Girl Talk
thedorkygirl
Ten, Martha
Written before the series three premier. Spoilers a bit for DW series three companions, natch.
"You've had how many girls in the TARDIS?"
The Doctor shifted his gaze from side to side and ruffled his hair, but Martha felt only marginal guilt over her shrill tone. He acted as if he hadn't upset someone before -- and the level of skepticism she held for that notion registered higher than her voice at the moment.
"To be fair, all of them were legal, and we remained clothed at all times. Well, when I say at all times, I mean at all times in the TARDIS. There were a few planets with strange customs, and once there was a fertility festival and a Batorak on the loose -- but, no, you don't care about that, do you? If it makes you feel any better, I've had a fair number of men. Jamie. Fitz. I don't count Harry, because I had Sarah Jane for the most part, and she's tops. I've had more. You want to hear?"
"Yeah, I think we'll stop talking about it in that fashion," Martha said. "I don't want to know how many men you've had."
The Doctor knitted his brows. "There's a funny story I can tell you if we're talking about in that fashion, oddly relevant to today --"
"We weren't! Oh, how did we get on this conversation in the first place?"
"Your pets," said the Doctor with an indignant air. "You told me about them and asked what I'd had."
"I was talking about dogs and cats. A goldfish. One goldfish. Her name was Edna."
"We could get a goldfish."
"We're not getting a goldfish. They're not shiny enough to keep your attention for more than three days, and in a month's time, I'd find it floating in a dirty brown puddle at the bottom of a bowl."
"There's a fish on Asthmith Five that glows in neon colors reflecting its moods. I'd be quite entertained, I think. At least six weeks. I've had a good track record on that time length, again oddly relevant."
"Oh, God," moaned Martha. "In a month's time, I'll be at the bottom of that fishbowl. You'll forget to feed me. Forget I don't glow orange when I'm hungry. Forget I'm with you. Leave me on a planet, you will, and by the time you figure out which one (and I'm sure there'll be a lag of at least four planets), you'll navigate the TARDIS ten years into my future. I'll have gone native like the Batorak."
The Doctor patted her arm comfortingly. "The Batorak wasn't naked, I was, and I'm sure if I forgot to feed you that you'd manage to find the kitchen by yourself. Well, not terribly certain, now that I think of it, because sometimes I get lost on the way to the kitchen. About once a month, really, and it always seems like it's in a new place, doesn't it? I can't decide if it's because I haven't woken up fully or if the TARDIS is playing games with me."
"Does that, does she?"
"You should have seen what she did to the Daleks," the Doctor said mildly. "Mind you, there was someone helping, and I died, but for practical jokes, the old girl really gets top marks. Bit of a lark, that. I'd take you to see it, but there's the whole crossing of the timelines and the possibility of death. Your death, not mine. Though I suppose I could die again if I weren't careful. Well, when I say suppose I really mean that there's about a sixty percent chance. Bit of a war zone, that was. Seventy percent. Seventy-five percent chance that I'd die. But only because almost everybody did. But I've beaten greater odds, of course. Yes, I don't think I'd die this time."
Being sensible, Martha didn't get into the conversation of multiple lives with the Doctor at that time. She knew that one mustn't ever start such a talk when one had the beginnings of a headache.
"Don't worry," he said, reading her look wrongly. "She brought them all back. Most back. At least one. Not the Daleks, of course. It was during her signature phase. She's out of it, now, thank God, but she signed everything for a while there like a hoodlum with a can of spray paint. She did do a thing with a bay, but that was more of a nostalgia trip for her, like an annual at the end of school. I'm almost positive it was the finish of it. Fairly confident."
Martha put her head into her hands and rubbed at her temple in a methodical fashion, trying to remember how to relieve a migraine. It seemed that in times of stress she couldn't manage the complexity of mirroring her actions, and the act left her feeling asymmetrical.
"If I were to leave right now, how long would it be before you had this conversation with someone else?"
"You know, I couldn't say. I honestly haven't done this before. This regeneration likes to rhapsodize, but I think I might put off this conversation a bit longer with the next one. It's not going so well, and I like to think that I'm the sort of man to learn from his mistakes. Well, I say learn from his mistakes and mean blatantly ignore all signs of them until they're there. I like to finish the job, you might say. I clean up after, though."
"At least I know you won't be lonely." Martha sighed. "I'm going to bed, Doctor, but first I need an adapter for my charger. Please find one and don't interrupt me to try to talk me into using one of the TARDIS's terminals. I know she has an excellent system, but I like my Blackberry."
"Such a limited piece of technology for how much time you spend with it."
He'd conveniently forgotten the afternoon he'd spent taking it apart and marveling over what he termed its quaint engineering before adding a temporal distorter and amplifying the antenna's range. Martha suspected that the lack of an electrical adapter was his idea of a clever prank, so she constantly brought up its necessity and the inconvenience of stopping Earthside to power up.
"Good-night, Doctor. I'll rig an adapter on my own."
"Wait!" he said. "I have a surprise for you."
"A surprise? Why do I have the feeling that this conversation was just a build-up?"
The Doctor shrugged with a poor air of nonchalance and ran his tongue across his top teeth. "I seem to have caught a bit of that nostalgia I was telling you about. Come on, we've nearly arrived, and he'll be here just after we do." He peered at Martha anxiously and gnawed his lip. "You promise not to dance with him?"
"I think the possibility of that promise died about twenty minutes ago. Are we back to that subject again?"
"Well, on one level, no. On a completely related level, absolutely. He's a bit omnisexual. Rubbed off on me, you know, and took me out of my funk."
"Your funk?"
"I was considering a life of asexuality. I really think he changed that. After nine hundred years, it couldn't have been easy. I owe a great deal to him, and it's time I repaid the debt."
Martha decided not to ask the obvious question and instead took the coward's way out of it -- not because she was afraid in any way but because she was tired of trying to wrap her head around the Doctor's past relationships.
"Like a monk? You wanted to be celibate?"
The subject was, of course, if he'd been and remained that way, but her intuition told her that the Doctor would keep mum (or at least vague) on that topic.
"The greatest form of abstinence is the lack of desire. Well, really, with me, it was more of confusion. There was a thing with hands and one with blondes. I'm still not sure I understand it, really. I know I didn't understand it then, and that's the greatest understanding I have now. I suppose you could say that I'm confused on a completely different level now than I was before."
"They should teach that in schools," she said wryly. "That'll stop teen pregnancy, confusion."
"By the way, I've been meaning to ask you to trim your nails shorter. Just a bit, you know, so it's less like claws. We could also stop by a shop and get some nice trainers if you wish. Running shoes. For when we run for our lives. I like mine. Do you?"
Interrupting Martha's contemplation for a cutting response, something chimed a fair rendition of Timberlake's Sexyback as an alarm. The Doctor clapped his hands together with the apparent glee of an eight-year-old child and licked his lips. Martha ached for some gloss for her own reflexively.
"Oh, good, he'll be here any second. Let's wait by the door, shall we?"
"Maybe," said Martha more to herself than the Doctor (having given up on the adapter), "he'll be able to explain you."
"Somehow," he said, "I doubt that."