TEN
In Kinsey Mund's well-lit flat, now enveloped by an inky black shadow, Martha pled her case.
"Look, you kidnapped this woman, this blogger, because she knows about him, yeah? Because you stumbled onto someone who knows his tricks, his patterns, his movements, habits, some of his friends, and perhaps even his current whereabouts? And to boot, she gave you a physical description! Not a bad plan, as plans go," she conceded. "But here's the thing, friend. I know a hundred times more about the Doctor than she does. And if you want him to trundle in somewhere ill-advised, risking his life to save someone, I'm a far better bet than she is."
"Why?" it asked.
"He cares about the human race on the whole, and he would never let anything happen to her, or anyone, if he could help it," Martha explained. "But me? I'm different. You take me instead, you'll not only piss him off, you'll hurt him. You'll cause him to panic and make him irrational, and he might make a mistake. At the very least, you might break his heart. Doesn't that sound like fun?"
"Dr. Jones, what the hell are you doing?" Kinsey whispered. "Are you mad?"
"The love of a Time Lord – or for a Time Lord – is a pestilence to be eradicated."
"Say what you will, but it's the fastest way to get him here. I'm telling you: you want to reel in the Doctor? I'm your best bet. Trade her for me."
There was a long silence, and then another deep, mirthful rumble that vibrated their feet. The alien was having another chuckle, probably at her expense.
"You are Martha Jones," it said.
Martha curtsied. "Indeed. Nice to meet you. Well, not nice, exactly…"
"The self-sacrificing companion," it sang, creepily.
"Again, indeed. But the Doctor has had quite a few of those."
"So ready to jump into the fray, and so lovingly put herself in the line of fire for a man who does not love her in return!"
Martha had no idea whether they could see her or not, so she held her face steady. "You've done your homework."
Kinsey looked at her with great surprise. Perhaps the invasive tendril of Bougie Boca's knowledge did not extend to the Doctor's personal relationships beyond "known associates."
"Yes, we have, Martha Jones," the thing said. "Too bad about the Doctor not caring for you. You are purported to be quite an intelligent, kind, and attractive human. Or so Ms. Boca's blog sayeth. But we have a different read on the Time Lords, Martha Jones. We know about his people from way back, and we know about how he's treated you, especially when you were in hiding at the school."
"Oh, right, your super-special tracking system," Martha said. "Sat-Nav'ed him across the cosmos, did you?"
"And through time."
"Good for you, that's some fearsome technology you've got," she said. "What, like, a Vortex Manipulator wired into a jet engine or something?"
"The Vortex is also a pestilence," it said. "A primitive, filthy highway, used by the primitive and the filthy."
"How do you travel through time if you don't like the Vortex?" she asked, genuinely curious.
"Silence!" it ordered. "The point is, we have seen, and we know. The love of a Time Lord is non-existent What passes for love is feigned and unreal. The Doctor is no different."
She smiled now, and winked at Kinsey, aware that the journalist in her was now riveted to the saga. Martha wondered if had ever occurred to her that the Doctor might have a love life of some sort. She guessed that it hadn't.
"And yet, you're using his love of humanity to lure him here... weird. Anyway unreal might be what your reconnaissance tells you, and honestly," she said. "Who am I to argue? All outward signs, as far as anyone outside the TARDIS is concerned, point to unrequited love. Unrequited longing and devotion. But I know differently now."
"Oh?"
"Oh," Martha echoed. "He and I have spent the past two (or three, depending upon how you choose to look at it) years growing closer, figuring out how to navigate being together. Because believe you me, there were issues. Big ones. One of them being a massive age-gap! I mean, I dated an eighteen-year-old when I was sixteen, and my mum nearly lost her mind. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds to me now?"
Martha actually laughed.
And then she went on, marvelling at her ability to talk the alien's ear off (if it had ears). She supposed she had learned a stalling tactic or two from watching the Doctor work. "But I have this evening bloody well earned the right to say: he loves me. And he has for a while. And if you take me, he will not let that slide, guaranteed."
"Nonsense! Our reconnaissance…"
"You mean the non-Vortexy thing that has allowed you to trail him across time and space, and always remain one step behind, until you finally slipped up and let yourself be known to him, and he started to chase you, too? Yeah, sounds great. Fool-proof."
"Insolence!"
She nodded. "Yeah! And how much research have you done tonight? Because tonight is when everything changed.
The alien seemed not to know what to make of any of this. There was a longish silence, then, it said, "You are now our prisoner, too."
"And Bougie?"
"She stays."
"Bad idea. I mean, honestly, you big, bad, clumsy thing, what you really ought to do is let us both go, and back the hell off."
