Okay, I'm going to go ahead and call this Part II.
I am fond of this chapter. It has everything - every aspect of the Doctor's personality that we all adore, lust after and fear. And at this point, it's almost like a brand-new adventure... and yet...
Don't forget to review! :-D
PART II
FOURTEEN
A full twenty-four hours after the Doctor and Martha Jones had snuck out of the cellblock level in UNIT headquarters, Martha spoke again on the phone with her sister. This time, it was Tish who rang.
"Hi," said Tish. "I've got Larry Fortis on the line here. I wasn't sure if wanted me to pass along your number or not, so I just decided to do a conference call. Hope you two don't have any deep dark secrets."
"Oh, okay," Martha said. "Larry, are you there?"
"Yeah."
"How are things?"
"Spectacular," he said with a bit of a chirp. "Mace and I have been sacked. And so have you, by the way, for whatever that's worth."
Martha sighed. "I figured." She had seen it coming and she tried to comfort herself with the fact that she didn't want to work there anymore anyhow. But the high-achiever in her felt affronted, because she had never been fired from any job in her life. Not even when she was a teen.
"Larry already told me about this," Tish said. "I hope you don't mind. And I think it's totally outrageous, Martha. I'm so sorry for you. I mean, I have no idea the circumstances of your firing, but I'm sure you didn't do anything to deserve it."
"Thanks, Tish," Martha said with a smile. "So, Larry, that must mean that you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement?"
"Yep," he said. "I had to sign a ten-page document, with my initials at the bottom of each page. Mace's document was more like a-hundred-and-twelve pages. He's seen some serious stuff, I guess."
"Yeah, lots of stuff, quite serious," Martha chuckled. "I wonder how long my non-disclosure agreement is... should I ever decide to play fair."
He chuckled as well. "They should have to pay you a sixpence every time the word 'doctor' appears in any context. You'll be rich in no time."
"Wait, what happens to you if you… disclose?" asked Tish.
"Imprisonment," said Fortis. "In a special United Nations detention facility."
"Is that really a thing?"
"Oh, yeah," he confirmed. "And they don't have to give you a trial, and they can hold you indefinitely."
"Blimey," Tish grumbled.
"There's an appeal process, of course," reported the physicist. "If we want our jobs back, we can go through channels. Mace was already talking about a defence strategy when we were escorted from the Tower. I, personally, don't think I'll be doing that."
"Are you certain?" asked Martha. "I know they have their… flaws, but it really is an excellent opportunity working for UNIT. For a doctor, for a physicist, for a military man…"
"Yeah, but they're a bunch of brick walls who only see in black and white," Fortis argued. "I don't want to be in their midst, if this is how things are going to be."
"Well, how does one build a defence?" Martha wondered.
"I assume you sit in a room with a panel of ostensibly impartial parties, and calmly lay out the reasons why your getting sacked was one of the great injustices in human history. Preferably with a Powerpoint presentation, handouts and audio aids."
"Sounds like fun," Martha commented.
"Oi, don't knock the Powerpoint presentation, with handouts and audio," Tish advised. "Trust me. I'm in PR… a little of that goes a shamefully long way."
"That's what I'm saying," Fortis agreed. "And if you can get someone reliable to vouch for you, then you're all the better off."
"What about…" Martha began.
"The Brigadier?" asked Fortis, anticipating her question. "No way. He was numero uno on that risk-of-compromise list. Actually… he was numero dos. You, Dr. Jones, were numero uno."
"What about the Doctor?" asked Tish.
There was silence on the line.
"Sorry," she tried, in response to the utter lack of anything said. "It's just… doesn't UNIT consider him to be, like, some all-knowing alien guru? I'm not saying he's not, I'm just saying…"
"Tish, I haven't told you the whole story," Larry said.
"You said you couldn't," she responded. "That agreement that you signed."
"Right. Let's just say that…"
"Actually," Martha interrupted. "It's not the craziest idea ever."
"Seriously?" asked Fortis.
"Technically, he's still on the payroll. He wasn't sacked, was he?"
"No," admitted the physicist. "That will never, ever happen."
"He wasn't on the risk-of-compromise list," she said. "And UNIT is just weird enough, just devoted enough to the Brig and to the Doctor that they might consider the Doctor himself to have been a victim in all of this. And he was! This whole thing revolved around him, and they would most likely find no wrongdoing on his part, and might let him give a defence of Colonel Mace. And of you, if you wanted."
"Okay," said Fortis. "You make a good point. I'll ring Mace and see what he thinks."
"And you?" she asked.
"What about me?"
