Martha and Mickey came into the sickbay. As they got to the door the Doctor noticed that they were holding hands, but as they stepped in they quickly let go as if they had been caught making out behind the bike sheds or something. "Mickey Smith and Martha Jones-Smith?" the Doctor commented. "You two are married?"
"We are," Mickey confirmed. "For nine years."
"Major Magumbo said that you were freelance but returned to UNIT a few years ago. How long have you been at UNIT Mickey?" the Doctor asked.
"I joined when Martha returned and that was about three years ago now. Freelance work was good, but there was less security, no benefits if anything ever happened, and no childcare."
"You're parents?" the Doctor realised.
"To a boy of five and a daughter who is coming up to 18 months. Harrison and Lily," Mickey informed the Doctor.
"I thought we weren't going to disclose everything?" Martha suggested to Mickey.
"But it's the Doctor," Mickey commented. The Doctor smiled as Martha tutted. "It's okay for you, he doesn't know you yet, he still thinks I'm an idiot."
"Pretty much," the Doctor confirmed and then laughed..
"Where are you now?" Mickey asked the Doctor. "I thought Rose might be on board."
"Jackie has flu."
"I remember that," Mickey commented. "That's not long at all after you regenerated is it?"
"A month or so?" the Doctor suggested.
"You told Rose you were just going to hang around in the vortex for a week!" Mickey exclaimed. "She's going to go mad with you when she finds out you've been here!"
"If you remember Jackie having flu and you remember me going to sit in the vortex for a week then do you remember Rose getting mad when I get back?" the Doctor asked him.
"No, I don't think so," Mickey confirmed.
"There we go then," the Doctor commented and grinned. "Rose is fine, brilliant even," the Doctor confirmed. "Twenty years on, she's going to be forty one," the Doctor realised. "Blimey, I didn't even think. Where is she? What is she doing? Is she still on board the TARDIS?" he asked Mickey.
"We came in to answer some of Josh's questions about his mother, not your questions about Rose, Doctor," Martha interrupted before Mickey could tell him anything he shouldn't know. "We've discussed it, and, considering the circumstances we think it probably is important that we do tell you what we know about the metacrisis and in doing so, you'll see that Rose was given a chance of a life that she'd otherwise not have been able to have," Martha commented. "Mickey can grab another couple of chairs. Weren't you going to make tea?" she suggested to the Doctor. He nodded and went out to the galley. "How's your ankle feeling?" Martha asked Josh.
"It's aching quite a bit," Josh admitted. "I'm not coming with you or going to hospital."
"The way the Doctor can treat you in here is going to be better than we could do it in UNIT or anyone could treat it in a hospital," Martha informed him. "I'd not suggest you leave, but, it can be tricky setting bones properly with just one pair of hands, so, as long as you're okay with that, I'll make myself available to assist the Doctor when the swelling has gone down. Would that be alright with you? If the Doctor still did it, but I gave him a hand?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I'm sorry that you've injured your ankle, but I'm relieved to see that you're otherwise okay. We were worried when we heard you went missing from your foster home."
"It wasn't a home."
"I'm just glad you're safe and that you and the Doctor have found each other, even if it is in difficult circumstances, and it's a bit out of order for the Doctor."
"A bit?" the Doctor scoffed as he came back in with three teas.
"At least you've got the right face, Boss," Mickey told him as he dragged two more chairs over.
"I do then?" the Doctor checked. "The only think I can think of that would generate the right circumstances for a metacrisis to occur is a regeneration. I thought maybe I'd changed again."
"This is why we shouldn't be discussing this with you," Martha commented and sighed.
"So I do?" the Doctor checked confused by her response. "You might as well just tell us what happened. Josh needs to know about his mum and I need to know about the metacrisis, but please don't tell me Davros comes back from the Time War?" the Doctor commented but then saw the way Mickey looked at his wife. "Right, Davros then? How? What happened?"
"Dalek Caan saved Davros from the Time War."
"Dalek Caan? Daleks don't have names. Since when do daleks have names?" the Doctor asked Mickey.
"You've not met them yet either," Mickey realised and scratched his head. "This is more complicated than I realised. Dalek Caan is a member of the Cult of Skaro."
"The Cult of Skaro," the Doctor repeated and nodded. "Not a myth then."
"No, not a myth," Mickey agreed.
"Davros created a new race of daleks using cells from his own body. They moved the Earth and 26 other moons and planets to the site of the Medusa Cascade. In the centre there was a dalek ship which we called the Crucible. Davros's plan was to use the planets to flatten a stream of Zed Neutrino energy and send it out from the Crucible through the Medusa Cascade."
"A flattened stream of Zed Neutrinos?" the Doctor stated. "But that would interact with electric fields at an atomic level? That would simply destroy everything?"
