A/N: Debatably the worst Torchwood episode (Day One. don't watch it if you haven't. please. trust me) made into a classic 'the aliens made them do it' fic for my favourite pairing. Will still make perfect sense if you haven't watched the episode – the alien of the week is just, simply put, sex gas. Yes, that's the official "Wiki" name for it. No, I don't know who at the BBC was on mushrooms. 2006 was wild.
1
There was laboured breathing in the alleyway. Filthy rainwater pooled in the gutter began to shiver under a cold whorl of winds. A blurry backlit imprint of 'Police Public Call Box' pulsed dimly in and out of sight — then arrived an inhale, an exhale, a guttural wheeze.
Vworp.
Huddled alone in the darkness outside a club, a young woman ranted tearfully at her phone. This moment of private anguish failed to deter the wooden stall that thrummed gustily into existence less than four feet away from her.
Speech stuttered out to gasping silence. Mascara-smeared eyes stretched wide, and her mobile sloshed into a dirty puddle, left facedown and fractured while heels clacked out of the alley. The club was fled in a blind, stricken panic.
Back in the alleyway, oblivious to the personal upheaval it had just caused, the TARDIS sat sturdy and luminous, pressed into the gloom. With a high creak the door jerked agape. A gap just large enough for a human head to peek out was created: and one young unsuspecting woman seamlessly replaced the other that'd just run away.
"This isn't where I live," Martha announced, regarding the nearby stinking skip and mildewed brick wall with distaste.
A "Hmm," issued from deep in the guts of the console.
"Doctor."
"Mmm?"
One panel of the console lay upturned at his feet, exposing a jungle of primary-coloured wire and gleaming copper filament in which his torso was presently buried. Currently the only visible parts of him were below the waist: Converse and long pinstriped legs and the occasional glimpse of red sock as he scratched his calf with his heel and disturbed his trouser cuff.
Normally she had no qualms about these below-the-waist aspects of him, but in lieu of the rest of his body, she found herself glaring at his rear end quite severely.
"We're not even near the right place."
"Mm-hmm," she heard, muffled. A new part of him appeared: the left hand. It did so, it seemed, solely to flap in a vague shooing motion and send her blood to a fine boil. "I'll be there in a minute."
After nigh on six months of travelling with him, to say that she was used to this sort of treatment was an understatement. His inconsistent regard for her as a sentient individual was something she'd had to desensitise herself to early on. Whenever he started seeing her as useful, whether as a pawn in some madcap scheme or simply as a distraction from his own ennui, all of a sudden she was 'brilliant' and 'a star' and he'd start invoking her full name with undue enthusiasm, Martha Jones this and Martha Jones that. But when she ceased to be useful in his eyes:
"Doctor," she tried impatiently, "we're—"
"In a minute!"
Intellectually, she could recognise it was not malicious, or even deliberate. It wasn't because he didn't respect her. The way the Doctor disregarded her was not the disdainful way that human white men had in the past; it wasn't on account of her race or her sex (two attributes she doubted he was even aware of, most days). In fact, it had nothing to do with her at all. She'd seen him do the very same to different species all over the universe, any time he got lost in that database of a brain of his. He was alien to everyone and everything, and even for all he was charming and charismatic, notions of basic human courtesy – like acknowledging another person's existence when they'd tried to talk to you five times in one minute – seemed to perpetually elude him. He didn't mean anything by it. She knew as much.
That clarity made the urge to call him a name and throw something heavy at his head no less compelling.
For a moment she eyed the mallet where it dangled from the underside of the console a few feet from him. Reckoned he'd be hard-pressed to ignore a sledgehammer to his nape. She'd like to see him mm-hmm a concussion.
However, sorely tempting as it was, blunt force trauma to his head was not the answer. It got them no closer to handling the problem at hand, which, of course, Martha was obliged to repeat for a fourth time, at considerable volume.
"This isn't my flat. You got it wrong."
It worked like a charm.
"What?"
At the accusation of wrongness, predictably, his full attention snapped upward. She heard his head bang forcibly against the mechanics. A scattering of sparks sprayed from the console. He recoiled, batting at the smoking electrics, appearing in full with one hand clamped defensively over his bruised dome as the other brandished a lit blowtorch. "No I haven't!" he denied with certainty, as well as a heavy dose of reflexive affront. Then, as an irritable afterthought: "What are we talking about?"
There was a pair of bulky, brass, rather steampunk-looking safety goggles strapped onto his face, cartoonishly large lenses fogged with heat. His hair stood at all angles, protruding chaotically between the straps of the protective equipment. Shirtsleeves were shoved up in haste and a brown leather welder's apron draped over the front of his suit: the sonic screwdriver stowed cosily in the front pocket.
He looked all the part of the mad scientist, and as her eyes drifted between the self-willed hair and casually flourished blowtorch – still burning blue against the air – she gave a little sigh and had to remind herself that she was not dealing with an actual human being. It was a fact she found increasingly difficult to ignore, as the days wore on, and her patience thin.
