A/N: The sequel to Informed Consent, in which Martha is overtaken by an alien entity and the Doctor must have sex with her to save her life: a classic 'the aliens made them do it' fic. In the sequel, they find themselves trapped in 1969 before the Doctor is able to purge the entity.

Warnings for (obviously) explicit sexual content and period-typical racism.

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1

A police box sat beyond a wrought iron gate, windows glowing bright into a fall of autumn rain. Its lanternlight rippled in the pouring haze, a luminous blot against the towering dark of an overgrown manor.

It was a long, drear moment before the door burst open – or, at least, tried to.

It hit the gate, jarring spear-tipped pickets with a clang that sent crows fleeing and skinned paint from wood.

A head poked out instantly, rather in shock.

"Damn it," muttered the Doctor, very much under his breath.

The head withdrew swiftly and the door banged shut. In rather short order, the time machine faded from the landscape with wounded dignity: ancient engines hoarse, lantern flashing, blowing away like a strange mid-morning dream.

For a little, it was gone, allowing another lifeless lull. Then from thin air arose a suspiciously familiar crescendo of dissonant wheezing. Winds cut the rain, chopping at the unkempt grounds. Long weeds thrashed under an invisible onslaught. Golden light pulsed against the treacly, drenching grey.

The TARDIS materialised beyond a wrought iron gate, rotated one-hundred and eighty degrees.

Rather more cautiously, the door creaked back open. This time, it swung wide without impediment, framing a petite silhouette in the halo of the doorway.

"Oh, that's just lovely."

Seconds passed before a quite taller one joined it – bounding up behind, leaning out to peer at the black sky. "Aw, buck up, Martha, it's just a bit of rain. Bit of precip does a body good!"

As clouds flashed and thunder snarled, the slight figure clinging to the doorpost was promptly shoved out into the storm. It gave an affronted shriek and tugged the back of its flimsy cardigan up over its head, futilely ducking for cover. "My hair is getting wet!"

"Looks fine to me," shrugged the Doctor, tatty white Converse splashing on the cobbled drive.

Before she could flee back into the box, the door slammed resoundingly in her face. Before she could kill the person who slammed it where he stood, he thrust something into her hands.

"There," he said amiably. "Now stop your whining."

Huddled under the shelter of her cardigan, Martha fumbled with the umbrella he'd offered. While she was momentarily stymied by the handle – puzzling under her breath over the candy red, novelty-size question mark – the Doctor turned to attend the TARDIS door.

The scar in its varnish instantly caught his eye. Wincing a bit and letting a sympathetic breath through his teeth, he pressed his thumb across the ugly scrape. The paint was crisply restored, after his hand fell away. "Sorry."

There was a soft snort behind him. He wheeled around to glare at its source.

"Not a word out of you."

"I didn't say anything," Martha insisted. She nodded behind him. "What's that?"

"Right, if you want to do the driving—"

"No, no, not that. That." She stopped wrestling the umbrella to stab it over his shoulder, past the TARDIS. He followed the point with a frown. A mildewed tin plaque dangled from the gleaming stakes of the gate, bumping heavily in the wet wind, red print weathered and fading. "Danger," Martha struggled to make out, leaning forward and squinting against the rain. "…keep out. Unsafe structure."

She found all of these points quite compelling, and turned on the Doctor a deeply unimpressed look. "After an ASBO, are we?"

"Unsafe?" His voice rose to a deriding tenor. "Says who?"

" London County Council," she pointed.

He blew a raspberry. "Rubbish. Ignore that," he ordered, punching his hands in his pockets and starting up the drive.

"I'm not getting arrested for trespassing, Doctor," she called after him. "Might be just fine for you, but I've got to get licensed! I can't have a criminal record!"

"We'll only be a minute," he dismissed over his shoulder, coattails swinging at his heels. "Massive disturbance, shouldn't be hard to find at all."

Still huddled beneath her sweater, Martha gave an irritable groan – then reluctantly hurried to catch up with him, leaving the TARDIS behind.

The umbrella snapped open like a circus tent. "Oh, you're joking."

"Oi!" The Doctor doubled back to snatch it from her, swinging it overhead protectively. "Don't knock it! Served me well over the years." He gave the umbrella a whimsical little twirl – not seeming to notice that this particular action found Martha struck square in the face by a freezing splatter of rainwater.

