Þa Gāsta Ġiedd

Martha

They were flung into the throes of a rainstorm. Underneath a dark grey sky and next to a dark grey sea both Rose and Martha were soaked through almost immediately. Enormous waves towered next to them and crashed down along the bay, splashing across their ankles and shoes. It was an icy cold shale beach at the edge of a black forest glistening with the rain, and the poxy umbrella Martha had brought wasn't going to do them a jot of good. Martha didn't think she had left the TARDIS for nearing on two weeks, not to do anything other than go shopping, and was overcome by a sense of wonder she had never felt before when stepping into the rain. She was actually enjoying it, being cold and soaked when she was normally hot and dry and felt like she were being suffocated – both literally and figuratively. Maybe she had been succumbing to cabin fever, but regardless, she felt a great and strange amount of relief.

She held a hand above her eyes to shield them from the rain, which flew in all directions in the strong wind, and saw shipwrecks strewn across the beach, along with discarded swords and shields and sacks with unknown contents. And they weren't just any ships, she recognised them distinctly as being Viking longboats, splintered against the rocks. It was hard to tell how long they had been there for, but there didn't appear to be any Vikings around now; it was desolate and the foul weather made it impossible to tell what time of day or night it was. There was some light breaking through the clouds, but whether this was moonlight or sunlight she didn't know.

"Ha!" she actually laughed, staring around, "I haven't seen rain like this for… I don't know. Months. God… You sometimes don't notice how much time you spend indoors, do you?"

"Are you alright?" Rose asked her, talking loudly over the wind. Martha was staring out across the chaotic ocean and the longboats, waves sea foam washing up over the shales. "Martha?"

"Sorry. I just miss the weather sometimes."

"I don't, this is awful," Rose complained. Rose had the backpack with their lunch in it, and she took it from where it was slung over one shoulder to remove the umbrella. Martha had her arms crossed and was still looking at the beach, wondering what the time vortex wanted them to find out there. She thought it couldn't possibly be a recent century – the Vikings had been around more than a thousand years before they were born. The cold rain was refreshing and woke her up properly to put into perspective her bad dreams and poor sleeping; she thought she had lost touch with reality.

Rose opened the umbrella to protect against the rain, but it didn't do much good with the strong wind. Though it was no effort for her to hold it and keep it from blowing away, it was quickly turned inside out, and then the sea splashed over their feet again. Rose's expression was that of someone who'd just have a bucket of ice water thrown across her head without warning. There was a bright flash in the sky and almost immediately a heavy rumble of thunder.

"Probably best to leave the umbrella," Martha called over the wind, "It'll attract the lightning. Do you know what century this is?"

"It's the early Eleventh Century," Rose answered.

"Why are we in the Eleventh Century?"

"I don't know, the time vortex brought us here, the time vortex told me when it is – I think we should head towards the woods," she decided, "It'll be more shelter from the rain, leave us less open to the lightning. And getting killed by any invading Vikings. Come on, it's this way."

"What is?" Martha asked, following her.

"I don't know. Whatever we're here for. It's this way." She was always so vague when it came to the time vortex. Martha wrapped her arms around her and emanated as much heat as she could, so much that steam began to rise from her skin after not very long at all, but the sensation just made her feel like she'd spent too long in a sauna.

Once they were in the forest it became even darker and Martha was unable to see her feet in front of her. Because of this, she tripped right over a branch after barely a minute of trudging through the muddy woods and fell into Rose's side. Rose barely noticed this, with her super-strength it probably felt a bit like leaf had brushed past her arm, but it prompted her to create one of those glowing energy orbs of hers, which hovered in the air just ahead of them an illuminated their dismal surroundings.

"What's it like when the time vortex tells you things? Is it like a voice?"

"No, it's like… I just know things, all of a sudden, and I know that I only know them because of the time vortex," Rose explained, "Things I need to know to make sure things happen the way they should."

"And the Doctor doesn't like it speaking to you?"