"Not an option."
"Okay, then by all means, sit still, use me as bait, let him find you, and spend the most terrifying night of your life trying to outsmart him, or keep him, or kill him… or whatever you Escappa plan to do with the Last of the Time Lords."
"He will die. You will all die!"
And with that, the shadow withdrew, and they could see out into the night air once again.
Martha went through the flat looking for doors and/or windows to the outside, through which they could escape.
When she returned to the living area, Kinsey said, "Well?"
"They're all locked," Martha said. "I even tried breaking a couple windows – no go."
"Damn."
"I'd lay odds that they're all deadlocked, as well, but there's no way for me to know that without the Doctor and his sonic screwdriver. You remember the sonic screwdriver? I believe you have a cute euphemism for it on your website, so that you can duck UNIT's tracking software?"
Martha knelt and began to untie Kinsey's restraints. The knots were tight, but given enough tenacity, they would give.
They were in a heavy silence for a minute or two, while Martha worked on the ropes.
It was Kinsey who broke the silence.
"How'd you know I was here?" she asked, softly.
"Colonel Mace. Told us he heard a growl on the phone when he rang you a second time, and we put two-and-two together. He also tracked your phone to this address." The first layer of knots was undone.
"Why are you here, and not the Doctor?"
"You know he needs a companion," Martha said, not looking at her. "Do you think he'd have been alive this long without one?"
"Seven hundred years, right?"
"Longer than that," Martha corrected. "Nine hundred at last count, and he'd be dead that many times over if he worked alone."
"As I understand it, he doesn't have nearly enough regenerations for that."
"Regeneration," Martha sighed. "Another word that gets flagged if you use it in your blog, eh?"
She pulled the rope loose and Kinsey's feet were free.
"Wow, thanks. Yeah... I have to avoid regeneration as well."
Martha sat back on her haunches on the floor and squared her eyes at the journalist. "Yeah, speaking of thanks, Kinsey, and regeneration, and people being dead without other people… you, and everyone on this planet, would have been long-since obliterated if it weren't for him, and you know it. So it seems like a pretty crap way to treat someone who's constantly saving your arse, to publish every titbit of intel you get about him, that leads the scum of the universe to him."
"Yeah, I know," sighed Kinsey. It was clearly not the first time she had thought about this.
Martha sat down beside her, and gestured for her to lean forward. She began to work on the rope restraints binding Kinsey's hands.
"I mean, for one thing, look what's happened! You've been targeted yourself! You should know better than anyone that associates of the Doctor get hunted down almost as fervently as the Doctor himself!"
"Is he pissed off at me?" Kinsey asked, looking back over her shoulder at the woman who was trying to help her escape, in spite of everythimg.
"Yes, but not as much as I am," Martha muttered.
"But he'll rescue you."
"He'll rescue us both. And we'll rescue him. That's how this works."
"How's that, exactly?"
"It's all we've been doing since I got here – helping him out. There!"
And with that, Kinsey Mund put her hands together in front of her body, clapped once and exclaimed, "Thank goodness! Thank you, Dr. Jones."
"It's Martha. Now let's find a way out of here."
Again, as if on cue, the black covering over the flat returned, then seeped in through the glass.
"Oh God, not again," Kinsey cried out, on the verge of hysteria. "No, no…"
And for a moment, it was as though they had been drowned in tar. All black, all hot, no air.
"Oh, no," the Doctor groaned, standing outside with his mad contraption in-hand. He was watching what looked like a big black egg in the sky descend upon Kinsey Mund's home, stretch, and wrap itself around the building. It pulsed for a several minutes, and the Doctor waited and watched. He knew that energy pulses and full-bodied throbs such as this were often the result of brainwave activity in non-corporeal beings. He wondered whether it was communicating… and with whom.
But one thing about this turn of events was good: it gave him some crucial information about the current state of the Escappa, namely, that they were still experiencing depletion, and it looked like some sort of contamination.
He had seen the Escappa in the old days, in their low-scale invasions of Gallifrey, what they called "reconnaissance" trips. He supposed that they had been hoping to scare Gallifreyans into thinking that they were gathering intel for a massive takeover, and that their research would make them all the more effective and insidious. But all they ever really did was annoy, and were allowed to do their thing for a couple of days, until they were driven out by local law-enforcement. They were ordinarily beast-like beings, squat with long arms and big, bug-like eyes. Despite their appearance, they were relatively intelligent. Not Time-Lord intelligent, but better off than a lot of the crazies he had met in his travels.
