Playing with the random pairings generator will take you strange places...I got Tish Jones/Grace Holloway/War...and came up with this odd tale set during the Year That Never Was, of friendship, torture and recovery. And of three unexpected yet true words.
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, Tish had been a really rather excellent PA. In her work life she was patient, efficient and good at convincing people that what she was telling them was exactly what they wanted to hear. On the other hand she was at this time and in this place, really rather terrible at being a maid. The skills required were, she supposed, somewhat similar, and her boss was equally likely to humiliate her publicly due to his insecurities about his reliance on her. The outfit officially sucked though.
She and her family are not the only prisoners. She's not sure that her parents know that though. They know about Jack, they've seen both the Saxons bring him out to 'play' with, but she keeps quiet about the others. The Doctor doesn't know either she's sure. Oh, he knows abstractly that there are others sharing their aerial prison with them, just not the specifics. She doesn't want him to either. She can tell from the way the Master looks at the other prisoner that he's saving her up for special.
The other prisoner has long red hair, and wears a white Doctor's coat. She's kept in chains like Jack but for the most part the Master merely taunts her. Her accent is American and she'd appeared after they'd spent several days hovering over San Francisco while the Master played at target practice on the city below. The woman knows both the Doctor and the Master of old but she is not like them. Just another human like Tish, only here because of the Master's vendetta against the Doctor. As time passes, however, she seems only to incite the Master's anger. She feels the wrong end of that screwdriver of his on many occasions. Whoever this Chang Lee is, Tish hopes his freedom is worth more than the blood the other woman is loosing. But the Master's obsession with locating him suggests that the boy is important to him rather than to the Doctor. Important enough that he doesn't just kill her for her continued defiance.
Tish isn't sure why he brings her along to watch. Some part of his slow torture of her she doesn't doubt. But whether as a warning of what he might do to her, or as a taunt of what he plans to do to her sister, she doesn't know. Perhaps its purely as torture to make her watch another suffer and be unable to stop it. Maybe as simple as he needs an audience, he seems the type. After a while it seems that her presence is purely to give him someone to clean up after him. It starts with cleaning the floors of spilled blood. It progresses to cleaning up the prisoner. He seals the prisoner's mouth closed when he leaves her so they cannot talk. The woman's eyes are proud if sad as Tish cleans away the blood and tries to keep the wounds from getting infected. And while the woman's lips may be sealed, Tish's are not, and while she tends to the prisoner, she tells her about her sister, somewhere out there, rebellion stirring in her wake. She sees the hope in the prisoner's eyes and for a little while she can believe that the Doctor's mad plan will work.
Sometimes she feels that her time in the cell with a woman whose name she doesn't know is all that keeps her going. She feels guilty drawing strength from someone who so clearly needs all their strength for themselves. But she cannot stop tending to her, any more than the Master seems able to stop torturing her. Cannot bear to think of her left there alone in a pool of her own blood or worse, waiting for Tish to return when she never will. So she carries on, giving what little comfort and dignity she can, sustaining herself on the gladness in the other woman's eyes, at seeing someone who doesn't want her dead or in pain.
As time spins backwards there is little time for any thoughts bar those of relief and survival. In the eye of the storm, they alone will carry the burden of knowing the truth. But as the clean up operation begins she sneaks away to release the last prisoner. The UNIT soldiers find them and carry the injured woman away for treatment. She watches them go, carrying the limp figure, so emaciated under her white coat, and tells the one guiding her back to her family the worst part of her own private burden: she didn't even know the woman's name.
She takes care of her mum and dad till Martha gets back from wherever she's gone with The Doctor and Jack, 'to sort things out'. The relief she feels when Martha returns scares her with its intensity. More intense than discovering for certain that her sister was alive and had a plan to save them all. Martha has always been the strong one, the peacemaker, the middle child, the one to hold them all together no matter what. Once Martha's back everything will be alright again, time will do the rest. She clings to that notion desperately in the face of her parent's trauma. Surviving is the easy part, she understands now; it's the learning to live again afterwards that's the hard part. Learning how to stop merely existing. She doesn't know if she remembers how.
Martha seems oddly at peace with the events of the last year. Tish has no illusions that the year that never was, has been any easier on Martha than on her, just different. But while Martha seems more together than before, Tish feels less together, less sure of whom she really is now. A constant feeling of uselessness dogs her. Their parents depend on Martha's calm and practicality to provide a framework for them to rebuild their lives around, to hang a cloth of normality back over the horrors of reality. Slowly, bit by bit, Martha's helping them to find a way to fix themselves. All Tish has to do is fix herself, and she doesn't even know where to begin. So she starts at the end.
It's difficult without a name but she doesn't know how else to do this. If Martha could find Dr Docherty then she can find the red-haired woman from the cells.
The hours of fruitless phone calls and questions wear her down. Standing amid the bustle and echoes in Waterloo station on her way to work one Wednesday she breaks a little. She's not sure how, the train journey is a blur to her scattered mind, but she finds her self sitting on a bench on Roald Dahl Plas, crisp autumn air stinging her cheeks. Some time later, she's not sure how long, time is interminable and the cold without is nothing to that within, Jack appears at her side. He watches her carefully and listens with the same care. He goes away for a while, returning just as quietly. He gives her a piece of paper with an East London address written on it, and walks her back to the train station. On the way he tells her about the section he led during the First World War. Calmly explaining the reality of sending good men (and bad men, the bad hurt no less when they fall) to their deaths, in battles he already knew were lost. He doesn't speak of the times when he'd woken bloody and broken, among the dead in the quiet of dawn, of crawling through the remains of his comrades to safety, his fatal wounds healing against his will, but she hears him all the same. She still doesn't understand how the Doctor could forgive the Master. He is so still in the aftermath of her question that she understands for a moment why they were so afraid of him. Then he moves, life and care written on his face and he is her sister's friend once more. He reminds her gently that she knows only too well how it feels to be alone with the things she has seen and done.