"I think he's scared of it."

"It did kill him," Martha pointed out, though she wasn't too sure she knew the specifics of Nine's regeneration into Ten. Her shoes were already coated in mud, socks soaked through from the seawater. She was going to stink very soon.

"That's… it's different. That happened – I became the Bad Wolf – because I absorbed it. It's like… a dam in a river. The river flows, but then gets blocked by the damn, so it all builds up and overflows in one area. That's what happened before, and then the Doctor took it away from me and died because of it. But now, I'm still the dam, but if the dam's open and the water can flow through freely. Or maybe there's no dam at all and I'm the river bed. It goes through me, it doesn't inhabit me. And it's not like I abuse the power I have," Rose said. Martha didn't believe that for a moment, she could think of one very distinct example where she certainly had abused her powers, and not that time she'd tried very persistently to kill Clara. To her annoyance, Rose sensed this in her silence. "What?" she asked pointedly, "I don't abuse it."

"I mean… you did, you know… get rid of Tentoo."

"God – everyone's always making me out to be some sort of monster because of that."

"Well, if I just threw Mickey off the TARDIS and never spoke to him again-"

"It's nothing like that," Rose snapped, "We were fighting. We were fighting for weeks before that happened, because he didn't want to live on the TARDIS anymore, and now he doesn'. Besides, he's fine."

"He is?"

"He's sad, but he's fine."

"You've seen him?" Martha was surprised.

"In the time vortex. Donna's adopted him like he's a stray dog. It's a huge secret, she thinks I don't know about it – but I've been keeping tabs on him for months, I've literally known the entire time. I made sure he reached Saigon okay, I made sure someone offered him a job; someone tried to jump him and mug him and I stopped that from happening. He doesn't know I've been intervening. It was a messy breakup I'll admit, but people have messy breakups," Rose argued. This was all news to Martha.

"Donna's 'adopted' him?"

"He's been living in her flat in London for weeks after she went and got him – and she only found out about that because there was a newspaper article about a fisherman in Vietnam catching a particularly big squid who happened to be him. That article was from a Vietnamese paper which got 'mysteriously' delivered to Shaun Temple, and he showed it to Donna because he recognised the man in the picture. That's how Donna found out. I'm the one who sent them the paper. We wanted different things in life, but I don't hate him. I don't want him dead.

"This is definitely a secret, by the way, you cannot tell the Doctor, he can't know that I ever even think about Tentoo anymore, he'd lose his mind. He's already on the brink with planning the wedding."

"Mmm…" Martha just agreed, all-too-familiar with the feeling of being 'on the brink' with stress. Though, Ten did seem incredibly agitated about this wedding – not that that was particularly surprising, it was hard to imagine the Doctor getting married. The Tenth Doctor, at least. The subsequent two were much more acclimatised to the idea.

Martha began to worry again as they trudged through the mud and the trees and the rainstorm, trusting Rose's 'time god' intuition. She began to think about what else Rose might know, and if she kept the secret of manipulating her ex-husband's affairs from afar, what other secrets could she be keeping? Secrets which weren't even her own?

"…The time vortex hasn't told you anything else recently, has it?" she asked carefully. Rose couldn't hear her over the storm, so she had to repeat herself louder.

"How do you mean?" Rose called. The wind and rain was almost deafening, only slightly dulled in the dense forest compared to on the beach.

"Just… you know. More secrets."

"I'm not gonna tell you stuff about other people," said Rose, "It's not like I pry into their lives on purpose."

"I mean about me." Rose stopped walking, the rain cascading down around them and bouncing off the leaves of the evergreen trees. Despite the bad weather, Martha thought it was probably sometime in spring. Rose narrowed her eyes, her eyes which changed colour at random and were currently a highly odd shade of pink.

"Secrets like what?" Rose asked.

"Look… I'll tell you, but I'd really like to know for sure before I do that you don't already know about it. Do you?"