"Whole star systems were being destroyed," Mickey commented. "Stars were going out. They were just blinking out of existence in the sky."
"We didn't stop it?"
"No, we did."
"But if stars were going out?"
"That was in another universe which runs about a year ahead. I know this all sounds mad," Mickey commented.
"It sounds perfectly reasonable though I'm not sure how any of us could access a parallel universe," the Doctor commented.
"Don't tell him," Martha warned Mickey. "He can figure that out for himself when he gets there," Martha informed him.
"What if I can't figure it out?" the Doctor asked Martha seriously. "What if the only way I figure it out is because you tell me about it now?" He raised his eyebrows at her.
"Then you'll be stuck in another universe and when Davros does return you won't be here and no one will stop the Zed Neutrino energy," Martha informed him. She wasn't going to be playing that game with him. "What if we tell you and you do something different?" Martha asked him. "I'm not entirely sure we should be telling you anything, but we've agreed to tell you about the metacrisis. I think if we let the Major know we were telling you that we'd both be court martialled, so just accept that we will tell you this, but we're not going to deliberately tell you anything else."
"Okay," the Doctor accepted.
"I didn't know parallel universes were real," Josh commented.
"There are parallel universes, but they're normally closed off," the Doctor explained for Josh's benefit. "They're parallel where everything is the same but also a bit different. So, stars were going out in another universe, the Cult of Skaro is real, and one of them called Caan brought Davros out of the Time War even though there is a time lock in place?" he checked with Mickey who nodded. He then looked to Josh. "Are you following any of this?" Josh shook his head.
"Your mum was travelling with the Doctor at this time, Josh," Martha informed him. "She was brilliant and smart and kind, but most importantly she gave him what for and kept him in line," she informed Josh who smiled. "I met your Mum before this all happened when I asked the Doctor to come and help us with something that UNIT was struggling to understand. UNIT was running round looking for something, and he was running round looking for something else, and your mum was the one that found the biggest clue as to what was going on and we all missed it, and, then she popped home to visit your great grandfather and your grandmother," Martha informed him. "Your mum never let travelling with the Doctor get in the way of family. I went on another trip straight after that. She really loved travelling with the Doctor and seeing all the brilliant things there were to see, but she always remained grounded and sensible too. She was a very special woman. She figured out a whole number sequence that meant we could stop a war in which hundreds and hundreds of people were dying every day — that's how good your mum was. You need to know that she was brilliant even before the metacrisis," Martha suggested to Josh. "We need to tell the Doctor about what happened with the metacrisis and what that did to your mum and how that might have affected you, but you need to know that your mum was brilliant before that and she was a brilliant afterward too."
"I know she was brilliant after," Josh informed Martha. "But, I want to hear what happened too. It sounds like it was exciting."
"Exciting?" Martha clarified. "Yeah, I guess it was."
"Were you there too?" Josh asked.
"A lot of us were involved. Most of us were on Earth at the start of it. The Doctor was on the TARDIS with your mum, but you know what Josh? All of us on the Earth? We were really busy and the Doctor, he was really late. I'm not sure what he was up to that kept him for so long. He was hanging round with the Shadow Proclamation or something. There were loads of us on Earth all working together to try and save the planet and trying to find the Doctor and your mum. There was me and there was Mickey. There was someone else the Doctor already knows called Captain Jack Harkness," Martha commented and glanced to the Doctor.
"Jack was there?"
"He was," Mickey confirmed. "And Sarah Jane, Rose, and Jackie."
"All of you together?"
"So if you were all there then it wasn't my mum it was everyone?" Josh sounded a little disappointed by that.
"Not exactly," Martha stated. "You see your mum got stuck in the TARDIS on her own. We were all worried that she had been killed and the TARDIS had been destroyed. We had all been captured by Davros and were being held prisoner on the Crucible. We couldn't do anything. Of course he was the one who was captured first," Martha suggested and indicated to the Doctor who just raised an eyebrow. "Davros started the countdown to set off the reality bomb, and, all any of us could do was watch. Then, half way through the countdown the TARDIS suddenly appeared in front of us and another version of him came running out. That version of him immediately got zapped by Davros and taken prisoner as well, so the only person left who could do anything about the reality bomb was your mother."
"On her own?" Josh asked.
"Yeah, we were all held in force fields," Martha confirmed. "Your mum stopped the reality bomb from going off. Then she did something to Davros so that when he tried to zap her it back fired and he zapped himself. Then she short circuited all the dalek weapons and then she sent a trip switch signal all the way through the dalek ship so the only thing they could do was go round in circles. She did all of that while we were being held prisoner. Then she let us all out of our force field prisons and she helped both Doctors send all the other planets back to where they came from. Then we had to tow the Earth right the way across space back to the right place in the TARDIS. Your mum did all of that. She saved all of us and she saved the reality bomb from going off. If that had gone off then it would have spread right across the universe and it would have gone through a rift and done the same to every other parallel universe as well. Your mum saved every living thing in every universe that day," Martha informed Josh. "That is how brilliant she was."
