Title: "Soap and Toothpaste and Home"

Author: Wish Wielder

Fandom: Doctor Who

Pairing / Character Focus: Martha Jones (Tom Milligan x Martha Jones)

Challenge: 30 Smiles

Theme / Prompt: #09 (Floral scent; Musk; Citric scent)

Word Count: 652

Rating: T / PG-13

Summary: It doesn't smell familiar and safe and home, but she supposes that's why it's death.

Notes: During Martha's bit between Torchwood and her return to Who. Speculation on her relationship, based on my personal ship 'n rumors based on pictures/press releases. Spoilers for end of S3.

Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and all respective properties are © the BBC. Megan D. (Wish Wielder) does not, has never, nor will ever own "Doctor Who".

"Soap and Toothpaste and Home"

She wants to say she doesn't know what death smells like, but she spent a year walking around the Earth and smelling nothing but. She's a doctor, and she's worked in the A&E and burn unit and she's felt it, tasted it, smelt it – lived it. She knows what it smells like when your skin's so badly charred they have to remove the limb, what it smells like when bodies have been left in the street for days and weeks because everyone else is too scared to move them – too scared they'll receive the same fate. She knows death, and she wishes every day she didn't.

It doesn't smell like this, the musky scent of his aftershave pillowed around her as she curls into his chest and tries again to chase away the demons. It doesn't smell familiar and safe and home, but she supposes that's why it's death. He smells alive, and she takes comfort in that. Soap and toothpaste and aftershave – aftershave he can only wear for her, just in case someone at the hospital where he works has an allergy. The smell will be gone by the morning, after he's washed and dressed for another day of work, and when she kisses him goodbye as she heads off for Torchwood he won't smell like this. But he'll still smell of soap and toothpaste (vanilla mint tonight; he's used hers again because it reminds him of her kisses), still smell of home.

And she'll focus on that as she goes to her day of defending the Earth, because it's still too easy to recall a time where he smelt of char and fire and burns. Where he didn't smell like soap and toothpaste and home.

"You died for me once," she tells him, and he's learned by now that the question isn't "Why?" – it's "How?" He had died for her – he believes her on that – and he knows he would do it again. It doesn't matter that he's not dead now; she works with things he has trouble believing all the time.

"A madman took over the world, and the Doctor sent me away while he was taken prisoner. I walked the globe to save him, and I met you, and then the madman found me. He killed you to get to me," she says, and he stays silent because he doesn't quite know what to say to that. So he holds her tighter, holds her closer as she cries into his chest. Because it's not every night, but sometimes….sometimes she remembers things, things he doesn't. And they chase her in the night, gnawing at her as demons he doesn't know how to chase away.

Not every night, but nights like tonight, when he's come home with the smell of hospitals and sickness still clinging to his skin. When he's had a patient he couldn't save, and then she's distant and back in a war he can't remember, clinging to him as she sees his body lying face-down in the dirty street. She couldn't smell the singed flesh on him then, but she knew it well enough from so many others that it hadn't been hard to imagine.

So she pulls him closer, and he lets her, because she's so strong all the rest of the time he wants to give her this. He wants her to know she can break down with him, that maybe sometimes it's ok if she can't be Martha Jones, the woman who once saved the world. That maybe sometimes it's best to be Martha Milligan, and maybe Martha Milligan can let him be strong for her.

Because she doesn't know it, but he can smell death, too. And he likes her familiar scent of oranges and honey and toothpaste and home just as much as she likes his aftershave and soap and toothpaste and home.

But really…the part they like best is the home.