INCOMPLETE
"So, do you know a psychic dry cleaner?" asked Martha, entering the console room the following morning. Her black dress was in her hands. She held it up to the light, seeing the splotches of oily residue left behind. "Because I don't think the standard operating procedure will do the trick this time."
The Doctor looked at her sideways. "I'm so sorry I forced you to walk into the ocean fully-clothed," he said.
She shot him a dirty, but still whimsical, look. Inside, she knew, though, that she couldn't and wouldn't have traded that experience for the world.
He reached out for the dress, and she put it in his hand. He did the same as she had just done; he spread it out and held it up. "Actually, I do know someone who can sort this," he said.
"Another dodgy planet?"
"Not so dodgy. Not most of the time any way. It's Earth."
"What, an actual dry cleaner?"
"Yep."
"But this is a substance from an alien planet," she protested. "What if it has, like, a chemical compound he's never seen before and he alerts the authorities or something?"
"Oi," he exclaimed. "I don't accuse your friends of intergalactic espionage."
She giggled a bit. "Sorry."
"Besides, he's not a local," the Doctor said. "He passes for human, but he's not human. He lives in Kansas, operates a legitimate business, but he does have some, er, non-local chemicals at his disposal. Remember when we had lizard guts? He's the one who fixed your blouse."
"Okay, then," she said. "Why Kansas?"
"His wife is from there. He fell in love, and what could he do? Love sees no species."
She blushed, but she did smile, which was a relief for him.
"Right then," she said. "Lead on."
When the TARDIS came to its usual screeching halt, Martha stood on the railing and peeked outside. There was corn as far as the eye could see, and perhaps a hundred metres off, a large silo. "Cool!" Martha exclaimed.
He joined her at the window. "Really? You think so?"
"Absolutely!" she said. "Don't get to see much of this in London!"
"Well then, town mouse," he said, offering his arm. "Let's go visit the country mouse."
They stepped outside the police box and pulled the door shut. Martha marvelled at the miles and miles of corn. "Just think," she said. "All this is destined to become crisps and ice cream and oil and energy..."
He wasn't really listening. "By the way, did I mention? It's 1957."
"What? Why?"
"My friend lives in the 1950's. Sorry."
Martha's heart sank. "Small town middle America in the 1950's?" she whined. "Doctor, you know what? I'm just going to stay here, okay?"
"Why would you do that?"
She pointed at her face. He was always forgetting that part.
"No, come on," he scolded, taking her hand. "Every time I come here they think I'm gay, so we'll just... you know, be extra friendly and irritate them."
She went with him reluctantly. "Yeah, but you can hold my hand and look less gay," she told him. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Be beautiful and charming," he said. "No problemmo."
They entered the town holding hands, and did indeed attract a few stares. The Doctor tried to be friendly while Martha simply tried not to make eye contact.
But before she knew it, they were turning the corner and entering a dry cleaning shop. The place smelled of chemicals and dust.
"Doctor!" the woman behind the counter cried out. She came round and rushed at him for a hug. "So good to see you! What brings you back to these parts, may I ask?"
She was tall and slender and awkward, with a few too many freckles and stringy strawberry blonde hair. She kept it pinned behind her ears unevenly with bobby pins, and the dress she wore was dowdy and a size or two bigger than necessary. Oddly, she wasn't wearing any shoes.
"Oh, bit of trouble offshore, I'm afraid," he answered whimsically, smiling back at her. He handed her Martha's dress, which he had slung over his shoulder.
"Offshore?" she asked, examining the dress. She put her hands on her hips. "How far offshore are we talking?"
"Adipose 3," he said. "Edge of the Mittvox Galaxy."
"Well, it's oily, but there ain't no stain we can't fix!"
"Glad to hear it," the Doctor said.
The woman looked at Martha with mischief in her eyes, then back at the Doctor.
"Oh! I'm sorry! Martha, this is Eleanor – she's the wife of the friend I told you about," he said, taking Martha's hand again. "Eleanor, this is Martha Jones."
"Oh, Martha," Eleanor cried, grabbing Martha's free hand to shake vigourously. "I've heard so much about you! He just sings your praises like you wouldn't believe!"
"Really?"
"Yes, of course! You're a medical student, right? The Doctor says you gave him your last breath once!"
"I suppose I did, yes," she confessed.
"And that you lured some mutated monster away from him, and saved his life when he'd been posessed by the sun, and took care of him while he was out of his mind at some military school out in the boondocks for months and months..."
