Teaspoon :: Nothing But Flowers by Vali

Tenth Doctor
Nothing But Flowers by Vali [Reviews - 17] Author's Notes: Takes place any time after "Gridlock" that you see fit. Contains intimations of bisexuality, Doctor/other non-con and other not-vanilla acts, so skip if this squicks. Other author's notes after the story.

He undid the zipper with a flourish, proud as a new mother. "What do you think? Lovely, isn't it?"

"Well, if you like that sort of thing…but it's far too small, and it looks a bit stiff."

"It's supposed to be stiff. And I'll never understand all the fuss about size, what's important is how it does the job--it really is lovely, isn't it? I've always thought so."

Martha gazed at it dutifully, unable to disguise a rising sense of disappointment. "Doctor, all I said was I really could use a few more pairs of knickers and a change of shirt."

The Doctor zipped the garment bag shut, looking a bit ruffled as he tucked in the jacket's mutton-chop sleeves. "It's just not 'you,' then, eh? Pity, it's got breeches to match--"

"If Dad and Annalise need a ring boy at their wedding, I'll keep it in mind." She stifled a sneeze as he ripped feverishly through another garment rack, releasing puffballs of gray dust. "So where d'you keep the plain ordinary clothes?"

"Bloody hell--" He was tossing jerkins and farthingales and Ian Drury T-shirts every which way, swearing under his breath. "My coat, where's my coat?"

"Over by the console, where you left it."

"Not that coat, for heaven's sake--my black coat, the tailcoat, the old one!" He glowered at her, as if she had deliberately hidden the mysterious thing, and tossed the growing pile of discards fore and aft. "I was thinking I might give it a test drive again, there's a peaked cap that goes with it I always liked--where the hell did I put my coat!"

"How the hell would I know?" She gestured helplessly at the endless racks filling every corner of the TARDIS wardrobe, a jumble sale post-typhoon. "Look, never mind, just drop me at whatever the Venusian equivalent is of Marks and Sparks and I'll--"

"No no, I know the bloody thing's in here somewhere, can't give up the ghost now--"

Perhaps he wasn't entirely sure what this mysterious "knickers" concept referred to, she mused; some of his traveling friends hadn't been too keen on them, judging from the evidence thus far. She wandered desultorily down an aisle, wrinkling her nose at the selections (hoopskirts, Union Jack T-shirts, bib overalls?), then gave up and leaned against the wall. "Well," she called out, "either you have a frighteningly rich fantasy life or you weren't joking about all the people you've traveled with. Who on earth wore this purple and orange catsuit thing?"

"I've been doing my best to forget." He suddenly appeared at the end of the aisle, clapping his hands impatiently. "Well, aren't we going to get you suited up properly?"

"What about your coat?"

"What about it? It's by the console where it always is. C'mon, can't be standing here half-dressed and ragged-trousered while the universe burns--"

She tried very hard not to laugh, and failed miserably, as he looped an arm in hers and marched her relentlessly round the racks: Come on now, don't be shy, no money down no salesman will visit your home, why not accessorize with this smart silk parasol, wouldn't the lady look smashing in this Viking tunic, fancy an authentic Highlander kilt by any chance? Slightly less authentic Mao suit? A nice fisherman's jumper? Only slightly naughty white Victorian nightie--no, actually perhaps not, bit tatty when you really look at it, can't go promising the universe and delivering cheap tat, in fact definitely not, how about these lovely pink-striped overalls instead?

"You really are an alien, aren't you? No woman in her right mind would actually wear those things in public unless she were stoned silly--right, now this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," she declared, holding up an argyle vest emblazoned with tiny question marks. "Please tell me you've got a mum who knitted that for you, otherwise there's just no excuse."

"It looks much better on," he insisted, and made her blink with puzzlement by brushing a finger against the tip of her nose, a gesture he almost seemed to expect her to recognize. "Just trust me. Cricketing trousers? I can take up the hem--"

"Do you have any plain things? Just, you know, normal boring everyday clothes, nothing with giant checks or question marks or built-in voltmeters or a bustle that won't fit through the doorway?"

"Absolutely right--plain-spoken clothes for a plain-spoken woman, just the ticket! Be right back."

He vanished down another aisle into a whirl of sequin-covered velvet and linen. Martha examined a belt-sized lace miniskirt, shook her head and then spied what looked like an alcove just round the corner, small and cramped but pin-neat in comparison to the wardrobe proper. Private dressing-room, perhaps? Peeking inside, she saw a tiny whitewashed room, an open steamer trunk taking up the length of one wall; across from it stood a single clothes rack, every item painstakingly pressed and evenly spaced from its neighbors. A long pink coat, an overgrown schoolgirl's uniform, a wine-colored jacket with deeply ruffled cuffs, diaphanous dresses in white and rose and peacock blue. In the trunk, a pair of soft sand-colored wool stockings wrapped carefully in tissue paper, a straw boater, a white hat decorated with cherries, a purple one with a turquoise ribbon on the crown. Pity that jacket was so narrow in the shoulders, the cuffs were a bit fussy but still…

There were swift, urgent footsteps behind her, and he was suddenly between her and the clothes rack with an unmistakable air of force. "No," he said sharply. "Not these. Ever."

Martha took an involuntary step backward, the teasing--Enjoy a bit of cosplay, do we?--dying in her throat. On the instant he seemed to recover himself, his expression shocked and contrite as he stood there with his arms curled around an extremely beige pile of laundry.

"Sorry," she said, "Didn't know these were off limits." She quickly retreated from the alcove. "Not that I had any way of knowing, of course…"

"Martha? Wait, come back--"

He caught up with her at the wardrobe door, dancing from foot to foot on the threshold. "I've got your stuff, see?" He held out the pile with a nervous grin. "Right here just like you asked, plain as a Puritan's birthday cake--don't be angry, Martha."

It wasn't his words that had unnerved her--let him tell her to leave things be, wasn't her spaceship--but something dark and cold that blazed from his eyes when he saw her touching the clothes, the sort of look she could imagine a she-bear giving a hiker who strayed too near the cubs. The same deep, hollow gaze a patient had given her just before death, a black void that seemed, as she gazed back, to spread and widen outwards like a puddle of ink to swallow up the hospital bed, the curled-up figure moaning in pain and fear, the beeping equipment, the room itself…she'd closed his eyes afterwards, trying to erase the memory of that spreading void, and poor Stoker had chided her for wasting time on such trivialities.

"I wasn't going to cut them up and use them for cleaning rags, you know." She shrugged as casually as she could manage, voice still tinged with frost. "I was just curious."

"Of course," he said, nodding, and then nodded again. "No, of course not. Good to be curious, pulled you lot out of the caves and mud huts. Not really your taste anyway, those things, I don't think, bit too fussy for a sensible girl, always been fond of the sensible girls, sorry, women…" His feet faltered and grew still. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

Whatever woman had worn those impeccably kept clothes, Martha suddenly thought, she didn't envy her. Not a bit. Or was it more than one woman? The steamer trunk contained two toilette sets laid out side by side, the tortoiseshell hairbrush still threaded with blonde hairs, the silver one with brown…no. Regeneration. Of course. They were the same woman's hairbrushes, a woman who had regenerated, another Time Lord who had…departed? Died? (He'd said his planet was gone, destroyed, all his people, but all seemed absurd, surely he couldn't have been the only traveler, exile, fleeing refugee …) Either way, Martha felt utterly foolish not for grasping it straight away: This Rose he kept going on about, these had to be her clothes, her things, and of course this Rose wasn't any mere human. She just couldn't be, the way he talked about her.

"She had good taste," Martha said. "Whoever she was."

He nodded, his expression turning far more familiar, more quantifiable; memory and grief ran wide and cut deep but after just a handful of years in a hospital that wasn't a frightening sight, just terribly sad. Stoker, poor wretched Stoker had been firm, even merciless in dismissing the higher significance of sorrow, and at the time she had agreed with him: The patients who succumbed to illness or heart trouble or madness after some terrible loss weren't any more exquisitely sensitive or devoted than anyone else, they simply had a systemic physical weakness unleashed by an overload of stress. Death, he liked to declaim at some length, really was the great equalizer, showing that no one had any truly higher feelings and nobody, outside of books, ever died of a broken heart. One went on, because one had to, and the worst and rawest grief was still a mere well, not a bottomless pit.

Of course, her entire perception of loss and its limits had, rather recently, undergone a certain shift.

"Did she leave?" Martha asked. "Or did she die?"

"It's a bit complicated," the Doctor said. "It's…very complicated." He shrugged. "Nothing you need to worry about, though, so I wouldn't."

The veiled warning was unmistakable, but at least this time it came with a smile. Right, then. Enough Bluebeard's wife for one day.

She reached out and plucked at the pile of clothing, extracting a pair of maroon gym knickers with A. Brazil on the nametag. No, just no. "These could be a little less plain, actually…"

"Right, I knew you were winding me up!" This discovery seemed to make him instantly cheerful, which he celebrated by flinging the clothes over his shoulder. "There's a great chest of drawers somewhere in here unless the TARDIS moved it, lay all the unmentionables in there end to end and you could circle the earth. All right, maybe outline the Manchester city limits. Sure you don't want this velvet smoking-jacket? It's a bit torn up and bloodstained, I know, but it keeps off the chill…"

******

He talked incessantly now, feverishly, tramping round and round the TARDIS as if breaking in a painfully stiff pair of shoes. It wasn't like in the alleyway, it wasn't one person just talking quietly to another about what really mattered to them--it was fistfuls of words, words, words tossed frantically at the nearest eardrum and none of them sticking, all too fast, too random, too disjointed, too scattershot to make any sense, even when it didn't sound like an outright fever dream. (What was all that again about Alan Turing and pink poodles with guns?). He talked to himself, to the TARDIS walls, to the clothes in the wardrobe and the air itself; he chattered continuously as she ate, made a constant buzz of sound as she read, wandered casually into her room to confide at her for hours on end. Reminded her a bit of Mum just after Dad walked out, the endless narrative of bewildered lonely fury as Mum mopped the already pristine floors, sponged the shining kitchen table, rearranged the cabinets for hours on end. Tish slipped out every night to escape it, Leo simply stopped coming home, but Martha had felt oddly flattered to be the object of even such absent attention. Needed, even. The feeling always faded when she realized, every night anew, that her mother now put far more utility on talk than sleep.

When he slept, which was almost never--she rather envied him that, she hadn't realized how much she needed a lie-in or seven--it was with the sudden, deflated exhaustion of a toddler after a screaming fit, utterly still and quiet where he had dropped and nearly impossible to awaken. Especially annoying when he passed out on her bed (though at least he didn't complain when she rolled him flat to the floor). Even more annoying when he strolled into her room the exact second she'd begun drifting off, plunked himself on a chair and began declaiming the inchoate Prose Edda of his life, lives, collective eternities with an urgency no amount of swearing or pillow-throwing could deflect. Her fault, really, the way she'd hung like a fool, like a groupie (no, much worse--a new wife) on every word, every intimation, every grab of her hand in the first rush of my God, it travels in time! Bloody hell, it really is full of stars! Shakespeare! Cat people! The Cagastistron Nebula! That purple bloke with the skin scales and big hammer! A war, an unimaginable war--and then realized the words were nothing but a thicket, impervious to love, money or repeated axe blows.

All this, she reflected as she scrunched a pillow over her ear, because of a single, stupid pair of tight trousers. Tish was right, it had been far too long.

"…so there I was, flat on my face and insensible thirty thousand light-years from any sort of sentient life, other than the Vantrixian serpent about to spend the rest of eternity twisting my large intestine into Turkish taffy, and the Brigadier--I've told you about the Brig, haven't I?--was pottering around Hampstead playing tea boy for some paranoid fools from the Pentagon, and entirely forgot about me and my little dilemma until the plutonium rods started raining from the sky. I mean, that's the last time I give one of you lot a comm-link if you're just going to let it beep for hours at a time, but that's the Brig for you, be there when I need you there, old friend old mate old Doctor, and piss off to another galaxy the rest of the time…" He propped his trainers on the bedpost, shaking his head indulgently. "The Brig, the Brig, the Brig, it's been too bloody long. Barely recognized him, the last I saw him--God, it's depressing how fast you lot age. Or maybe it was Liz I gave the comm-link, I can't remember. Clever girl, Liz, by your standards. Anyway, right after that I find myself in the middle of what looks like German enemy lines, which made the Confederate soldiers a bit of a head-scratcher--no, wait, I think that was before the Vantrixians captured me. All I know is one minute I was running around San Francisco with this girl, Chris or Frankie or some name like that, and there was this vampire cult and then suddenly--Sam, that was it. But that may have all been after I gave Harry the comm-link. Don't know why I did that, he was never the sharpest knife in Caesar's back…Martha? Martha, are you awake?"

"'Course he'll come crawling back, Mum," she mumbled, pulling the covers over her head.

******

She awoke six hours later to the scent of beignets wafting beneath her nose--apparently he'd got bored, and popped out to New Orleans while she slept.

"You missed Mardi Gras," he chided her, setting a tray of coffee on the end table and perching comfortably on the duvet edge. "The first Mardi Gras. 'Course, there were only the two parade floats and the Mystic Krewe of Comus hadn't thought up that curious beads-for-mammaries ritual yet, so you didn't miss much."

"No bloodthirsty pink poodles on the premises, then?"

He frowned. "Sorry, don't follow. How'd you ever get through medical school being such a layabout, anyway?"

"I'm not through it yet," she pointed out, propping herself against the pillows and dipping a hand into the beignet bag. "This is the first proper layabout I've had in three years."

"Beautiful little hamlet, New Orleans. I love those cemeteries where the bones all sort of float to the top of the soil, it's like a literal primordial soup." He took a huge bite, cheeks bulging, and swallowed with an audible gulp. "Bloody shame what happened--not a patch on Pompeii and Herculaneum, or the Great Fire of London for that matter, but still rather a body blow--"

"Bloody deliberate shame," she said.

