For about thirty-two seconds the Doctor stood in the same spot, rebooting: motionlessly taking stock of the last several months of his life.
Taking stock of Martha Jones.
He knew her. Hell, he'd all but vetted her. Put her through the ringer for the key around her neck and the coveted term of frequent flyer. She'd been the first – and perhaps only – good thing to happen to him after losing Rose. She was his friend and confidant at a time when it wasn't particularly easy to be either. At a time he needed it most, whether or not he admitted it.
The Doctor appreciated that he wasn't the most likeable bloke to be around these days. He knew she could see through the paper-thin veneer of quips and adventures. But she stuck with him regardless through the ups and downs, no matter how turbulent. Didn't run away when things got touchy, didn't balk when he mindlessly took out his frustration and grief on her. Cared too much. That was just the way she was.
He trusted her implicitly; had since that very first day, the day she'd saved his life. Gave her last breath into his lungs, to save a stranger. On New Earth he'd opened up to her about the War – hadn't been able to stop once she provoked it. She was the first person he'd ever told that much. And he had felt strangely safe, spilling truths he'd not dared speak before in that rainy alley in the underbelly of New New York. Speaking into those soft, understanding eyes. Finding solace in all the tears they'd welled, mirroring his, all the empathy that poured out of her at the magnitude of his loss.
For all the undertones of their relationship he'd rather not acknowledge, all the discomfort and gnawing guilt that she churned up in him – that moment was formative. It had created a bond between them, no matter how much he later regretted opening up that night. It was the reason she'd never been just a passenger, no matter how many times he told himself – and her – that lie. The reason he never really could take her, and leave her, home.
Martha Jones was the only one in the universe who knew what not only what he'd lost, but what he'd done. The only one he'd so far had the nerve to tell. Who stayed with him in spite of it; who shared the burden any time, any way she could. Who hurt when she couldn't, when he pushed her away, too compassionate for her own good.
The Doctor had no shortage of adoration, of course, if he cared to go looking for it. She was hardly special that way. He had amassed an endless supply of saved, indebted lives right round the cosmos, ready to heap on him endless certainty of his righteousness and benevolence. But all of that rang hollow and meaningless. Because there was no one left who really knew him. Knew what he had done in the Time War. No one who knew the truth.
No one except for her, it'd somehow turned out.
And when she tried to convince others of his integrity, when she smiled at him after the day was saved, when, with all the context of the carnage he had wrought, she threw herself at him in an all-trusting hug, convinced so thoroughly of his goodness – the Doctor was engulfed in selfish comfort. In unwarranted forgiveness. There was reassurance in her presence. An absolution he could find nowhere else in the universe.
And now it was gone.
He'd shrugged her off as temporary for so long that the thought had rarely crossed his mind, but at the rather foreign notion of losing her, losing that reassurance he'd been taking for granted, the Doctor got an unexpected pang – so gutting it startled him.
Had she been just a passenger, he would've cut his losses. Would've avoided the whole uncomfortable mess of it, deleted the entire fiasco from his memory, and flown off to scare up a companion of a reptilian species who found his mammalian form physically repulsive. But as much as it pained him to admit it, as staunchly as he'd resisted it… she was so much more than a passenger. She couldn't just be replaced, even if that was the vastly more convenient option.
He had to go after her, and they had to sort this out.
After half a minute of paralysation, the Doctor lifted his hand very slowly to touch his lips, staring at the empty console room.
Perhaps she'd got tired of hoping. Tired of waiting. Tired of him looking through her, ignoring all her little yearning sighs and cues…
Then he shook himself out of it with a hard blink.
"Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed aloud, and went to the doors, pushing them open and leaning out to look.
He knew her through and through. Sweet, awkward, brilliant Martha Jones, with her wry wit and healing heart. With her sneaky glances and pretty blushes. Martha was all righteous defiance and earnest concern, softness and constant curiosity. All shyly averted eyes and longing gazes, flippant sarcasm and cheeky schoolgirl flirtations she thought he didn't pick up on.
She was not – well, whatever in creation that had been. Something else was going on.
The alleyway outside was empty. He could hear and feel the beat of music pulsing through the grubby brick walls flanking him, the jumbled chaotic burble of human voices. Wherever she'd stormed off to, she was well on her way.
