AN/ No, I'm not dead! I have been inspired to write again! The BBC owns everything Doctor Who. This fic is a part of my TARDIS 100 series. Set during Human Nature in season 3. Thank you for reading and please let me know if you like it.
I woke up to a familiar presence approaching me. It was Martha Jones, coming back for a visit, I assumed. Before the Doctor had left, he put me on emergency power. It left me with a constant drowsy feeling. I had spent a great deal of my time trying to access the local radio stations, but there wasn't much. Every few days, Martha would ride her bicycle down to the shed where I was hidden away. She would never stay for very long, just long enough to keep herself in touch with what she tended to think of as reality. She relished the modern conveniences I had. She had already sworn to herself that she would never complain about plumbing, electricity, or other so-called necessities. The rest of her time with me was spent dreaming and remembering.
Martha unlocked my creaky door and stepped through into my cool, dimly lit interior. She closed the door and leaned against it, smiling at my central column and controls. "Hello."
Had I been more awake and had her mind been just that little bit more psychically tuned, she would have been able to hear my warm reply. As it was, she heard nothing. She mentally scolded herself and rolled her eyes. "Talking to a machine."
I sighed, somewhat used to reactions such as this. She never believed that I was alive.
Martha took off her hat and gloves and walked up the ramp. Bored and glad of her distraction, I flitted through her mind. She was remembering the Family of Blood's attack on herself and the Doctor and how this whole adventure started. I could see the images flashing through the forefront of her brain.
***
A poisonous green burst of light as an energy weapon is fired through my doors. It hit me at the base of the Time Rotor in a sting of pain and sparks. The Doctor shouted at Martha to get down, pushing her out of the way of the blast. My doors slammed shut, protecting them from further energy fire. My engines gave a growl. The Doctor was in a panic, Martha afraid for her life.
***
Martha slowly walked around my controls, her footsteps echoing slightly. She gazed at my controls, most of which she had no idea how to operate. More memories went through her mind.
***
The Doctor pivoted the computer screen towards him. I was sending the information from my scanners directly there, and he wasn't happy with what he saw. I wasn't either, to be frank. I don't like being hunted down like this any more than the Doctor did.
"Ah!" he growled. "They're following us. They can follow us wherever we go. Right across the universe. They're never going to stop." The Doctor ran a hand though his hair, his thoughts racing like an electric train. He soon came to the only conclusion he could think of - the only one that would work, that would be kind.
"What do you think?" he asked me mentally. Martha wasn't aware of this, but my memories were melting with hers.
"I support you."
He turned to Martha. Her role in this would be huge. "Martha, you trust me, don't you?"
"Of course I do," she answered instantly.
"'Cause it all depends on you."
***
Martha's gaze fell onto the screen.
***
The Doctor held up a fob watch with Gallifrenian symbols etched on it. "Martha, this watch is me."
She took it from him. "Right, okay, gotcha."
The Doctor sprinted around my controls and Martha followed, any calm she had slipping slightly into confusion as it clicked in her brain that what the Doctor had said once again didn't make any sense whatsoever. "No! Hold on! Completely lost." Her eyes begged him to explain.
The Doctor was multi-tasking, flicking switches, piloting me through the Vortex. "Those creatures are hunters," he explained in the clipped tone he always used for such emergencies. "They can sniff out anyone, and me being a Time Lord, well, I'm unique. They can track me down across the whole of time and space." He skipped around to another part of the controls.
"Huh. And the good news is?" Martha asked.
"They can smell me, they haven't seen me…" he started to power up the Chameleon Arch, double-checking its settings. "…and their life supplies are running out, so we hide. Wait for them to die."
"But they can track us down."
The Doctor stepped away from my controls and faced her, his deep, brown eyes meeting hers. I could sense his fear and excitement as he caught his breath. "That's why I've got to do it. I've got to stop being a Time Lord. I'm gonna become human."
***
Martha's eyes and thoughts turned upwards to where the chameleon device the Doctor had used to transform himself still hung from my ceiling. She still almost couldn't believe what it had done to him.
***
The Doctor pressed a button and the headpiece lowered from its storage compartment in the ceiling of my control room. They watched it come down, the Doctor still full of the nervous excitement, and Martha with more than a little worry about the alien technology.
"Never thought I'd use this," the Doctor admitted. "All the times I've wondered." I knew that he'd often wondered what it would be like to be human. He was very good at acting it, and the fact that Time Lords and humans look the same on the outside was a great help, but there was always a huge gap between acting the part, and actually becoming the role.
"What does it do?" Martha sounded like she was trying not to be scared.
"Chameleon Arch. Rewrites my biology." He looked over his shoulder at her. "It literally changes every single cell in my body. I've set it to human." He took the watch from her and set it into the headpiece. "Now, the TARDIS will take care of everything. Invent a life story for me, find a setting and integrate."
I had already started doing that. Inspired by our relatively recant reunion with Sarah Jane Smith and K9, I decided he was going to be a teacher named John Smith. I had always genuinely believed that if the Doctor had been born a human on Earth, he would have become a teacher of one kind or another. In many ways, he was one already. The location would be England, of course… but not London. The country side - some small, quiet town. As for the year, I plucked one at random. 1913. To suit that time in history, I knew that Martha would probably have to be John Smith's housekeeper, but at least that would keep her close to him. It was also a chance for me to gain some subtle payback on Martha for always thinking I was simply a machine.
The Doctor looked at Martha again. "It can't do the same for you. You'll just have to improvise."