"Well, so was Pompeii--the Kendriirogorians just covered their tracks a bit better. A hyperspace accelerator lets you do that."

"And the Great Fire of London?"

He brushed sugar grains from his suit jacket, not seeming to hear her. "A real shame. Always liked New Orleans. Bit odd of me, really, when I've been chained up and tortured there more times than I care to remember--"

"Deliberately?"

"Deliberately what? Deliberately don't care to remember, or deliberately trussed, whipped, flogged and otherwise manifestly inconvenienced?"

"The latter," she said, fighting a smile. The beignet was perfect and perfectly warm; she took methodical bites around the edges, trying to make it last. He ate his second one in three large chomps of teeth.

"I never seek those sorts of situations out, I swear, they just seem to happen--"

"Helpless as a kitten up a tree, are we?" She searched for a napkin, finally wiping her fingers on the white paper bag. "Not very surprising."

"You really do think I seek that sort of thing out." He took a swallow of coffee, looking equal parts indignant and intrigued. "Exactly how long have we been contemplating these matters, exactly?"

"We wouldn't have any idea what you seek out," Martha retorted, shaking crumbs from her T-shirt, "we are barely awake--and I didn't lose any sleep over it, before you ask. It just seems like something you'd do, engineering yourself a thrilling time while letting the other person think they're really making all the decisions."

A shot in the dark, that was, but judging from the sputtering it engendered she'd hit her mark. "Well, this is lovely," he declared, as she attacked the beignet in earnest. "So all this time I thought I was showing you the universe, quite selflessly sharing a galactic splendor or eighty you'd never have known existed, you've just been waiting for me to abandon you on the edge of the Canis Major so I can pop out and get my arse sliced to ropa viejo by Mistress Ilsa von Smegslapper? And here I thought we were friends."

"We are friends, Mr. Smith," Martha said, patting his hand with only the slightest mockery. "Friends are honest with each other, or at least they should be. Right, then, you don't like it rough. You say. So do you like it at all?"

As soon as the question left her lips, she wondered just how long she really had been contemplating it. As it was friends you were meant to be honest with, not yourself, she pushed the thought aside. "Seriously, though. Do you have sex?"

He stared at her. She supposed she was meant to blush or falter, and the supposition made her impatient. "It's not a come-on, for heaven's sake, it's a perfectly straightforward question."

"Is this because of what happened at the Elephant? Would've thought you had your hands full with Bill the Bard--"

"It is not because of the Elephant. I really just want to know."

"All in the interests of the ragtag collection of the blazingly obvious that you lot call 'science'?"

"All in the interests of my being interested." She folded her arms. "So do you?"

He ran a hand through his hair, looking seriously discomfited. "Weeell, reports rather vary, depending on whom you consult--well, they do," he insisted, as she shook her head laughing. "What are you sniggering about?"

"Look, just say you're not answering, that I'm a horrible rude bint and I don't get any more sweets--"

"I didn't say I wasn't answering, just didn't know the question was tormenting you so." He cocked an eyebrow at her, hair fanning straight up from his scalp like a featherdress. "I mean, I must have sex, right? What's the alternative?"

"How about asexual reproduction, just for starters? Parthenogenesis. Gemmules. Cell regeneration, there's a obvious guess--"

"Darling wee itsy-bitsy time-babies woven on great big clackety-clacking looms--"

"Go ahead and take the piss. You didn't say I was wrong, did you?" She folded the beignet paper with methodical fingers, ignoring his smirk. "I just meant I don't presume you have sex or that you want to or that you have it the same way we do, because that'd be…presumptuous." The tiny paper airplane, translucent with grease, bounced off his cheek and nose-dived into the sheets. "And I don't presume it's rude to ask, either. For all I know it's a perfectly conventional question in your culture--'Good morning, have you had sex?' Like the way the Chinese ask if you've eaten yet."

He struck a consciously pondering pose. "Hmm, I rather like that. Good morning, are you sated? Good afternoon, have your orgasms been of satisfactory quality? Good evening, it is our pleasure to serve ourselves to you--"

"So that's a no, then?"

"You know, come to think of it there is a nasty skeevy little planet out by the Ryrforgian galaxy where--"

"A definite no." She licked the sugar off the top of the beignet, half-hearted table manners abandoned.

"I didn't say that."

He tilted his head a bit more, regarding her tongue as it scraped the pastry's surface, her lips as she licked the excess from her fingers; she felt his gaze, and studiously ignored it. "Right, let me put it this way," he finally said. "Since you insist. I have had what a human would acknowledge to be sex, more than once. More than twice even, I'm rather depraved that way. Those of my 'culture,' as you phrase it, are fully capable of having sex should we choose to--"

"Like humans do?"

"If we choose to conduct ourselves that way out of the entire vast, infinite range of possibilities, yes." He gave her a look of rather haughty triumph. "In fact we can impregnate humans if we put our minds to it, though the little nippers are sterile. Two-legged mules in nappies, little johns and mollies with incredibly wonky genetic codes and distinct tendencies toward bipolar disorder and ginger hair. Amazing what a little sweaty frenetic cross-breeding will accomplish. All reminds me of the time Gregor Mendel and I got into a horrid row and I just told him straight out, look, padre, you can spend the rest of your tiny little human life fiddling around with bloody pea plants or you can hike up your cassock, get out there in the wider universe and really give those sad-sack Augustine eunuchs a what-for when you show them--"

"And have you ever put your mind to it?"

"Put my mind to what?"

"Children. Half-human or otherwise."

He became very suddenly interested in the patterns on the ceiling. She studied the line of his profile, the long arch and dip of his throat.

"You ask a great many questions, Martha Jones," he mused. "Am I about to be drugged and slid beneath the microscope? The experience doesn't recommend itself, from one who knows--"

"I'm the first one ever in how many centuries to be curious?"

"Hardly, hardly. But what d'you mean to do with this vast array of knowledge, hmm?" He dragged his eyes back downwards. "Am I an object of fun, or of profit?"

"I just mean to know things. Isn't that enough? I like to know how things work, and you must like explaining how they work--or making up your own rules about them, anyway." She reached for the coffee. "You're certainly capable of letting me know when I've strayed too far."

He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, leaning back against her leg. Through the folds of the duvet she could feel the pressure against her knee, her thigh.

"So were any of you gay?" she asked. "Or did you have laws and taboos against that--"

"Laws! You Earth creatures are so obsessed with the rules for this and regulations for that and all the whatnot wherefore crossed-I-dotted-T pillar-of-salt idiocies--you'll be as bad as my kind if you keep it up." He hunched forward, eyes inches from hers yet far too self-satisfied to exude menace. "I am not human, therefore everything human is barking mad to me and I can do just as I like. And I have done, but that's hardly relevant, now is it? I do have an eight-hundred-and-eighty-year head start on you, can't be helped."

He sat back again, staring down his nose at her as if from a great height. "As for all the rest of your questions, just 'cause, just 'cause, maybe, sometimes, I don't know and just 'cause. I mean, I'm brilliant, but I'm not omniscient. Not most of the time, anyway. And so, what about you?"

"What about me what?" she asked, deliberately obtuse.

"You know what about you. Got a boyfriend? Girlfriend? One of each? Some sort of polyfidelitous total-power-exchange harem of sweaty harness-clad medical residents always on the job--"

"Hardly," she laughed. She sipped her coffee, made an incredulous face and put it aside; thick with sugar sludge and yet still mouth-strippingly bitter. He was gulping it down like a camel at the oasis. "For a while I thought I might be gay, but nothing came of it. I mean, less than nothing. And then I was dating this bloke, but…anyway." And for a while I actually thought I might marry someone who told me I was the most boring and incurably bourgeois woman he ever met and that I sound like a dying cat in bed, but you really don't need to know that. "I've got exams and things, I'm busy."

"Coffee not sweet enough?"

"You're joking, right?"

"Simple question. Anyway, speaking as someone who's broken more unbreakable universal taboos than you've had hot dinners, there's only one rule that really matters: You can do whatever else you like, but you can't have shagging in the TARDIS."

She started to laugh, then realized no one else was joining in. "Wait," she said, "you're not joking."

"Why would I joke about something like that?" He seemed very nearly offended by the idea. "It's just the truth. It's just not done."

"Never?" She peered into his face, waiting for the solemnity to dissolve and feeling increasingly awkward when it didn't happen. "Never once, in all of your lives, have you ever had it off, ever, with anyone, here in the TARDIS."

"Not ever."

"You're--"

"Kidding you, no I'm not. Why are you so surprised I actually have standards? That's rather hurtful."

Martha shook her head in disbelief. "In all the centuries you've been traveling, all the dozens and dozens of us you've dragged on board--"

"No."

"--that blonde one, in the go-go boots, who was always twisting her ankle--"

"Not ever."

He was entirely serious; wide-eyed serious, like a child reporting a Santa sighting, but the solemnity was genuine. She sat up straighter, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Perfect gentleman then, are you?"

"Especially not the one with the boots, in the TARDIS or out it would've been like seducing a golden retriever--well, don't look so surprised. You must have realized as much, would you really have come running on board if you thought you'd be shacked up light-years from home with a superannuated space lecher demanding cash, grass or--"

"I did not run on board, you came round pestering me."

"Hardly took much pestering." He attacked a third beignet. "The point is, you are safe as houses and the TARDIS wouldn't have it any other way."

It crept up on you, this automatically saying she instead of it for a splintery blue box. "She forbids it, then?"

"You might say that."

"Looking out for my welfare, is she? Or is it just that she'd be jealous?"

His eyes grew wider, lighting up in that feverish, dilated way that made her think of a cat about to lunge for someone's foot. "I knew there was a reason I liked you, Martha Jones," he declared, abandoning the pastry and squeezing her fingers in an emphatic two-handed grip. "You have this strange way of grasping things immediately while pretending you don't, it's rather charming…yes, I do think she would be. And who could blame her?"

The praise brought an involuntary smile to her face, one she quickly tried to extinguish. "Leads you around by the nose then, does she?"

He shrugged. "She just wouldn't like it, is all. Her reasons are many and mysterious, and I respect them." He licked the sugar from his upper lip with the slow precision of a draughtsman making a pencil line. "Any final questions, class, before we adjourn for the day?"

"Just one," she said. "Promise. Easy one."

"Just one? I'm almost disappointed. Fire away."

She glanced down at his hands, still absently grasping hers. "Are you this cold everywhere?" she said.

He blinked. He seemed startled by the question, but not shocked.

"Well, I don't know," he mused. "Am I?"

His grip slackened and Martha pulled one of her hands free, sliding two fingers past his shirt cuff until she felt the knob of the wristbone, the faint furze of hair: like his hands, not ice cold, more milk-bottle cold. Startling, but not unpleasant. He watched her movements with a distant, almost scholarly expression.

"Is it uncomfortable?" she asked. "Touching someone that much warmer?"

"You did promise," he pointed out, "just the one final question."

That she had. She was stroking his wrist, she realized, and at first felt a bit embarrassed and then thought, no, why not? Nothing would ever come of it anyway, he'd made that very clear. His skin was smooth, indistinguishable from any human's other than the faint chill (and even then, her brain chattered at her in slight alarm even as her fingertips didn't cease their movements, so many drugs could give a patient cold hands, thyroid medications, beta blockers…). His pulse thudded with the habitual rapidity that still alarmed her but he was perfectly composed, sitting portrait-still as some of her own warmth seeped into his flesh. Just basic science, that was, her brain felt the need to remind her. Heat always flows from an area of greater concentration…

She was wearing an old T-shirt and rumpled pajama bottoms, the waistband too wide for her and falling around her hips. He reached out and touched the jutting angle of a hipbone, fingers sliding up to her waist and back down again, over and over.

…to an area of lesser concentration. Raynaud's disease, now that caused cold extremities too. Known for it. His fingers were very slow and insistent.

"So," he said, shifting closer, "are you always this warm?"

She pondered the tone of this question, as if it were a colorful stone washed up on the beach shore, and then tossed it aside. "Thirty-seven Celsius or thereabouts," she replied evenly. "Can't help my biology any more than you can. Probably a lot less."

His hand moved to rest at the small of her back. "So feverish," he tutted, "we simply must call you a doctor--"

"Oh, please."

"One silly clichéd advance to another, Ms. Jones." He reached beneath her shirt, rubbing her back in even strokes. "You started it, didn't you?"

"Am I supposed to be ashamed or something?" she asked, without rancor. "Or pretend that doesn't feel nice?"

"Is this inquiry of a scientific, cultural or feminist nature?"

She shrugged, pulling her own hand away. "Well, it hardly matters, anyway, as there's no shagging permitted on the premises--"

"This isn't shagging," he pointed out, softly.

Their foreheads were touching and her breath had grown faster, surely he sensed it and it seemed as though his had as well, and he raised his head perhaps to kiss her, perhaps simply to pull away from such dangerous proximity and just like in the wardrobe, it was like a glass drew back and she saw through and behind his eyes, saw something so distant and so shockingly old, antediluvian, ancient. Beyond any petty questioning, any tricks cheap or clever, and for the first time she felt the true meaning of the word alien, found herself this close to kissing someone, something so far above and beyond human that she felt like an oblivious fly flirting merrily with the swatter. Her back stiffened and she opened her mouth to say wait, no, feeling the lurch in her stomach at his own words--You started it, didn't you?--but he had already straightened up and turned away where he sat, concentrating on rolling up the open end of the beignet bag as if nothing had happened at all.

"Don't want these to go stale," he noted. There was the faintest flush on his cheek as he worked but he didn't seem angry, disappointed, anything except hellbent on preserving the integrity of the remaining baked goods. "Did you want another one?"