Of course, he could pinpoint her location with galactic precision, as the TARDIS stored the unique temporal signature of every soul that'd ever wandered its halls – it was sentimental that way. But he didn't need a GPS to track her, not tonight.
The Doctor grabbed for his coat without looking, shrugging it on in a single motion before stepping out into the cold.
He closed the door firmly behind him, tilted his head against the damp, earthy air, and started to follow his nose.
The scent was like a smoke trail, and she hadn't gone far.
Following it found him immersed in the loud, blurry, neon-tinted chaos of what Martha had earlier deduced was a nightclub. He didn't have time to bother with the long queue trailing out front, nor the beefy men in black guarding the door and selectively letting the bustiest women with the shortest skirts in. Instead he found a fire escape to climb, and breached the establishment through a side door upstairs, determined to get in and out with as little fanfare as possible.
The club was tiered, plush private balconies overlooking a bar and bright, swarming dance floor. He took the stairs to the lowest level three at a time. The air inside was so thick it offended his senses. It churned with the acrid bite of alcohol and other illicit substances: tangled up in pungent human sweat, vomit, and so many clashing, raging pheromones it made him want to stick his head out a window.
But the particular scent that'd led him inside was still, impossibly, much more powerful than even the singular funk of human nightlife. It wafted above the crowd like honey, mixed up in her perfume, distinctly sweet in a soup of unpleasantness: a beacon to his human among hundreds of others.
He needed to extract her as quickly as possible from the throng. Then figure out what the hell was going on with her. Because after that incident in the TARDIS – he was loath to even think of it as a kiss – he had several hypotheses. Not a single one of them good.
The Doctor waded through the jostling, drunken mob, pushing at heads and shoulders irritably to navigate the veritable swamp of humanity. He was following his heavily strained senses across the dance floor when he felt, quite alarmingly, something on his rear.
A hand, he discovered in astonishment, upon looking down with a jolt. At the high capacity of the room, any attempt to recoil from the defilement would inevitably cause a trampling incident; and so his eyes darted up to confront the hand's owner. He found a tussled, bottle-blonde head, big, brown, glitter-ringed eyes. A considerable bosom all but spilling out of a pink minidress.
"Hiya," the woman slurred in a Welsh accent, making an earnest attempt to drape herself on him. "I'm Rosie."
If the universe had a sense of humour, it was not one the Doctor remotely appreciated. He peeled the woman deftly off of him and deposited her in a ring of other young ladies who were raunchily swatting each other's shaking backsides. Rosie seemed happy and at home with this, and joined them without complaint. He shook his head and pressed on, jaw clenching – knowing that he and Martha would undoubtedly be having words about her choice of hiding spot.
Annoyed and harrowingly ruffled, he finally escaped the feral herd a minute later. Though, he got out far from unmolested: perspiring bodies kept trying to grind on him all the while, and quite a surprising number of young men apparently mistook him for their father (a particularly disturbing phenomenon to the Doctor, as they had most definitely not been addressing him with familial affection). By the time he emerged harried on the other side of the dance floor, everything below his waist had been pinched, squeezed and groped brazenly enough to make him reconsider his vow to protect planet Earth.
He fixed his jacket with an indignant huff, flustered. For heaven's sake. He'd take a fleet of Daleks any day.
Fortunately, he hadn't lost Martha's scent in the madness. Steeling himself, he ventured into a dark, narrow corridor, secluded away from the festivities. A couple snogged rather heavily against the wall and he squeezed past them with some effort, head cocked as he investigated the hallway. There was a supply cupboard, the door to a staff-only stairwell, and an archway that led into a set of toilets. He was close, he could tell.
"Can I buy you a drink?" A slightly older gentleman in a fedora materialised beside the Doctor so suddenly he almost jumped out of his skin.
"Yeah," he dismissed absently, brushing past him, "knock yourself out."
"Erm, I," the man stammered, "what do you –"
"Lime soda!" the Time Lord tossed over his shoulder, and followed his olfactories to the women's room.
Not that he realised it was the women's room at first. He bypassed the oddly triangular caricature on the door without a second thought, and didn't process where he was until a group of heavily made-up women crowded round the entry squealed and tutted at his entry, shooting him dirty glances before going back to applying their lip gloss and hovering over their mobile phones.
It gave him pause. And as the Doctor wandered further into the long, mirrored space, he felt an unpleasant pit settling in his gut.