Well, she's quite clever. She'll manage.
"I should have just enough residual awareness to let you in," he assured her.
"But hold on," Martha said. "If you're going to rewrite every cell, isn't that going to hurt?"
"Oh yeah," The Doctor confirmed. He didn't sound worried about the pain. It was just a simple fact, like saying that childbirth was painful. "It'll hurt."
***
Martha continued to gaze upwards as her memories fast-forwarded through her trip to my wardrobe to get clothing that would suit the time and place I'd picked out. The Doctor had taken this time to record his message for her, explaining the twenty-three rules he wanted her to remember during our three month stay in 1913. Martha has having other, more dramatically vivid memories. Before she'd gotten changed into her new clothes, the Doctor activated the Chameleon Arch.
***
My Doctor was screaming in pain. The Chameleon Arch was clamped around his head, buzzing as it changed him.
***
I knew Martha hated going over these thoughts, but she couldn't help it once they began.
***
Martha's gaze was one of horror as she watched the Doctor convulse, still screaming. One of his hearts was gone now, and the acids in his blood that enabled him to regenerate were evaporating. His Time Lord brain that had placed him at the bottom of his class back in the Academy, but at the top of the pile on Earth was already mostly drained, mostly human… and still he screamed. My heart twisted, hating those cries of pain even more than Martha. She put her hands to her moth, unable to look away.
***
Martha tore her thoughts away from those disturbing memories, going back to thinking about why she had returned to me on this day in the first place. Something had landed in a field last night, she was sure of it. Never mind what her friend Jenny said. Martha didn't know if it was the Family or not, and if it wasn't them, then what should she do?
She was feeling a little lost without the Doctor. Having a man walking around with his voice and face and dreams of being a Time Lord that he didn't believe just weren't enough. There was something missing behind his eyes, and Martha was beginning to crave that something. She need some larger price of him, some promise to hold onto. So she went to me and the video. She knew that I still held onto some part of him.
Martha remembered how to turn me on. The Doctor had shown her how to power up my basic systems so she could re-play the video he'd left her whenever she wanted to. She pressed the right button and went to my screen. My engines hummed as I woke up a little more. Martha licked her lips in concentration as she flicked some switches and the Doctor's message began to play. She smiled a little at the image of him in his brown suit, slightly wild hair, talking and acting as she remembered he used to do. During these times, she wasn't ashamed to admit how mush she missed him.
"Is this working?" the Doctor on the screen asked, tapping the recording device. I remembered answering him in his mind that yes, it was working, but this wasn't caught on the recording. The Doctor proceeded with his message.
"Martha, before I change, here's a list of instructions for when I'm human. One, don't let me hurt any one. We can't have that, but you know what humans are like. Two, don't worry about the TARDIS. I'll put it on emergency power so they can't detect it. Just let it hide away."
For being stuck with only one disguise, I thought this was something I still managed to do rather well. Martha was slightly irritated by the fuzziness of the Doctor's voice. I gently touched her memory so she knew which switches would make the sound clearer. She flight them and the Doctor's recorded voice improved.
"Four… no…wait a minute, three, no getting involved in big historical events."
"Good thing we'd be gone before World War One started." I mused.
"Four, you. Don't let me abandon you."
I knew this was something Martha had feared, but she was stubborn. She'd stuck with the Doctor no matter what he said or did to her as a human.
"And five -" The Doctor's voice was cut off and turned into a squabble as Martha fast-forwarded through the rest of his speech, ignoring his rants about pears and the House Martins.
"But there was a meteor, a shooting star, what am I supposed to do then?" she asked the screen. I also saw now that she had concerns over John Smith's love life, but she didn't want to voice them out loud, partly hoping they would go away if she didn't acknowledge them with spoken words. Words have power, after all. Part of me was surprised that Smith had found a possible girlfriend, but then again, it was a very human thing to do. So was the jealously that Martha was beginning to harbour. She kept reminding herself that it didn't matter what John Smith planned, they were leaving in a few weeks anyway. She would have her Doctor back and she'd hold him close.
The video returned to normal speed and the Doctor spoke with a serious tone. "And twenty-three, if anything goes wrong, if they find us, Martha, then you know what to do. Open the watch. Everything I am is kept safe in there. Now, I've put a perception filter on it so the human me won't think anything of it. To him, it's just a watch. But don't open it unless you have to. 'Cause once it's open, then the Family will be able to find me. It's all down to you, Martha. Your choice."
Martha lowered her gaze. She knew the Doctor was counting on her sound judgement and intelligence, some of the very reasons why he'd brought her along with him in the first place. The Doctor on the screen got up to leave, then quickly sat down again as he remembered something. Martha's eyes snapped back up.
"Oh! And thank you," the Doctor said. He gave a little smile and the screen switched back to the screen-saver that showed the exact locations of myself, the Doctor and Martha on a small map, as well as writing that Martha would never be able to understand that more or less translated to 'This is the Doctor's TARDIS, keep out!'
"I wish you'd come back," Martha whispered sadly, talking to the vanished Doctor on the screen. I tried to give her a mental hug. I missed him as well, but I knew that things would work out. I always had faith in my Doctor, and I knew she did too. We just had to believe in him and hold onto that hope.
Regarding the problem of the possibility of further aliens landing in the village, Martha decided to just wait and see. If anything else strange happened, then she'd consider opening the watch. One light in the sky wasn't enough to break our cover just yet. Taking a deep, decisive breath, Martha turned off the screen, gathered her articles and exited me, making sure to lock the door securely.