The Doctor was brilliant.
A surprisingly easy fact to lose sight of, given his penchant for doing inconceivably stupid things in front of her without compunction. Inviting a Dalek to murder him, employing his body as a lightning rod at the top of the Empire State building, throwing himself into all manner of danger he'd no hope of surviving with borderline suicidal fervour. Making the monumentally thick decision, without consulting her – or a book – that 1913 was a safe and restful place for a black woman to go undercover.
On a smaller scale, he was prone to forgetting to eat; losing his reading glasses on top of his head for hours at a time; defying every core tenet of ladder safety while maintaining his TARDIS. She'd been shouted at more than once for displacing his sonic screwdriver, only for him to inevitably (quietly) discover it in his trouser pocket later on. She had watched him, morning after morning, absently stick a fork in the toaster to fish out his bread.
But then, every now and again, he went and did something properly magnificent. Something impossibly genius enough to offset all the stupid. And she was reminded.
"This," Martha said, head shaking incredulously, "is ridiculous."
A solid kilo of insulated copper wiring, pilfered from old refrigerators and junked washing machines – a petrol cap, a bike horn, a worn commutator – one coffee-ringed Isle of Wight postcard from 1993 – and there, in all of its jerry-rigged, pound shop glory, was the timey-wimey detector. A piece of patchwork technology so advanced it could alter the trajectory of the human race: all contained rather inconspicuously in the shell of a dented aluminium lunchbox, bits and bobs whacked on haphazardly like a ten-year-old's science fair gone astray.
After a week spinning his wheels on the thing, agonising over it, obsessing about it, occasionally damning it, growing increasingly frustrated and causing egg shortages over three square miles – finally, he'd cracked it.
It was a pivotal breakthrough. Moreover, he insisted, it was cause for proper celebration. Which, in the absence of a nearby cosmic crisis to fling themselves at – in the confines of an ordinary, earthbound Friday night – manifested as something a great deal cosier than expected.
Savoury steam wafted through the kitchenette, windblown on a listless breeze. It curled off the faulty cooker hood and escaped the half propped window, snaking out in tendrils against the sultry thick of a midsummer eve – disappearing into the depths of the twilit city.
This was down to the man presently kitted out in Mrs Chowdhury's (kaleidoscopically flowered and aggressively cottagey) apron: very clearly intended for someone a foot and a half shorter and a great deal more ladylike.
"It'll do," allowed the Doctor, busily milling pepper. "Not my best work. Rudimentary detection matrix. Pretty barebones anomaly interpreter. Boil the hell out of an egg at thirty paces as well, but so long as we steer clear of hens…"
Perched on the edge of the worktop, stockinged feet swinging, Martha couldn't help but laugh as she examined the thing. "You're having me on."
He smiled over his shoulder. "I'm really not."
"What's the yo-yo for?"
"Makeshift temporal capacitor."
She snorted, delighted. "Rubbish."
"I said makeshift!"
The device did precisely what it was meant to. It was, according to the Doctor, a glorified metal detector – except, rather than metal, it only dinged when there was 'stuff.' Specifically, stuff which carried what he called temporal residue; trace elements on those who passed through the Vortex, indelible markers of time travel.
This meant the detector was susceptible to red herrings, and prior to its calibration, it had dinged nonstop at Martha. It dinged like mad at the Doctor, smoked and quivered as though it were losing its poor little mind. It dinged at things way off in Cardiff, and long-lost artefacts hundreds of miles away at the bottom of the sea. Having been constructed by the hands of a time traveller, it even dinged at itself, seeming to get confused at times – then all-out panicking, sparking, wailing its heart out upon realising the call was coming from inside the house.
But following a brief refinement, it had gone eerily quiet. Fine-tuned only to ding when a new bit of stuff was introduced to the timestream – on the presumption that Billy Shipton had not yet arrived. It remained quiet now, sitting heavy in the cradle of her lap.
"I know what it looks like," said the Doctor. "But it's fully functional. It is. Non-technological technology of Lammasteen – I'll take you there someday. They've achieved nuclear fission with thumbtacks and sticky putty, Martha. It's a rather beautiful philosophy, actually..."
She shook her head, smirking – poking at a disembodied piano key, a bit of a plastic bendy straw. "You're barmy, you know that?"
