In which Martha tries to be the perfect comforter, and the Doctor tries to appreciate it.
Martha Jones wasted endless hours of her life in competition with a ghost. Most of the time, as guilty as she felt to admit it, even in the safety of her own mind, she didn't understand why she wasn't winning.
She wouldn't say she was jealous of the girl. As far as Martha could piece together from the Doctor's sporadic comments, she hadn't really been any smarter or more adventurous or more, well, attractive than Martha was, but to even begin to compare things like that felt disrespectful somehow, like speaking badly of the dead.
The thing Martha thought she most had going for her was that she was here. She was physically and mentally here and he could see her and touch her face and be reassured of her presence whenever he needed. She wasn't a translucent face floating between the stars or on the edge of a distant memory, she was flesh and blood.
She didn't envy who Rose was, truly. Only what Rose had monopoly over. Martha only ever wished to be Martha, with two exceptions. Two very specific occasions burned painfully into her mind.
She was feeling pretty good about herself the first time the feeling sneaked up on her- she was about to take her rightful place in medical history, but where, she wasn't sure, exactly. She didn't know what century they were flying over at the moment.
She had discovered and documented a brand new illness. A malady, if you would, resulting from being possessed by a living sun. Martha was still deciding on a name for it, Post-Sun Syndrome or Post-Possession Syndrome or something of the like. Some part of her wondered, with a little smirking laugh at the irony, if her name might someday be inscribed in some alien student's medical textbook, while remaining completely unknown on Earth. Jones Fever, the colloquial name might be. More than likely not, because it was doubtful that anybody else had ever survived possession by a living sun.
Jones Fever, that didn't sound like something the Doctor would ever suffer from.
It was a fascinating illness, though, caused entirely by addling the brain's thermostat. After the extreme drop in bodily temperature resulting from, well, having a living sun expelled from inside you, the brain perceived the body as being much, much too cold and did everything in its power to warm up.
She came out that evening and found him sitting on the floor of the TARDIS control room, cocooned in blankets up to his earlobes, and smiling a too-goofy smile through chattering teeth ("'Ello, Martha, b-bit nippy in here or is it me?"), at which point she had dragged him to the medical bay faster than you could say Raxacoricofallapatorius ("J-just me, I take it").
Martha hadn't had much occasion to spent time in the med bay to date, but she wasn't surprised to find traces of the same ghost that haunted the rest of the ship. She had grown weary of finding Rose's things strewn everywhere- here was a pair of striped socks and a hair band thrown haphazardly on the floor, and she kicked them under an examining table before he could notice and look as though she'd shot him in one of his hearts again.
The first pill bottle she pulled out of the medicine cabinet was denoted with a pink sticky note 'For human tummies' in the all too familiar cursive, followed by an obnoxiously cute smiley face. Martha could only wonder what sort of misunderstanding had prompted this.
She hooked up the monitoring devices and converted the readings into a medical transcript with no trouble at all, and wondered privately how his previous companion would have managed without half of a doctorate degree. Martha banished the thought, scolding herself, and refocused on the task at hand. This was her first real chance to practice her bedside manner since leaving home, and though she was sorry it came at the Doctor's expense, he was complaining enough that she knew he was alright. Anyway, it was nice that for once the solution to a problem lay within her realm of expertise, and there was no one was hovering over her with a clipboard to give her a pass or fail grade.
It was also nice that it was the longest he had ever just been still with her. Martha sat up in the medical bay that night and talked with him about silly little adventures he had once taken, supposedly alone, until he became less and less coherent and fell asleep, and she studied for an exam she had coming up in the past/future/present, on Earth. She was professional enough not to watch him sleep, or kiss his forehead, or anything like that.
Her eyelids were drooping over her textbook around two o'clock in the morning, TARDIS time, when one of the machines beeped a warning that his temperature was spiking. Martha hurried over to where he was turning and twisting on the cot to check his vitals. The Doctor woke long enough to croak something she didn't catch, and she forced water down his sunburned throat until he managed, very hoarsely but politely, "Could you send in Rose? I want her to sit with me."
She was caught off guard and fiddled with one of the monitors again, panicked that he was hallucinating. She was suddenly terrified that he didn't remember who she was. In the time that Martha spent stalling, he asked twice more.
"Please, I'm cold, I can't warm up... I'd like her to sit with me. Rose." He was shivering like mad under the blankets. "Rose Tyler. God, I'm so cold..."
Rose. Every rose has its thorn, and this one seemed to be lodged permanently in his side.