"I don't live here." Each word was slow and emphatic. To be extra pointed, she jabbed a finger outside. "This is the wrong place."
"Impossible," said the Doctor. He roughly tugged his goggles up on his forehead, and made his hair about three times more atrocious in doing so, squinting incredulously out the open door. "Where are we?"
"How would I know? Sounds like a club or something." The strains of a song Martha only vaguely recognised boomed low and muted in the alley, bass leaking through the damp wall in support of her hypothesis. "Why don't you check?"
He nearly sent her into cardiac arrest by tossing the still-lit blowtorch at the floor, shortly before scrubbing his oily hands clean on the apron and dragging the clunky, low-res monitor around to give it a close examination. "Right, let's have a look at… oh, come on." He pounded his fist on top of the viewscreen and the dynamic readout fizzled with resultant static. The concentric circles onscreen swirled and sharpened. "Behave!"
Martha felt something cold on the back of her neck.
"Ah, here we are. Looks like the coordinates slipped. Nothing that can't be fixed, but… hang on, what's this?"
It was prickly and tangible, the weight of observation, lifting every fine hair from her skin. She tensed and whipped her head around, peering out the open doorway, prepared to see a drunken clubgoer gaping into the TARDIS. Then she stiffened, disconcerted, stopping dead.
"Erm," she hedged. "Doctor?"
"What have you eaten?" He was interrogating his ship, orbiting the half-deconstructed console and tutting. Buttons beeped plaintively as they were jabbed in short order. "I've told you not to go snacking in deep space. Picking up dodgy Artron energy from who-knows-where. Look what you've done! Mucked up the nav-system entirely, it's a wonder we even landed in the right galaxy!"
The thing poured mist as it drifted out of the night.
Martha dug her nails into the doorframe as she stared, hesitantly curious. It was a tight snarl of gasses, purple and clotted, gliding above sodden pavement in front of her. The mass smoked, wavered, moving as though it had a pulse.
"Doctor," she tried, louder. She couldn't seem to take her gaze away from it. Undulating and luminous against the seedy shadows of the dark, dripping side-street.
And all of her instincts clamoured at her, with sudden, dire urgency: run.
But it was too late. When she tried to slam the door and shut it out, her hand refused to move. All five fingers lay paralysed on the handle, the muscles stiff and uncooperative. She couldn't shift her legs or arms. Her eyes would not blink.
"Doctor?" she tried desperately, but her voice was suffocated, faint, trapped below a whisper.
"Can't take my eyes off you for one second," he huffed, turning a crank at breakneck pace – still roundly scolding his vehicle. "Putting the shields down like that, all for a snack? The last TARDIS in creation, zipping about unprotected. What if someone had gotten wind of that, hmm? We could have had pirates. Cybermen. Pirate Cybermen. You could have let anything onboard. When I say irresponsible…"
Panic rose and churned in her stomach as the fog slithered nearer. It seemed, for a second, to consider her.
"Doctor, please," her voice was wavering, small, eyes fixed and round, "there — there's something—"
Martha gasped, choked, the world rolling to black as it lunged.
"If you were that hungry you could have just said. This is the last time I'm pumping your engine. You know full well The Eye is too volatile to take this sort of stress." A moment passed before the Doctor glanced up irritably from his rapid-fire typing. "Martha, would you shut that door already? There's a draught coming in."
The door obediently creaked closed.
"The TARDIS seems to be having a few technical difficulties," he said, raking a brisk hand through his hair and leaning down to better scrutinise the monitor. "Can't navigate herself through space. We're not in London, we're in… eugh, Cardiff." He paused then. Slowly, his face turned up to the wire-strung ceiling. "Hang on. Cardiff."
He hit at something on the console. It bobbled back into place, looking as hurt as an inanimate lever physically could look over the unprovoked assault. "You did this on purpose, didn't you?" he demanded.
Light footfalls clinked across the floor.
"That's the last time I put you on autopilot," the Doctor vowed, glaring at the Time Rotor. The TARDIS made vague wheezy noises, which might have been a protest, a warning, sullen acquiescence, or perhaps total indifference to everything taking place and being said — it was impossible to tell with a space-time machine. He flicked a switch and sighed, dragging his apron off and slinging it over a railing. "It should only be a short hop to get you home, Martha. What's the postcode?"
"Postcode?" her voice repeated vacantly.
"Yep. Got to be precise this time; if I leave it up to the telepathic circuits again we'll probably end up inside the rift. Seeing as someone's got the munchies." Here was another accusing glance at the central column.
A pause stretched between them.
The Doctor tapped out an impatient refrain on the keyboard with his index finger.
"Don't you know it?" he eventually asked in a sigh.
"Know what?"
He turned one of his you-can't-possibly-be-this-thick squints on her; then he started, jumping a bit when he found she was no longer at the door. She'd wordlessly hovered over to stand under his shoulder. A cautious step back from her put a more comfortable space between them.