His hand went to his chest as though in protest: a clear, who, me? "What've I done?" His tone squeaked up in affront.
"Didn't you say there's one of these built into the TARDIS?"
"Yeah. So?"
"So you MacGyvered part of a time machine out of Sellotape and bottle caps in 1969!"
"MacGyver?" he scoffed. "Please. Cheap knockoff. And that bit with the paperclip was practically autobiographical, you know."
Her eyes rolled indulgently. "All right, well, you Doctored it then."
"Doctored it." His cheek lifted with a lopsided smile. "I like that." He wagged the pepper mill at her decisively. "I'll have that."
She smiled back, and tried her best not to fixate on it.
When the detector dinged again – and it would ding, he assured her – it spelled the end of this little bubble of play-pretend. The piddly two-by-four flat and the Time Lord in the apron. The matching bands on their fingers.
Of course – she wanted to leave. Being stuck in 1969 was a nightmare for her, for more than one reason. She'd no desire to spend a second longer trapped here.
But leaving: that meant going home. Returning to reality. Confronting the inevitable.
The sheer Everest of a task that was walking away from the TARDIS.
Forfeiting the best thing to ever happen to her.
He made, at present, a wonderfully backwards spectacle. Faffing about the kitchen in an entirely uncharacteristic t-shirt and jeans, arms bare, hair wet out the shower, trussed up in that grandmotherly apron all aflutter with ruffles.
The clothes were a delightful consequence of his junkyard escapade. Far from the only consequence, however – as his attention deficit, predilection for shiny things and documented inability to leave well enough alone all ensured that the flat was just barely navigable, their meagre rooms now crammed with the salvage of his expedition. A busted console television on rickety teak legs took up what little standing room had previously existed; atop it balanced a proper dinosaur of a home video camera. The former was purely for his own amusement – the latter was their ticket to filming the Easter Eggs for Sally Sparrow. A rickety desk fan oscillated by the kitchen sink, uselessly pushing around thick summer heat. He'd a gramophone stacked on a microwave (no suitable explanation provided for either). They also now owned, in the loosest sense of the word, a dinky little Zenith radio that was half-speaker, half-dial, and a comically long antenna, tucked in the kitchen windowsill where they found the signal crackled least. It did away with the uncomfortable silence that lived in the flat, and Martha was thankful. Even if every station did insist upon playing Build Me Up Buttercup ten times a bloody hour.
Even if the Doctor did insist upon off-key singalongs with backing vocals, every ruddy time.
There'd been a mild scare after discovering an empty rat burrow behind the cracked television screen ("Long-abandoned," the Doctor had assured her with nonchalant certainty) – a significantly less mild scare when something lithe and furry had streaked across the floor, scuttling over Martha's toes and giving her the fright of her life. It'd been humanely trapped by the Doctor ("Don't pick it up," she'd shrieked, practically tap-dancing in the kitchen chair, "why have you always got to pick everything up?") and released on the street outside, where it took immediate and indignant refuge in a storm drain.
Once the rest of the junk had undergone a vigorous disinfection by Martha, yellow rubber gloves and all – and she was satisfied she would not be contracting leptospirosis from any uninvited callers in the night – both the smell and the potential for infestation had been mostly eradicated. Mostly, of course, as there'd still been the Doctor himself to contend with.
His beloved pinstripe ensemble had fallen victim to the junkyard fumes, in a rather big way. She didn't know if he'd fallen into a skip bin or what – but the smell was untenable. Fortunately, he'd been eminently reasonable about it all. He'd given himself a good once-over with the sonic screwdriver to disperse the malodorous compounds, then had gone off to shower. When he emerged to a bundle of unremarkable human clothes – salvaged from the local mosque's charity bin, which the imam had invited Martha to help herself to – he'd accepted them without a word of complaint. Though there had been a certain amount of audible sighing.
It was embarrassing, really, how much it excited her to see him in such exceedingly laidback apparel. She'd never traditionally gone for the sort of man that wore a suit daily, after all; associated that sartorial arrogance prior to knowing the Doctor with bankers, politicians, businessmen and wankers at large. But blue jeans and a wrinkled ringer tee – that spoke to her. The shop-soiled throwaway clothes of some late sixties rock-n-roller youth. Even having seen him stripped down to his skivvies, the spectre of him dressed like this was enough to make her hormones work overtime.