"Are you sure you don't want the Doctor to help you get your job back?"
Fortis gave a great exhale, in contemplation.
"Come on," Tish said. "You said yourself it was the best, most interesting job you ever had."
"I did say that," he sighed.
"You said that what you went through… the thing that got you sacked… you said it was totally worth it just for the experience. And you couldn't have had that experience without UNIT, could you? Are you really willing to give up a job like that?"
"Wow, Tish," Martha commented. "You're more invested in this than I would have thought. Just how long did the two of you talk before calling me."
"Just, like... forty-five minutes is all," Tish answered, somewhat sheepishly.
Martha laughed. "Oh, is that all?"
Fortis ignored the whole exchange. "Okay, what the hell. Ask the Doctor if he'll speak on my behalf, and I'll see what Mace says. I'll text Tish with his answer," Fortis decided. "I'll admit, I loved my job. Even if there were a number of operatives lying about who really were constantly asking for a conk to the head."
"Lovely," Martha chirped. "Just one more question. When are you two going out?"
"Friday night," Larry and Tish answered in unison.
According to a text message from Tish, Colonel Mace seemed to agree with Martha, that UNIT would probably accept the Doctor's evidence on his and Fortis' behalf, because though he had been at the centre of the Blue Alert conflict, he was blameless.
The hearing for both Colonel and physicist was set, much to everyone's shock, three days hence. Martha and the Doctor had sixty-eight hours to prepare an airtight, but also moving defence. Martha tinkered with a few computer programmes, including one that she'd received from a friend in UNIT's software development department. They talked about what sort of presentation they would need – bullets points of their narrative? Charts explaining the Eustarus' function? A timeline leading up to when their "offences" took place?
Ultimately, they decided that their best bet was statistics on Colonel Mace's successes with UNIT, versus his perceived failures, and the same for Dr. Fortis. They spent an entire twenty-four-hour period doing research on UNIT's databases. Martha's clearance had been revoked and the Doctor's was limited anyhow, so they went in through the back door. The Doctor got round UNIT's ludicrous Doctor-proofing by sitting in Martha's kitchen, using Martha's laptop, with common, dodgy on-the-dole-living-in-mum's-basement hacker techniques.
But what they yielded was worth the trouble. Lawrence Fortis was a prolific physicist and researcher; he had spearheaded the development of several modifications to extra-terrestrial combustion systems that could be patented for practical usage in the next seven-to-ten years amongst the British public at large. Such a thing would make UNIT (and therefore, the government) a mint.
Colonel Mace had participated in nigh on a hundred alien interventions, and had never been even suspected of negligence. According to UNIT's official records, nary a soldier nor civilian had died on his watch without cause, and/or because of a mistake on the Colonel's part. In fact, in at least fifty-six per cent of cases, an instance of "valiant effort" from Mace had been responsible for saving the lives of soldiers and/or civilians. And, as it happened, his driving record was flawless.
Although the Doctor could think of at least one instance when Mace's stubbornness had cost the lives of a team of good men…
"You're not going to mention that in the hearing are you?" Martha asked, a bit incredulous that the Doctor would even bring that up just now.
He paused. "What? Oh. No, no. Of course not." And he went back to his reading.
Both Mace and Fortis had more accolades, and the Doctor pored over the data meticulously, working to memorise it, and mentally cross-catalogue them against their very few missteps with UNIT and any data he could find on value judgments regarding mistakes versus successes. For instance, violating a class-A protocol (attempting to escape UNIT HQ with Martha's keys), versus Colonel Mace's success in a code-black situation (using recreational mathematics training extremely quickly, to decode and disarm a bomb that might have levelled a town in Wales, inhabited by 4,000 people). UNIT, as a rule, did try to quantify everything, and as it happened, this would work in their favour.
Martha retired to bed on the second-to-last night before the hearing, and said, "In the morning, I'll compile what you've gathered, and make visual graphs of all of it, so you'll have it for the presentation."
But when she woke, she found the Doctor pacing back and forth in the console room, practising his speech. He had nothing written down; he had only the mighty power of his brain.
"Are you sure you're going to need visual aid?" she asked with a smile. "It would only distract from your stunning rhetoric! And I mean that!"
"You think?"
"Yeah. Take it from me… you're awfully persuasive. Just on your own."
He smirked exhaustedly, the approached her. He took her hands, in his and kissed them both. "I'm sorry we've been so concentrated on work. We haven't had time for… you know, each other."
"It's all right," he said, shaking her head. "I suppose all of this is the cost of being together, in a way. Or, it's the price that I have to pay for my carelessness."