"Doctor, she- she can't right now. I'm sorry." Tears stung her eyes, as much for the sting of her answer as the sting of his question.
"You see, I had this- dream- I had this nightmare that she-" The Doctor's face twisted in sudden pain, but his voice was dry and bitter when he spoke. "Never mind. It was real. They're always real."
She pressed a hand to her mouth and grabbed one of his with the other. "I'm sorry, Doctor," she whispered.
"Oh, Martha-" Nine hundred years of life and love and loss and a single strangled "Oh, Martha-", half-muffled by a pillow, was the most he ever told her of it.
She found a bottle of sleeping pills- graciously labeled "For Time Lords" with another smiley face- and prayed that it would knock him out dreamlessly for a few hours. Martha gave herself a failing grade on bedside manner- for crying, and for being the wrong person entirely.
(The Doctor wondered, in the few minutes before he passed out, if he'd ever be warm again.)
The next morning he was completely one-hundred percent- superior Time Lord biology and all- and at breakfast, he strolled up casually behind Martha and plucked her treatise on his experience out of her hands. He corrected a typo or two, filled in the recovery time to seven hours, and then told her with a wide grin that it was masterfully written and would be appreciated even in such a medically advanced civilization as New New York. This, he explained, was quite an accomplishment, for a human. Martha couldn't help smirking at his roundabout way of thanking her.
If he remembered their conversation the night before, he didn't ever acknowledge it, and so neither did Martha. She made it a point to never bring up Rose, and the Doctor, well, the Doctor was learning.
On the second occasion, they were running errands in the late twentieth century, and Martha was getting an early start on her Christmas shopping.
Her brother, Leo, child that he was, was still dearly missing one limited-edition baseball card from his collection, and so the Doctor and Martha popped by 1993 to see if she could find it. They parted ways- a fairly rare occurrence- in a neighborhood they were both familiar with, and Martha spent a frustrating morning searching everywhere she could think to- toy stores, comic book shops, even the checkout line of the grocery store. This was where she met back up with the Doctor, who was eating a banana and pondering the difference between all the various thicknesses and flavors of milk.
"Doctor, it's nowhere," Martha told him, as he bent down to use his sonic screwdriver to repair crooked wheels on a line of grocery carts. "I don't even know if the card has been released yet. I just sort of assumed you could find a 1993 baseball card anywhere in 1993- I don't even know when in the year we are- Just brilliant of me." She palmed her forehead before noticing the strange look the cashier was shooting her. "Maybe we should go outside to talk about this."
"Well, there's one easy way to find out when we are," the Doctor announced, stooping down in front of the newspaper dispenser outside the grocery store to see the date printed across the front of the paper. "April the twenty-seventh, 1993," he read.
"Hmm. A bit early, I guess. Do you suppose they release them every summer?" There was no reply, and Martha glanced down at the Doctor, who was still bent in front of the kiosk, unmoving, suddenly pale. "Doctor?"
"Nothing. It's nothing." He stood, running a hand over his face and studiously avoiding Martha's eyes. "April the twenty-seventh, just an ordinary day." And he patted the side of the kiosk and turned to walk away.
"No, it's not, Doctor." Martha grabbed his arm and held him in place. "You always say there are no ordinary days."
"Well, then that makes it somewhat extraordinary to find one, doesn't it?" The grin on his face was immensely fake and irritating. "Logic, Martha, if you please!"
"Tell me. What happens today?" she asked in a lower voice.
"Oh, lots of things. Lots of things happen today. Not an ordinary day at all. Eritrea, you know little Eritrea, in Northeast Africa? They vote for independence today, another free human society, I'm so proud of them, let's take a moment to applaud. And Yemen, Yemen just had an election. We're in the midst of human progress, beautiful, it's so beautiful."
He was prattling again, in that way that danced all around a subject without ever touching it, without really saying anything at all. "Doctor..." Martha sighed.
"Oh, but this is a sad day, too. This evening an airplane will crash and it will kill the entire Zambian national football team. All those young players, all their lives ahead of them... We should leave, this- this is a terrible day." The Doctor ran a hand through his hair again, and this time Martha saw that it was shaking. She waited.
"It's her birthday," he finally whispered. "It's Rose Tyler's seventh birthday, and she's having a party right now. She's going to get a stuffed bear named Clyde and a pink bicycle, and it's going to be her first without training wheels and it has a little bell on the handle that she will drive her mum mad with. She's missing her left front tooth and she can hardly pronounce her own name, and she's a rather stupid child, really, can barely count to twenty, she- she isn't clever at all."