"She was brilliant," Mickey confirmed. "She was like — have that Davros."
"Because the Doctor was in her head."
"No, because the things your mum did? The Doctor wouldn't have thought about doing them. She did have his consciousness in her head because of the metacrisis, but she was still your mum too and that made her even more brilliant. She was your mum but with all the Doctor's knowledge. He's just a time lord, but your mum? She literally saved everything everywhere, Josh, and we'd all failed. All of us together, two Doctors, and every one of us was taken, but not Donna Noble," Martha stated.
"That does sound pretty incredible," the Doctor confirmed. "But I was the first one taken prisoner?" he checked and pouted making Josh laugh.
"Yep, you and Rose up on the dalek ship, all bound up in force fields by Davros," Martha confirmed. "Late to arrive and then the first one captured," she informed the Doctor and then winked at Josh. "It's just as well your mum was there or we'd all be dead," Martha explained and Josh grinned in a way that made the Doctor smile. Martha glanced at Mickey, neither of them missing how much the time lord clearly cared about the teenage boy.
"Actually," Mickey interjected. "He wasn't just late to arrive and then the first captured," he suggested to Josh. "He was late to arrive, got shot by a dalek, and then was the first to get captured."
"I got shot by a dalek? I've never been shot by a dalek. You mean one of those overgrown pepper pots actually got me?" the Doctor checked appalled by the idea. Martha nodded her confirmation. "So, I did regenerate then? It's the only thing with the energy to create a metacrisis."
"Not exactly," Martha offered.
"How can you not exactly regenerate?" the Doctor asked and then sighed.
"Remember the hand you got cut off by the Sycorax?" Martha asked the Doctor and he nodded. "Well, that had been retrieved and you were keeping it in a freaky see-through jar under the TARDIS console. When you got shot by the dalek it was only a glancing blow so it didn't kill you outright and there was time for Captain Jack, Rose, and Donna to get you back to the TARDIS. It was enough to be fatal though, and, you did start to regenerate. Jack told me that you were in the middle of regenerating but then instead of going right through with it and changing, you used enough of the energy to heal yourself but then siphoned the rest of it into your severed hand which meant the full cycle didn't complete and you didn't change."
"That was handy," Josh commented. Martha and Mickey both laughed, not at the joke, but at the look on the Doctor's face when he'd clearly been about to make the same reference and had been beaten to it. "How did you get your hand cut off?"
"In a sword fight," the Doctor informed him. "That was a few weeks ago. I guess I'll get that hand back at some point. I did wonder where it had got to."
"So, you're like a lizard then? You can regrow tails?"
"I don't have a tail," the Doctor informed Josh. "And, no, not in ordinary circumstances, but I'd just regenerated for real that time, so I was still cooking and used some of the excess energy to regrow my hand."
"That wasn't your finest hour either, was it, Boss?" Mickey asked the Doctor and then turned to Josh. "He turned up on Christmas Eve with a new face and then promptly collapsed and feel asleep. He stayed asleep all the time that Rose and I were being chased by a robot brass band, we almost got killed by a Christmas tree, and got teleported up onto the Sycorax spaceship while he was fast asleep! Then when he did wake up he got his hand cut off in a sword fight and all the time he was wearing a pair of stripy pyjamas!"
"Don't forget I was the one that stopped the Christmas tree and told you something was coming," the Doctor reminded Mickey.
"Then went back to sleep again."
"And I won the swordfight."
"After getting your hand cut off."
"And I saved the planet."
"With a satsuma!" Mickey exclaimed.
"You saved the planet with a satsuma?" Josh asked the Doctor and giggled. "That's great!" Josh beamed. "All the soldiers with their guns and stuff and all you needed was a satsuma!" The Doctor raised his eyebrows at Mickey.
"Okay, boys," Martha chuckled.
"Have you ever saved the planet?" Josh asked Mickey.
"Mickey got eaten by a wheelie bin," the Doctor announced.
"Oh my God! What did you have to tell him that for?!" Mickey exclaimed as Josh giggled.
"And, I melted his plastic head," the Doctor added. "After he got eaten by the wheelie bin."
"I have saved the planet," Mickey stated. "In fact I have…"
"I'm sorry, Mickey." Martha interrupted him while trying to keep a straight face. "None of that is relevant so we can't discuss it."
"That's not fair," Mickey grumbled.
"All of us have played our part over the years, either working alongside the Doctor, or with other agencies such as UNIT," Martha informed Josh. "Or on our own, but, I do happen to know that it's true: Mickey did get eaten by a wheelie bin."
"That's a low blow Martha Jones," Mickey complained. "You're supposed to be on my side."