"No, stop…"
"Shh, it's fine. If we can get two good men their jobs back, then it's worth it."
"Okay, but be honest. How much coffee have you had in the last two days?"
"Oh, for our five barrels. You?"
"Only about three, but that's because I'm a Time Lord. I need less sleep than a human."
They both chuckled, then hugged, and sighed.
He kissed the top of her head and promised, "This will all be over, one way or another, by this time tomorrow. Then we can get back to the way life ought to be."
"Ought to be? You mean with foreign planets, aliens with tentacles, laser blasts and at least two near-death experiences per week?"
"Obviously."
"Brilliant," she chirped.
"Well, that… and also a lot of instances where we don't leave the bedroom for several days. Or wear clothes. I think that's really important."
"Oh, yeah. You've got to have that," she said, feigning seriousness. She closed her eyes, savouring the embrace.
The Doctor finally went to bed an hour or so after that, while Martha, feeling rather well-rested for once, attempted to clean up her flat. They set a perimeter alarm in the TARDIS, and set the TARDIS in her foyer, so that they would be alerted if any UNIT officers (or anyone else) came poking.
That night, she went to bed at a relatively normal time, while he stayed up, obsessively practising his speech again, having added an impassioned description of what occurred after Larry Fortis had given them the key to his cell. That is to say, he was able to anchor himself against Martha Jones, which meant that he, the Doctor, long-since such a valuable operative to UNIT that they had created entire protocols to keep him safe and secret, was not completely lost to "the dark side."
And the best thing about this impassioned description was: it was the truth.
The hearing came to order at three minutes after nine a.m. on Wednesday morning and took place in a small room in the basement of a neighbourhood church in Kent. Apparently, the goings-on of UNIT was too top-secret to go on-record, which would be necessary if they were to proceed in any government building.
And so, there was a rectangular table at which four UNIT officers (two women and two men) and one UNIT scientist (a woman) squeezed together with their legal pads, an analogue tape recorder (no computers), Styrofoam cups of tea, and stern expressions. Fortis and Mace sat in rickety wooden folding chairs on the other side of the room, almost in shadow. Both men were wearing dark business suits, as Mace had been forbidden to don his UNIT-issue military uniform unless and until his appeal was accepted.
To the two men's surprise, it was called, "The reinstatement appeal hearing of Colonel Alan Mace, Lawrence Fortis, Ph.D. and Martha Jones, M.D." Martha, of course, had never appealed, and had opted not to attend the hearing – instead she decided to wait in the hall. That the assumption had been made, both Mace and Fortis took as a promising sign.
"Colonel Mace, may we start with you?" said the severe-looking woman in the middle of the table. "What say you, in your defence?"
The Colonel stood and said a prepared piece, which illustrated succinctly that he acted only in the best interest of the Doctor, without admitting to what those actions entailed. As he had ample reason to believe that the fail-safe was not going to operate in the manner in which it was designed to, he did only what was absolutely necessary to ensure that UNIT might maintain its highly effective liaison with the Doctor. No more, no less.
Next, Fortis stood up. He cleared his throat, then shrugged. "I guess I don't really have anything prepared. But, basically, what I want to say is… the Doctor is valuable both to this organisation and to this planet, and I witnessed him being crushed by the abstract weight of hypergravity. I tried to help him. If you think I'm a terrible human being… then I don't know what to tell you." He shrugged again and sat down.
The room fell silent as the panel of five all stared at the two men incredulously, with an unspoken that's it? hanging in the air.
After about ten very heavy seconds, the door opened and a tall man in a pin-striped suit walked in.
"Hi, sorry I'm late," he said. "Ran into traffic. How are you guys? Have they started yet?"
Mace and Fortis both gestured to the panel, which, apparently, the Doctor had not seen yet.
"Oh, hello!" he exclaimed affably. "Nice to meet you, I'm the Doctor." He then lurched at them and proceeded to forcibly shake the hand of each member of the panel.
"Pardon me, sir, but are you, in fact, the Doctor?" asked the woman who appeared to be the panel's spokesperson.
"Yep. In the flesh."
"And you are speaking on behalf of Colonel Mace?"
"Yes, and Dr. Fortis as well."
"What of Dr. Jones?"
The Doctor's eyes squinted. "What of her?"
"Will you speak on her behalf?"
"Erm… yeah. Wait, what?"
"Doctor, apparently, the hearing is for all three of us," Colonel Mace explained. "Should Dr. Jones wish to be considered for reinstatement."
"Oh, that's nice of you. Hang on a tic." He moved back toward the door, opened it, stuck out the top half of his body. "They want to know if you want your job back."