Martha shook her head. "Right, then," he said, leaping to his feet. "You have a bit of a rest, I'll be off fiddling with the language circuits if you need me. Call me crazy but I'm good as certain I wasn't meant to be hearing seventeenth-century Occitan on the nineteenth-century Rue Bourbon…"

He strolled out, whistling something that sounded like the Marseillaise turned sideways. As his footsteps faded, Martha gazed quizzically at the walls of her room as though they might erupt any moment in reproof. The spot on the duvet where he had sat was still cold.

"So just tell me this," she said aloud. "Who won that round, exactly?"

The TARDIS let off a steady, jaunty hum, apparently a bit smug in the knowledge that propriety had once again been preserved. Martha shrugged, gave the wall a rueful little punch and retrieved her jeans from the foot of the bed.

******

When she imagined him that way (and before any scientific inquiry or facile flirtation had muddied the waters yes, she had imagined it once or twice, just because she thought human men were quite enough trouble for one lifetime didn't mean she wasn't curious), she pictured a happy little ferret bouncing in all directions on a great sproingy mattress, inevitably tumbling onto the hard floor and his own small furry head with a curse and a bristling grasp for lost dignity. The thought made her have to fight very hard not to laugh and quite put her off ever bringing That Matter up again, which was good both because the TARDIS really did seem to be keeping an eye on her and because there were so many other things worth thinking about: planets whose dawn involved six successive sunrises each more glorious than the last, her blue-box chaperone's endless wonderful rooms (a whole art gallery, a huge one!), the feeling when they went into hyperdrive or overdrive or whatever you were meant to call it that she felt time itself rushing past her and through her, rattling and tugging at very cell so she was almost afraid of flying apart into endless one-thousand-thousandths of seconds.

She was determined to figure out exactly how that all worked, at least what bits of it any not-Stephen-Hawking person could ever hope to understand. (Determined as well to find out why the one time she'd brought up that name the Doctor had snarled something about a "rotten little charlatan" and kicked the console hard.) Quite clear, too, that his hearts, liver, duodenum, whatever his people (had) considered the seat of their emotions was firmly occupied by this Rose, the Girl(s) in the Wardrobe, and it was one thing to flirt with a widower but quite another to do it right after the funeral. And so, whatever she'd once idly imagined might happen, it wouldn't and that was that and it was quite all right. See now, Nanny Spaceship? I'm being desperately good, and not to try and curry anyone's favor. Pinky swear.

Sometimes she would sit and read or revise or nurse a cuppa or (try to) ponder this whole nature-of-time question, and she would be slowly dragged back from the book or her own thoughts by the sudden realization that he had fallen silent, utterly uncharacteristically silent. Whenever she heard that silence and felt his eyes resting on her she never looked up, never gave either of them a chance to stumble back where they oughtn't, and usually he would clear his throat and start right up again with some long mad story about artron energy and Kassowarks. But sometimes, now and again, he just stayed silent.

******

He bounded into the control room like a game show presenter pursued by wolves, slapping his hands on the console so hard she jumped. "So! Where would you like to go today, Martha Jones? The universe is yours."

"Anywhere?" she asked.

"Absolutely anywhere."

It was a coin toss, of course, whether he could actually maneuver the TARDIS within a few dozen light-years of her choice, but he looked so ebullient she wasn't about to spoil the mood. "In that case, then, I'd like to go to…to Mars. No, wait, Saturn, with the rings and--no. Mars. Yes, I'd like to see Mars." He let out a groan of weariness, sagging against the console. "I get the feeling I wasn't meant to pick Mars."

"No," he sighed, "you can pick anything you like, I did say--pah, Mars is so dull! Why you lot named a perfectly innocent chocolate bar after such a mundane shard of rock I'll never know…why would you pick Mars, anyway? Nobody likes Mars. What about Raxacoricofallapatorius? Bit extraordinarily violent, I admit, but you can still have some serious fun--"

Martha shook her head. "That is not a real planet. You made it up just now."

"I did not."

"You did ask me where I wanted to go."

"Yes, yes," he said grudgingly, flinging his arms out as he addressed the TARDIS proper, "but why do they always think they want to go to Mars? Either that, or they want to zip back and prevent the Holocaust or say goodbye to Gran one last time or find that extraplanetary butterfly you keep talking about so they can 'see what happens' when they step on it--your Mr. Bradbury has a great deal to answer for, let me tell you, and don't get me started on old Harlan--"

"And what's wrong with wanting to prevent a genocide? Or saying goodbye to Gran, for that matter?"

"I keep telling you, interference in the time-stream is strictly utterly completely forbidden--"

"Except to pick up girls, apparently, so I don't see--"

"--and you never, ever, want to run into yourself coming and going. Remember that." He stopped dancing in place long enough to look perfectly grave, with a baleful look reminiscent of Stoker at his most self-important. "No resurrecting Adeola or anything like that, all right?"

"Who said anything about my cousin? Beg your humble pardon, Time Lord, I just wanted to pop next door and see Mars."

"And I did not 'pick you up.' We've discussed this before."

She retrieved her book, making a show of turning the pages. "But see, our appearing at any past event, just showing up where we wouldn't have been in front of people who would never have known about us, isn't that interfering in the time-stream by definition? I don't understand--"

"Look, the old girl is not named Ziggy and if it were that easy to put right what once went wrong the universe would already be all ice cream and jolly jingles." He fiddled with the console, whapped something very hard with the flat of his hand, winced and sucked on the injured fingers. "Right, so we've very sensibly chucked the Mars idea--go on then, pick a place, pick a time. Your choice."

"This is an interesting definition of choice. All right, then…" She pondered the question. "Woodstock. Let's go to Woodstock."

"And they always want to go to Woodstock!" He slammed his fist against a set of dials that buzzed and whirred madly in protest. "Why am I beset with creatures whose idea of a good time is no toilet paper and overpaid pseudo-hippies warbling and whinging about purple berries and drugstore truck-driving men? At least at the Michigan Womyn's Festival you can learn how to throw a pot or something. And by the way, any 'countercultural' event that even thought about booking bloody Sha-Na-Na--"

"He did ask me," she informed the TARDIS walls. "You're a witness. So what's your pleasure instead, then? Black Death? Reign of Terror? The Lament Configuration?"

"It's Lemarchand Configuration, properly speaking, and as for the Terror I really had enough of Camille Desmoulins sticking his tongue in my ear the first time out--"

"Right, I give up." She pulled a highlighter from her pocket, running it swiftly over a page-long paragraph of text. "Apparently I've got no taste and no discernment so you pick the place, Mr. Smith, and if you don't mind I'd prefer somewhere quiet and peaceful. No wars, no mad citizen-dictators, no insane supercomputers, no squashed butterflies. And lots and lots of flowers."

"Flowers?" He looked nonplussed, as though flowers were a mythical concept long dismissed by the finer philosophers. "Why flowers?"

"Because I like flowers, that's why. But no giant man-eating gladiolas or sunflowers that shoot off deadly gobs of space pollen or anything like that, just…nice, pretty flowers. I realize that's very pedestrian and boring, but it's what I want."

"Flowers. Huh." He mulled over the idea some more, hands clasped behind his back and tongue clicking at his teeth, and finally nodded in cautious approval. "Flowers. Think I can manage that much, bit more interesting than tramping round the cowpats on Yasgur's farm…in fact, I know just the thing. Hang on!"

The TARDIS roared to life and rocketed sharply to the left, sending her copy of Clinical Haematology sailing up to the ceiling and back down again. When it whacked him straight in the temple and sent him staggering into the nearest wall, cursing and rubbing his bleeding forehead, she chose to interpret it as vindication.

******

Warm, sweet, richly fragrant air rushed in waves through the TARDIS doorway; the Doctor took in a lungful, eyes half-closed in pleasure, and beamed. "I haven't been here in what, two centuries? Three? Good to see it looking so well." He leapt aside to let Martha through. "Welcome to Dryope-9!"

The sky was black with the faintest tinge of violet; looking up, Martha counted eight, nine--eleven moons, one massive and emitting a soft golden light and the others strung in a long arc behind it like deep purple beads. The landscape was such a riot of scent and color she felt instantly, very pleasantly dizzy. The Doctor, of course, looked thoroughly unfazed. "Well," he said, "do you like it?"

"Do I like it, he asks?" She shook her head. "It's bloody marvelous."

She stood stock still, trying to take it all in, but it was just too much: flowers of every size and hue carpeting every surface in sight, great ruby-red trumpet flowers, clusters of tiny blue and mauve buds like baby teeth, tubular golden blossoms as long as her arm, long twisting vines weighed down by indigo blooms wide as plates. A rugby pitch's worth of what looked like lilacs, but all striped and spotted and speckled a dozen shades of cream and pink; a copse of small slender flowering trees, dropping clusters of deep yellow petals curved like birds' wings; everywhere underfoot, curious little flowers of pure black popping up amid pale green and paler blue and bone-white grasses smelling of wine, apple blossoms, the faintest whiff of asafetida. The air buzzed, hummed and whined with the noise of countless insects, and every slight breeze carried a new, tantalizing fragrance past their noses.

"It's so beautiful," Martha finally said. "It's so…so much. Did someone plant all this, or--"

"Oh, no--this is all natural post-industrial reversion, river of orchids where they had a motorway and all that." The Doctor reached up to one of the yellow flowering trees and pulled off a twig. "Smell the sap, they used to use it in perfumes instead of jasmine. Magnificent, isn't it? And to think that when humans had the place colonized, it was a toxic industrial stewpot that made Northmoor look like Tlalocan. Puts you in mind of that Chernobyl meltdown, just a decade or two after the strontium-90 clears out the silly primates and the roses and barn swallows are busting out all over--wait, what did I say? Oh. No radiation here, promise. They did all contract a rather terrible bacterial plague about nine hundred years ago, wiped them out a treat, but I imagine it's probably burnt off by now. You're standing at the crossroads of the heart of the bustling downtown of the very creatively named Dryope City." He glanced down at his feet, at the remnants of asphalt broken to mosaic chips and grown over with moss. "The name Ozymandias suddenly comes to mind, can't imagine why."

"What sort of plague?"

He gestured toward a structure covered in climbing vines and thick with lavender pollen; it took her a moment to recognize it as the rusted shell of a pay phone. "Oh, some highly contagious hemorrhagic bacterium or other. Supposedly spread by dirty telephone receivers, of all things--terribly silly rumor, if you ask me. Still, I'd stick to your mobile if you want to ring your mum and gloat. Do you really like it? If you've got hay fever, now's the time to speak up."

"I really, truly like it," she said, between deep floral-tinged breaths. She realized she was grinning. "Is the whole planet like this?"

"Entirely, we're the first visitors in yoinks and the only non-insect life forms anywhere around. Not that the plant life is lonely, they're sentient and they've got each other if they want a bit of chat--"

"Sentient?" She drew her hand away from the scarlet blossom she'd been ready to pluck. "How sentient, exactly?"

"Oh, they can sense they've got off-world visitors and that at least one of them likes what she sees and that we're talking all about them--our language itself is just so much argle-bargle, but they have a certain telepathic ability that…hang on, what's wrong?"

Martha had stopped still in dismay; there was quite literally no way to move in any direction without treading on large clumps of flowers. The Doctor laughed. "Oh, that? Don't worry, they like it. See?"

He brought one red shoe up and slammed it down, and Martha actually seemed to sense, rather than outright hear, something resembling a wordless murmur of contentment. He laughed again when she slipped her hands in her pockets away from temptation, looking slightly revolted. "There's no help for it," he teased, quite deliberately bouncing up on his heels and very hard back down again as he walked, "we bring bliss and satiety to the lonely and downtrodden, we leave a trail of helpless ecstasy where'er we walk so pluck away, Martha Jones, pluck and pick and fondle the darling buds of May as if your very life depended on it--"

"You're disgusting," she called out, trying to sound stern and giggling far too hard to pull it off. "And stop squashing the poor perverted things, they're far too beautiful for--oh, look."

Something the size of a bat with long, feathery ochre wings glided toward her, regarded her with wide tobacco-colored eyes and then flew away again; Martha surrendered to the vague childish desire to follow it, finally losing its path in a thicket of ochre and brown vines. When she returned she found the Doctor leaning idly against the elbow-high remains of a crumbling wall, the brick covered in white flowers whose mottled green and black spots made her think of a moldy cheese. A velvet-soft, gorgeous-smelling moldy cheese. She pushed a knot of livid red leaves aside, spying a glint of something metallic against the brickface, and found a lettered copper plaque thick with verdigris.

"English," she murmured. "No, right, that's the TARDIS translating--"

"No, that actually is English. Dryope-9 was an Earth colony, or I should say will be one about four thousand years from now."

Once, Martha marveled, that might have seemed like a long time. "We're not too terribly far in the future, then."

"Oh no, this is the present-day planet," said the Doctor. "Been about nine hundred years to the day since the plague first hit, as coincidence would have it."

Martha blinked in confusion. "But, you just said--"

"Well, see, when the first spaceships landed they very sensibly started calculating a suitable tropical solar calendar--not the swiftest of tasks, when the sun only rises here the equivalent of every six Earth weeks--but subsequent settlers insisted on the Gregorian calendar, 'the Lord's calendar,' or bloody nothing. Then the moon-cults came along with a different lunar calendar for each one, then there was some huge intraplanetary war about Daylight Saving Time, don't ask me to work it all out, and then that little incident where a rift got torn right through the continuum fabric and I swear I was nowhere near the place at the time--and so the upshot is that they had at least twenty-seven different ways of measuring the planetary revolutions and could never decide precisely which sky-magician got to impose his, hers, theirs on everyone else."