"I know a few things about you, but I'm not sure any of them are that important…" Rose said, "What's going on?" That settled it for Martha, Rose couldn't know. If it was one of the 'few things' the time vortex had told her, she would have no trouble picking out what, precisely, Martha was referring to. And besides, she wasn't entirely sure that Rose would have been able to keep it to herself and wouldn't have immediately sought them out and attacked them with questions if she had found out. So she made up her mind to confide in Rose Tyler.

And that was exactly what she had been about to do, until they experienced something quite harrowing. There was a bright, blue-ish light, and for a moment Martha thought it must just be lightning – maybe it had struck worryingly close. But when the light did not dissipate after a second, she knew it was something else, coming from behind Rose. Rose still waiting for her reveal her truth, Martha stepped around her to get a look, and saw a figure glowing brightly, an entirely separate image from Rose's golden orb.

"Hey!" Martha called out at it, since it was in a distinctly human and vibrant shape, but when she shouted the apparition vanished as if into smoke or ethereal fog.

"What?" Rose asked her, "What was it?" Martha ignored her and walked past to head towards the spot where she had seen the abnormality but found herself splashing through a deep puddle. Rain bounced down through a gap in the trees, and briefly the moon appeared through the thick clouds; so it was the middle of the night, after all.

"I thought I saw someone. Something."

"Like what?" Rose asked, following her through the mud and rainwater.

"I don't know, like a person, but not a person. A shape. It disappeared."

"What were you going to tell me?"

"It looked like a ghost."

"Martha?"

"A ghost," Martha reiterated to her.

"Do ghosts exist, though?"

"Yes, they exist," Martha said, "They're made of energy, electricity. Esther sees them."

"Esther… sees ghosts?" Rose asked, incredulous, "Esther's… a psychic?"

"It's not like she sees them, she conducts them, you know she's like a walking lightning rod. She asked me about it in case there's anything I can do, medically, but there really isn't. Makes her faint," Martha explained, but ghosts were not her forte. Medicine, maybe, but definitely not ghosts. It may not have even been a ghost at all, could have been anything – a hallucination, some other energy-based creature, like the Frir or those ghastly 'sex clouds.'

"We should keep going," Rose said. Martha didn't think she believed her about the ghost, which was just typical. But she didn't know what they could do, after all, Esther wasn't with them, nor did they have any other method of generating heaps of electricity. They were in a flooded wood with a lightning storm raging, it was basically the best breeding ground for the supernatural around. "What were you going to tell me about?" Martha had to think about that, had to get herself back into her previous headspace before witnessing whatever it had been (though she kept a close look-out now, glancing around at her surroundings – even if she had been mistaken, there could easily be packs of marauding Vikings out there.)

"Oh, uh…" Now that something else was going on, she sort of wanted an excuse not to think about her own affairs, and so faltered when the time came. But she wanted somebody else to talk to about everything, somebody who understood life on the TARDIS, somebody she could trust, and most importantly somebody else who was a woman. "I'm, um…" Again, she stopped walking when faced with the enormity of the admission. "We're having a baby. I'm pregnant."

Something screamed in her face and she was overcome with terror. That same ghastly image, or at least a similar one, leering at her. Gaunt features, bright white skin, a vivid blue aura encompassing the entire vision, black eyes like coal and rotting, horrid teeth, glistening wounds secreting dark green fluid riddling its body. It shrieked into the night, appearing between them so that both of them screamed as well, Martha falling backwards into the mud while Rose backed away into a tree and accidentally elbowed it with such force that a whole bough of leaves snapped off. The bough fell and landed right where the spook was standing in the middle of a small clearing, Rose's own light source vanishing with its owner's terror. The wood crashed to the ground and into the mud and made the fiend disappear, throwing them both into darkness again.

In a panic Martha lit a fistful of fire, which was a tricky thing to maintain with the heavy rain pouring down around them, and struggled in the mud to get back to her feet. With a golden flurry Rose teleported across the meagre distance to Martha's side to help her stand up properly, Martha now filthy as well as wet and cold.