The Doctor's whisper rose at a rather alarming rate, until it seemed all of the universe's frustration centered around how well Rose could count at age seven.
"Do you want to try to go see her?" Martha asked, very quietly, not showing half the concern she felt.
"I can't! Don't you see that I can't?!" The Doctor turned half-crazed eyes on his companion.
Martha took a deep breath. "I meant from a distance... I thought you could maybe watch from a distance. It's not like she'll recognize you."
"I can watch from a distance and I did and I'm watching right now, do you hear me, I'm there right now watching!" He calmed himself again, just as passersby were beginning to stare. "It was her favorite birthday, and she took me to see it. Rose and I are down the block at her house right now, watching from the road."
The full realization settled over them both like a stifling blanket, and Martha could barely draw breath. The prospect of encountering Rose, just down the street, and seeing at last what qualities this mysterious girl possessed was equal parts terrifying and irresistible. She was suddenly dying inside, just to catch a glimpse of this ghost who twisted her thorns into the two of them daily. She must have been something spectacular, to leave so much pain in her wake.
"The TARDIS must have saved the date as a destination for this year. I didn't pay attention." The Doctor broke the uneasy silence.
"What happens if we see them?"
"Nothing."
"What happens if they see us?"
"Oh, I'd cause a paradox by crossing my own time line, and it could potentially cause a rift in all of time and space, and big black time monsters would come to consume us all," he said nonchalantly.
"We probably ought to leave, then," Martha inferred quickly.
"But- if I managed not to see myself- if I only saw her- I could warn her- I could- I could tell her not to-" He covered his eyes and burst out again, suddenly. "Oh, Martha, I can't, I can't do it, don't let me."
She heard a haunting echo of Oh, Martha from that long night in the medical bay and shivered involuntarily. But this once, just this once, he had told her exactly what he wanted her to do. "Back to the TARDIS, then," Martha said firmly, taking the Doctor by the arm and marching him back towards the police box. Here she was, dragging him forward, and he kept looking back over his shoulder. He would never stop looking over his shoulder for Rose.
She unlocked the ship, and he paused in the doorway again. "It would only take a moment. A few moments- she would believe-"
And the TARDIS shut the door all on her own, to the sound of a little tinkling bicycle bell coming up the street.
"And what are we stopping for?"
"Nothing." Rose shook her head quickly, as if to clear it. "I... I thought I heard the TARDIS, that's all."
"Well, you're a nutter, then," The Doctor said cheerfully. His concentration had perhaps been elsewhere- she looked so happy today. "Happy seventh, Rose." And he took her hand as they continued to walk. "May I be the first to say that you don't really look your age."
"Yeah, 'cause you're one to talk," Rose replied, and she nudged him with her elbow.
The Doctor paced around the console, murmuring techno-babble at a breakneck pace, pushing buttons, banging things with that little hammer, until the rattling stopped and they were back in the vortex again.
"Sorry about your baseball card," he suddenly said, keeping his back to her.
"I'm not so worried about the card," Martha said quietly. "I'm a little more worried about you."
"Oh, that bit?" he scoffed. "Happens from time to time. Humanized me, all you lot have. Just running 'bout in the 90's, minding my own business, and suddenly, emotions. So-" The Doctor practically interrupted himself, raising his eyebrows expectantly. "Where to now?"
"Just a moment, Doctor," Martha said, pacing slowly around to his chair and leaning her head down beside his. "Maybe you need to stop running for just a moment and- and face this."
The Doctor turned directly to Martha for the first time since learning the date, with the same dark expression he wore when he took her hand and told her to head for the hills.
"Martha, if you've learned anything from traveling with me, it's that there are some things you run from, because if they catch you, they'll kill you."
Martha shook her head patiently. "No one ever died from a memory, I promise you. Please, just tell me about her. It'll do you some good."
The Doctor folded his arms stubbornly across his chest. "I always got the impression you didn't like when I talked about Rose."
"Well, never stopped you talking before, has it?" she teased. He cracked a sideways smile.
"Just one story, Doctor. One of those stories that I see behind your eyes- you always start to tell me and then you stop."
"You want a story, hmm?" The Doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully and began with his rather characteristic "Weeeelllll, now... once we were... we were traveling, and she thought I was in trouble, you see... and she... she opened a grate on that floor and she looked into the- and I don't recommend you ever doing this- into the heart of the TARDIS. A human girl absorbed the energy of the Time Vortex- foolish, foolish human. She did a lot of foolish things."