She sputtered, and spared him an exceptional glare before hastening to duck out of the torrent herself, hunkering down by his side under the flamboyant canopy.

"It's hideous," she retorted harshly, as kitschy stripes spiralled in a psychedelic wheel overhead, speckling with the shadows of rapid-falling drops. "And anything in that house is going to see us coming a mile off."

"Mm," he replied in a pensive undertone, brow raising as he stared ahead, "I wouldn't be so sure."

Martha pulled her cardigan off her head and put it on properly, then used her sleeve in a fruitless effort to dab her face dry without smearing her makeup. Her eyes trailed up to the house, shadowed ominously against watery daylight, sharp black peaks rising to pierce the clouds. "I do recognise this place," she muttered. "It's on my way to work. But it's miles away from my flat."

"The TARDIS measures distance in parsecs and epochs. Miles away might as well be in your front lounge."

"Well, what do you think is in there?" she asked. "Must be something serious, to upset the TARDIS."

"Could be lots of things."

Their arms brushed as they sheltered under the rainbow umbrella together. Martha did her best not to notice. "What, no theories?"

"Plenty of theories," he said. "None good."

"'None good' as in – whatever's causing them is bad news? Or 'none good' as in, you think you might be wrong?"

He looked at her askance.

"Right," she sighed, eyes rolling. "What am I even saying, you never think you're wrong."

His eyes flicked back to the house with an imperceptible nod.

"Well – let's have it, then," said Martha, already exhausted. "Give me the worst possible scenario of what we find in there."

"Why the worst?" He frowned.

"Saves time."

"It's probably not as bad as the TARDIS made it out to be."

"You know you doom us the second you say things like that, right?"

"Really," he said, chuckling. "I think it's to do with the Rift."

"The Rift?"

"Bleeding chasm in the fabric of space-time. In, coincidentally, Cardiff."

"Of course it is. So what's it doing here in London?"

"It's not. On every planet, in every temporal thread, you've got these little… think of them as fault lines. Most times they're dormant, totally innocuous. But sometimes they can open up into fissures. If the fissure is small, not much can slip through the cracks; you likely won't even notice it. Just whispers, images – glimpses of time. Mostly, what you lot call ghosts."

"Hang on – you're saying ghosts are real?"

"Of course they are. It's never just the pipes," he advised her. "But unlike what you see in films, they're completely harmless. Just afterimages. The real danger comes with larger fissures."

"… like the one in Cardiff?"

"Like the one in Cardiff," he nodded. "The bigger the fissure, the larger the chance something'll fall through."

"And end up in a big scary house in London?"

"And end up in a big scary house in London, precisely."

As they approached, it became clear that the grand front door was securely boarded, another trespassing notice nailed upon the wood. The Doctor diverted along the overgrown jungle of what once might've been shrubbery.

"Why don't you just sonic it?" she wondered, frowning.

He answered in a rather low mutter. "Doesn't do wood."

"Doesn't do… what? Are you serious?"

"Don't knock it!"

They found a way in through the conservatory on the side of the house. "Humans first," said the Doctor, gesturing to the broken window.

She looked into the dripping depths of the glasshouse. Lightning floodlit the dense greenery within, throwing long, reeling shadows across the wet dark.

"That's speciesist," she informed him.

He raised an eyebrow wryly. "All right," he said, and handed her the umbrella. "Budge over, then."

"With pleasure." She stepped back, allowing him to hunch down and duck carefully through the half-shattered pane.

"Your turn," she heard from inside.

Martha swallowed hard before abandoning the umbrella. As hastily as she dared, she squeezed through the gap, wincing as the edge of the jagged glass glinted razor-fine before her nose.

Evidently unbothered by the rainwater dribbling through the fractured roof, the Doctor was stepping slowly between overgrown pots, shining the sonic up into the hollowed, dripping gables. The corners of the room were blanketed in vines, centuries of ivy and dead wisteria. He waved the sonic at those too.

"That's weird," he observed.

"What is?"

"It feels… different, in here." He turned, the blue eye of the sonic pointing back at her. "Off."

She shrugged, hugging her elbows. "It is a bit nippy."

"No, not that. It's…" He shook his head, voice trailing. Then he rifled in his pocket.

