I don't own Doctor Who. The song belongs to The Airbourne Toxic Event.
The lyrics are done in italics.
Please review, I will love you for it.
Peace x
And it starts sometime around midnight.
Or at least that's when you lose yourself for a minute or two.
But you can't be sure that you haven't been loosing yourself the whole time. Your whole life. You aren't sure if you lost yourself to the Untempered Schism all those long, lost years ago. And you've made up the drums and the wars and the Doctor.
No. You haven't made up the Doctor. Or the drums. They are the only things that are genuine, if anything is genuine at all in this world, in any world.
You think about that as you stand under the bar lights. Sweet cigarette smoke and bitter alcohol numb your already anaesthetized senses. But not enough. Everything must be real because your body hurts. You keep spasming in and out of reality in flashes of blue light and it's a kind of bone-melting agony not when you leave, but when you come back.
And the band plays some song and it's one of those dreadful indie bands that despondent humans love that is all low, chocolaty voices and slow guitars and unnerving drum beats. You listen to the lyrics of the song and, like always, like forever, like your life, about forgetting yourself for a while.
You turn, shaking your head, sipping your third glass of syrupy wine and you can feel the grapey booze streaming through your puckered veins.
Then, oh, then. Then a small black woman walks through the door of the bar and the piano's this melancholy soundtrack to her smile and your broken lungs close up and your insane hearts swell. No, no, no, it's not her. Not her. Not with the same weary, stunning smile that haunts your shadowy dreams. The one she wore when she saw you leaving after every time you found in that year...
(Oh, how you taunted her... oh, how you wish, just once, she had begged and cried for you to stop, just stop being so ruthless, heartless, humanless, to stop hurting her, stop healing her.)
And that white dress she's wearing, you don't like it. She looks wrong. You like her in a red leather jacket or a black army uniform.
(Red - lust, violence, danger, blood. Black - power, sadness, elegance, death.
You like all of those things.)
The thought of her and black and her and red has got you nearly dropping your drink, it's got your knees knocking, it's got your mouth salivating. But white – it's far too much like a wedding dress and that makes your chest throb.
Red and black. Or nothing. You like her in nothing too.
Nothing makes you smile like a hungry wolf.
You haven't seen her for a while – not since you were both on The Valiant, which seems like a lifetime ago. You were a different person then. You only look marginally the same, too out of order to be Prime Minister Saxon.
But you know that she's watching because when she arrived you saw yourself, a dark hunched figure, in her bottomless, beautiful eyes and she wasn't scared, she needn't be, you'd only hurt her now if she said please, only if you knew she'd run from that shabby toilet cubicle in Des Moines with your blood under her fingernails. You thought after all those escapades, you thought after everything you wouldn't feel this way; you thought you'd be over her, over yourself.
And yet, your hearts still beat faster than normal and your blood jumps and charges because she's laughing, she's turning in another man's arms, leaning up, kissing him with lips that belong to you.
Your next realisation makes you want to laugh, laugh until it hurts, until it makes you eyes run with tears, until it kills you. You really should have guessed: she's holding her tonic like a crux, a glass of ruby Merlot, just like you, (you two are so alike it makes you want to throw up) and it's slipping and sliding in her sweaty palm. You make her sweat.
She catches your eye again and your insides burn and you see the trickles of moisture down the side of her temple: oh hell, you make her sweat. Her gaze makes alcohol seem like orange squash and you may make her sweat but she makes you totter of the edge of coherence.
And now the room is suddenly spinning around your head and you feel sick and dizzy as she unwinds from this man of hers, she walks up, leans on the bar next to you, not looking your way. The heat of her, you're sure it must be blistering your skin, what you show of it, because your hood is up and your sleeves are rolled down, despite the nasty humidity of the bar, then, a low, distant voice asks how you are. You have to let your eyes rolls to stare at her in disbelief. There is the smallest blush is on her cheeks so you obviously didn't imagine she said it. You don't answer her, to your joint relief. What do you both expect you to say?
You inhale for something to distract yourself (alpha and omega, is she this close to you?) so you can smell her perfume, it's spicy and rich and earthy (the taste of it fills your mouth, saturates your tongue, and you almost drool, you almost retch). You can see her lying naked in your arms, very abruptly, in your minds eye, you envision it and so there's a change in your emotions because you've gone from feeling nothing to feeling humiliated.
