OKAY KIDS. GET READY FOR SOME PUNCH TO BE PACKED!

I DO NOT WANT THE NAUGHTY BET TO BE DROWNED IN THE SEA OF GREAT SORROW, SO PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THIS CHAPTER ONLY REMEMBERING THE WEEPY STUFF!


ELEVEN

As BBC News prattled on about a corporate giant who had gone mysteriously bankrupt while taking his cronies on long trips to the Caribbean, a computer screen blipped beside the television. It showed a display of the ever-growing pink blob with arms at the centre of the Earth. Two of the arms were now fully formed on the screen, the two in Brazil and Egypt. The Colorado and Tahiti arms were still being detected, and the fifth, it seemed, was going to deploy in central Asia, but it was not yet clear precisely where.

Martha stared at it in disbelief. She could not believe that this was what was on the inside of her home planet. How had the scientists got it so wrong? How could astronomers not have detected something spacey within the Earth's crust? How is it that the ship wasn't giving off radiation, as well as leaking a drug into the Earth's elements? And how the hell do you drown when you're in a ship at the centre of the Earth?

The Doctor entered the room with the sandwiches. He'd offered to do it when Martha mentioned it, and she had agreed to let him, without too much argument.

"Thanks," she said, taking her plate. "I would have done it, you know."

"I know," he said. "I just wanted to be nice."

She looked at him with a little surprise. "You are nice."

"I haven't been called that very many times," he said.

She ran her free hand through his thick shock of dark hair. "Well, here it comes again, are you ready? You are a very, very nice man. And you're sexy." She smiled, pleased with herself.

It was an inexplicably emotional moment for the Doctor. He knew Martha was just being cute (though sincere), but something so simple to a human was often watershed for a Time Lord. For this Time Lord, anyway. He wasn't sure why he felt he needed to mask this for Martha's benefit, but he did, and as such, dug into his sandwich with gusto.

He'd made tomato-mozzarella sandwiches on focaccia with olive oil and basil. He had sliced some peaches and laid them out nicely on the sides of the plate and brought a pot of tea from a plug-in near where they were sitting. Martha had just planned to throw some jam sandwiches together, but she wasn't about to complain. She hadn't eaten since that small bite of strawberry and brie in Vail with the unfortunate Vincent Bidwell, and she hadn't realised how hungry she'd become. She was so grateful for this, she all but moaned with satisfaction.

She glanced at the computer screen, and commented through a mouthful of focaccia, "Vail is almost complete. Central Asia's coming along too." She chewed and swallowed. "I've been laying odds in my head as to who will identify the next site first, the world press or the TARDIS."

"Oh, the TARDIS, hands-down," the Doctor said, matter-of-factly, also speaking through a mouthful.

"But you're not exactly an objective party, are you?"

He looked at her with amusement. He licked two of his fingers. "Care to make it interesting?"

She smiled back, flirting a bit. "What did you have in mind?"

"If I win, and the TARDIS works it out before the media does, then you have to..." he leaned forward and whispered something in her ear that made her blush.

Her jaw dropped, and she said, "Doctor! You are definitely washing your mouth out with soap before kissing me again!"

He looked at her with barely contained glee. "How 'bout it?"

She thought about it, still blushing a bit. "What if I win?"

"Name your poison."

"Okay," she said slowly. "If the BBC reports it first, then you have to..." and now it was her turn to whisper in his ear.

He pulled away and looked at her with questioning eyes. "There are over eight thousand different symbols in the Gallifreyan alphabet. That could take days."

"Even better," she chirped, smiling. "Is it a deal, then?"

In lieu of an answer, he offered his hand. They shook on it, looking lustfully into each others' eyes. Truthfully, neither of them cared who won the bet – everyone wins either way, and they both knew it.

They both sat back again and distractedly carried on with their sandwiches.

"I just can't believe this," she commented, staring at the slowly growing Rachnoss star in the middle of the Earth. "This thing has really been there the whole time? Through the amoebae and continental drift the Australopithecus and the... 1980's?"

"Yep. The whole time."

"All that time, and then one day they just drowned? I just don't get it, Doctor."

He sighed. He looked over at her and searched for any indication that she suspected the truth. He found nothing to betray her feelings to that end, and that actually made him feel worse. Clearly, the question of how the Rachnoss offspring were killed was on her mind, and he could go on ignoring it, he could make something up, he could blame it on a natural phenomenon. But he was trying to turn over a new leaf in the honesty department, he was trying to let Martha in, become closer to her, let go of the anger so he could love her from a place of light and fulfilment.