Avoiding the leaking rain, nose wrinkled at the smell of sweet, earthy decay, Martha made her way toward him, footsteps crunching. "Here," he said, and tossed something at her.

She barely caught it, fingers grasping round a plastic casing. It took her a moment to work out it was a torch. "Oh. Thanks."

It flickered on, a little roundel of bluish white against the thick spools of ivy crawling the walls.

"You look in here," he said. "I'll look in the house."

"What exactly is it I'm looking for?"

"Dunno." He creaked open a large stained-glass door into an oppressively dark corridor, sonic screwdriver illuming the dusty gloom. "You'll know it when you see it, probably."

Martha narrowed her eyes at him a bit.

"Are you trying to keep me out the way?"

"Of course not," said the Doctor, not missing a beat. "That would be speciesist of me."

He stepped up into the house, and turned to see her regarding him with her hands on her hips.

"Look," he said, "it's better this way. No risk of an ASBO, right?"

She gave him an incredulous look. "I'm already trespassing."

"Yeah, but only a bit," he said, as he backed into the darkness. "Doesn't even count, really."

"You could've left me in the TARDIS."

"And miss out getting your hair wet?" he replied, giving a subtle smirk. The expression looked rather sinister in the blue cast of the sonic. "Just look around," he told her, placating. "And don't…"

"Wander off, yeah. I got it."

"Good. Like I said, I'll only be a minute."

Sighing massively, Martha watched him go. Hugging herself in the cold, she turned round impatiently, sweeping her torch about the conservatory. Things slithered from the light for deeper dark, and she gave a bit of a shiver.

Head on a swivel, sonic whirring softly, the Doctor walked squarely into a paradox.

It hit him like a waterfall of treacle; clamped solid around his arms and legs, weighing him down in an instant, submerging him to the neck in wrong.

"Eugh!" he hurled on instinct.

Martha whipped back around – and was surprised to still see him, a trenchcoated silhouette a couple of metres away in the wan light of the grand entryway.

"What?" she called. And then, squinting: "Er… what are you doing?"

"Ugh!" The Doctor gave yet another shudder, bouncing on his soles and shaking himself out like a wet cat. "That is just wrong!"

"What's wrong?"

"Time." His jaw clenched as he uttered the word. "Whatever came through the rift is affecting localised time. It's spread so thin here I can feel it in my teeth."

Martha, resigned by now that she would never even remotely grasp his abstractions, asked the only relevant question to her: "It's not hurting you, is it?"

"Hurting, no. It just feels… bleurgh." He gave another shudder. "Beyond nails on a chalkboard."

"Maybe I should come with you."

"Stay where you are," he ordered. "I'll be fine. I'll be back."

She huffed a bit petulantly, watching him disappear through a looming archway.

He went for a cursory wander, ducking into a dark, draughty kitchen. All the while his face was drawn into a furrowed grimace as though something painful were grating on him – and it was. The paradox clung to the very air in his lungs, every inch of the moment, mud-thick and bone-cold. He fancied he could see it running down the walls in great big gobbets, swelling up in the corners as he walked through the rooms of the house.

"Right," he heard Martha's voice muttering softly, rather under her breath. "Just leave me tied up outside like a dog, why don't you."

"For the record," the Doctor announced evenly, "I can still hear you."

"Well, you did!" she spluttered.

"Keep an eye out, Martha," he warned. "I don't like the feel of this place."

"What am I keeping an eye out for? " She gave a great, exasperated sigh. "The only thing in here's a statue."

In 2007, in a crumbling manor in London, the Doctor's hearts stopped dead.

A long way away, Martha Jones saw headlights.

The glow of the sonic sputtered out, his thumb slipping from the button – leaving no light save for the grey cast of drenched sunlight, cutting soft into the drawing room through stained glass.

For a full beat, he was immobile, frozen solid at the possibility: staring entirely through the wall in front of him, mind gone to warp speed.

It couldn't be.

It was a manor in disrepair. Late 19th century build, by the post-Industrial tang of the air; well-heeled, by the towering enormity of the estate. Mirrored double mantles in every room, scraped parquet beneath the dead leaves at his feet – a chandelier laying derelict in the landing, shattered and scintillating. Ornate moulding and papering at every corner. A place of once-sprawling wealth, a testament to overindulgence and unwavering decadence before its downfall…

Of course there was a statue in the garden.