Vaguely, everyone in the room could hear the voice of Martha Jones say something colourful but unintelligible.
The Doctor protested, "Okay, okay… oi, language. Really." He closed the door and reported, "She says no, thank you. Now, then, may I speak?"
"Please," said the spokeswoman.
Seeing this panel changed the game. They were rather more milquetoast than the Doctor had been expecting, and something shifted inside his mind. He said almost nothing the way he'd practised, but he used every piece of relevant information that he and Martha had gleaned in research.
He began by giving the panel an absolutely dizzying astrophysical description of what the Eustarus was meant to do. The officers looked at the panel's only scientist for help, but even she was frowning at the Time Lord, as though trying to keep up.
He confused them by explaining in extremely hazy terms the circumstances which led to the Blue Alert being called at UNIT. He didn't want this lot knowing that their Chief Medical Officer had shagged their alien liaison, and that's what had caused the problem, at least initially. Things like that just look terrible on paper, and if Martha was going to leave UNIT under the shadow of collusion with a possible rogue Time Lord… well, at least collusion would remain the only incriminating noun in the charges against her, as it pertained to doing stuff with him.
Instead, he used the phrases, certain events, particular utterances, specific confidences, given objectives, and the like, so often in his explication, the panel looked at each other with quizzical uncertainty multiple times before he was finished.
Then, he launched into the large accolades (and tiny gaffes) of both Colonel Mace and Dr. Fortis. He gave them the math. That is to say, if UNIT kept score (and it does), where would these two men end up?
"Firmly in the plus column, as you can plainly see," he concluded, after firing at them a tizzy of examples, numbers, variables and citations of UNIT's code of conduct.
Lastly, the coup de grâce. He went for the pain.
"Now, to conclude this sparkling display of rhetoric…" he paused, stood firmly, placed his hands in his pockets and took on a very earnest air. "Has any of you ever been sucked into a black hole? Well, neither have I, but part of my consciousness was, but that's a hell of a lot more violent than it sounds. Energies that make up the essence of me were taken and turned inside-out, pressed and perverted within me, and against a concrete floor. My options were, be pressed into an unyielding, rock-hard surface by a localised hypergravity field or… oh yeah, there was no other choice. My air was cut off. I could not breathe, I could not speak. And do you know what it feels like to have your skull nearly crushed? You wait, with no breath, to hear a wet, sticky pop, and then silence and black. Imagine that, if you will. Just think about the world's slowest steamroller and the pavement.
"After a time, I could not even think to find the words for what I was feeling. Couldn't have spoken even if I'd had breath. Literally cosmic forces were imprisoning me and I did not know if I would come out of it dead or alive. Would I walk out of there regenerated or wind up a forgotten splat on the floor of a military organisation that values me so much, it imprisoned, and subsequently terminated employment of, two good men who tried to help me?"
He paused to let that sink in.
"I was drowning. Choking for my life. Horrified beyond measure, beyond any fear I have ever felt. And mind you, I've faced down Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans and politicians. And the only hope I could see was…" he paused, and gulped. He had to play this bit with finesse. "My best friend – Martha Jones. Outside the bars. She was the only thing I had to hold onto. She was my lifeline, my anchor. She had everything I needed to survive, even if all that meant was that I didn't have to die horribly, all on my own. I could see her eyes, hear her voice, I could have all the faith in her that I wanted, but in my terror…" he gulped again with emotion.
He paused, gathered himself, "In my abject terror, I could not touch her. That's all I needed and wanted in what I thought could be my last living moments… just to hold her hand. And it's not just some touchy-feely emotional thing. I needed a physical anchor, much as Omega once needed one. His was a flute made of matter. Mine was a woman made of… well, love. She was the one thing I could cling to, to come out on the side of love.
"And this man," he said, turning toward Fortis, gesturing grandly in his direction. "Bless him, he took pity on me. And on Dr. Jones. Because he was there, watching, getting his hands dirty, doing what a human being does, and not just sitting in an office somewhere, following some protocol. He felt the need to help. He couldn't just stand there and let it happen. So he took matters into his own hands. Yes, he assaulted UNIT officers. Yes, he stole a key. Yes, he opened the door to the cell of a prisoner who'd been deemed too dangerous to set free. But he also gave me my lifeline. He let me be touched. He put me together with the woman…"
He stopped short and checked himself. He almost said words he would have regretted saying in front of this panel… and frankly, in front of Colonel Mace.
"The woman who represented salvation to me. She couldn't stop what was happening – no-one could. But she could save my soul, as, truthfully, she'd done countless times before. And Lawrence Fortis knew that, and acted in spite of you lot."