He traversed the remains of the wall, clearly relishing another chance to play tour guide. "So you see, when I say that the planet was settled by Earth colonists four thousand years from now it was actually two thousand years past, and when I say the plague happened nine hundred-some years ago, it actually happens six thousand seven hundred and twenty-four years from now. Or possibly fourteen thousand and eight, depending on your number systems and whether the time continuum's bowels are flaring up that day. You do see?"

Martha considered this. "And all that somehow isn't criss-crossing time streams in some kind of potentially universe-destroying--"

"I'll explain later. Look at that plaque again--notice anything unusual?"

Martha pulled the leaves back farther and examined the lettering:

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog
Quick Zephyrs Blow, Vexing Daft Jim
Few Quips Galvanized the Mock Jury Box
Pack My Box With Five Dozen Liquor Jugs
J.Q. Vandz Struck My Big Fox Whelp

"That the TARDIS misfiring again?" she asked.

"No, that's actually what it says. Now, Ms. Jones, what facts can you glean about those sentences from a bit of close observation? Hmm?"

"Er, let's see…American English. 'Galvanized.' "

"True, but irrelevant. Or actually, perhaps tangentially significant. Try again."

She studied the plaque carefully for several moments. "The letters," she finally said, running a finger over the X's and Q's. "Am I right? Each sentence uses every letter in the English alphabet--"

"Pangrams, yes. Good. Notice anything else? Look carefully."

She leaned closer, searching for anagrams, acrostics, iambic pentameter, some arcane numerology pattern in the letters, and came up blank. "Can't find it," she confessed, feeling somewhat thick. "Well, other than that none of the sentences make any sense--"

"Don't they?" He seemed genuinely surprised by this conclusion. "No one's ever packed a box with five dozen liquor jugs in all of human history? You lot were mainlining the moonshine for a few decades there, you must have done--"

"Well, they're nonsensical all put together, and why stick them on a wall like this?"

"Well, why not, and how do you know they're nonsensical?" He gazed at the plaque with a slightly myopic squint. "Perhaps this is actually the key to the great mystery of Dryope-9. Perhaps, in fact, this 'daft Jim,' crack pay phone sanitizer and father of three, was so addled and vexed by the zephyrs blowing his hat and hair and morning paper in all directions that it was he who neglected to sterilize the fatal phone receiver, thereby precipitating the downfall of one of the most noble, refined, dioxin-happy civilizations the universe has yet known. And of course, when the details of his willful neglect reached the jury at his subsequent trial, not even the wittiest quips of the defense counsel could dissuade them from pronouncing the maximum sentence the law allowed, though of course by that time so many of them were dropping from the plague right where they stood that there were, sadly, no more bailiffs left to carry daft Jim off to the slave-galley and he was able to escape amid the confusion." He stood back from the plaque with a proud little flourish. "So you see, Ms. Jones, that there is actually not the least nonsensical thing about this unobtrusive little memorial epigraph."

Her lips twitched. "Yes, I see, it all makes perfect sense now. But you forgot all about J.Q. Vandz, that's quite unforgivable."

"So I did, so I did. And who was he, pray tell?"

"As everyone knows, he was Queen's counsel in the notorious case of daft Jim, the prosecution the triumph of a long and glittering legal career. Sadly, he was spotted only three days later staggering helplessly through the downtown streets in the final throes of a plague-induced delirium--"

"--at which point he collapsed right on top of a fox whelp just trying to sun itself by the roadside, which then leapt over a half-sleeping Alsatian in a desperate bid for escape, found itself in the middle of the traffic desperately trying to flee the smoking husk of Dryope City and caused the lorry carrying the last remaining medical supplies to swerve and overturn--"

"--at which point the few surviving citizens threw their hands up and declared, bugger this, let's load up the liquor jugs, drive out to the countryside and get so pissed our livers burst open like bad tins of beans." She released the handful of leaves, letting them drop back over the plaque. "Truly, the only sensible response."

"Indeed. Ms. Jones, we may have just read the exquisitely taut, focused narrative of a society collapsing around its own ears and yet still, still, having the wherewithal to memorialize the event for future generations. Even knowing there wouldn't be any future generations. Can't help but admire that to bits, now can you?"

"And as for the elusive half-sleeping Alsatian, sadly no more is known than that Bingo was his name-o. So," she demanded, "what actually is the big, significant thing that links all these sentences together?"

"Oh, I haven't got a clue, I was hoping you had some theories. Are those the Lotis bugs I hear?" He tilted his head to the sky. "Hang on. Listen."

Something let out a low ghostly call, like an owl's hooting drawn out as a single long slow note. Martha craned her neck to see a stream of large apricot insects descending with almost solemn gravity onto the yellow-flowering trees, first in sporadic pairs, then in an astonishingly steady swarm.

"They pollinate the false jasmine," the Doctor explained, pointing to the showers of bugs now crawling thickly on the branches, turning the trees pale orange. "They're also a favorite snack for the golden ochrys, that's that great large insect you were trying to catch for a pet, so they should be back any moment as well…there."

The Lotis bugs continued their descent, several ochryses now hovering nearby and gliding haphazardly into the swarm for a swift mouthful. The Doctor watched with the faintest trace of a smile, his shoulder pressed against Martha's with an easy familiarity.

"Why don't they just go into the trees to get them?" she murmured. "There's so many."

"Repulsed by the smell of the tree sap, apparently. Chacun à son goût."

She watched the ochryses wheel and circle, always keeping a safe distance from the trees. "It's so gorgeous. And so solitary. It's just…I love it." She grabbed his hand, smiling. "Thank you."

He smiled back. "Solitary," he mused, clasping her fingers. "You're never alone, are you? Back on Earth, I mean."

"I suppose not. Sometimes I wish it were all a bit less hectic, but…family's family, you know. And you're not a good doctor if you can't at least tolerate all different sorts." She shrugged. "But you're never alone either, really, there's always someone traveling with you. The ones you've mentioned, and…others." Martha hesitated. "Some very good friends. Exceptional friends. Yes?"

"Once or twice, yes," he said. "Some very good, exceptional friends."

"I'm not asking any more than that," she said. "Promise."

"You can ask anything you like, Martha." He turned toward her with an urgent expression, as if anxious to retract an insult. "Absolutely anything. Understand?"

She shook her head. "No," she said, "I don't think I can. Or should. But that's all right."

He didn't answer. The length of his arm was still pressed against hers, their bodies touching and yet still removed from each other, and as his fingers stroked hers Martha felt herself shift very slightly, but very unmistakably off balance. Like that ridiculous little desk toy Tish had given her, an oblong full of colored liquid that swayed on a tiny fulcrum, one end or another tilting down under the rushing weight of the gel; she felt that way now, as though something heavy and thick were filling her body and threatening to knock her forward, make her lose her footing and herself unless she did something quickly. The ochryses, they were so lovely, entirely worth concentrating on in their own right. The Lotis bugs, pale and serene against the almost gaudy yellow of the tree blossoms.

"A sunrise only every six weeks," she said, her voice calm and even. "But the colors, I thought most night-blooming flowers were meant to be white or pale pink--"

When he leaned toward her she hesitated, remembering the sight of that brief, dark flash of age and eternity, but when he kissed her she had already closed her eyes. She pulled just the slightest bit away, giving him a chance to do the same, and was just the slightest bit hurt when he followed her cue.

"Martha?" he said, also quite calm and composed.

"Yes?"

"I think we should go back to the TARDIS now."

She nodded, feeling both disappointment and relief. "You're right. She'll be missing you."

"Martha--"

"No, I'm serious! She will." Just how did you get to see a splintery wooden box as alive, somehow more alive than you were yourself? It was disconcerting at best. "I wasn't being sarcastic. It's like…I can feel it sometimes when we walk in and out, I can't explain it. But it's like she likes you to leave just so she can enjoy having you come back." She laughed abashedly. "I know that sounds stupid, but…Doctor, why are you looking at me like that?"

"And why do you insist on saying things like that?" he demanded, and to her shock he looked very nearly distraught. "Why?"

"I didn't--" Why had she said anything? Perhaps she wasn't meant to sound so familiar about the TARDIS, perhaps it was rude of an outsider. Not that she had any way of knowing--why, after that first, almost tearful outpouring, was it so bloody difficult to get him to stop the speed-freak's travelogue and just talk about his people, his planet, whether they had drunk from the fingerbowls or shagged letterboxes as a religious ritual or told their children babies got woven on looms, anything? "I told you it sounded stupid--"

"It's not stupid, it's not stupid at all. It means you understand things, that you actually comprehend--" He broke off, shaking his head in dismay. "It means you understand. That's what it means."

"And why," she demanded, "is it so bad that I understand things? Why?"

"Because," he breathed, "it's terribly exciting."

His fingers sank into her hair and they locked mouths and bodies together, staggering a bit until she threw an arm toward the wall for balance, and that was another question answered right there, she thought as she felt the erection pressing against her thigh. The inside of his mouth was cool, his skin as she ran her hands beneath his jacket and up his back was cold but not cold enough to cause the deep, aching shiver that traveled through her stomach, her legs, the shiver he must have felt as one of her legs wound itself around his and he pushed her gently back against the surface of the wall--

"Right," he said, catching his breath as he abruptly disentangled their limbs. "This would be a bad idea, to keep doing this. A very bad idea. Right? Wouldn't it?"

"I am really not the person to ask right now," she said, gritting her teeth.

"It's not you, Martha. I mean, it is so very not you because I want to, I really want to--Martha, you need to stop rubbing your leg right there."

"Why, exactly?" She rubbed a bit more vigorously, taking a certain pleasure in seeing him swallow hard and stumble over her shoes.

"Martha, I know I look jaw-droppingly alluring in a vaguely ferrety sort of way but I'm an old man, all right? I'm such a very, very old man, I'm far too old for this whole Captain Kirk routine and I swore I would never, ever, even if I really could save a planet or two doing it that I'd never make a mistake like this ever again--"

"Doctor?"

"The last regeneration, right after that, I said to myself, right, self, you are the grownup here, this is causing all manner of problems you should very well have anticipated and it's got to stop now."

"Doctor--"

"And it did stop, it really did--and that made her decide I was behaving 'like a gentleman,' so I must be 'serious' about her, and I suppose I thought I was in my own way and it made me forget about…everything, and all right, it was all very flattering, and just, Christ, what a mess. I broke my own rule, I never do domestic and I did more domestic than Nigella bloody Lawson and I thought, well, maybe it'll make her start to think of me as a brother--"

"Doctor."

"Of course, I tried that same trick with Cleopatra and it only made things worse--"

"Doctor!"

He jumped. "What?"

"You're crushing my foot."

"Sorry. Sorry." He pirouetted hastily off her toes. "Martha, I--" He sighed, with a pleading expression that made her think of Leo after he'd smashed up Dad's car. "I'm sorry. I mean, I really am truly, honestly, incredibly sorry that--you must hate me. I would hate me. You hate me, don't you?"

Someday, Martha thought, years from now, I will look back on this moment and hit someone. Probably him. She tore at a handful of the wall vines instead, ignoring the consequent sigh of botanical bliss. "For God's sake, I don't hate you, Doctor," she said wearily. "All right? I really don't. I've got this sudden incredible overpowering sympathy for my first boyfriend, I admit, but…"

But Christ, you really are a scared, fussy, bombastic old man under that shiny pretty surface, aren't you? And to think I was starting to find you a bit too intimidating. She ran a hand through his hair with an only slightly patronizing affection, letting it rest on the back of his neck. "All right," she said, rubbing her knuckles against the nape. "You're right. Time to be on our way then, Grandfather Smith."

He didn't move.

"Bloody hell," he muttered.

"What?"

"Well, you don't have to shout. Just, er…" He stared past her to the bug-infested trees, chin lifted almost comically high to avoid meeting her eyes. "Could you do that again?"

"What, call you 'grandfather?' "

"No! Er, that other thing." He dipped his chin back down, a head-duck of embarrassment. "The thing with your hand."

Martha waited, giving him one last chance to equivocate, remonstrate, seek out some other amazing form of plant life to distract her. When it didn't happen she knuckled the skin once more, made small circles with her fingertips.

"Like that?" she asked.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Just like that."

"Right here?"

"Mm-hmm--nape of the neck, just there. Bit of…" A flush crept slowly over his face. "…bit of an erogenous zone for my kind."

She ran her fingernails over his neck, digging in hard, and he drew a sharp breath between his teeth. "That didn't hurt, did it?" she whispered.

"Just a bit," he said. She did it again. He closed his eyes tightly, his hands sliding from her shoulders to her breasts. She shrugged off her jacket, dropping her arms to let it slide to the ground, and returned to the application of fingers, fingernails, the inside of her wrist, pinching and scratching and stroking for any interesting reaction.

"I knew a woman once," he said, lips brushing the top of her head, "who could work on that little bit of skin for hours. Just like that. Make a poem of it."

"Another traveling companion?"

He shook his head. "Frenchwoman. I stopped off for her, not the other way--" Martha ran her teeth slowly from nape to jugular, and his hands faltered. "Oh."

She pressed her lips to his throat, the fast pulse grown markedly faster, the tender spot behind the ear. Her shirt bunched beneath her arms as he cupped her breasts in his palms, pinching the nipples between thumb and forefinger lightly, carefully at first, and then suddenly pressing down with such force that she started and winced and breathed very hard. He pulled her shirt and bra off for her, tossing them to the grass, and kept her arms raised up by a hand gripping her wrists. She felt her face grow hot, a sudden agony of self-consciousness, but as he surveyed her bare breasts and trailed his free hand down her rib cage his eyes were gentle, thoughtful even, behind the veil of arousal.

"Well, isn't that interesting," he whispered, stroking the curve of her belly. "You're beautiful."

