Well, on the heels of my previous smutty piece of literature (heh), I offer you this. As I've said, reasons to make our heroes shag are pretty much the name of the game now, and what a fun game it is!
This will be two chapters, and I will post the second sometime in the next couple of days!
More than usual, I can actually see this scenario occurring in Martha and the Doctor's world. Unless I'm the one imagining things, I really do think the Doctor is guilty of that once-over thing of which Martha accuses him, and I believe he did spend series 3, at least somewhat, in denial. Because... come on! ;-)
Be prepared for a cliffie, but I hope you enjoy it! :-D
PART 1
Once upon a time, a medical student met a Time Lord in a hospital that went to the moon.
And while the whole hospital was losing its mind with confusion and fright, the medical student kept a cool head. She pointed out to a panicked colleague that they were unlikely to lose oxygen through the window because they were not airtight anyhow, and wondered aloud what, then, was keeping them safe.
"Very good point," said the Time Lord. "Brilliant, in fact. What was your name?"
"Martha," she told him. Ordinarily she would have bristled at a cheeky stranger asking her point-blank for her name in such a way, without prelude. But this was a weird day, and he wasn't a total and complete stranger, after all – they had met before.
And he had definitely flirted with her. Winks, smirks, that thing with his eyebrow... and, well, she wasn't exactly complaining about it.
"And it was Jones, wasn't it?" he asked.
She nodded.
Adrenaline was pumping, and ten million questions were running through her head. Would they live or die? How the hell was any of this possible? How much air did they have? How would they get everyone calmed down? How would they ever get out of this? Who was this man?
The fact that she wondered myriad things, in that moment, did not change the fact that she saw him, in those few moments of first real contact, quite conspicuously look her over.
Later, of course, as she became his travelling companion, she came to realise that the whole episode, to him, was a trial, to see if he might want to keep around for a while. The fact that she had misunderstood why he wanted to keep her around… well, that was neither here nor there. The truth was, she had passed her audition with flying colours.
Although… had she really misunderstood so gravely? His eyes had slid over her whole body, like feelers. Couldn't he have been sizing her up for other, less cerebral, more visceral reasons, as well? In spite of what he said? In spite of how decidedly he pushed her away whenever she tried to get closer to him? Because she remembered that day well, and that window incident wasn't the only time he had done something similar while they were there on the moon, especially when he thought she wasn't looking. His eyes had taken her in quite avidly on a few occasions that afternoon, as it happened.
And then there was that kiss. Oh, the kiss…
A month later, the Doctor found himself captured by a race of green, squiggly, four-armed beings who were planning to hold him until he gave up the location of the Reltrix Key and Opu Legend. The Doctor was never, ever going to reveal the coordinates, mostly because he didn't know them, and moreover, had no idea what the Reltrix Key and Opu Legend were. But his jailers were steadfast and thoroughly stupid (a sometimes deadly combination), so they locked him in a cage and didn't listen to any of the actual sense he was making.
Fortunately for him, Martha had gone back into the TARDIS to get her jacket when the first of the squiggly green guys had seen him, and the committee seemed to have no idea that he wasn't travelling alone. The Doctor, of course, was clever enough not to let on.
Martha watched events unfolding from the screen in the console room, as the Doctor had opened up a remote connection with the TARDIS and the surveillance devices in the area, clandestinely, using the sonic screwdriver. And when the green guys had given the Doctor a deadline – a literal dead line, as in, produce the information before the alarm goes, or you'll be dead – Martha sprang into action.
She found the psychic paper in her pocket from the previous day's adventure, and used it to convince the squiggly security guards that she belonged there, and was doing inspections. From there, she was able to worm her way into the same room with the Doctor and his captors, jump onto the computer terminal and work out how to manipulate the clock, gifting the Doctor with an extra hour on his countdown.
A Time Lord can do a lot with sixty minutes.
It gave him time to continue his silent search, and locate some of the mechanisms in the walls, and sonic their way out of there, with ten minutes to spare. That's fifty minutes he needed, and wouldn't have had, without her.
Back in the TARDIS, safe and sound, floating through space once more, he said, "Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my hearts, Miss Jones. I'd have been executed fifty minutes' prior, if it hadn't been for you."
"You're welcome."
"You are brilliant do you know that?" he said, staring across the console's lights at her with admiration.
She blushed. "Thanks."
A week or two after that, they encountered a substance that the Doctor likened to Kryptonite for TARDISes, and their trusted vessel became marooned on a Yelpakian ship, floating through the Po Galaxy. Turned out, a band of space pirates had planted the substance there as a trap. Mr. Randers, one of the Yelpakian passengers was a sort of mechanic on his home planet, and had access to codes that could unravel the molecular structure of the "Kryptonite," so as to allow the Doctor safe passage off the ship. This would have, in turn, given the Doctor and Martha room to breathe, with the time and space they needed to save the cruise ship from the pirates.