It all made her, privately, very glad of the junkyard trip. And even gladder of the pinstripe suit hanging on the back of the bathroom door as it deodorised.
She'd made clear that he shouldn't cook on her account, that dinner needn't be such an elaborate event; Martha had lived before on her fair share of student cuisine, frozen dinners and cup noodles and box macaroni, and had told him as much. But of course the Doctor wouldn't hear of it: none of that, over my dead body, so long as we're here there'll be not a single bean on toast, not on my watch.
The insistence on cooking for her was new, and she'd be lying if she said she didn't enjoy it – he'd never done anything so domestic on the TARDIS, and the gesture felt decidedly romantic, if unintentionally so. But she also quite enjoyed having a place to live, and couldn't shake the notion that he was one reckless elbow away from burning down the flat. He was a hurricane in the kitchenette, narrowly escaping banging his forehead on the upper cupboards. An unhinged orchestration of stewing and chopping and grating, pure culinary anarchy – bits of scallion minced just about everywhere, a steel pot sonicked to a violently overflowing boil, his cooking techniques seemingly an ode to the sprawling, deranged way he piloted the TARDIS. All four limbs and a generous helping of hyperactivity disorder.
He was in unusually high spirits tonight. Before today, the Doctor had been treating their little Back to the Future predicament like a terminal diagnosis he was in rigid denial over. Every word weighted down with an undercurrent of morosity, every half-hearted smile giving way to dead, glassed-over stares into the middle distance.
But now, with the promise of light at the end of the tunnel, he seemed to be back to himself – and then some. Back to the high-octane, manic depressive, can't-get-a-word-in-edgewise exuberance: all smiles and double-entendres and epic, rambling monologues that went nowhere and were largely fabricated about interpersonal hijinks with prominent historical figures. Crooning along to a particularly crunchy transmission of My Way out their junkyard radio, singing the bits he knew into a wooden spoon as he clanged and clinked about like a housewife on a bender. This was topped off with requisite promises to take her to see Sinatra live ("After the double sunset and the singing fields, obviously – yes, course I remembered the sunset, Martha. Never forget a promise, me.")
"D'you know," he shoved the spoon in her face, ladled full of some manner of sauce he was simmering, "I was actually the unofficial sixth member of the Rat Pack?"
"No, you weren't," she said fondly, before dipping her head for a taste.
"Was too – ask Sammy. He'll vouch for me. Good lad. Not Dean, he'd a vicious jealous streak. Nasty bit of work, that one… and then there's the mafia business, of course." His brow went up. "More salt?"
She licked her upper lip and stifled a smile. "You know it's perfect."
And it was impossible not to think, as the Doctor held the spoon to her mouth, intently watching her tongue chase away the flavour from her lips.
He was one and the same with the man who'd fucked her last night.
This Doctor, with his implausible anecdotes and atrocious Sinatra impersonation. His mad-scientist brilliance and smiling deflection, the full-tilt whimsy and enigmatic charm that'd lured her across the cosmos. The same Doctor as he'd always been. Holding her hand, shielding her from peril. Full-chested, patronising iterations of 'brilliant, in fact' and 'Martha Jones, was it?' and 'oh, you're a star', laid out for her like breadcrumbs, hooking her on the intoxicant of his praise. Aeons lying behind the false warmth of those winsome eyes.
In this tiny stifling flat, in the unmade bed just a matter of steps away, that Doctor had fucked her. The man she knew; loved, despite all reason.
If she slid too close to the edge of the counter she could still feel the ache, the desperate echoes of him inside her. She could still sense the dark, straining intensity of his voice in her ear. How it flushed her skin, all breath and shuddered heat: breaking on a helpless, gorgeous fuck.
Could hear his ghost, murmuring filthy and soft in the prelude, awash in deep, steely breaths and I'll bet you're close and so ready for me and good, there's a good girl…
"Perfect?" he echoed, looking idly at her lips.
She could feel her pulse thudding in her veins, beats turning erratic. "Yeah," she managed.
It was almost impossible to reconcile. That the man who had been so stonily uninterested in her, so standoffish and rigidly uncomfortable at even the implication of a flirt – that very same man had brought her to orgasm with his fingers not twenty hours ago, breathing hot, reckless encouragements into her skin, mouth hovering above her pounding heart.
