All righty, the story is starting to wind down now. Not sure exactly how many chapters more, but not very many! I'm excited!

This chapter exists mostly as a way to tie up some loose ends with Jack and Rose. I thought both of their stories needed to be told, and their motivations revealed. Also, Rose's plight is supposed to light a fire under Martha, to get her to act faster and more aggressively.

TWENTY

Everyone else in the world.

The whole world?

Surely it was an exaggeration, Martha thought, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. It was just after Christmas, and her Doctor Who stories, initially just a British and Irish, and to a lesser extent, an Australian phenomenon, had now spread to the New World. The U.S. and Canada were now on-board. Some North American magazines had recently begun printing the stories from the beginning, two at a time, to catch their American readers up with the readers in Britain. Tish had become Martha's de-facto agent, and was currently in negotiations to have the stories translated into Arabic, French and Spanish. This way, they could spread further into developed parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and certainly South America and Western Europe. Most people in the world could read in one of those four languages, so Martha reckoned it would be a good spread.

But the Doctor had said everyone in the world. And the bigger the stories got, paradoxically, the more Martha worried that they wouldn't reach everyone.

What about China? Russia? What about people who don't read? Should we start looking into doing radio dramas, or audio books?

These were the thoughts currently keeping her up at night. The rational side of her mind said that with the way she was doing things, she could probably get close enough…

Honestly, what Tish could be negotiating was beyond Martha. She was not accepting any money for her stories, which was absolutely by design, and was obviously one of the reasons why so many publishers were clamouring for them. They were popular, and free. The only thing she asked is that no-one ever change a word. What cards Tish could be holding or what she was asking for, Martha simply didn't know. She had come to realise over the past several months that she had frequently under-estimated her sister in the past. But Tish was actually very good at her job, and it was a job that Martha could never do.

As various people had begun to recognise the Doctor's story, Martha had heard from a number of doctors and nurses. Even though she had changed the names of the "companions" in the Doctor Who stories, the tales of the Time Lord who travels in a police box was clearly not lost on people like Dr. Jovanka and Dr. Brown, both of whom had tried to get in touch with Martha to praise her efforts at getting the Doctor's story out there.

Although, plenty of them had called or written to scold her for making light of the patients' affliction for her own gain and for exposing the wounds of their families and of the BBC. Martha knew that they weren't privy to the fact that she was receiving no financial gain from this endeavour, and felt that they were choosing not to see how well-veiled she had made her stories. No family could be identified, no patient, and not even the facility. No news had even yet come to light that anyone suspected the stories were based on anything other than Martha Jones' imagination! No-one in the general public knew there were any patients or families or facilities to be identified! Nevertheless, plenty of former Tardis workers had accused her of breach of ethics, and threatened to report her to various medical boards and committees. She was not exactly astonished to find that she didn't feel threatened in the least.

The fact was, she had not spoken to any of them, nor had any direct e-mail or paper-and-pencil contact with any of them. Tish had relayed all of the messages to her, and had relayed Martha's sentiments back to them, with her special PR spin.

The three people she had not heard from were Joan, Sarah Jane and Jack. She understood why Sarah Jane was keeping out of it, and Joan as well. But not hearing from Jack was hard for Martha. She had tried his home number, and his mobile number – both had been disconnected and changed. She asked Tish to try and get through to Jack at Saxon's place, but as Tish told it, the switchboard there was impenetrable. It felt to Martha like Jack was being kept just as much of a prisoner as the Doctor.

And then one day, out of the blue, she'd received a breathless, whispered call.

"Martha?"

"Yes?"

"It's Jack."

"Jack! Oh my God, it's so good to hear from you! Why are you whispering?"

"I'll tell you later. Can you meet me at Raimundo's at 7am on December 28th?"

"Yeah, I'll make sure that I can."

"Okay. I'll see you then." And he'd clicked off.

She hadn't slept anyway, so as long as she was awake, worrying about the whole world, she decided to get up a bit early and have an extra long shower. When she met Jack at the busy little espresso house, she was knackered, and bless him, he could tell.