And all of these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind. You have lost count of the amount of times you came and she didn't. She will always be stronger than you in that sense. That is what makes you hate her. That fact that the few times she did come, you practically had to force her.
Your next sip of Merlot tastes like the blood she scratched from you in her rage at the fact that you made her toes curl in the dust and the sand and the hot and the cold and the fact that you drew your own name from her lips in a trembling gasp.
There was one time when the curl of your bodies was so vicious that her back arched up and your hips met and you are sure you passed out for a few seconds and she almost screamed.
Almost but not quite.
You are running out of money and drink.
You'll always remember the first time: like losing your virginity but so much more exhilarating, and oh, by the zesty zither of Zeus, it was like two perfect circles entwined. In a site staff closet in the Euro-Star station, Calais-end (just after she left England, and she wasn't half staggered to see you, even more so when you didn't kill her).
Later in the year, on the soggy bank of Lake Malawi (you dragged her there by the roots of her hair, you ripped her clothes off under the inky sky, it felt like you were the only two on Earth).
And up against the wall of a bomb-torn building in Afghanistan (you found her sleeping so you kicked her awake, a hard shoe in the stomach, you didn't haul yourself here to watch her have a nap).
Then in a four-star hotel on a cold marble floor in St. Petersburg (she was hoping that wasn't a security camera in that corner, you were hoping they'd give you the tape).
In all those recollections there is that perfume, it hung on your clothes and in your hair when you left her to go back to The Valiant and London and Lucy Saxon, and it's not perfume at all, it's just her, it's just human and you went around smelling like it.
That makes you feel hopeless, and homeless and exceptionally unclean so you knock back the rest of your drink and hit the bar top with your empty glass and you still taste sticky blood in your mouth.
You chance a glance at her and the lines of her face, her hair, her eyes, and she looks older and you hope you did that to her and not the Doctor because that's not what the Doctor is supposed to do.
You could forgive yourself but not him. Could you even forgive yourself?
You are so confused and intoxicated and lost in the haze of the wine.
You don't like the word forgive.
You do mean to speak in some way, to say something about the way it ended, that's a thought. Apologize, maybe. Absolve, perhaps. Then you remember who you are and what you've done and you don't say I'm sorry and you don't say I forgive you and you don't even say fuck off like you want to. She's moved away before you can offer a reprieve from the silence between you.
Then you see it. On her fourth finger. On her left hand. A band and a diamond. A ring. No. No, shit, it can't be...they've only been together for a year or so.
A blink of an eye. You think she might be happy with him and it makes your throat close.
The white dress is not too much like a wedding dress...
...It is a wedding dress.
And your enmity is the veil that covers her lovely face.
Then she leaves and you feel icy and in pain again, the blisters gone, the heat cooled, the memories dashed and you just have to look to see who got the rock on her finger, it'll be someone you don't know, some obscure nobody because you know human girls can only cast their hearts out to so many extraordinary, terrifying men before they need a bit of normal (usual, ordinary, customary) love.
Or not - because it's that Doctor that helped her all that time ago and you killed him and that is so sickening, so human, you want the world to split in two right now and destroy everything living thing that resides of this stinking hellhole of a planet.
She makes sure you saw her, she looks right at you and bolts: walking hurriedly to the door, (like she is finally fooling herself into think she can run from you) with her boyfriend- fiancé, you remind yourself- in tow, making a right scene, which is very unlike her. You like her because she is hushed and potent but girls and men are grabbing at them, hands raking skin, protesting, don't leave!
You didn't notice she was here with friends and boyfriend fiancé. She left them to walk over to you and be ignored by you. You think you may love her, may send her flowers, you may leave her alone for the rest of her life, just for that. She cares too much, the silly, silly girl.
You start tapping out an age-old rhythm on the bar as she walks out the door and a few people glance at your fingers, almost like they recognise it, like Archangel may have existed, and you think it might be fury mixed with a slice of habit because you recognise your blood boiling andyou can feel your stomach in ropes as you whack out the drum beat onto the wood.
