinning that half-maniacal smile she never knew entirely what to make of.
"Martha Jones, abstracted by history into myth, preserved before your time and long past it. How long you've existed," he said, resting his chin in his hand, his elbow on the table. "And how long you will."
Something about his words deeply unsettled her. Surely this was an honour, one of the most amazing things about traveling through time? Coming across yourself in places you'd never expected, like meeting a future friend in the park on your lunch break, only in paradox? This was immortality of a sort she'd never thought to look for, and hardly knew even now how to question.
"There's a limit to my existence, same as everyone," Martha retorted, but she stole a copy of the sonnets from the TARDIS library (though not the first edition copy) that never did make its way back.
In the first few days of the Master's rule – the first few days living in this crowded house with one shower a week (if you were lucky) but before they'd started rationing water and food – Martha Jones had come to call.
It was a story they liked to tell a lot at Halfway House. Jorie, a sullen-faced fifteen-year-old girl, had christened it about a month and a half into their communal life. They had to have something to call this place, they felt; and though no one had ever written it down, it was capitalised, made proper, in their minds at least. No one liked the name, but no one really protested it either, so it stuck.
In any case, they'd been among the first people Martha Jones had ever visited, before they realised who she was or who she would become; and to make up for it they latched onto every bit of news of her and incorporated it into their own growing saga.
Like the rest of them, she'd arrived with the clothes on her back, a mauve faux leather jacket and worn jeans, and nothing else. Like the rest of them, she'd been looking for a place to hide for the night. Unlike them, she'd left in the morning. But first she'd told them all about some bloke called the Doctor, told them to think his name in a year's time: they'd know when. There'd been panic in the house at the time, so close to the initial massacre, and few people had actually listened, and no one had taken her seriously. Few of them told the story that way today, of course, but in the end it didn't matter, because they were telling it to and among people who had been there too.
Only a few people minded that last bit; Jorie wasn't among them. It bothered her when Julie tittered that The woman said she'd met Shakespeare too, or when Michael replied, Well, perhaps after all the poor girl's unstable; and who knows at this point what drove her there.
"Maybe it keeps her sane, telling stories," Jorie said one night, restless and needing to possess or belong to some truth other than what was around her.
"Don't we all?" said Julie in turn, uncharacteristically sober.
They forced Martha Jones into the basement when John heard the first whirr and whine of approaching Toclafane. They hastily covered the door with a bookshelf. Outside, the corn rustled in the eerie Kansas night. They were so far away from anything out here that Toclafane sightings were usually few and far between, and they made Sara's skin crawl as it was. She'd heard what it was like on the other side of the world.
Sara stilled her trembling and didn't think about the look of dread and resolve that had come over Martha's face as she, John, and Bethany had wrestled her into hiding whether she'd wanted it or not. There were times you hid. This was one of them.
"Do you think it's true, the stories about her and Japan?" she asked Beth, whispering in these final moments, because this was suddenly something to fear.
Her sister-in-law shrugged, her tense face unwilling to give. "Maybe. We're hiding her now," she pointed out.
Martha stayed quiet behind the door; the women didn't know if she could hear them. Perhaps this was one story she never told at all. Perhaps theirs would be, as well.
Somewhere in upstate New York (just the one "New" tacked onto it,) she met a young man who lived on a family farm long past a state of disrepair. His parents had left a few months earlier and had never come back. He never asked Martha if she'd heard anything about them: the world was overflowing with graves. After all, six hundred million sounded like a lot until you realised that no, it really wasn't. After walking from ruined city to ruined city with vast swaths of wasteland in between, Martha found it wasn't all that unthinkable anymore. People had long since accepted that if their family weren't with them, it was unlikely they were alive anywhere else.
"I've always wanted to see London," he told her earnestly, his vowels and consonants meshing as strangely in that sentence as they had in his asking her if she'd like a glass of woudduh.
(Woh-tuh, she enunciated slowly in her own mind; it wasn't so far off.)