He was leaning closer – and Martha's breathing stopped altogether, hitching to a standstill.
In the sudden proximity, she became very aware that he smelled like her. Had used the only bar soap in the shower, the only shampoo, and was now giving off warm, sweet notes of vanilla and lilac, ten times more intoxicating than it ever smelled on her – mingling with the steaming tendrils of Italian herbs, the waft of clean, masculine, undiluted Time Lord. Her lips parted involuntarily. It felt like stumbling on a cliff's edge, the way her heart seized.
Then he stuck out his tongue and licked the spoon himself.
"Nah," he said, nose wrinkling to the side. "More salt."
She felt like she'd been holding her breath for an age when he spun away toward the hob to tend the sauce.
Somewhere in the universe, Martha was certain this had to be legally recognised as a form of torture. Cruel, highly specialised, merciless torture.
Her senses felt perpetually heightened, nerve-endings hypersensitive; arousal on a hair-trigger. At this rate the Doctor could twitch an eyebrow the right way and she'd have to excuse herself to the loo. It was absurd. Her hormones were turned up to eleven, her sex drive seemingly granted an independent sentience of its own, perfectly innocent trains of thought liable to go to filth in milliseconds.
It made the bands on their fingers even more of a miserable farce. She'd all of the pent-up newlywed fervour – and absolutely nowhere for it to go.
There had always been a certain amount of tension, cohabiting with the Doctor – at least on her part. But now it was entirely out of hand. It was a particular kind of hell, to be overwhelmed by her attraction to him, mind aflush with dangerous, graphic hypotheticals. To be crushed by his outward unattainability; left to fill in the blanks with the sins of her imagination. In that hell, which she had inhabited for the majority of the time she'd known him, there were butterflies and nervous sweats – fantasizing and rejection. It was regularly difficult to focus; to conduct herself as a normal, rational, civilised person in his presence.
And that had been just imagining.
To exist with the forbidden knowledge she now possessed: there were no words, for what it did to her. To know what he was like when his guard slipped – to understand, with her entire body, precisely how he fucked. How he sounded, gone white-knuckled and breathless. Knowing for certain what he looked like, those brown eyes near blackened with single-minded lust. The way his face changed right on the verge of orgasm.
It was just about agonising, to have all of that lurid, devastating context… and be expected to ignore it. To carry on, acting unfazed. Nothing to see here, business as usual, just the best of mates being utterly platonic together.
It was an incredibly strange dynamic to exist in. Having a sexual relationship borne out of necessity, not desire or love or affection. The keen awareness that boundaries still firmly existed – the complication of not quite knowing where they laid. It wasn't as though she could touch him, kiss him, do any of the instinctual things that traditionally went along with two people fucking like it was the end of days. The way the Doctor carried on, she was very aware there were rules of engagement; trouble was, he hadn't bothered to let her in on them. Even a general rundown would do. Some loose guidelines. Kiss on the forehead – tentatively permitted – eyeing up the other's bum in denim – strictly prohibited.
But they didn't talk about it. She supposed he saw no need. She'd required an energy transfer, so he'd given her one, and beyond that she imagined there was nothing to discuss in his eyes. As though no explanation or elaboration was required, regardless of the fact that she had been rendered unable to sit without wincing for days to come.
He wasn't daft – he had to have some idea, of just how ruthlessly this situation was tearing her apart. How painful it was to be intimate with someone she loved – only to be reminded in a rush of blindingly cold reality that it was nothing more than empty, unfeeling sex to him. A box to be ticked, just another line item on the Doctor's weekly to-dos. He'd probably put it on one of his Post-It notes. It brought her reluctant amusement to envision. Grab milk from the market; rummage for spare parts; water the Swiss-cheese plant; fuck Martha half blind.
She hadn't the mettle to bring it up herself, however much she longed to. The haunting recollection of a stern, point-blank, "That was a genetic transfer," more than enough of a deterrent to keep her from even trying. The humiliation that had come with being put in her place, so to speak, had never fully dissipated.
Which left last night just burning in the space between them – completely unspoken.