She'd been wondering about this, yes, so much more than once or twice, since that night in the Elephant, since she'd first stepped into the TARDIS (since she'd first touched him in Royal Hope, she'd been so bored and distracted thinking of that bloody party, and he'd been simultaneously humming with nervous energy and rumpled with sleep and he'd smiled at her from his bed like no one else were even there, and the sudden, absurdly incongruous rush of desire unnerved and unbalanced her far more than a second heartbeat and he'd seen it, she knew he had, there was nowhere to hide), and it amazed her now just how easily it all happened. Easy as him putting his mouth to her breasts, licking and sucking as avidly as if he'd wanted to all along; easy as the hand on her belly snaking into her jeans; easy as his fingers pushing past the cleft to caress the clitoris with measured, persistent skill. Easy as pulling her hands free of his grasp to undo his shirt buttons, growing impatient and sliding them beneath the cloth to run her nails along his chest, liking the sounds that that drew from him so much she raked them farther and farther down. As he pinched and fondled her bottom she rubbed his cock through his trousers, felt a flash of cruel glee at his expression when she didn't undo them; he cradled her pussy in the curve of his palm, rocking his drenched hand slowly back and forth, until she thrust involuntarily against his fingers and let out a shaky sigh.

Between kisses they pulled and yanked at the remnants of each other's clothes, both of them febrile and clumsy, and he was actually laughing and she was laughing too at the adolescent eagerness in his face, at how ridiculous they must have looked to those sentient flowers, him struggling with his jacket and his trousers around his knees, her with her knickers tangled on an ankle--and wasn't this the very definition of B-movie absurd, clueless Earth-girl about to shag a centuries-old alien left poetically adrift by the demise of his whole species and all this in a bloody field of flowers, no less?

For it was because it was so ridiculous, hopeless, fleeting, evanescent that it was so wonderful, she thought, as he returned his tongue to her breasts and traced a long wet path between them, then bit one nipple so suddenly and so deep that sensation shot through her and she almost shrieked. That, she was now certain, must be what her father really saw in Annalise: the utter, risible absurdity of their pairing, an exhilarating defiance of fate and common sense and all laws of good taste and who wouldn't want that, who wouldn't embrace such a delicious way of shouting against the void? She felt a sudden rush of warmth and benevolence for her father, for Annalise, for all the bits of the Earth and known universe she'd ever seen and everyone in them, though it might have been from the Doctor burying his fingers deep inside her, finding every marvelously sensitive spot. Her knees buckled and she bore down, squeezing with her thighs and other muscles she hadn't known she possessed; he laughed again to feel himself imprisoned, and when she released his hand he put it to his mouth and slowly, meditatively, with eyes half-closed in pleasure sucked each finger clean.

She was naked now and he still had his shirt and that unnerved her sometimes, being more bare than the man, irrationally afraid she might be laughed at (or even just left there, abandoned, her outer shell peeled off), but as she watched him, licking his hand and almost crooning, she put her own between her legs. She stroked herself even wetter, took her hand and worked the fingers between his buttocks, farther up, farther up. As she pushed slowly past the ring of muscle and into his arse he made a long, drawn-out hissing sound and bit indiscriminately at her breasts, her neck, any bit of skin within reach.

"Not so easy," he whispered, her earlobe in his teeth. "Harder--"

She gave her fingers a sudden, obliging shove, and he shuddered and moaned out loud.

She was leaning back against the brick now, one arm flat against the top of the wall while the other wrapped around his shoulder blades. The leaves prickled her skin, rubbed the backs of her thighs as he thrust, and she slid her hand to his throat and dug in her nails. He sank his teeth into the flesh of her shoulder, shifting her buttocks beneath his hands at just the right angle to make them both gasp, and then pain leapt from her shoulders to the back of her head and she squirmed backwards, trying to evade the sudden angry spasm cramping her neck.

Oblivious, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he felt her sudden movements and redoubled his efforts. "Martha, yes, that's just--" Her shoulders stiffened, and he opened one puzzled eye. "Martha?"

Her face reddening, she let go of him. "Sorry, I'm sorry, my neck, I--ow, dammit--"

"Shh." He drew back, rubbing her neck obligingly until the crick eased and subsided. "I got you a bit pretzeled. Try again--"

He sank to his knees, pulling her down with him into a patch of lacy peacock-blue flowers; the movement kicked up a noxious cloud of pollen and he sneezed violently a half-dozen times in succession. A hand over her mouth, partly from the pollen and partly from a vain attempt to stifle her laughter, Martha grabbed his arm and dragged them both to the relative safety of the nearby grasses, dotted with the tiny, mercifully less aggressive black blooms.

"Right, then, try again." He let out a final nose-cracking sneeze, wiped his streaming eyes and gave her a sheepish glance. "Bloody Iole lilies," he muttered, "can barely breathe within ten yards of one--"

"Hang on, you knew you were allergic to those things?"

"They're nice-looking," he said, shrugging. "Thought it might add to the mood."

"So a Lady Chatterley complex on top of everything else? You really are a piece of work, Doctor." She slid from his arms. "Hang on, lie back."

"It's all right, I'm still--"

"I can see that," she said, cupping her fingers around his balls, enjoying his start and shiver when she touched the spot just behind them. "I want to."

She ran her tongue along the underside of his cock, put her lips to the head and drew him slowly into her mouth. Quite like any human's, still cold but not nearly so cold as the rest of him, and she felt what she knew was an utterly ridiculous sense of pride when he writhed at the touch, when he clutched at her hair and then remembered himself, relaxed his grasp just enough for courtesy's sake and to permit her to drag her mouth slowly back down the length of him. She lapped once more at the head, grazed it with her teeth just roughly enough to elicit a near-shout, soothed it with long, wet strokes as she worked her way back up, felt him rub the nape of her neck with slow, rhythmic fingertips as he thrust into her mouth. (Thinking of the Girl(s) in the Wardrobe, she was certain, thinking of a woman of his own kind, a woman for whom those fingers at just that spot felt far more than just pleasant but that was all right, it's just what you had to expect, fucking a widower just after the funeral--)

With a visible effort he pushed her away and they were wrestling now, each struggling to put the other on their back, and of course he was stronger and the outcome was less than suspenseful but it still let her sink teeth into his skin as he had to her, scratch at him, flail and kick and struggle in a way that grew more exciting the more futile it became. He got her arms pinned above her head and Martha quite deliberately crossed her legs tight at the knees, squeezing them shut, for the pure pleasure of seeing the hungry, gloating grin when he wrenched them apart. He was fucking her very hard now, very fast, skin slippery with a strange, acrid sweat and his hearts galloping in a way that still scared her, it was nothing to his kind but it still scared her, but his body was a wonderfully cool weight sliding against hers and his face was helpless with need and he was in perfect rhythm with her now, effortlessly matching every twist and turn of her hips. She felt a groan gathering in the back of her throat, then that mocking voice flitted through her memory--d'you think I like fucking dying cats, that's just what you sound like in bed--and she tasted shirtcloth trying to stifle the sound. Fingers twined suddenly in her hair, pulling her head back from his shoulder and gripping so she was staring straight into his eyes.

"No one can hear you," he whispered, breath coming in short bursts. "Except the flowers, they don't care, don't care, no one can hear us, no one--"

Sensation wrenched her forward and back and Martha cried out loud and then louder, shouting every hackneyed yes and please and don't stop she could muster because what else could you say when you didn't even know his name, when you didn't care who he was or what he was, when you didn't care about anything but how your clit, your cunt, your breasts and your whole skin and every part of you were nothing but feeling made flesh, when keeping both him and that feeling inside you were all that mattered anymore? He was thrashing and grunting and moaning her name and she'd wanted this since Royal Hope and he must have too, he must have imagined her this way again and again too, and then feeling seized hold of the last remnant of her and she was past thinking at all, past anything as she came, as his thrashing became relentless and frantic and then, so suddenly, ceased with a half-stifled cry of his own.

He had collapsed on top of her, panting, his cheek pressed against hers, and Martha closed her eyes and listened to the rapid mutual hitch of their breathing deepen and slow. She lifted her head and kissed his cheek, feeling what she knew was a purely physical tenderness but that didn't matter, it was quite good enough, and he smiled and kissed her with the selfsame tenderness back. Something sticky and cold was leaking onto her thigh and she thought of those old folktales about the devil, his cold semen and his (always young, female, feckless) devotees gathered on blasted heaths literally to kiss his arsehole, so disgusting, and all she could think was yes, she could do that, if he liked her fingers down there so much she could use her mouth as well, she wanted to see what that did to him, what so many things could do to him, could make him do to her…

The Doctor rolled off her body, interrupting her reverie with a startling abruptness. "What is it?" she asked, trying to keep her voice cool and indifferent. "You going somewhere or something?"

He seemed quite genuinely puzzled by the question. "Surely," he asked, as he parted her legs much more gently than before, "we're not finished just yet?"

He put his tongue to the drying trail of his own come, tasted it, then traced it to the source and started licking it away. Martha lay back quietly, too pleasantly drained for any appreciative theatrics, but nonetheless very soon heard herself crying out once more.

******

"Bit late to ask, I suppose," the Doctor murmured, "but are you taking anything?"

"Taking any--oh. Bit late to ask, yes, but I am." Martha raised herself up on one elbow. "More force of habit than any actual need, before now. I just hope it works with a non-Earthling."

"Probably does--I know I said we could impregnate humans, but it's not commonplace." He rolled onto his side, pushing away the wrinkled bundle of his coat they had been using for a pillow. "Just force of habit? Come on, you're young, you're pretty, there must be somebody. Or some recent somebody."

"Young and pretty doesn't get you much of anything, these days--though if I told Annalise that, she'd probably laugh in my face." She turned her head to a patch of pink and yellow buds, taking in deep amber-scented breaths. "So no, there wasn't anyone. Unless you count Stoker, poor bastard, which I didn't--"

"Stoker?" The Doctor's voice scaled a near-octave of disbelief. "Stoker. You're kidding, right? Gray-headed fellow with the fancy office, in love with the sound of his own voice, drained drier than a Death Valley cistern, liked salt a lot, that Stoker?"

"No, Kev Stoker, who comes round to read the gas meter--yes, that Stoker." She gazed defiantly at him. "Go on then, have a good laugh."

"Well, don't get so defensive--I've seen stranger couples, believe me. And better him than that gormless Morgenstern bloke, the one stroking his hero complex all over the telly--"

"Oliver is not gormless," she retorted. "All right, yes he is. But he means well. And Stoker--"

"He still made you call him 'Stoker?' He was a pompous git, the poor bastard."

"Wasn't he just, Doctor. Well, he loathed his first name. I don't blame him, it was a family name or something--I mean, would you want to walk around being called 'Mellersh' if you didn't have to be?"

"Mellersh?" He blinked. "Right, point taken. So how long did that last?"

She laughed. "Blink again and you've missed it--a few nights and weekends together, mutual breakup, no hard feelings, thank Christ." She traced his cheekbone with her fingertip, trailed a hand down the line of his jaw. "And he wasn't much to look at and I know it was unethical, probably, but I didn't care; he was widowed and a bit lonely, I'd just had an ugly breakup and it was nice having someone keep telling me I was beautiful. I used to worry he might be, you know, exoticizing me, but I don't think he was--"

"So one of your more admirably color-blind old lechers, then?"

She gave him a reproving look. "You're one to talk. And he wasn't kinky or anything, but he still liked being in charge in bed. That can be fun, actually, if someone knows how to do it without being an arse. Most men don't."

Hands tucked behind his head, the Doctor seemed to mull this over at some length. Martha stared down at her own body, at the bite marks on her breasts and thighs already starting to bruise.

"I had a relationship like that once," he mused, "ages ago. He was a far nastier piece of work than your Stoker, but still."

The pronoun surprised her for a moment, then she chided herself: For heaven's sake, if you were as old as all that and you hadn't ever tried it the other way… "He traveled with you?"

"Well, yes and no, but that's a long story. It was actually ages before that, back home. We were in the equivalent of your university together. Well, more the equivalent of Oxford and Harvard and Cal Tech and MIT and SAIC and the Sorbonne and Tsinghua and the Institute for Advanced Study all rolled together, minus the primitive technology and the rowing teams." He stroked her arm, her breast a bit absent-mindedly as he talked. "Anyway, we were friends. Well, we'd been friends when we were younger, not so much by then, but we were both so bloody screamingly bored with the Academy and all the sanctimonious little eejits in it that we'd do anything together for a bit of fun. Lots of getting shit-faced, being thrown out of Shobogan brothels on our arses, breaking into time capsules, full-throttle screaming matches over the Ancient Covenants, altering the gravity coordinates in old Borusa's private chambers--"

"The usual sorts of things one does, yes," she said dryly.

"Well, I also played an arseload of chess, much more fun than those interminable classes on discontinuity physics. Real chess, I mean, not your silly one-dimensional version. Anyway, my one advantage was that at the end of the day he was a superb student and I wasn't, and he actually cared about honors and commendations and head-pats from the Cardinals and I didn't, so it was good fun to meddle with his assignments and experiments just to watch him twitch. Then he started meddling with mine, which was a bit unfair considering I was just barely scraping by as it was, and the whole thing devolved into…" He trailed off, slipping an arm around her and pulling her back toward him. "Do you really want to hear this?"

"Why wouldn't I? I'm curious." She settled her chin against his chest. "If you want to tell it. So you're saying you two became, well, lovers?"

"That's a bit of a rankly sentimental word for what we were."

"How did it start?"

To her surprise, he actually turned faintly pink. "It's a long story involving a Shobogan whore and an electrified perigosto stick and the moral is, never ever challenge a hollow-legged man to a drinking contest when you don't know what the prize is. Anyway, er." The Doctor raised his brows in reminisce. "He did things…to me, an escalating series of things, and I went along with them. I really, honestly don't know why, but I did. You ever have a friend like that when you were small, someone who would bully you incessantly and you'd just accept it without question? Though you could have stopped it, easily?"

