THE WHEN
Panting, Martha remained pinned between the Doctor and the wall. She felt limp and sated, as though at last her body was relaxed and sentient. The blinding desire of the previous weeks had finally caught up with them and asserted itself, as it turned out, just at the wrong moment.
Still, they recovered from their tryst slowly, relishing the throb of afterglow.
And for his part, he panted back in her ear. "God, we needed that," he hissed, after catching his breath. He began kissing her neck again, slowly bringing them both down from the high.
Martha opened her eyes. But she could see nothing. No old house, no hideous wallpaper, no scary stone angels and no Doctor. If she couldn't feel him around and inside her, she'd doubt whether he was there.
"Doctor, have you got your eyes open?" she asked, tentatively.
"I don't know," he answered absently. "I suppose not."
There was a pause, and she waited for him to realise that inexplicably, suddenly they were in pitch blackness when they had been, just moments before, shagging against the wall of a reasonably well-lit house. Then, the light kisses along her neck stopped, and she heard him whisper, "Shit."
"I know!" she cried out. "What happened?"
"I don't know," he answered. "I'm going to pull away from you now, okay?"
"Okay," she said, disentangling her legs from around his waist and preparing to be set on her feet. His member slipped out of her and she put her feet down. Disgustingly, her left foot landed in what felt like a bucket of water. "Ew!" she cried out, instinctively yanking her foot out and trying to step to the right toward her dry foot. She fell sideways against what felt and sounded like a metal shelf, and some very loud debris dislodged and fell to the floor.
A few more expletives escaped both of their lips, and then the Doctor asked, "You all right?"
"Yes."
"Where are you? I'm reaching out."
She reached out for him and felt the soft fabric of the Doctor's tan overcoat, and grabbed on. It felt like a forearm. "I'm here," she said.
"All right, don't let go," he said. "I have to put myself back together."
She said, "Okay." She felt him lower his arm, then she heard the zip of his trousers. Then she felt him grab her arm, then her hand.
"All right, that's sorted. Are you decent?"
She felt for her dress to make sure the strapless garment was still covering all of the appropriate areas. "Yeah, only... can't find my knickers."
"Can you do without them?"
"I suppose."
"Good. Now, shuffle your feet carefully so that you push aside anything that's in your way, and so you don't smack your shin on a tombstone or a cat or something," he said. "I'll go first."
"Can you see a door or anything?" she asked.
"Not really," he answered. "But maybe if we move, something will reveal itself!"
As they began to move, the Doctor seemed to bump into some other metal article, because once again, the space was filled with the din of metal hitting the floor unceremoniously, and hitting other metal things even less ceremoniously.
Martha couldn't help but giggle a bit. "This is barmy!" she whispered.
"What's going on in there?" a voice said from somewhere muffled.
"Hello?" the Doctor called.
"I know you're in there, so you might as well come out and face me!" the voice insisted. It was a man's voice, and its accent was muttled.
"Er, we'd love to," the Doctor answered. "But we don't know how. It's a bit dark. Can you give us a hand?"
"Oh, for heaven's... hold on!"
There was a pause, and the Doctor and Martha heard what sounded like keys rustling. A moment later, a door opened in front of them, and a very annoyed-looking man stood, framed by dim light. "Well, out you come, then," he said, gesturing.
They could now see that they were in a large-ish broom cupboard. Martha's foot had landed in a mop bucket, she had knocked over a metal supply shelf, and the Doctor had toppled a stack of metal paint pans. They navigated through the junk that covered the remaining six feet between them and the door, and stepped out into a white, sterile corridor. The man who had rescued them was short, approximately sixty years old with a scraggly grey beard. He was wearing green polyester trousers with some sort of white uniform shirt, and a deeply disapproving expression.
"Now don't think I don't know what you were doing in there, young whippersnappers," he told them, shaking his finger. "And I'm here to tell ya, you wouldn't be the first!"
The Doctor and Martha looked at each other, and nearly burst out laughing when their eyes met.
The man eyed Martha carefully, and, she thought, a bit disdainfully. She shifted uncomfortably, looking back at him. The man looked at the Doctor and said, "Where did you find her?"
"Pardon?"
The man smiled with a bit of mischief in his eyes. "Oh, I see, I see. A bit of trouble from the family, eh?"
"Pardon?" the Doctor repeated.
"I understand," the man assured him. "But I still must tell you that I disapprove. What's more, I can't for the life of me work out how you got in there! I carry the only key."