"Hey," he said, kissing her on the cheek as he sat down across from her. "You look terrible. You look like you haven't slept."

She smiled. "Thanks – I haven't! But you're looking good."

"I'm not feeling good," he confessed, running his hand dispairingly over his face.

"I gathered."

"I've been reading your work," Jack commented with a little smile. "Interesting stuff, I must say."

"Well, I've always fancied that I missed my calling as a novelist."

"Why are you doing it?"

"It's a long story, Jack. You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

He smiled and patted her hand.

"Martha, I don't have much time," he said. "Saxon's people are watching me, pretty much twenty-four seven. I only could come today because I happen to know that the head of security's wife had scheduled a C-section for this morning, but it's only a matter of time before the rest of them realise I'm late for work and start looking for my car."

"Blimey. I wondered why you'd been so incognito."

"Yeah, sorry about that. But I came here to give you some news."

"Okay, shoot."

Jack took a deep breath, and a quick glance around, as though looking for spies.

"Something weird happened the other day," Jack began. "For months and months, it's been the same old thing. He sits there in front of the window in a chair, staring out, and every few hours, he says, come on, Martha, or something like that. Once in a while he eats, but mostly, I have to feed him intravenously. His eyes are sunken, his hair has started turning grey at the temples, and he's lost weight, if you can imagine that. They really make him up for the television cameras whenever they're there, to make it look like he's thriving."

"Mm-hm," Martha commented. She had suspected everything Jack was saying, though she didn't want to speak now because she was afraid she'd cry.

"But, about a week ago, I was talking to him," he continued. "I do that – I talk a lot, even though he never answers. I usually try to keep him in character, keep myself in character, at the risk of jostling him somehow… psychically. I don't know if that makes any medical sense or not, but… anyway, I was talking to him in character, about planets we'd visited together, about aliens and time… He looked right at me, totally bright-eyed, and said, 'Jack, I'm sorry you got blackmailed into being my nurse.'"

"He said that? To you?"

"Yeah," said Jack, agitated and excited. "He knew I was there to care for him, and knew I'd been blackmailed."

"Okay. What else?"

He blinked hard at her. "Why are you so calm? He acknowledges me as a caregiver! It's a sign of lucidity!"

"I realise that," Martha told him calmly. "What else did he say?"

Jack looked at her with shock, then cleared his throat and continued. "He wanted to know whether I was protecting my partner from something, and I said yes. I tried to assure him that I wanted to be with him as well, and that blackmail wasn't the only reason why I was there, but he just smiled sort of indulgently, and asked what kind of information Saxon had over us."

"Did you tell him the truth?"

"Yes," Jack confessed. "I did. I talked about our Special Ops mission in Afghanistan in '02, and said that one of my officers had got into jam. I confessed that I had perhaps misused my own spotless military record in order to get him out of it, and after that, we sort of fell in love. He asked me when I'd joined the military, and I told him I'd enlisted when I was eighteen, hoping they could boot-camp the gay out of me. He laughed and said, 'so, mid-1980's, then, before Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' Like he knew I'd been born in the late sixties. The nineteen sixties, not in the 52nd century."

"Then what?"

Jack still couldn't believe Martha wasn't more surprised.

"Then, he said 'Thank you for sharing such a big secret with me, Jack,' and went back to looking out the window again. His eyes glazed over, and he reverted to form. I tried again the next day to introduce real-world stuff, but he wasn't home anymore."

"He was sharing his big secret with you, too," Martha said. "He did that by asking for reciprocation."

Jack stared at her for a long moment. Then asked, "What?"

She sighed. "If I tell you what I mean, and explain to you what I think happened to you that day with the Doctor, then I'll be revealing my own big secret as well," Martha told him. "And it's big."

"Are you saying you want me to tell you about my partner's Special Ops thing? I'll only tell you if you promise to believe that it was an accident."

"You can tell me if you want," Martha said. "But no, I'm trying to say that it's big, and you can't spread it round. Everything is going according to plan, and you can't let this get out, okay? But you deserve to know."