The officers on the panel looked at one another, as if to wonder, "Did he really just say that?"
"And," he burst out. "Then there's Colonel Mace. A nearly impeccable record, and you've given him the sack because he was seen by a junior officer, leaving HQ through a tunnel that he has full clearance to use, in a vehicle that he has full clearance to drive? And because he had a set of keys in the car that did not belong to him?"
"Well, Doctor, as you must know…" said the spokeswoman.
"Yes, I do know," the Doctor interrupted. "The keys in the vehicle Colonel Mace was driving were said to have been recognised by your junior officer as those confiscated from Dr. Jones. Well here's some news: protocol be damned, both Colonel Mace and Dr. Jones outranked that officer. All of you know in your heart of hearts that whatever bogus Blue Alert is happening, whatever class-A protocol, rank reigns supreme in UNIT. Whose word, truly, from the depth of your conscience, do you think you can trust? Now, ask yourself this: what is, exactly, Colonel Mace's word on the matter? What is Dr. Jones' word on the matter? Have either of them been asked to confirm or identify the keys? What has the Colonel admitted to? What actual proof do you have of anything?"
This time, the panel were too stymied even to look at one another, so they continued to stare stoically at the Doctor.
"I know you lot think you're impervious to the laws of Great Britain and of mankind in general," he continued cheekily. "But in point of fact, at the end of the day, you're just another government agency. Colonel Mace could find a lawyer tomorrow who could cut through the red tape in the blink of an eye, and topple your case against him like a sandcastle. He was fired before being officially heard, for which he could sue the agency, and still have his job secure. Fortunately, Mace is too kind a soul to do anything like that, but if his appeal is rejected today, who knows what effect that would have on him?"
The fact was, what he was saying now, it was a total bluff. But the ladies and gentlemen on this unassuming panel looked absolutely dumbstruck. He could not imagine that they, here in this basement, would give him much resistance.
"In closing, I will just say this: the original vision of UNIT was not to be an impenetrable fortress of protocol and bureaucracy – that is something that has grown around it over the years like a bunch of vines from the underbrush that eventually choke a perfectly good tree. Help unwind the vines today. Cut through the rubbish, and let two good, effective men back into the taskforce. Or next time around… well, I don't want to say that it could be you, but…
"Anyway, have a lovely day." The Doctor turned to Fortis and Mace and gave a little salute. "Gentlemen." With that, he left the room.
Martha and the Doctor had no idea how long the appeal hearing would last, so once he had said his piece, they left the church and boarded the TARDIS, which was parked across the street. They rematerialised on the embankment near Parliament, had a chat and people-watched, before killing some time in the shops.
Just after dark, Martha received a text message from Tish. "Both Larry and the Col have got their jobs back. Pls thank the Doctor."
And, pleased with themselves, they locked the wooden doors and retreated into the blue box together, now with near-total abandon. Once alone, and now unencumbered, they crashed into each other like two stars combusting.
Their first night since their first night was incendiary and filled with promise. Martha was still rather in a dreamlike state; she was pliant and submissive, and yet vigorous and dynamic. She let him take her however he liked, but in the throes of passion, she took back; she did not hesitate to seize upon the seeds of satisfaction and make them flower. She knew how to channel pleasure through her extremities, and how to communicate with her body. For the first time, as he began an earnest rise toward his own climax, it occurred to him that she must have learnt all of this somewhere. Was he not benefitting from her past experiences… past lovers?
The thought of her learning these things with someone else made him ill with jealousy, even if most of it was before they met.
No, he decided. I won't just be one. I will be the one. For her, I will be the only. I will erase other men, the ghosts of their hands (and other parts) on and in her. She's mine now, and I will claim her until I feel it so.
He thought of their early-morning tryst against the wall in the hotel. The secrecy he ordered her to maintain, the hot, urgent sex right now that he demanded from her. All of that was settling in today, and the memory of it fuelled him
He also thought, oddly, of Mace and Fortis and how easy it had been for him to bring the panel to their knees with his words and manner. He felt vindicated and powerful because he'd got what he wanted. The fact that Fortis and Mace wanted it too... that was a happy accident.
And he thought of this moment, this crashing, burning, out-of-control moment. She felt like a warm bath of crackling, glistening, tingling crystals. He sank into her, poured himself into her, filled her. She came hard, and he felt her insides throb and spasm as words of blinded bliss fell from her mouth.
He felt her pleasure along with his. He watched her face and body distort with explosion.
His doing, all his.
The whole episode was exceptionally satisfying.
Especially now.