The funny thing about Doctor Who is that plot holes can be roped into a new series of stories. I'm trying to latch onto this one though, because it's essentially latched onto me.


00: A Prologue or Something

Were she able to trace back to when this started to happen, Martha would've said right back after she got onto the Tardis after The Year. In reality, it happened the second her and the Doctor's timelines converged, the second he opted to go back in time for a simple parlour trick, the second Martha locked eyes with the Doctor, and the second she alerted him to the fact that she's already met him before. It happens when she steps onto the Tardis and it happens when she feels something more of the ancient ship when she lays her hands on the railings.

It was a lot of careful manipulations, making sure the Doctor doesn't know, making sure Martha isn't aware until just the right moment. Making sure she stays, so that the job can be done. For any other creature, this would've been impossible, but the Tardis is smart, and she's experienced in things like this. She has had a lot practice, and a lot of time.

There aren't many other realities where this can work. As she works on Martha, she can feel reality splintering and warping, a last ditch effort from a species that lost the right to exist. She feels them, laying in the groundwork, rewriting history again, but much more subtler, more conniving and while later on - currently - she cannot track the exact changes, she knows that when they're finalized, all the universes will darken, and the struggles that her Doctor went through will be for not.

So in Martha, the Tardis tries to save everyone, leaving a small little piece of a creature long since gone (had they existed in the first place), and hopes that this failsafe will work. All across her timeline, Martha is slowly being rewritten, in subtle ways that not even the Tardis can detect anymore. She will - is - becoming something that the near extinct race won't even be able to combat as a collective.

...

Humans were not built to see time the way other beings can. Not in this universe anyway. Those that can have gone mad. Their brains are complex and amazing, able to comprehend and contain so many contradictions in ways that many other sentient species will never evolve to learn. It's part of what fascinated the Doctor in the first place. But time was never meant to be their domain.

There are some, however, who are able to become a tad time sensitive, in fact, most humans may find that they already are. Odd little echoes of conversations never had, dreams that felt real until pointed out otherwise, and so on. Martha herself probably would have never said that she was even on that level. Aside from the occasional case of deja vu, she's never felt any special connection with time. A fact that remained the same when she started travelling with the Doctor.

Then her and the Doctor were dropped into Farringham and for just a moment, she felt otherwise.

A part of her was still bitter about being dropped in 1913 to be a maid. A part of her will probably never truly trust the Doctor because this was a very common oversight with him. He mentioned many times before that his body can change, that when he dies and regenerates, the possibilities for his new body are endless. And though that might be true, Martha was painfully aware that the form he was usually stuck with was very white and very male and since he was an advanced species with many privileges, there will be a part of the Doctor that will never fully understand her specific brand of discrimination.

As she scrubbed the floors, she entertained the thought of asking to go back in time again, when this was all over, to warn the people of Africa to not trust any of the white settlers, and arm them to the teeth with weapons so that maybe in her time, the roles would be reversed.

That trailed off to her wondering whether she would change as this happened or because of her travelling on the Tardis, she'd be aware of the changes made and remain unchanged herself. Would the Doctor's other companions change as well? Or would an alternate universe be made to handle the rewrites?

That of course, trailed off into her wondering if changes had already been made in her past and what exactly they would be. She paused in her scrubbing, a hint of a migraine was coming on and her vision was blurring over. In her mind's eye, Martha saw many possibilities, and many definites, some existing in realities separate from this one and some interacting with this current one. She squeezed her eyes closed, hoping that maybe the images would be stopped but then she heard the chanting.

For a moment, Martha was trapped. There was the paralyzing horror that gripped her heart at watching the Earth being ripped apart, the realization that it was also getting burning, while also being made so it never existed. The feeling amplified and a chilling shiver rushed through Martha. She couldn't breathe for a moment because she knew that this was happening to nearly every planet and galaxy, to the point where each reality was unmaking itself, repeating on over into the reality next.

The universe's inhabitants were sacrificing their worlds to make sure they can stop the source, and Martha found herself panicking at the near despair she felt through them. As if she herself were there in that time, fighting with them. Because there would still be someone alive when things unraveled to the beginning, she realized, and whoever was there would have to stitch things back up, and they could only do it in their image.

She could hear Jenny calling out her name in hushed tones, trying to not alert the others. Her fingers were digging into Martha's shoulders painfully and they both were shaking slightly. Immediately, Martha was back to her present, cheeks wet and breathing like she just ran a marathon. She tried to reassure Jenny by saying "I'm fine" but instead, the wrong two words come out.

"No more."