Martha opened her mouth to deny this, then remembered Kavita Singh, whose idea of eternal childhood friendship had involved spinning her round and round until she got dizzy and sick and pinching her until she cried. "Actually, yes," she said. "But not after I was eight years old--this is much more interesting. And so what happened?"

"What happened?" He chortled. "One day I went a time-analogue bridge too far, that's what happened."

"I don't follow."

"Well…I lost a bet. Rather, I should say I lost a bet with myself that I'd never get caught red-handed altering the artron flow on one of his dimensional engineering projects." He shook his head in apparent disgust at his own carelessness. "Took me nine and a half hours to get it right, would have looked flawless and perfect and then fallen apart like a card-house when he tried to demonstrate it to the examiners--" He was almost snorting with laughter at the thought. "Years of work, I mean actual years of work, and he would've had to start all over again from the beginning, it could have been legendary. But of course, he had to get suspicious and come back to his rooms unexpectedly early, while I was putting on the finishing touches. Ruined the whole bloody thing for me."

"Years of work destroyed by a single schoolboy prank--okay, hang on, which of you is supposed to have my sympathies here?"

"Just trust me, Martha, if you'd known him you wouldn't be asking that question." The Doctor started fondling her breasts, running an idle hand along her backside as he talked. "Caught red-handed and I'd never seen him so angry--that Earth expression about someone being so angry they're spitting? Actual saliva, turkey-red face, thought that was quite a good joke itself, actually." His hand became less idle, kneading the skin enthusiastically. "You really have a lovely bottom, do you know that? Even through that baggy white hospital coat, I could see--"

"Sorry, but it's too late to distract me now."

"I'm serious." He tap-tapped his fingers along the curve of one buttock with a little smile, resting them right where the swell of flesh began. "Build a little encampment right there and just live in it for a while, that'd be very pleasant. Anyway, spitting angry. Even though he'd ruined my joke I still couldn't stop laughing at the sight of his face, and of course that was exactly the wrong thing to do--"

"Let me guess," Martha said, drawing her nails lightly down his back. "He blackmailed you."

"You might interpret it that way, yes." He arched his back beneath her touch, and she obligingly sank her fingers in deeper. "When he'd regained coherence, he just smiled at me--never a good sign--and started explaining how it was a blessing in disguise to have found me there. Apparently he required an experimental subject for one of his more obscure projects, and I could either offer the necessary assistance or I could try and explain myself to the Cardinals right then and there. Now keep in mind I got expelled from the place anyway--don't remember when, or what I did, but it wasn't this--and it wasn't exactly a moment of dire trauma, so I might just as well have told him to consign himself to the Bottomless Past and stalked out of the room." He shrugged. "But I didn't."

"Did you ever? Had you ever before?"

"Did I what?" he asked.

"Tell him to go to hell, or the boundless past, or wherever. When he got an idea in his head, of that sort."

The Doctor leaned forward, kissing her breasts, and rested his head on them with a thoughtful expression. "Don't remember that I ever did, no," he replied. "Like I said, I couldn't tell you why not."

Martha shifted beneath him, until they were again face to face. "An experiment, then," she whispered. "Of what sort?"

"A variation on a theme, really. Of all the things he'd been doing to me before."

The Doctor eased himself more comfortably on top of her, resting his lips at the ridge just above her earlobe. His voice vibrated softly against her ear, making a small tickle run down the side of her jaw and neck.

"He didn't bother locking the door, I remember that. He had me take all my clothes off and then kneel in a corner of the room, hands behind my head, wrists crossed. He actually moved my arms around like a doll's until he got them how he wanted them. Then he tied them that way, with these thin straps." He slid his hands down, cupping her bottom. "Put a gag in my mouth, then."

"What sort?"

He lifted his head, giving her a scornful look. "What do you mean, what sort? The kind where you can't talk, that's the general idea of--"

"I know that. I mean, you know, was it a handkerchief, or the sort that looks like a horse bit, or…"

The Doctor stared down at her for a moment, an odd little glint in his eyes, and shook his head reprovingly. "Really, Ms. Jones," he declared. "And you accuse these poor, downtrodden flowers of being perverted."

"Who's perverted?" she replied calmly, reaching for his cock. "I just like to have a nice clear picture in my head."

"Purely in the interests of accuracy."

"Of course."

He placed a hand between her legs, stroking as she stroked. "A large one. Buckled in the back. A thing around the chin so you couldn't work it out with your tongue. Big stiff padded bit inside the mouth, very conducive to jaw cramp and cottonmouth."

"Blindfold?"

"At first. A heavy one, no light coming through at all. I could hear him moving things about the room, something that creaked; I don't know how long it took him but it felt like a good hour. My arms were already killing me after ten minutes. Then he pulled me up by the elbow, marched me across the room and tied my arms to something--obviously I couldn't see what, at that point--so I wasn't quite standing and wasn't quite kneeling. All my weight on the calves. Supremely uncomfortable." He trailed his tongue along the curve of her ear. "Then he took the blindfold off. He always did it that way. He liked seeing the expression on your face when you saw what he had planned for you."

Martha ran the fingers of her free hand along his throat, lightly as she could. "What did he have planned? Was it a whip or something, or--"

The Doctor let out a short, rueful bark of laughter. "That would have been bearable, at least."

He shook his head again, expression caught somewhere between arousal and defiance. "He was a bit scarily obsessed with organic experiments--cells, tissues, species biology. I won't ruin the mood by telling you what that led to, but no matter. There I was, starkers, gagged and tied to some sort of wooden rack, and he'd laid out this whole panoply of instruments next to me, they looked like endless variations on the sonic screwdriver--actually they looked like a whole demented sonic toolbox."

The Doctor tilted his chin up in pleasure as she ran her fingers beneath it, down the Adam's apple. "He picked one of them up--and he actually did have a memorandum-book there to chart this all in, because it was an actual experiment, that's the really mad part--he picked one of the little instruments up, and it was very shiny metal and it looked quite like a very sharp scalpel. Certainly enjoyed the reaction that got him. He leaned right into my face. 'Don't worry,' he said, in this wretched, nasty little sing-song voice, like a hyena trying to soothe an infant. 'No blood. Not yet.' "

He thrust against the palm she had cradled at his groin. "Then he took the flat part of what looked like the blade, and he pressed it to my foot."

"What did it feel like?"

For an answer he removed her hand from his cock, took hold of the thin webbing between her thumb and index finger and pinched: rather as hard as Kavita used to, then harder still, until his nail left a crescent like tooth marks and she winced aloud. He didn't let go.

"Imagine that," he said, still pressing down, "hard enough to feel like it's drawing blood, like all the layers of skin are flattening under an iron weight, under a boulder, under some horrible crushing planetary gravity." He released her hand. "And at the same time, the very same time, this stretching feeling in the skin, a tearing burning feeling like it's being stretched to its limit and might actually rip apart--and then, though I know some of this will be purely theoretical for you, imagine that feeling all up your legs, down your chest, in your throat, your arse, your cock, your balls. Everywhere."

Martha shuddered, envisioning the poor rugby player with the ruptured testicle from her first clinical rotation. "It sounds horrible, actually," she said, feeling indignation attempting to battle with excitement. "It sounds sick."

"Well, it was." He eased his fingers inside her. "It was. And it wasn't."

He moved his hand carefully, patiently, finding all the right places. Stretching her. In her mind she imagined him naked, tied with his arms above his head and unable to equivocate, prevaricate, answer back, and indignation faded away in defeat.

"It was everywhere, that feeling?" she asked, eyes half-closed. "All at once?"

"Oh, no, not at first--first the foot, of course, which was quite unpleasant but bearable. That didn't last long. Then the back of the knee, that thin skin there. Then the rib cage. The underside of the arm, far more wicked spot than it's given credit for, you know. Very slow, very methodical. Very scientific. I was shaking a bit, I mean, it did bloody hurt, but I was feeling quite pleased with my own endurance even though he'd skipped all the really sensitive spots." He eased his hand in farther. "He must have seen it in my eyes, because he just smiled and said, 'Now, let's try it on setting number two.' "

Just a bit farther, his hand went. She wriggled against him, inordinately pleased at the quickening rasp of his breath. "And then…"

"And then it doubled, and double didn't feel twice as bad, it felt exponentially worse. Small of the back, now. Up the spine. He got to the back of the neck and after two seconds of that, I was rattling the rack trying to pull myself off it."

"What did he do?"

"What would any self-respecting sadist do? He laughed. A lot. And took more notes." The Doctor pulled his hand away, feeding his fingers to her; she tasted stickiness and salt, obediently mouthing each one tightly between her lips. "Oh, that's nice, Martha, you're so very good at that…and then he pressed the thing on my balls, on my cock. White light behind my eyelids, that hurt so much, and I lost my temper and tried to shout things at him and he thought that was magnificently hilarious--'What was that, then? "Fuggh yeee, lemm dow"? Can't understand a word with that thing in your mouth'--and he grabbed my hair, yanked my head back. 'We're just getting started,' he whispered. 'We've got hours to go, so learn to like it.' "

She was breathing hard at his words and felt ashamed of it, in some cordoned-off decent corner of her mind, but the rest of her was twining legs and arms around him, drawing him back against her body. "And did you like it?" she asked. "Some part of you?"

"I hated it so much, I couldn't stand it, I couldn't endure it, I would have done anything, said anything just to make it stop--and I'd never been so hard in my life and there wasn't any way to hide it, that was the worst part of all. He was laughing, just tears of glee. Then he stopped, and it should have been a relief but I knew what was coming, I was trying to pull that bloody rack down around my ears because I knew what was coming and he said, 'Setting three.' No preliminaries, right to the balls, and I started screaming. Begging. Of course he didn't stop until I was snot-nosed sobbing, and I was still hard for it and that made me cry even more--"

"Please fuck me," she whispered.

He thrust inside her, his eyes tenebrous with lust.

"I think he was afraid I'd choke if he didn't stop--not that he cared, other than losing his subject data--so he undid the gag and let me breathe. God, it was like--like this air, after a coal smokestack. He grabbed my hair again and said, 'Didn't you forget something, didn't you--' and I panicked and kept saying thank you, thank you, bloody babbling fool. Then he shoved the gag back in and started beating my arse."

"With--"

"Don't know with what, it made this thudding sound when it landed and it stung like hell. Full arm swing, no pausing for breath and I could feel the bruises coming right then and there, but it was such a relief after what he'd been doing I could've cried all over again. Every muscle was spasming because I couldn't lower my arms, I couldn't straighten my legs. Then, when he decided I'd been cosseted enough, he started again. New instrument--God, Martha, move your hips like that again--from the toolbox, setting one, starting at the foot."

"Same feeling?" she moaned, gripping his arse hard, urging him on. "The same?"

"I couldn't keep track anymore, I was just this…thing, this thing that he used, and everything was a blur, it was…squeeze a bit harder, that's good…it was every horrible uncomfortable painful sensation, itching, tickling, scratching, burning, something that felt like a fist and didn't leave any marks, and I was crying, I was laughing, I'd been turned inside out and then it was suddenly gone." They were so close now, the warning tremors seizing her limbs, his body gone rigid trying to hold back. "It was gone, it was gone, and he was taking his last memoranda, closing up the toolbox, and I thought, he'll leave me here, just leave me hanging here and I couldn't even lift up my head--"

"And then what?"

"He undid the straps around my arms and I fell, straight to the floor, my legs couldn't hold me. Everything was--yes, right there--every nerve and muscle was jelly and just to lower my arms, just that, it was heaven, and then, then he…do that again, Martha, do it again--"

"And then--"

"That's so good, it's so good--"

"Then, Doctor, please what then--"

"--and then he slammed me face-first to the floor and beat my arse again and fucked me so hard and so long that I--"

"Don't stop, don't stop--"

A buzz of excitement drifted from flower to flower as the two entwined, frenetic figures rolled and flailed against the grass, blossoms crushed and stems torn and bleeding, and then one let out a long keening sound and the other a quieter, almost desperate groan. They pushed against each other and the grasses for another long moment, as if trying to pin down something already slipping away, and then their movements slowed and ceased and the plants, well pleased with the novelty and excitement of this particular endless night, turned their attention back to the call of the Lotis bugs and the rustle of the wind.

"The memorandum-book," Martha whispered, between fervent kisses. "What did he--"

"Don't know. I never knew." He let out a long sated sigh. "I couldn't look him in the eye for months."

His head remained cradled on her shoulder, his hair damp with sweat and his breath turning slow and even against her ear. Moving carefully so as not to wake him, Martha brushed his temple with one last kiss and drifted off into a longer, deeper sleep.

******

"What are those bushes out there?" she asked, pointing. "The ones with the purple leaves."

"What's that?" He was buttoning his shirt one-handed, retrieving his coat from the grass with the other hand and shaking it free of grass and twigs. "Could be some sort of Earth hybrid, I suppose, looks a bit like a rhododendron. I don't really know what it's called."

Martha gave him a sidelong glance. He looked distant and tense, as he had since she'd woken up, since they'd started gathering their clothes and reluctantly--in her case, at least--preparing to depart. Perhaps he was just embarrassed about that last round of true confessions, she mused as she pulled her jacket on, so probably not the time to tell him that thinking about it was still making her wet. She'd certainly never done anything like he'd described, not with anyone; she didn't dare ask if he'd ever like to do it again. Maybe, she thought, if she were very lucky, he'd start hinting at it himself.

"They look like great rose petals," she marveled as she stared at the bushes, her fingers itching to touch the velvety-looking, deep burgundy leaves. She lifted her hair away from the jacket collar, pinning back the strands as best she could without a mirror. "Right down to the thorns. I can't think what sort of Earth plant has the thorns in clumps like that, like fists--"

"I'm not a botany textbook, Martha. I just told you I didn't know."