Not talking about it was horribly juvenile. It was unbearably English of them. It was also, perhaps, for the best, in the end. Because apart from anxious insecurities on her part and empty reassurances on his, there really was nothing helpful or substantiative to say. Acknowledging her plight might have been the compassionate thing for him to do, but practically speaking, beyond the evergreen I'm sorry – the backbone of his lexicon – what was there for him to tell her? Nothing short of I love you would actually make it better, and that was notoriously off the table. For more reasons than one.
As terrifyingly easy as it was to forget, what with the footloose way that the Doctor approached it all – the fact remained that the sex was coerced. That it was circumstantially essential. It was not something he wanted or had chosen to engage in. An act of literal charity, when it came down to it.
Which was the most frustrating bit of it all. She couldn't even sulk properly. She couldn't be short with him, or let it show how deeply her feelings were trampled. She felt small, petty and conflicted – felt like she'd no ground to stand on, not when the Doctor was literally siphoning off doses of his life for her. She was permanently indebted. He was like a volunteer organ donor on steroids, at this point. Wholly self-sacrificing, giving of himself without hesitation, in the most visceral sense. Without a word of complaint. Without, notably, going all dour and brooding and Rose never would've gotten possessed by sex gas on her.
It left her no choice but to put on her best approximation of an equally pleasant mood, and stalwartly beat down her inner turmoil.
The emotional turmoil, at least. The physical turmoil was another matter entirely, and she'd long since resigned herself to the fact that she would never master that aspect of herself.
And it didn't particularly help her keep things in appropriate perspective, the Doctor making it a point of order that she enjoyed herself. Ensuring that she came so hard she'd feel it in a past life: both times. That was the part that plagued her most. The actual sex itself was in the interest of her continued survival, and she knew she couldn't read anything into it – gait-widening ferocity notwithstanding – but the kissing, the touching, the way he spoke to her…
It was a trap, nothing but an invitation for pain. She was projecting human reasoning onto a non-human entity. Trying to impose reciprocal affection where there was none. Her logicality and objectivity were compromised by the oxytocin; she couldn't be trusted to draw any sound conclusions at this juncture.
But she couldn't shake it.
It couldn't possibly mean nothing.
In her limited sexual history, there was no such thing as meaningless sex – she supposed she'd always been rather conservative that way, the antithesis of her sister. There had been no reckless one night stands or cheeky slumber parties. In theory, Martha felt it made practical sense, the decoupling of sex and intimacy. But in practice, she couldn't quite get her head around the reality of it. Couldn't fathom how he could talk to her like that, look into her eyes, give her a shag so devastating she could barely stand to think about it without squirming – and feel nothing.
She found herself staring at his side profile against the streetlight from the kitchen window, worrying her thumbnail between her teeth. Wondering how he'd react if she threw caution to the wind. Crossed the veritable laser maze of lines they lived within. What he would do if she just sidled up behind him and hugged her arms around his narrow waist, buried her face in the warmth of his back…
"…Earth to Jones. Come in, Jones."
She startled back to reality, inhaling, eyes locking to his. "What?"
"Colander," he said impatiently, arm outheld – not for the first time, she realised. "Right near your hip. Pasta's done."
"Oh. Right." She handed it over, slightly sheepish.
He smiled a bit, searching her face. "Where were you just then?"
"Sorry?"
"You looked a million light years away."
"Ah." She shrugged one shoulder and glanced away. "I suppose I must've been."
"Well – back down to Earth with you. I need you to grate my parmesan."
After dinner they'd tackled the washing up as a team; Martha drying, the Doctor scrubbing, almost standing hip to hip at the sink. Then they were distracted by the novelty of their radio, the Doctor launching into an eyes-closed, nightmarishly committed rendition of Suspicious Minds: sending her into peals of stomach-clenching laughter at his nasal, brash, lip-curled Elvis pantomime (even worse than Sinatra, she was charmed to discover; she adored it when he was bad at things).
"You are actually the worst," she'd laughed, delighted, to a bump of his hip, and a bassy, brow-raised rejoinder of, "Because I love you too much, baby…" as his finger wagged to the beat.
Which was about the best kind of cruelty there was.
For someone so deeply opposed to domestic, he really was uncannily good at it.
He stayed up into the wee hours, like always, dissecting his junkyard spoils. She showered alone, went to bed alone – like always.
It was one of their better nights in 1969.