But when their fuel resources became scarce, and/or their food sources, their composition changed, and parts of them became sludge-like. He had only ever seen slightly depleted Escappa with their jaws and fingertips turning into what looked like dirty crude-oil. But this was a whole new level of gross. It looked to him as though the ship's entire crew had broken down into the black slime, and this was the extent of their ability to move about on Earth.
He had been right in thinking that this was why they had not followed him about at the banquet. They knew they could not be seen without causing a panic and/or attracting far more attention to themselves than they wanted. And they had got lucky when Kinsey Mund had gone off alone…
He reckoned that he and Martha had got lucky when they hid in the supply cupboard. That was early in the evening, though – perhaps the Escappa was still getting the lay of the land at that time.
Frankly, the Doctor never really knew why they were so keen to rid the universe of the Time Lords. Most psychotic species of that bent either wanted to break the laws of time and space and didn't want any interference (not that the Time Lords were super long in that department), or they just couldn't stand the Time Lords' imperious, professorial air. The Doctor wasn't keen on it either, but he also knew he was guilty of it from time to time.
He, himself, had done some inadvertent "work" toward putting the Time Lords on a lot of species' metaphorical radar, by zipping all over the place and putting out fires. He supposed that perhaps some might have thought that all Time Lords were like him. If some manner of space scum thought that all of his compatriots were prone to stopping them from strip-mining inhabited planets, enslaving other species, or generally pirating certain corners of the cosmos, then no wonder they would want the Time Lords gone. Granted, the High Council were keen to keep the Daleks from taking things over, so they had gone to war, but that had been an extreme case. No-one wanted everyone, everywhere, for all time, converted into Daleks.
But the Escappa, as far as he could tell, were just bigoted. They were from the same galaxy, and they just didn't want the Time Lords in it. They hadn't been a huge threat when he'd been in his formative years, so he hadn't thought to ask. By the time it became relevant to him, personally, there was no-one left who knew the answer. The Doctor just knew he had to run, because now, it was just him.
Him, and whoever got caught in the crossfire.
Martha, eventually, as always, chose to hop into battle with him. Kinsey Mund had just fallen arse-backwards into it, by being careless. Well, he could relate to that, couldn't he?
After a few minutes, the stretchy black thing retreated back into its egg-in-the-sky form, and then disappeared at a certain spot in the air.
The Doctor squinted at the spot. What was there? A portal? Some sort of substance that caused them to dissipate?
He aimed the sonic screwdriver at it, and ramped it up to its highest setting.
The signal was faint, but it was there…
Something chemical-based, consuming massive amounts of energy.
"Gotta love an invisible spaceship," he muttered, with a smirk. "Gotcha."
Martha had gone into the house so that he could be available to dismantle their equipment. With their ship in the sky, and no TARDIS, it might be tricky…
Were it not for the fact that the sonic had been tracking the Escappa's energy signature all day. It's the only way it had been able to find the ship, as high up as it was.
He sprinted back to Martha's car and started it, then let it idle. He switched on the radio, took a deep breath, then set himself to work.
Task one would have been to reverse the function of the radio's antenna, so that it transmits, rather than receives – it would have been a cinch. But when he thought about it, he realised he would need it to receive as well, because a mutual signal was required, in order to manipulate. And so, he was able to open up communication between Martha's radio and anything else that was both transmitting and receiving.
But on the radio, it was registering all right – as a malfunction. A horrid noise came through the car speakers, and he could not make it stop by turning the volume dial. He knew that was when things were working.
Task two: send the Escappa's energy signature through the transmitter, so that it would lock onto the ship hovering above Fabian Road. It had no trouble doing that.
This was where the real finesse began.
He turned on the device that he had retrieved from the TARDIS, and tried to remain calm. He always tried to remain calm, but rarely succeeded – calm was not, generally speaking, part of his core personality. Especially not in this body, for whatever reason.
Methodical, yes. But calm, no.
Still, even though he had an intricate job to do that required stealth and patience, he could not help but rush a little.
This was because he could not help but think of her, once again, doing the hard bit, so that he could dismantle an insidious and dangerous network. Martha was in a house being enveloped by black sludge, occupied by an alien foe, while he was sitting in a car, tinkering with its bits and bobs.
His years with Martha had been inevitably running through his mind this evening, and just a few minutes ago, he had invoked the memory of Martha leaving on her round-the-world trek. He had been remembering how much faith in her he had at that time, and had now. It was buoying now, as it had been then.
But he now also remembered a bit more of what that year was actually like.
This was exhausting.
Sleeping on a cot in a tent for a year… that he could handle. Doing it in that aged body, well… it's not like he was exactly a novice at new bodies. Once he'd got used to what it could, and could not do, he could live with it.