"Yeah, I was sort of wondering that myself," the Doctor said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Say, I'm the Doctor and this is Martha. Perhaps you could be a mate and tell us where the hell we are?"
The man rolled his eyes and muttered as he began to walk away.
"Oi!" the Doctor called. "What's that?"
"Listen you," the man said, shaking his finger again. "I'm a tolerant man, and if you want to have a poke in the broom cupboard with your black bird here, that's one thing... but if you're on some of those hallucination drugs, well, you can forget about getting any help from me. I don't hold with that sort of nonsense."
Martha opened her mouth to protest, but the Doctor stopped her. They watched the man shuffle away.
When he didn't say anything for a longer-than-usual period, Martha said, "Er, do I really have to ask?"
"You can ask, but I don't know the answer," he told her. He took her hand and began walking down the corridor. "Let's find out together, shall we?"
As they walked, she remembered. "Doctor, before, when we were... you know, against the wall in that house, I could see over your shoulder. I saw statues. They were moving."
He stopped dead in his tracks. "Statues? What sort of statues?"
"I don't know, they were statues. Stone. Angels."
"You saw them? Why didn't you tell me when you saw them? We could have avoided this whole fiasco!"
"I tried, but you were... not exactly listening to reason at that moment, Doctor."
"You should have tried harder! You could have stopped me!"
She stuck out one hip and put her hand on it. "Doctor, a moving train couldn't have stopped you."
At this revelation, he seemed annoyed. How could he have got so lost in the moment that he didn't hear Martha asking for help, warning him of moving stone? Briefly, he reminded himself that this is why he'd made it his policy in the past not to become "distracted" by a companion. But he shook that thought away – he'd made his choice with Martha.
He sighed and took her hand again. "Fine. Let's just figure out where we are. When we are."
"When?" she asked, incredulous.
"Yeah, you see, those angels you saw... they live on potential energy. They zap you back into the past and feed on all of the moments you could have had."
"Fantastic. How very abstract of them."
They made a right turn and saw a door at the very end of the hall. They sped toward it and walked through. It was early evening, based upon the amount of light and the number of people milling about. Upon looking up at the building they were in, they discovered that it was a hotel, and they had just walked out of the basement level. They made their way to the front of the hotel, and went inside.
The girl behind the counter was wearing a white and red flowered dress, long-sleeved, square-necked and darted in front, and her blonde hair was piled Marge Simpson-high. Martha guessed that she had single-handedly taken three years off the ozone with the hairspray she had used. Her black eyeliner totally engulfed her blue eyes, and false lashes framed them in a creepy kewpie-doll sort of way. Her lipstick was pink and opaque, and she chewed gum like it was tar.
"Hello there," the Doctor said. "We'd like a room, please."
The girl eyed Martha. "You sure?" she asked.
"Oh, for God's sake," Martha sighed. "Can you just tell us today's date?"
"It's thirteenth February," the girl said. "Tomorrow's Valentine's Day."
"Okay. Thirteen February, nineteen...." Martha said, searching the girl's face for signs of life. She could guess from the girl's attire that it was the 1960's but it might help to have something more specific to work with.
After too long, the girl finally answered, "Sixty-nine," as though Martha had completely lost her mind.
"Right then," Martha said. "And where is the nearest train station?"
The girl gave quick instructions, letting the Doctor and Martha know that it would be approximately a five-minute walk. The Doctor again offered his overcoat, and this time, Martha took it. It was February, and she was bare-shouldered. There was no rain to soak the thing, so she thought she might be able to wield it.
As they left the hotel, the Doctor said, "That was clever!"
"Yeah, well, I could see that you were about to take the long way round, so I grabbed a shortcut," she ribbed him. "Besides, the fewer people that look at us like a circus sideshow, the better."
"Sorry," he told her. He kissed the top of her head. "I promise, next time, we'll go somewhere where no-one cares."
"Right. Well, we just have to get back to the TARDIS," she pointed out. "Then we can do the Tahiti thing, like we said."
"Well, I'm afraid it's not that simple," he told her. "The TARDIS was left in park in 2007. We're in 1969."
Martha gasped. "Oh my God! We're trapped in 1969!"
For the second time in ten minutes, the Doctor stopped dead in his tracks.
"Trapped in 1969!" he said. "Martha, look in the pocket of that coat!"
She searched the pouches on the inside of the Doctor's heavy tan coat, and the contents astonished her. But she knew instantly what he was looking for: the plastic purple packet given to them by Sally Sparrow in 2007. She found it and handed it to him with a happy flourish.
"Ha!" he exclaimed. "This is our ticket home!"