And your 'friends' (nosy bartenders that have said the odd word to you since you pulled up this stool two hours ago and the drunkards that have crowded near you) say - when you go pale and you crackle blue for a second and you hiss in agony - "What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost"
Little do they know that you are the ghost. Don't you all remember me? Of course not, you have booze, you don't need Harold Saxon.
So you get up and you kick the stool over.
You spit onto the floor and a few people cry in indignation. You just need to get the taste out your mouth. You don't even know what the taste is. But it needed to go, you need to go, and you walk.You're blindand pissed off under the streetlights and out of the corner of your eye and in the orange glare you see dark skin and white dress look around to confirm that you have stormed out after her.
Now you know where she is going. You follow. You always follow. It's the only thing you can do.
And you're too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you as you yank down your hood to let some bitter Christmas air onto your burning skin and peroxide blond hair flops in your face.
The wind whips up the smell of humans and your stomach yowls eagerly for a split-second but it still makes you feel nauseous, makes you think of sneaking to the laundry room on The Valiant to wash your clothes because they reeked of her...
You can hear the whispers as though they were shouts "Doesn't he look like...?" "Isn't that...?" "You don't think...?"
You let out a small, enraged shriek and launch another kick at the outside wall of the pub and you feel your toe breaking, so you hop up and down for a moment and you don't care what you look like. The people back away and your head is reeling: the more you jump around the more you feel like you might faint from drunkenness and pain, the world is falling around you, but you force yourself to stay conscious because if you don't, you may never wake up again.
You see hideous white dress and its fiancé turn a corner.
You just have to see her.
It feels like blood is pouring out your ears when really it only roars in them and it runs over and over in your head, louder than the drums: you just have to see her.
They are walking down her street, back to where she lived, the placed you blew up (has she gone back to everything you took from her?), and his jacket is wrapped around her thin frame and you think if you were Thomas Milligan would you take off your hoody, offer it to her?
No. You'd let her freeze. The stupid bitch should have a coat. She lives in England for Rassilon's sake.
You just have to see her
Thomas Milligan is going up the front steps, he is holding his hand out for the house key, and then she'll be in his arms, in their bed, in their life.
You never had sex with her on a bed. Subconsciously, one or both of you figured that would give it some sentimental value and neither you nor she wanted that.
But she told you that, because of you, she'll always hate sand and marble floors and strange scenarios (such as closets and other playful things).
So Thomas Milligan and his fiancée will never make love on a beach ablaze with sunset or in some honeymoon palace in Barbados with shining granite flooring or on an operating table in her hospital.
And he will never know why. That doesn't make you feel any better and you wish it did.
But now he is going to unlock the door and she about to go forever.
You just have to see her
You run. You fucking run to her.
You just have to see her.
He is inside the house. You hear her say she thinks she'll left some trivial human delight in her car.
She walks to the car and hovers there and you know there is nothing in her new, black, sleek Citroën DS3 she needs. She is fiddling with her keys and the door, shifting from foot to foot.
Waiting.
You stop running. She stops shuffling. "Martha..."
You just have to see her
She turns. She steps closer to you and the heat is slightly more pleasant than before – not blistering, more soothing.
"Tell me not to marry him" You do not.
"Tell me you love me" You don't do that either. You never will. (Tell her, you mean, you'll never tell her.)
A sad smile appears on her face. A knowing smile. She knows without you saying and you find that relieving and revealing at the same time.
She knows you. Knows, without words, how you are feeling, what you want to say. With her, you'll never been a man of many words and with you, she will always be a girl who won't needed many.
In a monstrous cliché you both lean in at the same time. But you don't kiss. You don't classify it as a kiss and you hope she doesn't either.
It's just a smash-up of mouths and tongues and teeth and hands and fingers and nails.
The taste of honey over obsidian rock and the taste of picking apples in late autumn mix in your mouth and it's you and her, it's the taste of your saliva on her skin, and you want to drown in it forever.
Then she disappears, evaporates, vanishes from your hold. Her front door closes. It's like she was never next to you, close to you, on you, in you. The flavour of rich red wine and aftershave (that'll be Thomas Milligan's) lingers behind your teeth.
The image of the small, sad smile fades before your blinking eyes.
You know that loving Martha Jones is like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands.
And you know (on your life, you've always known) that she'll break you in two.