Even the minuscule figure he had become, eighteen inches tall, showing his entire nine hundred-odd years, living in a bird cage was doable. It was not great, of course, but he was alive, and there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
And her name was Martha.
What was unbearably fatiguing was the daily mocking – not of him, but of Martha herself. The constant japes at her mettle, brains, cunning, or lack thereof, which would get her found and killed. The incessant ridiculing of her belief in him, and vice versa, the Master sticking out his bottom lip and asking, "Aw, Doctor, how does it feel to know that your best friend will be mine in three days' time?"
All year long, the Master would claim to almost have her. To know precisely where she was, and to have his people lying in wait, ready to close in.
"Just think of it," he whispered to Francine Jones once, while she cleared away his lunch plates. "You'll get to see your baby daughter in just forty-eight hours, won't that be lovely? I'll bet she doesn't scrub a toilet half as well as you, though."
That had been six months into their stint together on the Valiant, and Francine had taken it in stride… for that moment. Later on, of course, she had snapped.
The Master said similar things to Tish, and he could only assume to Clive Jones as well, though the Doctor rarely saw Martha's father. He and Jack were kept in a different part of the ship.
The Doctor knew his enemy all too well, and knew that the Master kept him so close-by not just to torment him, but also because he was terrified of him. Terrified in general. He knew that the Doctor was the one person in the universe who could possibly outsmart him, and it behoved him to know what the Doctor was up to, at all times.
Although it became clear that as true as that was, he had grown to fear Martha Jones even more.
"I think it's so amazing, Doctor, that you have such faith in your human companion," he would say offhandedly. He would start soft and mocking, and end up raging around the conference room, unleashing his unique brand of unhinged fury all over the Doctor, and whoever happened to be nearby, which was frequently Francine or Tish. "Such pride in her abilities, and in her capacity and willingness to do good in the world. Because we all know that the Doctor does not take fools into the TARDIS, no siree. He does not bring in weaklings, nor whingers nor fusspots, no! The Doctor only recruits the best. And Martha Jones… she must be amazing. I mean, I have no first-hand view of that – to my way of thinking, she's just human detritus waiting to be swept away – hopefully in the next thirty-six hours! But by golly, there must be something good about her, for you to care so much. Aw, just look at your eyes, old man. It's almost sweet how much all of this hurts you to hear. It's almost painful for me to tell you that we literally have her address, and that she's been staying in the cellar of an elderly couple in Hokkaido. That bitch thinks she can hide from us, well, she's got another thing coming! She's got…"
And on and on and on.
For about three months, this sort of discourse succeeded in rendering the Doctor sick with worry, but he learned over time that it was all bluster. In fact, now he lay in his bird cage, not eating his tiny ration of food, he wondered why it had taken him so damn long to learn this. Probably because his concern (and love) for Martha was bubbling over pretty much all the time. The mocking only served to make things worse… for a time. Eventually, the Doctor calmed, and realised that it was all designed to do exactly what it was doing: scare him, and for good measure, piss him off. And so, he ceased to listen.
Or, rather, he tried. He could never quite do it. And once in a while, he would even speak, say something like, "Master, back off," or "You leave her alone." He couldn't help himself, because he had seen what the Master could and would do to those of whom he was afraid, and it was not reassuring. The year had to come to a close some time… what was to become of Martha, if anything went wrong upon her return?
And as the year actually did come to a close, things got tense again. The Master would do his usual bluster, but for the first time in months, Tish, Francine, and the Doctor would look at each other with dread in their eyes, because they were no longer sure whether it was bluster. In fact, by design, it very well might not be.
Then the day came. She marched into that room, stony-faced except for when she looked at him and smiled.
Perhaps it was his smaller stature, or his diminished capacity to do… well, anything, but the joy and pride he felt upon seeing her again was overwhelming. He thought his hearts might burst out of his chest.
And then the Master grandstanded. He boasted. He did what The Master does.
"I never could resist a ticking clock," he had said, with utter glee. "At zero, to mark this day, the child Martha Jones will die. My first blood! Any last words? No? Such a disappointment, this one. Days of old, Doctor, you had Companions who could absorb the Time Vortex. This one's useless. Bow your head. And so it falls to me, as Master of all, to establish from this day a new order of Time Lords. From this day forward…"
The Doctor had no idea what the Joneses were thinking, but he was hopeful. On-edge, but hopeful. Because he had known this would happen. That the Master would not just deploy his ships across the universe… that he never could resist a ticking clock. Or, much like himself, the opportunity to talk, perhaps too much.