But, before he had the chance to give the Doctor the computer commands to do it, Randers was shot by the pirates. With a gaping chest wound, he requested last rites, and a cleric was called. The Doctor set about trying to work out the computer code himself, which would have taken, even for him, without the TARDIS' help, days to decipher and then duplicate. Martha did what she does best: she healed. She decided to refuse to see the man die, both for its own sake and for the sake of the TARDIS and every other being on the ship who was not a pirate.
She put pressure on the wound, delegated responsibilities to the onlookers: finding ingredients for and concocting a makeshift aenesthetic, finding supplies for sterilisation, finding a needle and thread, finding point-nosed tongs (or something similar), finding antiseptic solution and gauze, etc. Ultimately, she shut herself, Randers and a couple of assistants in a storage closet, away from pirating eyes, and removed the bullet.
Afterwards, she sewed him up, helped him manage his pain and stave off infection. Meanwhile, the Doctor worked on the codes, just in case, and also distracted the pirates by messing with the computer system. Within a day, the patient was well enough to call in a password and grant the Doctor access to the codes he needed.
Just before they flew back onto the ship, the TARDIS fortified with a force field and a flight plan, the Doctor said to Martha, "Once again, I couldn't have done it without that mighty brain of yours."
"All in a day's work," she shrugged, a bit uncomfortable, and she didn't quite understand why.
"I am so glad I met you," he said. And with that, he looked her over as he often did. Those brown eyes licked at her as though they could taste her. "And you are going to be a chuffing brilliant doctor. The world is all the richer for you in it."
Another week later, she got past an admittance device that sensed and catalogued only the "texture" of a person. This was on a planet of malevolent, blind, very tactile warlords. She was able to sneak by because she had donned the Doctor's jacket, convincing the device that she was the Doctor, thus putting an extra set of eyes on the scene and allowing the two of them (and the captive they were trying to free) to triangulate their efforts.
Two weeks after that, she revealed that she had been a lifeguard during uni, by saving a fisherman from the biting cold waters of the Pacific. This was just seconds before the boat they'd been on was set to vanish into a worm hole, delivering it from its destined harm.
In another week and a half, she cauterised a wound on the Doctor himself, saving him from a bleed-out. The swirls of regenerative light had already begun to gather round him, and with shouts of, "Oh, no you don't! Just you hang on, Doctor!" she used what was immediately available in the diner where they had had breakfast (three galaxies away), to stop the bleeding and burn it closed. The pain for him, she knew, was excruciating, but had not protested because he knew that there wasn't time to administer a numbing agent.
"And because I trust you," he said, recuperating the next day. "And I trust you because…"
"I know," she sighed. "Brilliant."
She'd known what he would say, because he'd said it each time she'd done something clever to save the day, or help him save the day. And she was getting really bloody tired of hearing it.
"Yeah," he said, not deaf to her flat, defeated tone. He frowned. "Something wrong with being brilliant?"
"No," she said. "Not a thing."
And she watched in astonishment over the next few hours as the golden light swirled around the Doctor's wound. It became a scar, and then disappeared, all in the course of an afternoon.
She had begun, by then, to realise why she enjoyed less and less hearing him call her brilliant.Because yes, she did have a pretty formidable intellect, even if she did say so herself. She knew she was a quick-thinker, and felt confident that someday, she'd make a very good surgeon, or ED doctor.
But she was much more well-rounded than just being brilliant implied. More specifically, she felt that her body should be more than life support for a brain. And given some fairly compelling evidence, the Doctor seemed to think so, too. As many times as he had touted her intelligence, twice as many times, he had flitted his eyes over her from head to toe, and made little effort to cover it. She couldn't imagine, with all of the looking and no touching that he did, time after time, that he was not mentally touting her form as well. Not to mention all the everyday flirting they always did, and the growing-closer that was happening naturally as a result of travelling and risking their lives together.
It could not be a secret to him that she had some very strong feelings for him… hell, she might as well admit it: she was in love with him. How could she not be? A man of action, of passion, of good humour and bizarrely beguiling good-looks… and of absolutely staggering intellect to boot. She could appreciate all of that about him, and she could acknowledge that it made her ache, made her want him like nothing she'd ever wanted before.
Why couldn't he acknowledge all of those things about her? How could he keep licking her up with his eyes, while only ever giving her very nice hugs and telling her that she was brilliant? Was he really so caught up pining for a former companion that he'd brought someone aboard to whom he was obviously attracted, only to feel too guilty to do anything about it?