"Right, and then she walked across the world and saved the planet from destruction," the Doctor said. "She's bloody amazing, this one."
"And she is pretty, just like you said," Eleanor winked at the Doctor.
"Yes, well..." he said.
Eleanor leaned back on one hip and looked at Martha with exaggerated awe. "Look at you," she said. Martha smiled uneasily. "You've won the favour of a man who does not easily impress, my girl."
"I suppose..." Martha shrugged. "Anyway, it's lovely to meet you."
"Likewise, I'm sure," Eleanor said. "Well, come on in, you two. We'll get to work on this dress."
They followed her through a curtain and into a room with cement floors and shelves full of chemicals. Different stretching mechanisms loomed about the room, and surfaces gleamed silver. There was something antiseptic about it, and appealing to Martha. Perhaps it was simply the company.
Eleanor hung the dress on a rack and closed a metal cover around it. "Pretreatment," she said matter-of-factly.
She motioned for them to follow her up a set of stairs, and to Martha's surprise, it led into a home. The door opened into the kitchen, and the living room was to their right. At the table, hunched over a sea of paperwork, sat a tall man in a white and blue plaid shirt. He looked up and gave a start when he saw the Doctor.
"Doctor!" he yelled, standing up abruptly. "Fantastic to see you!"
"And you," the Doctor said, shaking his hand in a peculiar way. They grasped each others' wrists as they did so. The man had an accent that was clearly not local. To Martha, he had a bit of Eastern Europe in his voice, and she wondered how he had fared in this town when he'd first arrived.
"Martha, this is Keloftarolanch Devlorfylund from the planet Trekornak B-6. But, around here, he's called Jim Rigby the dry cleaner," the Doctor said to her. "Jim, this is Martha Jones."
"Oh-ho-ho!" Jim laughed, coming round the table to get a better look at Martha. "Martha! You're like a legend!"
"Oh, Jim," Eleanor scolded. "Stop it, you're going to embarrass the poor girl! Now, you two, sit and have coffee. Or, sorry – it's probably tea in your neck of the woods. Jim, can you make them some tea?"
"Coffee's fine," Martha assured them. "You're too kind anyway."
"My neck of the woods doesn't have a trademark beverage, so I'm good with anything," the Doctor said, ribbing Jim a bit. He grabbed a chair at the kitchen table and motioned for Martha to take it. He sat next to her.
"Great," Eleanor said. "I'll make up the guest room for you two."
"Oh, we can't impose..." the Doctor protested.
"No imposition," she insisted. "Besides, in this town, the two of you won't be able to get a motel room, no how. Not together, anyway. Now I'll assume that you'd both want to take the guest room, or am I being presumptuous?"
"No, not at all," the Doctor told her.
When Eleanor was gone, Jim said, "Now, Martha, my wife wouldn't like me to say so, but we really have heard tons about you."
"I know," Martha smiled. "She said so downstairs."
He gestured toward the Doctor with a tilt of his head. "How did you handle this one after he'd been through the chameleon arch?"
"Not without a bit of headache," Martha answered. "Not the brightest three months of my life."
"And how long have you two been together?" he asked, briging two coffees to the table and sitting down.
"Erm," she said, clearing her throat. She and the Doctor glanced at each other. "Two years and some change, I guess. What about the two of you? How long have you known the Doctor?"
"Oh, ages," said Jim. "He keeps changing his face! Stick with him long enough and eventually you'll find yourself travelling with a whole different man!"
"So I've heard," she laughed.
"He's known me through four regenerations," the Doctor told Martha. His eyebrows were raised for emphasis. She knew that meant centuries of the Doctor's personal timeline – it was quite a relationship they had.
"Wow," she said to Jim. "So you knew him through the war, and the Daleks coming back, and through Rose, and all of that."
"Who's Rose?" Jim asked.
"Wow," Martha repeated, ploughing through the question. "Doctor, he's the first non-evil person I've met who's known you longer than Captain Jack!"
Jim looked quizzically at the Doctor. The Doctor muttered, "Bit of trouble with the Master." Jim's expression seemed to say, "Ah."
The three of them chatted for a bit, and when Eleanor joined them, the four of them spent the morning in the kitchen, talking about whatever came up. The Rigbys had been married for seventeen years, no children (reproductively incompatible), and had had their dry cleaning business for eleven of those years. They had met when Jim had been sent to Earth on an agricultural study, and his decision to stay with Eleanor had resulted in ostracism from his home planet. They seemed to know almost everything about how Martha and the Doctor met, and Martha sat back with amusement and listened to her own life story being read back to her as though it were a Greek epic.