"Shit!" exclaimed Rose.

"That was a ghost!" Martha said, "I told you!"

"You're having a baby!"

"The ghost."

"Forget about the ghost, the baby – oh my god, I can't believe it. You and Mickey!" Somehow, Rose had overcome the horror of a genuine ghost jumping out at them enough to beam widely, her eyes changing through a verifiable rainbow out of sheer excitement. "Are you okay from that fall!?"

"I'm fine."

"Are you sure?" Rose asked urgently.

"You're as bad as Mickey," Martha shook her head.

"Is this why you were in the medibay this morning with those kittens when you're allergic to them? Oh my god, is the baby alright? Is there something wrong?" This was why she didn't want to tell anybody – the incessant questions. She didn't even know which to answer first, so she settled to answer none of them.

"Technically it's still an embryo," Martha mumbled. Rose ignored her.

"Bloody hell, I can't believe it. I can't believe Mickey had it in him. A baby – wow. That's mental. I'm so happy for you! I'd hug you but, I've got a bit of an issue with hugging people too hard at the moment, the Doctor keeps moaning. But seriously, this is…" She grinned, balled her fists, squealed.

"Yeah…"

"Are you not happy about it? You don't seem particularly happy."

"I am, both of us are, it's just…" she lowered her voice and stepped closer to Rose, "Helix says it's going to be a Time Lord. You know, like how River was born. And it's also got traces of the Manifest virus."

"'It'?" Rose questioned.

"You know it takes seven weeks for a foetus to develop its gender?" Martha said, "We have no idea if it's a boy or a girl. Or some sort of glowing, tentacle… thing. I'm scared."

"Martha," said Rose firmly, "It's going to be perfect. He or she or they or whatever is going to be the cutest, most adorable baby basically ever with the best parents anyone could ask for. And you're a doctor!"

"Being a doctor is making me even more worried," she said, "And I can't talk to Mickey. I can't tell him I'm worried. He's anxious enough already."

"Well…" Rose sighed, "You can talk to me now. You've told me. Who else knows?"

"Just Jack, and Ianto, but only because Jack was with Ianto at the time and Jack refuses to go anywhere without him," Martha said, "That's all. I've only known for a week. I just wish there was someone who knew, for sure, what was going to happen."

"Maybe you should talk to one of the Doctors?" Rose suggested, "But not mine, he couldn't cope at the moment. But there's only a few days until the wedding, and then I'm sure he'll calm down. Or Eleven, he's the one who was with Amy and Rory while she was pregnant."

"Yeah, and the baby got kidnapped twice and then brainwashed into killing him and they didn't get to raise their own daughter. And now she's River. I don't want a kid like River," said Martha.

"No, no, I see your point…" Rose put her hands on her hips. "I'm sure we can find someone to help put your mind at ease. We could even… I'm sure I could find a way to talk to Thirteen for you. She must know. She knew about the cat."

"I'm not a cat!"

"I know! I'm just making suggestions! I'm excited for you! You and Mickey! You two are so much better together than he and I ever were, and he's gonna be the best dad in the world, I know it," Rose said. "How-" They heard a piece of wood snap nearby as though somebody had trampled on it and silenced immediately. That last time Martha had checked (about a minute ago), ghosts couldn't break tree branches.

They paused to listen – though Rose was hardly able to contain herself and was obviously dying to ask Martha more questions – and heard whispers. Footsteps. People nearby, real people, talking about something. When Martha clenched her fist and put out the fire burning in her palm, the darkness made the nearby lamp the travellers were carrying pronounced enough for them to see it. They certainly weren't ghosts, and they didn't look like soldiers.

"Let's go see who they are," Rose said, which Martha had been about to suggest herself, "Maybe they know about the ghost." Martha nodded and joined Rose in her careful approach, not wishing to startle the group.