The Master babbled, and Martha began to laugh.
And like any great plan-foiler, she told the Master all about Professor Docherty. The Doctor had told her a year ago to get herself back into the Valiant in 365 days, and Martha had worked out how to do it. The Resistance, the freedom fighters in the name of Martha Jones. It was turning out to be a glorious day!
"I did just what the Doctor said," she explained. "I went across the continents all on my own, and everywhere I went, I found the people, and I told them my story. I told them about the Doctor, and I told them to pass it on. To spread the word so that everyone would know about the Doctor."
And there she was, giving credit to him again. There, in her combat gear, rescuing the lot of them…
But he had asked her to, this time.
Do the literal leg-work, Martha. Let me stay here and meditate.
Because his year spent in hell hadn't been just for the sake of waiting. It had been a way to keep himself close to the source of the telepathic field, to integrate himself psychically into its matrices.
The Master mocked her again. "Faith and hope? Is that all? Is that your weapon? Prayer?"
He actually seemed incredulous. He could plough through faith and hope any day of the week, with one arm and leg tied together behind his back.
"One word," she had said. "Just one thought, at one moment, but with fifteen satellites, and a telepathic field binding the whole human race together, with all of them, every single person on Earth thinking the same thing at the same time. And that word is Doctor."
But even before zero arrived and the faith and aspirations of the human race had restored him to his full capacity, he felt infused by it. Because he knew what was coming.
And because seeing her, and hearing her voice, and watching her stand up to that despot, had lifted him higher than he could possibly have known.
And when the telepathic field brought the collective efforts of Mankind to him, yes, it was because they were saying his name, thinking of him. But only because she told them to. Because they had faith not in him, but in her. Her name had become legend that year. The comings and goings of Martha Jones had been kept-track-of by the Resistance, because there were rumours of a woman who could get them out of the bind they were in… not of a Time Lord. Because she came into their midst and talked them through. Because they believed her when she said, "The Doctor saves us all the time," not because they had ever seen him do it.
When the Doctor stood tall again, ready to take back his life, it was on her effort. It was her faith and love imbuing him, fortifying him. The human race, yes, his name, yes, but on the word of Martha Jones.
And no amount of mocking, threatening, or infantilising her could take that away.
She was a bona fide hero, and always had been. And he loved her.
He had known it for some time now, but the past year had been so chaotic and a simple struggle to get through the days that he had forgotten just how much her smile could mean to him, how much he wanted to have her in his life forever. Whatever forever might mean for them…
It was like he fell back in love with her on that day.
Unfortunately, what he learned from his experience of the past few years, was that as soon as you learn to accept someone's love, and the prospect of returning it, they are taken from you.
With Rose, just before walking into Canary Wharf, he had turned a corner, wondering if perhaps…
With Martha, just before walking into Utopia, in the close quarters afforded by their semi-cruel stint in 1969, he had realised that he couldn't bear the idea of Martha not being herself around him, because her self was what he wanted. Her. Just her.
And then the Daleks, Cybermen, Torchwood, and the Master had taken any optimism he might have held in his hearts, and destroyed it.
But far from being accidentally exiled to a different dimension, Martha had chosen to walk away. She had done so, in part, because she believed that he could not return her affections, and in the moment, it felt like the wrong time to argue with her. The debris from the past year was heavy in the air, and… something about the moment told him that she needed to be free. Her demeanour had changed, the way she carried herself… staying with him would perhaps have diminished her.
In addition, she did need to be with her family, and they all needed to heal. It would not be the ideal time for her to start a new relationship. (Even though she actually had… but it had ended quickly, and badly.)
Perhaps, he thought, our time has passed. And so she went, and he let her.
And kicked himself for letting it happen again.
Over the next year or so, his feelings about Rose and his separation from her would evolve dramatically… it would become rather draining. But his feelings about Martha stayed relatively unmoved. He had his theories as to why…
And tonight, his whole being quaked with urgency. He sonicked Martha's car radio, and concentrated on his breathing, because it was starting to feel like he had turned another corner.
They were on the precipice of something again, and she was in a house covered with black ooze.
He wanted her out of this debacle now.
He would not let her be taken again.
I hope you're still finding the flashbacks interesting and relevant to what's happening. For me, they are a reminder of who our characters are, and of the fact that in *this* version of events, they didn't just fall in love tonight!
I know that the flashbacks cause the present-day story to move more slowly, so thanks for sticking with me! In the next chapter, some of the mechanisms we've been hearing about will begin to fall into place!
I would absolutely love a review right about now... it would make my week! Thank you for reading... :-)