Jim got up and made some sandwiches and sliced some oranges, then went down to tend to Martha's dress. After lunch, they played a few card games, and when it was time, Jim went downstairs and fetched the dress. He hung it grandly on the doorjamb and announced, "Good as new, eh?"
"Lovely! Thank you!" Martha gushed as she fingered the dress. The texture was back to normal, the oil stains were gone – it was perfect.
"Oh, you're very welcome, beautiful lady," he said to her, kissing her cheek. "Now where will you be wearing it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure," she said. "Every time I do, something happens to it."
"Well, why bother if you're not going to live in it?"
"Very true," she smiled.
"Of course, you can do just as much living out of the dress," he said, busying himself with cleaning up the card game.
Martha and the Doctor both knew it was an innocent comment, meant to illustrate that it doesn't take a beautiful dress to make one feel special and beautiful and alive. But with the state of mind they'd been in lately, it made them avoid one another's eye.
They declined an invitation to take dinner with the Rigbys, but decided rather to have their own private picnic in a park. Later on, they strolled hand-in-hand through a cornfield, that most fascinating of rural places in the mind of Martha Jones. She had decided not to wear the black dress tonight – she knew that if she did, there would be a flood or an earthquake or a swarm of locusts sure to adorn the garment with some disease or time-stamp activatable imprint of biblical disaster. She had made do with a pair of linen capri pants and a tank top.
Neither one had said anything for a while, and then Martha couldn't stand it any longer. "Doctor, your friend's name is Eleanor Rigby, have you ever noticed?."
He sighed. "Yes, I told Jim to choose a different surname, but he wouldn't listen."
Martha laughed. "Ten years' time, they'll have a good laugh themselves."
"I suppose they will," the Doctor said. He chuckled as well.
For another few minutes, they walked in silence while Martha stewed over a question. She didn't want to insult him, make their relationship any weirder than it already was, but she had to know something.
"Doctor?"
"Hm?"
"Did you put him up to saying that?"
"What? That he'd heard a lot about you? No, that's just how it is."
"Well, not just that he'd heard about me, but that he hadn't heard..."
He looked at her, understanding. "Oh."
She looked at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. He didn't give her one for a while.
"The answer is no, I didn't put him up to saying it," he said.
"Is it true?" she asked. "Did you really never mention Rose to them?"
"It's true," he answered. "I really never did. I hadn't realised it until now."
"Why not?" she asked. "Wasn't she just as remarkable as me?"
"Eh, I suppose."
An idea occurred to her, and she found herself voicing it before she could stop herself. "Was it that she was so remarkable, that you couldn't bring yourself to mention her, to share her with someone else?"
He winced a little. God, this was messy.
"No, it wasn't that. It was... Rose was dynamic and clever. She was a kind of diamond in the rough, as I saw it, and that's part of why I loved her. But that was just it; she was a bit rough, or at least she'd had a bit of a rough background, needed a lot of rescuing. It's like she wasn't finished yet, not quite a whole person."
"Oh. Wow."
"And I guess I just wasn't in any position to brag about her until I felt she was complete," he said. "Like at some point she'd have a coming-out party or something and I could reveal my work. Maybe that's petty of me, selfish – vain, even."
Martha could see why he would think that, but she knew he was exaggerating. The Doctor was not a petty man.
And then he stopped walking and faced her. He stroked her upper arms. "But you. You're something else entirely. You're dynamic and clever too, but you're a diamond among diamonds, Martha. You were complete when I met you. You didn't need rescuing, you don't need me to teach you about life. You didn't need anything from me..."
"But clearly I do. Isn't that why we're here?"
"Perhaps, but it's closer to the same thing that I need from you. With you, there's a reciprocity which Rose wasn't really capable of providing."
"I can see that, I guess."
"I loved her, but I felt like I needed to finish bringing her up before I could..." he trailed off.
"You mean you and she never...?"
"Never," he said. "I thought about it a lot, of course. Drove me to distraction, in fact. But it would have been like a schoolteacher and his pupil." He shuddered a bit.
"That's a surprise, I have to admit."
He nodded, but didn't say anything.
She turned, took his hand again and coaxed him into walking some more. "Doctor, relationships are hard. It should be about what you both bring to the table, lessons you can teach to each other, but little inequity can be good, you know?"
"I hope so," he commented. "Otherwise, we're all doomed."