The impatience in his voice made her turn around. "Right, then," she said, echoing his tone. "Takes a lot of concentration to do up your trousers, I'm sorry I distracted you."

He had that expression on his face, the one like you were the bloodhound and he the poor cowering fox--Christ, if men really were universally terrified of looking a woman in the eye after a shag, it was time to ring up Laura from university and tell her she'd been right about compulsory heterosexuality all along. "Doctor," she asked, already feeling the sinking sense of deja-vu, "you've been acting strange ever since I woke up. Is something the matter?"

"Of course not. Why would there be?" He kept shaking the coat, seemingly mesmerized by the heft of the fabric. "I mean, absolutely nothing, absurd question, why would anything be the matter after--" He stopped fiddling with his shirt cuffs long enough to give her a defiant glance. "Look, you'll probably give me a slap for saying this, and I might deserve it, but what happened doesn't signify…what you might think it does. It doesn't signify that at all. All right?"

Martha considered this. "Other than our finally admitting we fancy each other," she asked, "exactly what would it signify?"

"I'm serious, Martha. I don't want you getting any strange ideas." He gripped her arm, gazing urgently into her face. "I'm not your alien boyfriend you can bring round the house for tea and a sitdown with Mummy and Daddy, all right? This isn't going to last forever, I'm not settling down with anyone, ever, for any reason, and I haven't just found my sweet mystery of life so if any of that's what you're thinking, you need to get it out of your head right now."

She pressed fingers against her forehead, fighting an incipient headache which she decided to blame on the perfumed air. "Yes, Doctor, it certainly is a great relief that you broke that news to me. Because if you hadn't, I'd still be waiting breathlessly for you to whip a conflict-free diamond ring from your pocket and then we'd get a mortgage on a semi-detached out by the Horsehead Nebula and start making loads of sterile manic-depressive immortal ginger babies--I mean, just how daft do you think I am, anyway?"

She waited for him to laugh, relieved shameless laughter, and provide her with her cue to lament the sameness of men everywhere you went. Instead, he flinched.

"We should leave," he said, his face closed.

"So what did I say now--"

"We should leave."

"Tell me what I said."

He'd already broken away and was marching back to the TARDIS with rapid, purposeful steps; when he realized no one was following him he whipped round with an angry glare. "Well? Let's go!"

"Time for Martha to go walkies, is it?" She stood, arms folded, and glared back. "You said you didn't want me getting ideas, and I told you, honestly, that that's the last thing on my mind, and somehow that upsets you so please have the courtesy to tell me why."

"This trick isn't going to work twice," he said, shaking his head.

"It's not a trick. I think it's a completely reasonable demand--"

"Look, Martha, what happened just now, that was…lovely, enchanting, it really was, but it's meaningless. Do you understand me?" He picked flattened petals from the fabric of his coat, rubbing them to nothing between agitated fingers. "Meaningless. It means nothing because it has to mean nothing. We just…forgot ourselves, and I need you to forget that we did because that really is for the best." He shook out one trainer, the red cloth stained nearly orange with pollen. "So please, let's just leave. Now."

Martha considered this at some length, feeling something tight and hot start to rise in her chest. "Lovely. Enchanting," she repeated in disbelief. "So help me out, Mr. Smith, did we just shag each other silly or did you just come back from a ceramics exhibit at the V&A? I mean, it was an entire hour ago so I can understand why your memory's slipping, but I--"

"Martha, I'm telling you this for your own good, it was a mistake--a wonderful mistake, I admit it, but I can't have you getting ideas. All those things you lot put all your hope in, pour all your energies, to my kind they're just distractions and trivialities. And that's just how it is." He pivoted on his heel. "Now, I really think we should go--"

"So what am I supposed to do now? Apologize for distracting you from your endless wallow in self-pity?"

He froze in his tracks, turning very slowly. "What did you just say?"

That look was back again, sitting coiled behind his eyes and ready to spring. Seeing it inspired a perverse sense of pleasure. "You heard me."

Wrath stared her straight in the face, the black void spreading and widening all around her. She stood her ground, fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms.

"Self-pity," he repeated, with a sort of wonderment. "Self-pity--let me explain this all over again. Everything," he said very quietly, each syllable a hard sharp stone, "is gone. Everything is gone. Everything I ever had, everyone I knew--wiped from the face of history. Gone, and there's no zipping backward to retrieve or relive or rescue any of it, ever. Do you have any idea what that means? In case you don't, because I'm starting to have my doubts, let me also explain that whatever Mills & Boon may have taught you one good fuck or two isn't going to repair--"

"I know there's something you haven't told me," she said, letting the suspicions that had flitted quietly, almost apologetically through her mind since New New York crawl into the light. "Probably quite a lot of things--and fine, they're not for me to know, but Doctor, I know they're there. This war you talked about, these terrible things that happened, none of it was in a vacuum and none of it happened all by itself. Did it?"

"What are you accusing me of?" he asked, not raising his voice. The void had swallowed the flowers, the trees, the bushes whose name she would never know.

"I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm well aware you don't owe me the truth, I'm just letting you know I'm not a fool. You fought in a war. You were a soldier in a war--"

"I never said--"

"You fought in a war, you said you were on the front lines of a war, and it involved all sorts of planets and species and galaxies and somehow, you're the only one left? Not your people are the last ones standing, not even a handful of them, just you." Martha felt her hands shaking, curled them into fists. "These machines your people all had to travel literally anywhere in existence, you even said the TARDIS is old and rickety and outmoded by their standards, and somehow no one else gets away but you? Nobody?"

His expression hadn't changed, but she saw a muscle in his jaw start to twitch. "So, Ms. Jones," he mused, "in your complete pig-ignorance of what actually happened, you seem to be accusing me of being either a mass murderer or a pathological liar. Do have the decency sometime of letting me know which it is--"

"How would I know if you're a liar or not?" Martha shouted. "You talk around every question, you make everything into a lunatic story, you give me poetry about silver trees and talk yourself blue about vampire cults and electric sheep and you know perfectly well that you're not saying a bloody thing."

She took a deep breath, trying to collect herself. "I do know this, war's ugly, war's horribly ugly, and people do all sorts of things, wonderful heroic things, terrifying monstrous things, that they never thought they could, don't they? Canary Wharf, after my cousin died, I was having all sorts of monstrous thoughts myself, thank God no chance to act on them, and we never even got on all that well." She pulled fretfully at a loose thread on her jacket, watching it snarl. "So I haven't got any idea of what you did, or didn't do, or what would have happened if you hadn't made whatever choices you made--I don't know if you're a killer, an escaped prisoner, an exile, a hero, a dissenter, a torturer, a spy, a 'good German,' maybe all or none. I don't know anything about it, you're right. And knowing what I don't know, I won't think you're evil and I won't assume you're good. I'm sorry for what happened to your people, I'm horribly sorry, but I can't just assume that you, personally, deserve my unvarnished pity."

He thought this over for a long time, staring fixedly down at his feet, then shook his head in apparent disgust. "You don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about," he told her. "Pathetic ignorance. But why am I surprised? I always expect too bloody much out of humans, it's my natal curse." He resumed his tracks to the TARDIS. "Now let's please go, before I really say something I'll--"

"It's not all about you, you know. No matter what happened."

He stopped in his tracks, but this time didn't bother turning around. Fine then, Martha thought, let his bloody exquisitely sensitive back take the brunt of it. "Look," she said, "whatever happened, whatever choices you had to make, I know it was unimaginably horrific, I mean literally unimaginable--I can't even start to think how you must feel and I wouldn't try. But--"

She sighed, quite admiring her own ability to dig herself in miles deep without even a sandbox shovel. "A man I took care of once, Doctor, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, wife, children, his neighbors, his friends--everyone. Everything. His entire neighborhood was destroyed, his house and his money were confiscated, his livelihood, his citizenship, everything you could take away from him he lost. And no one else survived but him."

She shivered at the memory of that tiny wizened figure curled in the exact center of the bed, the hollow black chasm of his eyes. "And it gets worse. When I saw him he had Alzheimer's disease and was regressing backwards in time, waking up every morning thinking he was back in Treblinka, hiding food under his pillow, screaming for hours on end--Doctor, you keep insisting the Face of Boe was wrong, but he wasn't. You're not alone, the really horrible thing is that you're not alone in losing everything that matters to you. You're just one of thousands of thousands of millions, God knows how many out there in the whole bloody universe, and I'm sorry if you think that's harsh but it's the truth. You've lost so much. And you've been given so much. And you've probably taken so much from someone else, maybe without any choice in the matter, because that's what war means. I'm saying…" She swallowed, took a deep breath against her own pounding heartbeat. "I'm saying, in all those ways, you're not alone. And you never were, and never will be. So there's no point in setting yourself up as--I don't know, some sort of all-seeing, all-suffering lonely god. Because whatever you are is pretty far beyond me, but I'm sorry, it's not so far as that."

He was silent for a moment, seemingly considering her words. Then he turned around and smiled, a cold, derisive upturn of the lips.

"You know," he said thoughtfully, "it's so…adorable, sometimes, the way humans think their tiny little flyspeck lives give them the slightest real insight into death or pain."

"Besides every single one of us actually experiencing those things, you mean, with no way to escape them?" Martha demanded, a tremor in her voice. "Besides that little detail? And having enough decency not to mock someone else's suffering because our own is so peerless and precious and far beyond what those sorry little peons must think they feel--"

"You with all your great overarching wisdom and experience, your pathetic, useless little eye-blink of a life span--don't you dare presume to lecture me about war and pain and hard choices," the Doctor snarled, his face a contorted mask of fury. "Don't you dare. If you'd been there for any of it, if you'd even just been at Canary Wharf--"

"I lost someone I loved that day, you supercilious bastard, we all lost people that day--"

"--and whatever that man suffered, your standing over his bedside and tut-tutting from on high, running on your tea break to tell your gibbering little friends what a special precious lesson it's taught you about life, that doesn't give you the least idea of what losing everything, everything, really means."

"He says not knowing a damned thing about my life, not knowing anything I've ever been through, because he's been too busy boring me senseless with an endless stream of self-aggrandizing shit disguised as mutual conversation--"

"I saw enough of your life to get a good idea--you've had a nice, gentle ride, Martha Jones, and don't pretend otherwise." He had his hands thrust in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched with tension and voice careening towards a sneer. "A nice soft easy ride, with all kinds of creatures human and otherwise giving everything they had so you could prance from your bed-sit to the hospital and back again thinking the whole universe was peaches and honey, utterly oblivious, nothing to think about but surgical rotations and bad television and darling brother's precious party--" He shook his head dismissively. "At least Rose understood life isn't perfect, you lose people, you have to fight for things, you don't just stretch out a hand and get anything you want--"

"And here we go again!" Martha kicked viciously at the ground, dislodging a stone amid a shower of pink petals. "Yes, perfect untouchable marvelous adoring Rose, who believed everything you told her and never dared ask any questions that might make you look bad, did she? It's just fucking unforgivable of me that I don't want a pretty story, I want you to be you! Nasty, shameful, lovely, cowardly, noble, kind, angry, brave, brilliant, stupid, frightening--all of it. Do you understand?" She started pacing back and forth, ready to cry with frustration. "That's why I went with you, it wasn't to get away from my family, it's because you were you and I just--"

Bloody hell, why was she even bothering? "Right, I give up, I really do. Just go on and tell me what a rotten little bitch I am and how wonderful flawless Rose would never, ever have behaved so ungratefully if you'd condescended once or twice to climb off your high horse and fuck her, and then just leave me here to rot."

"Don't tempt me," he said, between clenched teeth. "I wouldn't lose any rest over it--there's clean water, ninety percent of these flowers are edible and if you're very lucky you might get a Time Agent or two buzzing round the place in a few decades' time. And besides, it's really not a concern because whatever happens you won't be here forever, all alone, all by yourself, for a whole eternity of waiting now will you?" He straightened his tie with angry, jerking movements. "So if that doesn't sound like paradise to you, you'd better follow me back to the TARDIS right bloody now because I'm leaving."

"At least there'll be some peace and quiet!" she shouted at his retreating back. "At least Stoker was able to shut his sodding mouth for thirty fucking seconds at a time!"

He vanished into a copse of false jasmine without looking back. Tears streaming down her face, Martha stalked past the brick wall and vine-choked pay phone, sat down next to the purple bushes--whatever they were called, she didn't care anymore--and indulged in the fleeting relief of a good hard cry. Very fleeting, as the second she'd blown her nose and furiously mopped away the last traces of salt water the gravity of her situation started to sink in. Now I've really done it, she thought, her stomach knotting up. God. They'll think I've been raped and murdered, or that I just ran off and left them--so was it good for you, Martha Jones? It'd better have been fucking mind-blowing, because it looks like that's it for the rest of your life...

If there really were water here, she'd better set about finding it quickly. That other ten percent of the flowers, were they just plain inedible or was it oleander and nightshade time if she ate a fateful stray berry? Nothing to read, either, not even Clinical bloody Haematology, wasn't there a Twilight Zone episode like that, some poor bugger stranded on some planet whose only pair of specs broke…arms wrapped tightly around herself against a rising sense of panic, she waited for the sound of the dematerializing TARDIS. Other than the buzz of insects and the murmur of flowers, silence.

So, happy now, Professor Martha Know-All? Next time, why not just pop down to the veterans' clinic, find some shellshocked soldiers and set off a few fireworks right behind them? Doesn't that sound like fun, too?

No TARDIS sounds. She waited, forcing herself to sit still, and when she could no longer stand the feeling of impending doom set out toward the insect-laden trees. The TARDIS sat where it had landed in a clearing of bone-white grasses; he was sitting in the doorway in his wrinkled coat, elbows on his knees, looking up at the Lotis bugs hopping from blossom to blossom. When he heard her footsteps he turned his head, gazing impassively back at her.

"I was about to go look for you," he said, his voice steady and neutral.