As they moved through the trees Martha finally saw who they were; just three people, a family, the mother carrying a lantern while the father carried a young boy in his arms. The boy looked like he was asleep, but then broke out in a particularly aggressive and wet-sounding bout of coughing. Clearly, he was unwell. The parents desperately whispered to their son to be quiet in case he disturbed the 'gāstas.' Knowing that they were probably going to scare the little group no matter how they introduced themselves, and fearing for the wellbeing of the boy, Martha stepped forwards out of the trees to greet them.

They were quite terrified to see Martha and Rose come out of nowhere, but upon seeing they were two women and certainly not spectres of any kind, nor did they have any weapons, they relaxed slightly. Of course, Martha could set them on fire just by thinking about it and Rose could remove them from existence, but they didn't know that.

"You should know better than to be out here after dark," the mother warned them, holding up her lantern. It had what looked like animal skin stretched over it, presumably because that was easier than making glass. The boy began to cough again and curl up against his father. "This forest is haunted by the souls and bodies of the dead."

"There's more than one?" Rose asked, "More than one ghost?"

"The gāstas are not the worst of it," the father said, "The dead themselves still roam, the washed-up Dane invaders, their ships sunk at sea. Our own kinsmen and warriors as well. They wander among these trees."

"Wait, you mean… hang on…" said Rose, thinking. The boy coughed again.

"Is he alright?" Martha asked, squinting to get a look at him. They were all soaked to the skin and shivering. "Why did you bring him out here in this storm?"

"We needed to visit the witch," the father said, "To heal him."

"The witch?" Martha asked, horrified, "You're going to see a witch?" When she thought of witches, she remembered the Carrionites from Elizabethan London, the ones who had tormented Shakespeare and the other peasants – they would certainly not help a young boy in need, not unless they intended to use him as part of a twisted plot of world domination.

"We have already been, she lives much deeper in here, where the spirits are more free, but more tormented," said the mother.

"What did the witch do? Did she help you?" asked Martha, looking at the child and noticing redness around his eyes, "He looks like he has whooping cough, he could get pneumonia, you ought to keep him warm and indoors and cover his mouth when he coughs." She would also recommend a strong course of antibiotics and vaccinations for the parents and anybody else the boy may live with, but of course, antibiotics and vaccinations weren't anywhere close to existing. The likelihood of a child that age surviving whooping cough were sickeningly low.

"The wælcyrie already helped, she gave us a poultice, he's improving already," said the mother.

"He is?" Martha asked, incredulous, not wanting to get too close to the child because she didn't have an up-to-date whooping cough vaccination, and it was an incredibly dangerous infection to contract during pregnancy.

"He hasn't been vomitting with his coughs anymore," the father explained, "They're less violent. Seo wiċċe is a great healer." Martha was sceptical, but if they were telling the truth then it was medical evidence.

"Why would a witch help?" Rose inquired, "What did she ask for in return?"

"She asked for nothing," the mother said, affronted, "The witch helps all those who need it, she has cured many ailments in our village, she even repaired a sword wound which would usually mean death in one of our warriors, struck down by the Danen."

"Tell me about this wound," Martha said, "How bad was it?"

"It split his belly apart. The smell was inconceivable."

"And this witch healed a wound like that?" Martha was amazed. A stab wound which ripped the guts and stomach apart with a sword would kill someone in their own century in minutes, coming with an enormous risk of infection. An expert surgeon would need to be operating almost immediately for any chance of survival, but a witch had saved him? In the year 1000? "Where can we find this witch, exactly?"

"The way we came from," the mother held up her lantern and nodded in a direction through the trees, "She is a good woman. She brings the only solace we get with the wīcingas killing as they please."

"We must leave," the father interrupted, "Before the dead find us. I hope the witch can help you with your struggles."

"Yeah," said Martha as they began to leave, though she was still highly suspicious of this witch, even more so if she was genuinely helping people, "Me too."