Martha didn't laugh, but she felt something tight loosen in her chest all the same; and so she told him about all her favourite hideaways in London, and all her favourite holiday spots from childhood. When she reconstructed her memory, it was Tish and Leo and her mum and dad her mind recreated: her dad telling a story made up on the spot, featuring monsters and gremlins and witches and all sorts of fantastically wicked characters. She'd listened then like it had been meant for her alone.
She could see herself in her mind's eye, nine-year-old Martha leaning against a tree in a park and laughing at her dad's silly faces and her mum's own laughter that even then had been too rare. There'd been a bird lurking just out of sight in the branches above them, darting from branch to branch as if it were playing hide and seek with Martha's eyes and ears. It had seemed to her that it was trying to join in the fun, twittering merrily along with them. But Leo had started throwing sticks up at the leaves where he saw movement. He couldn't have done much damage – a six-year-old's throw was only so good – but Martha pulled him down next to her anyway, admonishing him gently.
"We don't throw things at animals," she said, sounding very grown up indeed to her own ears.
"Why not?" Leo nearly pouted. "It was just a game."
"Play it without throwing things," Martha said, "like this." She made a few attempts to imitate the noises the bird was making, clumsily formed by her lips and tongue, and the birdsong immediately changed: a challenge. Leo tried, and then Tish tore herself away from their father's voice to try, leaving their parents watching their childish antics in amusement.
"Martha wins," Tish said later, collapsing in defeat next to Leo, who'd given up some time before. "I give up."
Martha smiled serenely, and made a few noises at her in her triumph.
III. The Prophet
In Russia, outside what remained of Vladivostok, Martha ducked into a house in one of the lesser-hit neighborhoods. Inside the living room, the view from the windows might have been beautiful once, overlooking the Golden Horn Bay. She had three hours before she met her contact nearby and left for Japan, and she was hungry.
She stepped over three decomposing bodies on her way to the kitchen. She was so hungry, she didn't think anything would make her stomach turn ever again. But there, in the corner of the living room, was a prayer corner, complete with nearly waxless candles and a box of matches sitting on the table next to three propped up icons.
She wasn't familiar enough with the Cyrillic alphabet yet, she'd had more luck in Greece with the slightly familiar symbols from her science and medical textbooks: mu rho theta upsilon, Maria Theotokos (pray for us.) She recognised the two icons on the right and left from their scrolls, they never changed – Saints Anthony and Jude. But in the center, new and rough on an unadorned wooden grain, her own wide eyes stared back at her above her own high cheekbones, dark against white against dark. No gold leaf light for her. In 2D, it was disconcerting. Her fingers traced the letters she couldn't read, and she wondered what title they'd given her.
(The Dark Lady, some called her in another of her likenesses; and even now, it threw Martha a bit to think about it. Perhaps it shouldn't be so odd to meet herself here in this new likeness, or to know herself by another new name, but it would never stop being odd to see herself so transmuted. A park bench on her lunch break, she'd thought a lifetime ago, eating cereal at breakfast in the TARDIS with the Doctor. A park bench on her lunch break, meeting an old friend calm as you like. Martha was lightheaded just thinking about it.)
In the kitchen, she found and ate a tin of canned corn with her fingers, and that was a luxury so great that she closed her eyes at the sensation of the kernels bursting on her tongue. She forgot her own representative eyes watching her for a moment, forgot the eyeless sockets of the family in the living room. She thought of nightingales and wordless languages, of language carving out reality word by word, meaning upon meaning.
The room was silent, and she was blessed. She slept for two and a half hours, and rose not quite refreshed.
Word of her had somehow made it across the Pacific ahead of her. When Martha arrived in Chile and had been taken to the safe house for a few hours of respite, a little girl immediately knelt in front of her and crossed herself.
"Bless me, lady," she said in English so thick that it took a moment for Martha's exhausted and stuttering brain to realise what was happening.
She immediately dropped to her knees in front of the dark haired girl, raising her chin and touching her cheek, bringing the girl's hands up to touch her own cheeks. "No, you mustn't think like that," she said. "I'm no more special than you. I'm just like you, d'you see? Just ordinary Martha. What about you?" Martha asked, wracking her mind for what little Spanish she knew. "¿Como se llama?"