He wasn't quite sure what his worst fears were exactly. But when he turned the corner: there they were, in living colour.
He stopped in his tracks and stiffened like someone had poured ice water down his back.
There was panting and grunting, echoing off the tiled corner of the room. A half-open stall door, swinging back and forth. A disturbingly rhythmic sort of… smacking.
The Doctor very much wanted to tell himself it was just another anonymous display of indecency, to dismiss it and move on. But emanating from that corner, he heard a voice he knew all too well. He knew that panting. Knew the exact capacity of the attached lungs, simply from having heard them labour so many times – always on the heels of an exhilarating sprint for their lives. Never before in the grungy, seedy bowels of a nightclub toilet.
She had followed through on her threat. And – in record time – found someone who was… interested.
Perhaps troublingly, the Doctor not once had the passing thought that he might have been intruding on an entirely consensual arrangement that was none of his business. In fact, he wasn't certain he had a single thought at all.
His reaction was instinctual, frighteningly kneejerk. Something bristling and untameable welled up in him, made his hearts fire like bullets and his hands clench to fists; something that he wasn't at all prepared to confront.
His trainers squeaked hard and fast across the dirty floors and he threw open the stall door, sending it banging into the wall with rather more force than intended.
But his wrath didn't last long. Not long enough for him to understand its cause. Certainly not long enough for him to act on it, and snatch the collar of the young man who was shoving his companion up and down a graffitied wall. Not long enough to drag him from the stall and permanently compromise his bodily integrity.
In the second after the door hit the wall, it was all over.
The faceless, nameless man whom the Doctor's subconscious was busily planning elaborate and unjustified violence against: he let out a shuddering, euphoric expletive. And went up in glowing vapour.
If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he couldn't have been talked into believing it.
Suddenly held aloft by nothing but air, Martha dropped with a tiny shriek, sliding roughly down the wall. On pure reflex, the Doctor moved to catch her – grabbing her by the biceps before she hit her head on the porcelain bowl or twisted an ankle on landing.
She gasped up at him. Panting numbly like she'd just finished a marathon, dishevelled, her sweat-dampened hair flopping out of its updo and hanging down in her eyes. They were wide open, totally glazed: openly stunned to see him standing there in place of her previous paramour.
The Doctor stared expressionlessly at the dust cloud shimmering in the air between them. Blinked at the crackling buzz of residual energy, making the hairs on his wrists stand erect.
There were about a million thoughts in his head, but like always, one propelled its way to the front of the queue more readily than all the others.
"What?"
The dust was beginning to settle round their feet. He looked down in disbelief at it.
"Just… what?" he croaked.
Rather unexpectedly, Martha gave a sudden start – the faraway, dreamy absence glazing her eyes vanishing at once. Gasping again, she fumbled at her downed jeans, trying to wriggle them back up and cover herself. There was lace tangled around her bare thighs, the neck of her tank top twisted under the slipping left cup of a satin bra.
He let go of her arms and took several steps back, mechanically averting his eyes to the grimy tile wall. "Oh, my God," he heard her mutter tightly under her breath as she tugged and squirmed back into her trousers, hurriedly fixing her clothes.
There was a message on the wall crudely penned in red marker, unique amongst the other rather more explicit vandalism, reading in scribbled bold: Love, Not War! The Doctor found himself grateful for the reminder. He took a slow breath and tried to calm his nerves, shoving his hands deep in his pockets and setting his jaw.
He was unsure why his hackles were still up. The target of the vicious retribution he'd gone into autopilot to exact; he didn't even exist anymore, the poor sod. Nor, the Doctor reluctantly supposed, had he technically committed any actual wrongdoing. Which was probably the main thing.
When the frantic rustling of fabric stopped at last, he cautioned a glance back at Martha. She was making a clumsy and frantic effort at rehabilitating her hair, swiping it hurriedly out her face. Her lips wouldn't close and her pupils were enormous.
"You followed me," she breathed. It was all she got out, almost at a whisper.
"Yes," he stated plainly, and didn't see much point in saying more on the subject.
"I…" She put her hands on either side of her face, grasping her cheeks in dismay as lucidity set in. "God, I don't… I don't know what I was…" Martha stared at him desperately, looking increasingly horrified as she flattened herself to the wall. "I don't know what… I swear, Doctor, I…"
"I believe you."