He breathed out uneasily.

Almost a requirement of a place like this, sculpted birds and fat marble cherubs to overlook the basil and lavender in bloom…

"Just keep looking," he called.

Martha said nothing. There was silence from beyond the wall.

It was not one he recognised. No exasperation, no softly-sighed impatience or irritable resignation. Not a he's-on-my-last-bleeding-nerve silence. No footsteps, no movement – no breath.

And off it went, singing like submarine sonar: the Doctor's sixth sense.

His body tensed, posture growing rigid at the crawl of his skin. The fine, transparent vellus hairs floating to stark attention at his neck and wrists. A seeming shiver in his soul – warning, foreboding. A sudden all-over, ghost-touched cold.

There was the TARDIS's avoidance, her sickness and turmoil. Skipped time tracks, divergent temporal streams: all in desperation to stay away from this time and place.

There was Time itself, disturbed in this house. The delicately woven web of local time: torn to ribbons inside these walls. A paradox of devastating magnitude, raking at him like knives on ceramic.

It couldn't be, not here, not now, not that —

Impossible.

And yet, he was running. Vaulting over the chandelier in a snap of coattails, bursting through the scullery and the morning room — skidding to a halt in his sprint before the opened doors of the greenhouse, sliding so hard his Chucks squeaked.

"No," he breathed sharply – eyes wide, jaw tightened. "No."

In the rain-dripping scaffold of a ruined Victorian conservatory, it stood alone, rigidly silhouetted against the gleaming, leafy dark.

A torch rolled on the ground before it, still aglow.

"Martha?" shouted the Doctor.

A full, dead silence swallowed his voice. Cold, vast, ringing in the house against a faint roll of thunder.

Gallifreyan fairytales were uniquely disturbing in the universe. Mostly as one way or another, they all turned out to be true.

Humanity had its own share of macabre storytelling for their young, to be sure – witch's ovens and wolves, trolls and gremlins and ghosts. But those stories were pure fantasy; whose harm could only exist within the confines of a fledgling imagination.

On Gallifrey, there was no such comfort as make-believe. Children were told of the Void. No Time, no space, no light – simply, endlessly, Hell. Forced to understand the concept in its full and paralysing entirety. They were regaled with the darkest pockets of creation; things far too great and monstrous to ever hide under the bed. Shadows that lived on the forest floor, in the bellies of caves and the space between trees: that cleaved skin and tendon and flesh from bone should an unwary traveller pass through. They were told of a Nightmare Child – a celestial evil, manifested by pure thought, an unfathomable Thing whose jaws spanned a galaxy.

The greatest horrors imaginable, let loose inside innocent, impressionable minds. So many sleepless nights, he had endured as a child, weeping himself to exhaustion; so many times he had felt the moons' chill turn to suns-rise against the blanket, giving him a respite from the dark Unknown, and all of the terrors living inside it.

Hundreds of years, centuries gone by, so much history seen and created and burned and forgotten. And yet, still: his nightmares were alive and well.

His eyes widened, fixated – refused to blink.

"Hello," he breathed, swallowing hard.

Distant lightning dappled the arch of stone wings, shadows bleeding black along the sculpted plumage. Its eyes were wide open; the bulbous, gravelly rounds expressionless. One arm hung suspended, almost gracefully outstretched, hairline-cracked fingers strung with ivy and moss.

From the crook of its knuckles dangled a long silver chain, latched to its end a gently revolving key.

"Oh, Martha," he muttered, watching it whirl and glint wistfully. "Where've you gone?"

He felt the coursing of Time as keenly as the flow of his breath or the blood in his veins, and his instincts were afire. Events were converging; time was unsettled. He stood, right then, on the precipice of cause and effect – rain pattering upon the open rooftop, billowing cold into the greenhouse.

The paradox bubbled around him, its threads tightening, inescapable. Closing in on all sides, smothering and acrid as the depths of a tar pit. It was a closed sequence, a fixed loop. Fate calling like a bell tolling in his head.

Wherever Martha was: what happened next was set, quite literally, in stone.

Time intended him to follow.

"Right, then," said the Doctor, quite heavily. He straightened his spine and gave a grim, cheerless smile, sizing up the Angel. "Suppose this calls for an allons-y."