The girl smiled shyly, ducking her head. "Isabel," she answered.
Isabel sat on her lap for the rest of the night, while she spun stories with her hands out of the air from her lungs. Isabel fell asleep halfway through, her head resting against Martha's heartbeat and body relaxed safely within Martha's loose embrace; and Martha slept on her pallet that night with the girl's innocent weight next to her. No parents or guardian ever came to retrieve her, and though Martha couldn't bring herself to be surprised, she held onto Isabel's pudgy hand in the dark.
One day, Francine came in to talk to the Doctor. Between her and Tish's surreptitious searches over the last several months, they'd discovered where all the cameras and bugs were in the room. Now she went about disabling the one or two closest to the Doctor, keeping silent while she did so.
"This is a risk," he pointed out unnecessarily when she finished, holding her appraising gaze in a warning.
She hummphed, dismissing it. "This is always a risk," she returned, keeping her voice low. "What do you know about my daughter?"
The Doctor shrugged. "What do you want to know?"
"Where is she?" Francine asked. "Is she safe? You must know more than we do."
"Francine, I think I may know less than you," the Doctor said, a bit of frustration creeping through his tone. "The Master isn't actually able to track her movements day to day. I know what you know, and I know what he doesn't know. That's all."
Francine turned away hastily as a tear spilled from her eye too fast for her to conceal. "Japan…" she began.
"She got out," the Doctor reminded her.
"It's not about that," Francine said, not looking at him, because of course it was, and of course it wasn't. An entire country, an entire people burned out of existence, and her daughter alone emerged out of it all. A non-resurrection for a non-death, destruction behind her and prophecy before her: all of it was almost too horrifying for words.
"She is what you made her," Francine said softly.
But the Doctor shook his head. "No," he said sharply. "Martha is Martha. She's doing what she is because I asked her. Don't cheat and undercut her by saying otherwise."
"Martha is Martha," Francine repeated in an almost dreamlike way, as if it were the secret to something she wasn't aware had secrets at all.
IV. The Protagonist
"Faith and hope, is that it?" the Master disparaged.
"No," she'd replied. There was Archangel. There was the Doctor.
But she thought about it just a few hours later, lying on her childhood bed in her mother's home, she smiled, because it was true. She'd saved the world by faith and hope. That was a fire nothing could put out, and she'd kindled it with words.
This all still felt like a dream, like she would wake and find herself running across the world with half an energy bar, a third of a canteen full of water, and a million words to her name. She thought about hands raining across her face and back in benediction, in desperation. You must have something we do not, they'd all said silently, every last one. So she'd let them touch her, and she'd slept where she could, telling her stories before, during, and after, and keeping all of theirs when they never asked her to do it.
She could write them all, all these stories that had no basis in this life. I can't just leave them, she'd said, and meant humanity. I spent all these years training to be a doctor; now I've got people to look after. It was easy enough to accept a mantle she'd never taken off, easy enough to wear it like a standard. No more blue boxes for her, no more madmen: this was her, getting out.
This is the moment, Martha thought to herself, trying out the thought for size, her smile suddenly wanting desperately to give way to tears. She was too exhausted for either, and it only made her more tired thinking about it. So she held onto the thought, and there was peace in it. No more proselytising: time to trade reality for reality and fairytale for fairytale. Med school tomorrow. Early day, getting up before dawn. Well, she was used to that.
She closed her eyes then, rolled onto her side, and fell asleep to the sound of a bird calling for her outside her window, words and song and languages and stories all jumbled in her mind in a psychedelic mesh of real and unreal as she teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. Perhaps she dreamed; perhaps she answered back. She didn't remember when she woke.
("Dr. Jones," one of the patients she'd been given charge of called her the next day.
But she shook her head. This is a title you earn, she thought. That's enough of stories: I'll tell you something real.
"It's Martha. Just Martha," she said, and smiled.)