He sighed again.

"It was me, Martha," he said quietly. "I drowned them."

"What?" she asked, stunned.

"I drowned the Rachnoss. There is no one left alive on that ship to stop the leakage of the Vitiatum because I killed them all."

Martha stared at him with wonder. "Were they part of the Time War as well? Is that why they were sent into exile by the Time Lords?"

"No, that happened almost five billion years ago. The Time War was... more recent. And when I killed the Rachnoss, it was more recent even than that."

"How recent?"

"One month before we met."

"Before you and I met?"

"Yes. Remember when we were in that room in the hospital with the computers, and I swore to you that I hadn't been looking for trouble?"

"Vaguely. Sorry, it was a weird day."

"Well, it was because I'd been lying low, trying to stay out of the fray for a bit. I'd gone a bit insane with the Rachnoss and a friend of mine helped me see that I'd gone too far. And that I needed someone in my life to keep me grounded. To tell me to stop, to keep me connected to humanity."

The wonder continued to radiate from Martha's face. She had been prepared to hear about atrocities he may have committed in the Time War, but not so close to home, so close to her. She had to know something else, something that may have seemed superficial, but somehow important to her. "What did you look like then?"

"Excuse me?"

"What did you look like? Have you regenerated since then?"

"I looked exactly like I do now. I was in this body, with this hair and face and teeth and personality." He couldn't look at her as he said this. He knew that his companions could come to terms with his past if and when they knew he'd been 'a different man' back then, especially because his personality changes with each regeneration. But this, he wasn't sure she'd be able to recover from.

For her part, she was having trouble picturing it. Her Doctor, the man who had tried to show mercy to the last Dalek in Manhattan, in the name of not committing genocide... the eyes, mouth, ears, freckles, hair and disposition she loved had been warped into a murderous rage and drowned an entire population of incubating Rachnoss. She tried to imagine her Doctor, stony and insane and determined, and the amount of water it must take to drown beings who live four thousand miles below the surface of the Earth. It must have been chaos.

"What were they trying to do?" she wondered.

"They had used a woman called Donna and doused her with a kind of magnetic particle. That re-animated the ship at the centre of the Earth, and the Rachnoss children were on their way back up to devour the human race. I offered the Empress a chance to flee, but she refused. So I flooded the hole and drowned them."

"Oh my God," she whispered. "Why couldn't you just seal off the hole somehow?"

"That occurred to me later," he confessed. "But at the time, I was blind with fury. I was heartbroken and angry and just... pissed off and dangerous. I'd just lost Rose, had just given up trying to find a way through to her side of the void when Donna appeared. The whole episode scared her so badly, I'd scared her so badly, she refused to travel with me after that. As it was, she kept asking me what had happened to Rose. I'm pretty sure she was convinced I'd killed her."

"And then she told you that you need someone."

"Yeah. She saved my life that day, Martha. She stopped me from staying too long and drowning myself along with the Rachnoss, and she kept me from being alone, by implanting a conscious need. I travel with whomever I'm drawn to, but had never considered the need for a companion before."

They sat in silence for a long time. Martha's mind was darting all over the place. She was wondering about regeneration and war and heartbreak and murder and all that was going on in the Doctor's mind in those first nine months they were together before they'd opened up to each other. She had just been travelling, seeing it all, taking it all in and enjoying herself while all that turmoil was going on beneath the surface of the Doctor's mind. She'd seen the first hint when they were on New Earth and he'd confessed he'd lied to her about his home planet. But still, she'd been so caught up in her adolescent unrequited love business, she'd managed to convince herself it was the most angst happening inside the TARDIS. She felt almost ashamed for feeling so sorry for herself all that time.

Again, lost in her own reverie, she was startled when the Doctor began speaking. He was staring at the floor and his face was dead. "The Daleks blew the Citadel to smithereens with no warning. Everyone who lived there was still inside – along with Thisa. And I had let her go."

This change in gears was a surprise to her, but she listened. He had confessed to killing the Rachnoss in anger, what exactly had caused this segueway?

She tried to be helpful. "Well, you said she was like her father," Martha said. "Talented like him. Was she the daughter of someone important?"

He nodded.

"Perhaps while she was helping with negotiations, she got to see her family again. You gave her that."

"She didn't die with her family," he told her. "She died with a bunch of stuffed-shirt strangers who did not understand her."

"I'm sorry," she whispered. It was a condolence as well as an apology for forcing him to say it. She wondered if she should even bother trying to console him with such banal assumptions.

