Chapter 1:
Title: Imagining
Words: 533
Rating: G
Disclaimers: Not my characters, not my 'verse, no copyright infringement or personal profit is intended.
Summary: The Martha of a few days ago couldn't have imagined it. Post-ep for "Gridlock".
A/N: Text in italics is a quote from the episode.
The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine.
It sounded so beautiful when he described it, so impossibly beautiful – orange skies and silver trees and citadels reaching up, up, further up, towards the glass and the air beyond it. A flight of fancy drenched in color, too big and bright for a human imagination.
At least, the Martha of a few days ago couldn't have imagined it, she knew that much. If you told that Martha to imagine a tree with silver leaves, she could have obliged; she could have taken the image of something she'd seen (oak, elm, maple) and re-colored it, painted silver over green and left it at that. She would have tethered the new to the familiar in order to understand it. A human habit, useful when it came to things like exploration and study but not as handy when one was faced with new planets and time-traveling phone boxes.
Every morning it looked like a forest on fire.
But just a few days later, listening to the Doctor, she could see those trees – really see them, not just the cobbled-together bits of human experience that passed for them. Alive and shining, catching the light from two different directions. Thin leaves that shivered in every breeze and made the sunshine dance. And what startled her about them was that even as they shimmered and shook with life those trees looked so old. They were twisted with age and battered from storms that would have felled any tree on Earth. But still they were dancing.
Ancient but alive. Perhaps it was only him she was imagining, inventing Gallifrey as everything different and strange and new about him. Medical school taught her how things wear down with age, how friction took its toll on joints and skin lost its elasticity and muscles lost their tension, but there was the Doctor, nine hundred years old and still running like he was on batteries.
Except for times like these, when he paused and remembered. That was when he slowed down; that was when the weight of all those hundreds of years began to peek through. Much like the trees, at least as she imagined them. How withered they must look when there's no light.
We lost. Everyone lost.
Or maybe they didn't. How would she know, anyway. Maybe they were just as vibrant in the dark as in the sunlight. Maybe Gallifrey had a moon, and they were never in the dark at all. Maybe he didn't feel the eons on his shoulders; he certainly didn't feel them the way a human would. Maybe, maybe.
There were still so many questions she had to ask, still so much she wanted to know, still so many boundaries she had to judge because he certainly wasn't going to point them out to her. But they had just escaped another situation that by all accounts they shouldn't have, and she was exhausted, and he was exhausted, and there was still the slightest chance he might send her home once they got back in the TARDIS. So for now she could listen, and watch those ancient silver trees dance in the sunlight.