Homecoming
"Martha, come have some tea."
Martha closed the door to the sound of her mother's voice. She let her eyes rise slowly up the palsy wallpaper to their stylishly decorated ceiling, where the plaster dripped like organised tears. Behind her, she could hear the TARDIS pulsating; even through the heavy wooden door, the ghost noise of a spaceship echoing relentlessly against her eardrums.
She strode upstairs before the sound faded away, brought to life suddenly as she breathed in the sharp tang of her mother's lemon cleaner.
"Are you still using Rebex?" she called, leaning over the staircase. "That'll give you cancer."
She heard muted voices from the living room, but nothing directed at her.
With a shrug, Martha crossed the hallway and curled her fingers around the door handle to her bedroom. She hadn't been up here since she'd started traveling with the Doctor. She shifted, opening the door then resting palms on hips as her gaze fell on calendar hanging behind the window and the circled date upon it.
"Shit."
She walked over to the desk. It was below the south-facing window, catching the chill light from the clouded day. She didn't let herself look past the lace into the empty street beyond, but turned, leaning against the table. Her bed was unmade. Despite the elusive, pungent odour of bedroom hanging in the air, the room was lived in, relatively clean. There was no dust on the surfaces, no cobwebs in the corners, and the three spider plants Jake had given her during his happy hippy faze matched the pot plants from her memory: neither withered nor thriving, merely settled upon the bookshelf.
Martha threw down her coat and turned back to the calendar. Four days missing. Four hundred days missing. And she had less than a fortnight to make it up. She stared at her desk blindly, her eyes catching on the delicate dust specks thrown into focus by the sunlight. All her textbooks were there. It seemed wrong that they weren't dusty too.
There was a light knock on the door. Martha turned to see a smiling head poked around it, just like the Doctor might have done. But the smile was soft and sympathetic, the full lips tilted helplessly upwards, a warm and relieved face. Nothing like the Doctor's.
"Hi Mum."
She held out a cup of tea. "Won't you join us downstairs? We haven't seen you for.."
Martha snorted. "And I haven't seen my books for longer than that. Have you seen that deadline? I'm going to die, Mum; the next exam is going to kill me."
"You saved the Earth."
Martha rubbed her eyes before rolling them to her unadorned ceiling. "Somehow I don't think Doctor Taylor will accept my excuse. But it's okay. I can do it. It'll just take… time."
"Time," her mother echoed.
"Or twelve and a half days, to be exact." Martha half turned back to her desk, opening a textbook. "I'll come down later. Just after I finish… " she leant over a diagram and pulled a large notepad from her second drawer before seizing a green ink pen, scrawling the title with a flourish that was decidedly unfamiliar.
Her mother set the tea down on the desk and laid a hand on her daughter's shoulder. Then she closed the door. Martha clutched the mug of earl grey as she listened to her mother's footsteps fading away on the stairs; then she grabbed her alarm clock, positioning it on the desk where its incessant beat was comforting, a steady drum to her fevered revision.
She'd made the right choice. She just didn't have time to dwell on it.