Martha closed the distance without shifting her gaze, mirroring his step, the aqua flush of the Time Rotor reflected in her dark eyes. Eyes that were, the Doctor realised, quite intently set on him.
"All right?" he checked, wariness creeping into his expression.
"Just fine," arrived the mechanical reply.
The Doctor's face, in turn, went even warier. "Right," he said, and grabbed the handbrake between them — unsubtly preventing her from moving any closer. "So, your flat, then. Unless you don't want to grab your clothes anymore?"
There was an unfocused, absent haze to her eyes: and yet still, somehow, they were unambiguously fixed on his. Staring bottomlessly… almost mesmerised.
"Martha," he said, a bit sternly.
And then he let out a noise that was half-choke, half-yowl as she seized a fistful of silk necktie and hauled him down.
There was a haphazard collision: chins smacked together, noses squished, foreheads butted awkwardly. Mouths crashed, but it was contact too blunt and vicious to even call a kiss – more like an act of violence than any romantic overture he'd ever experienced. The force exerted on his windpipe by the knot of his tie was staggering.
He yelped involuntarily and pried her off, wheezing, ripping himself away as though burned.
"Martha!" he shrilled, beyond disbelief, clutching his throat as he collapsed back against the console.
A rushing wall of cold distance flooded where human warmth had invaded. And any anger he might've felt, any sense of violation – it was dwarfed by complete slack-jawed astonishment as he gaped down at her.
As he stared at her through giant eyes, for the first time in a terribly long time, the Doctor found himself absolutely speechless.
Undeterred by his retreat, Martha was sidling closer. She stepped around the handbrake, advancing on him with an almost predatory kind of gleam in her eye as he struggled to gather his sufficiently scattered wits. He felt the small of his back dig into the console's edge. And the feeling of being cornered made his ire rise. "Stop it," he warned lowly, frostily, setting a grave look upon her. "Just stop it, right now, all right?"
Perfectly unfazed by his warning, she pressed up against him, sliding her front along his rather sultrily – bodies touching in all sorts of uniquely alarming ways. He tried to push her off, but she resisted with surprising strength, hitching a leg up on his hip to anchor herself.
A noise not unlike a squeak pushed from his chest at the action, rising before he could swallow it – an involuntary utterance of dismay, bafflement, humiliation. "Martha!"
"Hmm?" she breathed, stretching up on her toes and putting her mouth on his neck; making a deliberate and unabashed effort to climb him.
The shock was all-consuming. His ears fairly rang with it.
In his right might he would've simply picked her up and neatly removed her from his person; perhaps even from the TARDIS altogether, until she'd learnt her lesson. But as addled as he was by the progressing assault, all the Doctor could do for was stand there, flattened like a hostage against the controls. Mouth slack, eyes bulging – in the grip of a numb, life-altering upset as his companion sucked on his pulses.
Instinct prodded at him, naturally. Pushed him to defend himself, to bodily overpower her, to incapacitate her with a gentle thumb to the right pressure point… but he could do none of those things. The threat triggering his instincts, the danger his reflexes were responding to: it was Martha Jones. Small, clever, terribly useful Martha Jones. Tiny and well-trained and so razor-sharp no one ever saw her coming. He often privately thought of her as his secret weapon: never anticipated, the perfect ace up his sleeve in moments of crisis.
Martha. His friend. His companion.
It was a conundrum he was unprepared to face. There was no using Venusian Aikido on Martha. No knocking Martha out with a swift telepathic poke. No retribution he could will himself to enact, no aggression in the whole of his being for anything even distantly Martha-adjacent. There was absolutely no contingency plan for a thing like this – for a companion gone rogue.
Because things like this simply did not happen. He went to great lengths to ensure it.
"What are you doing?" he spluttered dumbly, his brain stuck like a skipping record over the last ten seconds.
Without a word, she dragged both hands down his chest – going straight for his trousers.
The crude advance knocked him for six all over again. He inhaled sharply and snatched her wrists just in time, holding them fast. "What has gotten into you?" he demanded, pitch sliding ever higher. He tightened his grip when she tried to pull free, head shaking wildly, incredulously. "This isn't you, Martha. Have you eaten something dodgy as well?"
Her eyes flicked at him with irritation. "Not working," she huffed lowly, and he felt heat crawl up the back of his neck to burn the tips of his ears when her attention trained southward, pointedly between his legs. "Why isn't it working?"
For a long and uncomfortable moment, they stood at a silent impasse, pinning each other with hard, contemplative stares.
Then, at last, she let out a heavy breath and pushed away from him. "Fine," she snapped, turning away and storming past. Her boots rattled the grating as she marched down the ramp towards the door, shoulders set.
As she passed, he caught a whiff of her scent in the air she disturbed. His eyes widened and his mouth came open again, more or less involuntarily.
The way she smelled…
Oh.
Oh dear.
"Where are you going?" he managed.
"If you aren't interested," arrived the cutting reply, "I can find someone who is."
The TARDIS door opened, and slammed hard enough to rattle his teeth.
He stared at it in absolute shock.