As she lay in bed that night, torturing herself over all of these questions, she wondered, at the same time, whether she'd ever have the courage to ask him. Undoubtedly, in the morning, in the light of day, she'd be far too "sensible" breach such a topic. It would be too risky. Too scary.
The night, and impending sleep, brought a kind of terrifying clarity to just such a situation. And with it, oftentimes, courage.
"Damn it," she said aloud. "We do this now."
Before she lost her nerve, she threw off the covers, ripped the door of her bedroom open and traipsed down the TARDIS corridors to the console room. She knew he'd still be there, working on the Time Filter, whatever the hell that was.
"Hi," she said, rather heavily, walking across the grated floor.
"Hi!" he said from underneath. He slid out on his back. "I thought you went to bed. Is everything okay?"
"No," she reported.
"What's wrong?"
She paced to the nearby, tree-like column and back, then did it again. The seriousness of her demeanour made him take notice, and he stood up, wiped the debris off his hands and gave her his attention.
She stopped in front of him, and asked. "Doctor, why did you invite me to travel with you?"
"What?"
"You heard me."
"What's brought this on, Martha?"
"Just answer the question."
"Erm," he said, uneasily, massaging the back of his neck with his palm. "Well, because you saved my life. I thought you knew that."
"No, that was why you took me out for a road-test. The thank-you gift. The treat. A quick jaunt to a Shakespeare play. I'm talking about…" She clicked her tongue with exasperation. "Why did you decide to have me stay?"
"You proved yourself. You've got a cool head in a crisis. You're an unbelievable problem-solver. You're vastly more clever than any human being I've ever travelled with, and mind you, that's saying something."
After a pause, she asked, "Why else?"
"What do you mean?"
"That hospital was full of clever people. Other medical students, even doctors and nurses with a hell of a lot more experience than I have. And yet, you chose me."
He shrugged with a confused grimace. "What do you want from me? I told you: you proved yourself."
"Why did you ask me, so to speak, to prove myself? Doctor, all I want to know, is why me? What's so special about me? And don't tell me I'm brilliant!"
"Martha, I really don't know what this is all about."
She stared at him in exasperation for several moments.
Then, "So, I'm brilliant. Good to have around when the spit hits the fan."
"Yeah!"
"So, it's all about my brain. What's above my shoulders."
He swallowed hard, and momentarily averted his eyes. Even if he was truthful about not understanding at first, that tiny show of nervousness proved that now, he knew what she was driving at.
"Yes," he answered, less emphatically than she suspected he might have liked.
"Nothing else?"
"As I've asked you already: isn't that enough?"
Again, she was silent for a few moments, before saying, "When you look at me, what do you see? What are you thinking?"
"What do I see?" he asked. He pointedly broke eye-contact just then, and leaned against the lone seat in the room, now crossing his arms. "I see my best friend in the whole world."
"Your best friend."
"Yes," he answered, his eyes resting on hers again.
"That's not what I mean."
"Then what do you mean?"
"I mean, when you really look at me. When your eyes do that thing, where they slide over me and take me in, like little blind fingers or something… what do you see then? I mean in your mind's eye?" She lowered her voice to a semi-sexy, lilt. "It has to be something, Doctor, and I'm fairly certain you're not fantasising about neurons firing quickly inside my cranium."
His head lurched forward and he tilted it as if to ask her pardon. His eyes squinted a little too pronouncedly, and he asked, "When my eyes do that thing?"
"When you look me over. Head to toe. You keep sizing me up, over and over again. You can say all you want about finding a proper travelling companion, but… well, I don't like to boast, but I've had more than one man look at me that way. None of them were looking for a top-of-her-class medic to lean on in a pinch. So, tell me. When you do that, Doctor, what's going through your mind?"
"Erm, nothing," he said with an uneasy chuckle. "Th… that is to say, nothing, because I don't actually do that, Martha."
"Don't actually do that?" She got close to him now. She whispered, "Are you telling me that you never, ever contemplate my body over my brain? You're saying that all those times I've watched you drink me in with your eyes, it's been all in my head? Just like everything else worthwhile about me?"
"Martha…"
"Are you telling me that there's nothing physical that made you choose me? Nothing like a spark that ignited between us when we met, that caused you to say, I want that one, and not just for running and fighting and for saving your life?"
He looked at her with wide, terrified eyes. He was like a rabbit in headlights. She could feel him trying desperately to maintain eye-contact. It would be disastrous to let his eyes wander now, if he really was going to keep up this charade.
"Martha…" he began again, with a calm, somewhat condescending tone.
She took a step back. "So, we're friends."
"Yes."
"The best of friends?"
"Yes! I don't understand why that's so…"
"Okay, Doctor," she chirped. "Good to know."
And she turned on her heel and headed toward the corridor.
"Martha…"
"Good night, my friend," she said.
But inside her mind, she told herself, It's on.
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