"But at the end of the day, the inequity needs to balance."
"You mean, if I need you more than you need me, it's okay, as long as the reverse is true sometimes as well?"
"Yes."
"That makes sense."
"Of course it does. You and I can both think of times when I've depended upon you, and vice versa, and not just when our lives are in peril and ships are crashing into the sun. And we're still here, aren't we?"
He stopped again, and faced her once more. "So do you think the fact that I need you more than you need me right now balances out the fact that you're in love with me?"
"Maybe. As long as you think there's potential for the scales to tip."
"I think there definitely is. More than potential." His eyes were soaked with worry, with sincerity, perhaps regret.
"Then I think it's fair," she said, smiling.
His expression turned on a dime, and he smiled back, a bit sideways. "Have we just made another deal?"
"Shall we seal it with a handshake?" She was being very coy now, looking at him through a tantalising bit of hair that had fallen in her eyes.
He stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. His lips met hers softly, her eyes slid closed instinctively, and her hands travelled up and pushed gently against his chest. She could feel both hearts racing against her palms, and her own pulse insisting hard inside her veins. He moved his hands up to cup her cheeks and chin, and his tongue pushed delicately into her mouth. She tugged at it with her lips and teased back with her own tongue.
When at last he pulled away, he asked, "Shall we go back to the house?"
She nodded, leaning into him as he put an arm around her. Neither of them said anything on the slow jaunt back to the Rigbys'. They enjoyed the feel of being together, the heat of each others' bodies, the vivid memory of their first real kiss.
When they arrived, the Doctor let them inside, and they found that Jim and Eleanor were already asleep. They turned on no lights, but the moon shone in from the outside, bathing the house in a blue glow. Martha sat on the sofa and looked back up at him, inviting him to join her. He did, and they resumed where they had stopped in the cornfield.
He rested his arm and elbow on the back of the sofa and cradled her head in the crook of his arm as he kissed her. She unbuttoned his suit coat so she could feel the warmth inside, be closer to his skin. And as time progressed, his grip became tighter, his breathing came out in forced moans, and everything about him grew insistent and desirous.
A sense of danger came over Martha as the Doctor's tongue probed between her lips once again, and her body flushed with heat in response. A snog standing in a cornfield was one thing, but this was another. A private living room, a warm house, a comfy sofa, a man clearly inflamed, the 'elders' fast asleep and a bed waiting for them twelve feet away...
And then he took his lips on the journey past her ear and down her neck which they had taken last time the moment had struck, and his tongue found a sweet spot and she gasped, digging her fingers into his flesh. This gesture gave her such a surge of lust, for a brief moment, she thought it was a foregone conclusion: their relationship would be sealed right here, tonight on this sofa in a rain of frantic panting and flying clothes and reckless momentum. Her mind was filled with images; capture, ecstasy, release, recovery... then the bed, tangled sheets, slower movements, a new momentum, a new release...
She knew they'd be here all night.
But then he said it. Four words changed everything, at least for now. "Don't ever leave me," he whispered desperately into her ear.
Her eyes flew open as she tore herself away from the images melting in her brain. New revelations tortured her now.
When she didn't say anything, with the same desperation in his voice, he insisted, "Martha, say it! Promise me!" as his lips travelled lithely over her skin.
He sounded like a child, and there was too much need there. She knew that feeling all too well, and she knew what the Doctor would have done in her situation.
"Doctor..." she whispered back.
He paused and looked at her. His hands and fingers moved over her face, caressing her eyes and hair, exploring her softness. His lips curled into a wry, clueless, smile. "I think you are complete," he whispered to her.
She smiled back, tears forming in her eyes. "But I don't think you are," she said. "Not just now."
His hands dropped from her face, and his entire body seemed to lose its impetus. His eyes went to a pleading, helpless expression, and he said, "I was hoping you wouldn't notice."
The tears came, just like little sprinkles of rain down glass, and she said, "I think we should say good night."
"Yeah," he whispered. He took her hand and squeezed it. "Go," he said, without looking at her.
She stood up, and plunged her right hand into his unruly hair. She let her fingers stroke through slowly, just once, and she said, "I love you." He looked up at her and opened his mouth to speak. She stopped him. "You don't need to say anything. Just know that I love you."
As she looked back from the bedroom door, he settled himself on his back, a throw pillow beneath his head. He smiled at her in commiseration, and she blew him a kiss and closed herself inside.
When the sun came up, neither one of them had slept.