Long after Jack had left Raimundo's, Martha sat with one hand wrapped around an espresso, absently watching people order their drinks, pay, and pick them up. There was something hypnotic about the whole process. She would have liked to have ordered another coffee, but she was riveted to the café dance.

She was left with the image of the Doctor, sickly and even thinner, staring out the window. She was left with the image of Jack and his partner, cowering under the threat of military prison, as posed by Harold Saxon. And she was left with the image of Jack looking at her sceptically, and with a twinge of fear. That had hurt. He hadn't believed her. He spent almost every waking hour with the Doctor, with the man she was trying to help. He had seen the "lucid" side, and yet, he didn't believe that the Doctor was trapped, and that Martha's stories could save him. She had held out some hope with Jack, but it truly did appear now that her only veritable ally was Tish. Though, Tish didn't really believe it either – she was just doing it because she'd promised to give Martha the benefit of the doubt for one year.

The good news was that Martha was now more sure than ever. The Doctor was alive, though not well, and he needed an out.

For a few months now, she had been resisting listening to the final instalments of Rose Tyler's narrative. The last thing she'd heard was an adventure in which the Doctor had literally met up with Satan. In the story, the Doctor's faith in Rose had saved the day. Not Rose herself, because the Doctor believed in her… it was the fact that he believed in her, an intangible bond between the man and the woman. It had given Martha a bad sort of chill. It had literally been the catalyst for him to muster up the will to fight the beast. He'd been reluctant to do what needed to be done, because it might mean sacrificing Rose. But in the end, he'd said that if he'd never believed in anything before, he certainly did believe in her.

"He believed I could survive! He believed that the power of his love would be enough to give me the will to come back to him, even if I was being pulled into a black hole," she had said in her narrative. She had told the story, weeping throughout, and Martha could clearly hear that the woman had come unhinged. She was no longer caring that people could hear what she was saying on the recordings, and her condition, her state of mind, was only going to unravel further. Martha had stopped listening at that point.

Martha recalled Jack saying that Rose had been "hauled" out of the BBC, that she was "tragically" not in control of her emotions, and that she had screamed I love you at the Doctor in front of "God and the world." An ugly picture formed in Martha's mind after listening to the Satan story, and she suddenly felt she knew how things had played out. She realised why she hadn't been able to track Rose's employment history after leaving the BBC – Rose was probably now a patient herself somewhere.

Rose Tyler had once been a good doctor, and she had been a great help to Martha's process. Martha chose not to confirm nor disprove her assumption about Rose's fate – she chose to honour the rational, benevolent woman she had once been, and not find out any more about Dr. Tyler's humiliating undoing.

And, as sad as this revelation was, it was more frightening, than anything. If Martha could not martial her emotions and her fear and worries, who could say whether she would come unglued as Rose had? Then none of them stood a chance – not her, not the Doctor, and maybe not even Jack or his partner.

The way of the Doctor lies a bit of madness, Martha could see that now. But she could also see that she needed a plan that was sleeker and more concrete than the one she'd been executing. It had been good thus far, and it had worked as she had thought. But the Doctor had told her to go deep, and go big. She'd gone in already so deep she couldn't see her way out. But big… that was another matter. It felt big, this Doctor Who story phenomenon, but not big enough. She needed some insurance. Perhaps it just needed to be a bit more organised.

Rose thought she could just love him. It wasn't enough.

Martha had thought the world could just know him. But that wasn't enough either. They had to want to know him. They had to be impatient to see him, excited at the very thought of what might happen to him…

"Tish?" Martha said into the phone as she paced about her flat. "Can you book yourself a few appearances on chat shows?"

"Excuse me?"

"You're going to go on some chat shows and speak for me."

"I am?"

"Yes, who else could do it?"

"But… why?"

"I'll explain later. Just tell them who you are – they'll want to have you. Do, say, five shows in five weeks, spanning from mid-January into February. That'll be pretty good timing then. I'll tell you what to say."