As her train pulls in, he pulls her close and she clings to him like a child. The fraternal kiss he places on her forehead keeps her warm on the journey home and she clings to his words as tightly as she'd clung to him. The only thing nearly a hundred and fifty years of living had taught him about life: it goes on.
The flat is only a few minutes walk from Mile End tube station near an eat-in Chip Shop where she forces herself to eat something that might vaguely qualify as lunch. Still she stands on the doorstep for over an hour before she can bring her self to tackle the door entry system. The frail woman who answers the door seems like a stranger to her. So different from the proud, angry woman spitting defiance and blood at the Master, in the face of torture. Maybe this is the great revelation, Tish thinks, that such strength is only possible in the face of adversary, with nothing to fight against the full horror of what you've faced slowly breaks you down. This must be why Jack still fights the dark, to keep the desolation at bay. The woman's name is Grace, a San Francisco surgeon before the Master stole her away to be his plaything. The stilted conversation turns to Martha, and she wonders aloud how her sister does it. Grace suggests that perhaps Martha is not fighting against something but for something. She puts a doctoral spin on it, fighting for life, rather than against death. For a moment there is a spark in the older woman's eyes and Tish recognises her for a moment. Grace must recognise something in her too, for she smiles then, not a big smile, just a little one, perhaps only the essence of a smile flitting across her lips and eyes, but it warms Tish in a way she hasn't felt since the anger faded. Something to fight for. A mutual challenge perhaps.
Grace isn't ready to return to her old life, so Tish helps her build one here. It starts with concocting a tale to explain her disappearance across the ocean. They sit in the clean but bare kitchen and embellish the 'official explanation' into something with enough truth to be believed. It's then that Tish decides that Grace needs a plant to brighten things up. She pops round one evening with a peace lily and finds her at war with the washing machine, after the fight with the temperamental appliance somehow the awkwardness disappears. Evenings and weekends are spent turning the flat into a home. Trips to IKEA and B&Q transform the slightly shabby bed-sit into comfortable mish-mash of their slightly contrary tastes and help Grace learn to deal with other people again. Tish has never been one for DIY or decorating but standing around in borrowed overalls, tinny pop music emanating from the tiny radio, and laughing at Grace's futile attempts to remove paint from her own nose, she feels happier than she can remember feeling in years. Her flame-haired companion's indignant comments and expression belied by her dancing eyes.
The offer of a shower seems a good excuse to put off returning to her own too quiet flat. Grace seems to take forever in her own, and passing the door Tish can hear her crying. In the last few weeks Tish has begun to be able to push aside the memories of taking care of the other girl post-torture, of torn and burnt skin and red hair darkened by the blood encrusting it. She's never liked to ask but she's sure that Grace is at least a decade older than her, but right now the figure curled up in the bath tub, head on knees, arms wrapped round both, under the unending spray seems almost childlike. Abandoning overalls and socks she sits on the edge of the bath for a long moment watching the too-hot water drag swirls of paint off Grace's arms down over the still vivid scars that marr the smooth skin of her sides. The over-sized t-shirt she borrowed from her brother is slowly soaking through by the time she moves to rescue the flannel from where it's been dropped on the floor of the bath. The water temperature doesn't bother her, lately she takes her own showers too hot, as though they might drive the cold from her own heart. She carefully cleans the paint and tears from Grace's skin, as gently has she'd removed blood and bile during the year that never was. Coaxing her friend to her feet she ministers to her softly, as though cleaning her body could wipe away the memories that haunt them both. Somewhere along the way the life returns to those empty eyes and she knows her friend has returned to her. As she pauses to contemplate the change the cloth is eased from her fingers and the paint is cleaned from her own skin with equal care. Her now sopping wet T-shirt and underwear removed and abandoned with consummate ease. Logically she knows that the water must now be running cold but it matters little when the only warmth she feels is from the places where Grace's fingers have grazed her skin.
The soft towels they picked out together remove the worst of the water from their skin and hair. In the soft light of the bedside lamp they burrow beneath the sheets, whispering secrets and fears against each other's skin. They find a way to warm each other that seeps all the way into their bones. Every kiss or touch an explosion of joy, a sally against the dark that would engulf them both if they let it. At the edge of sleep Tish acknowledges that it is here that she belongs.
In time Grace finds work as a surgeon, her professional reputation compensating for the physical and psychological scars she still wears. They find a flat that is closer to both their new employers, and have just as much fun decorating their flat as they did Grace's. Somewhere amid all the laughter and tears, recriminations and hope they've become inseparable. They cannot explain their bond to outsiders, words are somehow insufficient, but they care not for others opinions. Grace refuses to give explanations to her colleagues beyond 'we take care of each other', while most of Tish's family delude themselves that it is companionship and comradeship that bind them together. Martha just gives her a knowing look and buys them tickets to see a production of Madam Butterfly for Christmas.
And all around them, life goes on.