"The glass dome over the Citadel fell, and the flames escaped into the mountains surrounding. And Gallifrey..." he choked. "...and Gallifrey began to burn. First the Citadel, then the city, the mountains of Solace and Solitude... and I watched."

Martha moved close to him and took his hand. She kissed it and held it tightly in her lap as she listened.

"Any citizens surviving in the city were evacuated by the Daleks and taken away, aboard the Mastership. They were to be enslaved, the cleverest ones converted to Dalek. A Time Lord mind with a Dalek's disposition – now there is something that could have destroyed life as we know it in the universe."

Martha was reminded of their brief stay in New York, 1930. The hybrids were made benign by diluting the Dalek force with conscious Time Lord DNA and an inherently human core. But he was right. Purely distilled Time Lord knowledge and intelligence with all emotion and compassion removed... she shuddered.

"By then, the Cloister, the collective TARDIS consciousnesses, had been destroyed inside the Citadel. I had the only living TARDIS left." He looked around the room and absently stroked the arm of the sofa, a little piece of his trusted vessel. "I tried to save my planet. I landed in the plains and used everything I had to keep the flames at bay… wind, rain, sand, my will. Nothing worked. The flames burned too hot and too strong, and eventually, I just... I had to get out of there. There was nothing else I could do. The blast on the Citadel had come so without warning..." he sighed. "I could have tried harder, I suppose."

"Don't do that," Martha said.

"I know. Useless, eh?"

His breathing was laboured now, ragged. His teeth were clenched, and he talked through them, holding anger back just barely. Martha squeezed his hand tighter, hoping to help him brace for whatever came next.

"I hovered above and saw my planet slowly burning... dying, just dying right before my eyes." The tears came now, he choked on every third word, and his fingers dug into the sofa's arm, and Martha's palm. "The trees and grass themselves were calling out to me, screaming. Everything was alive in those last moments, and everything was suffering."

She was crying with him now. She felt the full force of it all, the whirlwind of fire and pain and screaming he must have been bombarded with in those moments. Time Lords and TARDISes and planets and time and particles, everything is connected, everything is alive and feeling. The whole of the Doctor's body and consciousness must have been buzzing with hurt and decay and a sense of doom. And in this moment, sitting here with Martha in the TARDIS, watching BBC News, it was all coming back, perhaps for the first time ever.

"What was left of my planet was suffering and burning. What was left of my people were aboard the Dalek ship ready to be enslaved or worse," he explained, trying visibly to calm himself. "But I knew that my TARDIS had a little something of the Cloister left within her heart – a whole network of time vortexes and untempered schisms with one last big push still remaining. I discharged it, what was left of the Cloister's will, and it burned my planet whole in one stroke of a button, along with the Dalek Mastership and my people on board, swallowing the whole thing within a time-lock."

Martha exhaled a short, rough breath, and tears literally fell from her face onto their hands in her lap.

"I killed my planet, and I thought I would go with it. I was ready to go with it, die with my people. And I did," he said. "I died. For about two minutes. I hadn't been at the centre of the explosion, I'd only been taken down by the blowback, and the TARDIS saved me. I regenerated."

"What were you like then?"

"Bitter. Oh, so bitter. And angry, damaged, raw. I had nothing left to give, Martha, nothing. I tried to feel as little as possible, and only landed anywhere when it was absolutely necessary. Only wound up on Earth because some living plastic had found its way back here."

"I remember that," she whispered, wiping her eyes. "Department store dummies came to life."

"Yep," he said. "I followed them down into a department store basement where they had cornered a girl. That was the first human contact I'd had in... I don't know how long. First human, first humanoid, first sentient contact with anything other than the TARDIS."

"You saved her?"

"Well, I held out my hand and told her to run. But in the long run, I think she saved me."

Martha smiled. "That was Rose."

"Yes, and you know how it goes after that," he said, almost rolling his eyes with the repetition of it. "More tears, more loss, more guilt... and then there was you." He looked at her with eyes full of tears, a streaked face, and more sorrow than she had ever seen. But he managed to smile, a little glimmer of hope through the darkness hanging about him.

She touched his face, stroked his cheek. "And then there was me," she agreed.

"And oh, do I love you," he said, more tears pushing through, falling over her fingers.

"I love you too," she sobbed. She leaned forward and pressed her lips against his, sealing yet another huge revelation with an affirmation of their bond. Magnetically, they were driven to press together, to seek closure for the fissure that no longer existed, to put no daylight between them.