He saw her swallow hard. "You do?" Her voice was small.
"Of course I do." He stuck out his hand to her. "Let's get back to the TARDIS, so we can…" He glanced at the dust around her boots and cleared his throat carefully. "…sort everything out."
Which was a rather more complicated proposition, now that they were sorting out not just an unfortunate and unsolicited sexual advance, but also what appeared to be a mystic homicide. The Doctor wondered what it said about him, that he'd much rather talk about the murder than the kiss.
"Okay," she said, seeming unsteady. She put her hand in his. He felt it shaking. "Okay."
She let him guide her out of the toilet stall, not seeming to know which way to go. The Doctor was concerned in the extreme by the clear disorientation in her features, watching her look around like she'd never seen the room before. "All right?" he checked, trying to catch her eye.
She gave a rushed, reflexive nod, gaze dropping to the floor.
It wasn't even slightly convincing. He sighed and gave her a brief once-over. "Where's your jacket?"
"I…" A pang seemed to come over her and she glanced at her bare arms. "I don't know."
And that did it. The hand he wasn't holding went up over her eyes, and with a helpless jolt, she began to cry.
"Oh, Martha," he groaned softly. She tried to turn away in shame. He held her hand tighter, thwarting her retreat – pulling her into his side and wrapping an arm about her quivering shoulders. "Come on, please don't do that."
"I wish you hadn't followed me." The words were hiccoughing, barely intelligible. "I wish you hadn't seen me like this."
"Do you even remember how you got here?"
"No," she sobbed. "My head hurts."
"Then how could it possibly be your fault?" He shook his head. "Something is very wrong here, and it's my fault for not catching it earlier. In the TARDIS. I ought to have known that wasn't you, right off. I'm sorry." He gave her a healthy squeeze, folding her in, letting her bury her face in his chest.
"Where did he go?" she whimpered.
"Hmm?"
"That… man, the man I was…" She couldn't even bring herself to say it.
"I don't know," said the Doctor gently. "But we'll figure it out, okay?"
It was a rather atrocious lie, of course. He knew an energy transfer when he saw it, and that man had gone nowhere. He'd been atomised in a heartbeat, bones, clothes and all: and what bits of him weren't sprinkled on the floor of the women's toilet were making their way into the ventilation shaft, about to rain down on oblivious clubgoers.
But she was already very out of sorts, and he didn't figure that tidbit of hideous information would help matters at all. "Let's just focus on getting back to the TARDIS, yeah?" he encouraged, coaxing her forward.
Her awareness of her surroundings was questionable, but when he started walking she followed more or less blindly, her fist clinging to his lapel, seeming glued to his side like a lost child. Which suited him perfectly fine. The absolute last thing he needed was her running off and beguiling someone else to their death. He'd enough on his plate as it was.
The women crowded in the entrance of the loo tittered when they saw Martha clutching at him and stumbling along. "Busy night, love?" one cracked, setting off a tide of raucous laughter among the rest.
Martha was coherent enough to wilt into his coat at the mockery, hiding her face with a sniffle. The Doctor levelled the lot of them with a look that could've flattened an asteroid.
As he passed by, he reached into the pocket where his sonic screwdriver lived, and pretended not to hear the synchronised wails of alarm when seven mobile phones exploded in tandem.
In the darkened corridor outside the toilets, the fedoraed man was waiting on the Doctor with a hopeful look on his face and a lime soda in hand. He saw Martha and frowned delicately. "Is she…."
"Terribly inebriated, yes, and well, me, I'm the designated driver, you know how it goes. Can't be doing any drinking I'm afraid."
"It's a soda," the man pointed out, looking down into the glass.
"Exactly. One sip and I'd be seeing double – excuse me, madam, sir." The snogging couple had progressed to something loosely approximating intercourse and he struggled to guide Martha around them without getting hit by a leg or elbow.
The risk of losing her trying to cross the dance floor was too great, and he also couldn't stomach the idea of all those hands grabbing at her the way they'd been readily helping themselves to him. Rather than take the chance, he sonicked the staff-only door and pushed through.
Fortunately, rather than lead to a posse of growling security guards, there was only a narrow, poorly lit corridor beyond. He followed his nose again – it was doing quite a bit of legwork this evening – and headed for fresh air.
And he almost made it out without issue.
Almost.