"Yeah?" Martha refused to judge the foolishness of the practically-dead, but she pushed that a little further.
"Well- only if she thought it would save people. Would have died herself if I hadn't taken the energy." The Doctor made a rather suspicious gesture toward his mouth.
"You kissed her? That's how you took it?" Martha teased, half in amusement and half in annoyance.
"Something like that, yeah. It's a little foggy because I had a different face at the time," he said flippantly, as if daring her to question the normality of the statement. "She was dying at the moment, and I died shortly afterwards- well, regenerated- but yeah, it happened. First kiss. Only kiss, actually." His expression dared her to question that, too.
"Really?" Her eyebrows shot to her hairline.
"Mmm-hmm." He studied the ceiling, arms folded across his chest.
"You expect me to believe that?" Martha asked with a good-natured smirk.
"I expect you to... at least pretend to believe it, for the sake of my sanity." He excluded that one time Rose had been possessed on principle- possession kisses shouldn't count.
Martha wasn't sure whether to be more saddened or relieved by this revelation- she had always assumed they were lovers. She put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "You told me that she's safe where she is- you got her to safety, you should be proud of yourself. You did the right thing."
"Did I?" The Doctor spun around in his chair, and she pulled her hand away quickly. "Tell me, Martha Jones, do you want to be safe?"
"Excuse me?" she stammered.
"Do you want to be safe? Would you like me to drop you off on planet Earth and lock you in a cage with your dear family and give you three square meals a day and a nice job and a nice house and a nice car and no way out?"
Martha saw where this was going, all too late, but she answered anyway, quietly, honestly. "I'd rather stay with you." An old bitter feeling surfaced inside her. She had never asked for the contest- tired of the comparison- once, she had a genuine and pure longing to be Rose so she could help, but now she wished he could look at her and hear her answer just this once- just this once, hear how much she herself cared.
"See!" He dropped his head to his hands. "That's precisely what Rose would have said."
And then Martha said that thing she knew she shouldn't have said, under her breath, but still all too audibly, a bit sarcastically. "Me and Rose- we're just alike then?"
He turned an alarmed, taken-aback scowl on her. "Of course you aren't," he snapped, rather sharply.
And then silence. For two doctors, they knew surprisingly little of how to alleviate the pain between them.
"Right, then." Martha stood immediately, blinking very hard and very fast. "Thanks for the story, Doctor. Are you- are you going to be alright?"
"Always," he said very quietly, to his folded hands, as she headed for the door. "Thanks for listening."
Martha relived the conversation for hours that night and couldn't believe how horridly rude she must have seemed. The Doctor spent about a minute and a half of his nightly tinkering with the TARDIS regretting his slicing comment to Martha. Then he found a pink barrette in a ventilation shaft, and he was back to regretting everything.
So flesh and blood hid away, while he searched the stars for the translucent.
(He couldn't find either one.)
Martha awoke late in the night and heard him still rattling and banging around in the control room. She was worried a bit, and guilty, at any rate, too worried and guilty to go back to sleep. So she rose and found her way to the kitchen, made a pot of tea and brought it to the control room door, the way all good insomniac friends should. Halted there, she heard a muffled sob from inside, and she froze, alarmed, waiting for the sounds to stop. They didn't, but the door handle was stuck. He had managed to lock her out.
Three more times she came to the doorway with that pot of tea and three more times she debated knocking. But she didn't. She couldn't. A thousand thoughts flew through her head- it wasn't like him. If she interrupted, he would be humiliated. He would never forgive her. If he wanted her, he knew where to find her. He must have chosen to be alone.
Unless she never should have walked out in the first place, or she would still be on the other side of that door.
But mostly Martha told herself that she would never know the right thing to say or do to help because she wasn't sweet, darling, precious Rose.
(And maybe if they had walked that extra block on April the twenty-seventh, she would have understood that sweet, darling, precious Rose would have been just as completely out of her depth now.)
(Maybe she also would have understood that wild dogs- or possessed Ood or angry Slitheen or whatever- couldn't have kept Rose out of that room with that tea, even if she had to break down the door herself.)
(But she wouldn't have needed to, because for sweet, darling, precious Rose, he never would have locked it in the first place.)
Well, the muse had been away for around six months and then she attacked at four o'clock in the morning and this happened. Hopefully she'll stick around more permanently now :) Reviews feed her!