"I didn't get very far," she replied, in the same fashion. "I thought I should start searching for a pond or a river."

"So you really thought I'd leave you here?"

Martha laughed; she couldn't help it. "What was that line about the fly and the wanton boy? Yes, I damned well thought you might. Your eyes, when you're angry? They're a bottomless pit."

"She wouldn't allow it anyway," he said, patting the TARDIS's flank. "I told you, safe as houses."

"Yes, well, Jiminy Cricket didn't always carry the day either."

"I thought you might not come back," he said, studying his pollen-smeared shoes. "Other than the imminent terror of forcibly spending decades on the Maker's Diet, why did you?"

"Because right now you look just like a little boy who had nobody show up at his birthday party, that's why." She ventured a bit closer, steps slow and cautious. "And you probably know exactly how to put that look on when you might lose an argument, but it still works."

He tilted his head, scrutinizing her face; his eyes were shadowy with exhaustion. "Have you been crying?" he asked.

"Probably allergies," she assured him. "Those Iole lilies. As I don't know the first thing about suffering or bad feelings, it couldn't possibly be anything else."

Something that might have been guilt flitted across his face, and he shifted to make room for her in the doorway. They sat in silence for several moments, shoulder to shoulder.

"Look," she said, "you've got to decide which one panics you less, the idea that I'm in love with you or the idea that I'm not in love with you. Then we can just take it from there."

He didn't answer. She braced her feet more comfortably against a clump of the white grasses, enjoying their faintly peppery smell, and when he slipped a tentative arm around her shoulders she didn't shake it off.

"I'm sorry if I put my foot in it," she continued. "I realize one death camp on one planet can't start to compare with what you've seen, but it's all I've got in the way of--"

"One death camp is quite enough horror for the universe," he said softly. "I should never have dismissed it."

"No," she agreed, "you shouldn't have. He was a nice man, when he was lucid."

He toyed with the edge of his coat, sighing. "I used to have compassion, I swear," he said. "I used to have so much of it. Or maybe I only imagined I did."

"I never said you didn't have compassion," she replied. "Or thought it."

"And I never said--"

"So which is it, then?" she blurted out, and to her horror felt her eyes starting to leak. "Am I someone who 'understands things'? Or am I just some posh bitch with a flyspeck life who--"

"Martha, I--oh, Christ, don't cry. I'm sorry."

"You say that like breathing, don't you?"

"I mean it. I'm a bastard, I really am, but you probably figured that out already. Stop crying."

Martha nodded, wiping her eyes on the crisp handkerchief he'd pulled from his pocket, and gathered herself with a deep breath. Then she pulled very slightly back, raised a hand and slapped him hard with her fingertips.

"Hey! What the hell was that for?" He rubbed his cheek indignantly, then started laughing. "That was a stupid question, wasn't it?"

"Just a bit," she agreed, patting his arm. "Besides, you can't pretend anymore that you don't like it."

"I'm quite fond of these teeth, thank you, please don't start dislodging them now." He gave her a sidelong look. "As are you, I seem to recall--"

"I was just being polite," she assured him.

"In that case," he said as he took her face in his hands, "manners maketh man very, very happy."

As he kissed her she stroked his hair, forking her fingers through it so it stood wildly on end--she was becoming rather fond of it that way--and smoothing it back into place. Even this bit of playfulness felt tentative, carefully judged and calibrated; not another question, she vowed, nothing about home planets or wars or absent friends or who'd worn that West Ham United jersey or whether he liked his toast with or without marmalade, not a one. Ever. The kiss became deeper, warmer, and when they pulled away from each other he drew her back, cradling her head against his shoulder.

"Lonely god," he said thoughtfully. "Catchy little catchphrase, that. Did I ever call myself that? To you, I mean?"

Martha shook her head. "It just came out. Sorry."

He was silent for so long that she lifted her head again. He'd picked up a fallen tree branch, still heavy with flowers; as he methodically stripped away the petals, the heavy, redolent smell of the sap snaked slowly through the air.

"I spent some time, the last year or two, thinking I was a god," he noted. "I mean that in the most base, superstitious, entrail-reading fatted-calf-slaughtering sense of the word--give me your blind, your seven-deviled, your nasty scabrous lepers oozing ichor from every nostril. Good bit of fun for everyone, really, provided you were part of the inner circle of the elect and not, you know, the other ninety-nine percent. Then for a bit I thought I must be the God, the one and only whatever your conception of the sky-magician happens to be--I'm not sure what decided the issue." He tossed a handful of petals onto the grass. "It must've been the suit. I mean, what's the point of being an all-high oop-a-doop-whango Supreme Potentate if you don't also get bespoke tailoring in the bargain? That must have been it. A lot of that time, right after the war ended, it's something of a blur."

Martha pulled a stray petal or two from the branch. "It would be," she agreed.

"She said, treading cautiously as a kitten in a roomful of sheet metal presses."

"Just taking your word for it," she said, watching the petals flutter onto her shoes. "I may have reached my dead limit of investigative nosiness, you'd be amazed--"

"Don't go knocking investigative nosiness. One of my best friends still makes an excellent living at it."

He raised his arm to toss the branch aside, then seemed to think better of it and laid it carefully against the grass.

"You really do understand things, Martha," he finally said. "A great many things. A disturbing number of things. But what you don't understand yet, or don't want to, is that people have got very, very hurt thinking they were going to be with me forever. They've got very hurt thinking they could rely on me to bring the tea on time, much less…" He laughed mirthlessly, nudging the tree branch with his toe. "I get tired of people, they leave, not always willingly, and all I feel is relief. When I do want them to stay with me…sometimes, I haven't been kind or honest about assuring they have nowhere else to go, no one else but me. This was before it was just me. Before any excuse. I tore a friend of mine away from men she loved, twice, because I was so angry she wanted to leave me. We were devoted to each other, like I hadn't been to anyone in ages, and I did this. I let a woman who loved me get taken away from me forever. I left a woman I could have loved waiting for me until she died. A woman I did love, I…"

His voice faltered and he fell silent, rubbing his forehead.

"I rescue people, then I ruin them. I've abandoned damaged, mutilated, irrevocably altered people to their fates because I was angry with them, or because I actually thought I was doing them a favor--I'm not sure which excuse is worse. I've had loyal, kind, generous friends who thought the world of me, who might have willingly given their lives for me, and I've quite forgot they even existed for decades at a time. Oh, and I did mention being a genocidaire three times over? No, wait, technically speaking it was four times at least. That I remember. I'm starting not to remember things, or people, or whole years at a time, and it's far too early in this regeneration for that to start happening and I'm scared." He picked the branch up again, slowly stripping off the bark. "Well, a bit more than scared, actually, but it'll pass. Everything does, your friends, your family, your home, life, the universe, everything..." He glanced at her. "You said as much, didn't you? Back there."

Martha brushed her palms against her jeans. The quiet, steady flow of his words kept unfolding in her head, the thread from an unraveling sweater, the endlessly rotating tape recording of a confession on some old cop show. "I wasn't trying to trivialize it," she said, "anything but. I didn't mean--"

" 'Genocidaire.' That's rather jaunty sounding, now isn't it? All I need to complete the picture is a nice ascot, maybe a fedora tilted rakishly over one eye--"

"Doctor."

"My people were always dead set against interfering in outside events," he said, tapping the branch against the dirt as though pounding a gavel. "Absolutely not done, ever, ill-bred vulgar idea at best, let the simple folk suffer and die like the houseflies they are--I knew better, though. I was going to go trundling through the universe and windmill-tilt myself into a self-righteous lather, putting everything going even the slightest bit pear-shaped everywhere I went perfectly permanently right. You can see how well that idea turned out, can't you?"

"I can, actually," she pointed out, gently taking the branch from his hand. "I seem to recall your saving the old Earth--thank you, by the way, I'm very fond of it--and a great many people on the new one, and from what I gather that sort of thing seems to have happened again and again and again, in more galaxies than I'll ever know the names of. And if you hadn't come down with an acute case of lurgy from all that hard work and ended up flat on your back in hospital, a thousand-some of us would have died by suffocation."

"Your friend Stoker, though--"

"That I tend to blame on that Plasmavore and her nasty little straw, I'm just funny that way. Are you saying someone else's terrible bad luck is all your fault, too? I thought you said you'd got over thinking you were a god."

He shook his head dismissively. "Sparing a victim, or a handful of victims, every now and then and calling it magnanimity. And that's how I live with myself. Blon Slitheen was right."

"Who?"

He shook his head again. Another Time Lord, she surmised; family, perhaps.

"And if you hadn't done what you did in that war," she said, trying to dance carefully past any potential land mines, "whatever it was that you did, then maybe Earth, or whole galaxies, would have been wiped out entirely. Or I or someone else would have been made a slave, or left starving on a wasteland of a planet, or been tortured and killed without ever knowing why. You were right. I don't know anything about it, I was spared all of that by creatures I never heard of fighting battles I never knew about. Making choices I couldn't imagine. So don't we have to start listing all of that, too, if you're planning on condemning yourself? I only read law for about five minutes, but I seem to recall that if there's no presentation from the defense, it's not a proper trial."

Her voice had the same measured, artificial sort of calm she'd learned to use with agitated patients; she was certain he sensed it, also certain he hadn't heard an actual word she'd said. She started breaking the branch into fragrant twigs, putting one in her pocket for a souvenir.

"So didn't you say once that you'd met Marco Polo?" she asked. "Tell me about it. I've always wanted to visit China."

"I did tell you about it," he said. "Didn't I?"

"You might have done--all I remember is something about your losing the TARDIS in a chess game and then I fell asleep." She drew closer. "Or maybe it was backgammon. Tell me again?"

He wasn't fooled, his expression told her as much, but he appeared grateful for the distraction nonetheless. "Well, the TARDIS had a bit of a systems cock-up right in the middle of the Mongolian steppes, and we were promptly waylaid by some petty warlord who, of course, took us for evil spirits. One does get a bit tired of that misapprehension after the eight hundred thousandth repetition, but anyway, Signor Polo shows up right in the nick and makes a great fuss out of saving our bacon."

"This was when you were with Owen and Barbara?"

"Ian, Ian and Barbara. I do miss those two sometimes, though you'd think they'd have had the courtesy to invite me to their wedding--the young people these days." He grinned at the memory. "I think Barbara actually detested me at first, when she wasn't dismissing me outright as a daft old fart. That's the price you pay for kidnapping, I suppose."

"You kidnapped them? You couldn't have--" She laughed. "What am I saying? Of course you could have. Go on."

"Long story," he shrugged. "They had it coming. Intelligent woman, Barbara, so admirably intelligent, and disliked me so very intensely. Rather an alluring combination. Anyway, his caravan was headed to the court of Kubla Khan, Marco Polo's was, and the high-handed bastard actually took my poor TARDIS hostage so I and Susan and the future Mr. and Mrs. Chesterton had no choice but to tag along on the way to the stately pleasure dome--"

"Susan? Who's she? You never mentioned her."

"My…a girl I was traveling with. Student in Barbara's class. That's all." His face darkened for a moment. "So Susan strikes up a friendship, some wretched girl getting dragged halfway across Asia to marry a nobleman six times her age, but none of the rest of us were enjoying ourselves at all. By the time we hit that sandstorm in the Gobi tempers were straining a bit at the seams--didn't help matters that Tegana, that's the charming fellow who thought we were demons, had taken to slicing holes in our water skins and other boyish pranks--so anyway, we're stumbling about outside with the sand slicing at us like great fistfuls of needles, I can feel layers of skin getting blasted right off, and--" He started chuckling in anticipation. "So you understand that none of this is my doing, right? All Tegana's and Marco Polo's and the steppes? So we're stumbling about and Barbara turns to me with this look of freshly pan-fried death in her eyes and she actually says to me, she…"

His voice trailed off into uncertainty, the smile fading from his face. Martha waited.

"She said…she…" He cradled his chin in his palm. "I don't remember. I really, truly don't."

"Anyone could forget," Martha said. Measured and calm, once more. "Especially you. Everything you've seen, all the lives you've lived…"

A sharp breeze traveled across the clearing, ruffling their clothes and momentarily flattening the grass beneath their feet. She smelled pepper, jasmine, an almost medicinally strong odor of lemon traveling through the air.

"She was my granddaughter," he said. "Susan was. I was a dad once. More than once."

Something heavy and sweet, like gardenia. That lemon smell again. The faintest trace of asafetida.

"I killed them all," he said, and as he turned to face her, a limitless amazement slowly filled his eyes. "All my people. Me. Her. All of them. All at once. I killed them all."

Her stomach plummeted, twisting into knots as it tumbled over and over itself, but she felt quite immovably calm. So, she thought with a rather distant interest, this is what it really means to be shocked but not surprised.

"You loved them," she said. "I could tell. There must have been no other choice--"

"How old are you again, Martha?" he asked, without malice.

Too young, she thought, too bloody young. Younger, maybe, than Susan before she died. Before he killed her. Before he killed his children, and her.

"You're right," she said quietly. "I wouldn't know."

His shoulders sagged and he sat gazing silently out at the flowers, looking shrunken and deflated inside his coat. Martha reached out to touch him, and then let her hand drop.

"We should be on our way," the Doctor said.

Martha nodded, rising to her feet and stepping into the TARDIS proper. He didn't move.

"Doctor?" she said.

No answer. She stood behind him, waiting, staring down at the tense knotted line of his shoulders beneath the fabric. When she put a hand to his hair he reached up and took it, holding her fingers as though they might shatter beneath his touch.

"Did you want to go now, Doctor?" she asked.

No answer.

"Doctor?"

He didn't move. Beneath the moonlight the flowers hummed amongst themselves, serene and indifferent.

END

******

Notes: Story title from the Talking Heads (lyrics here). The catsuit belongs to Iris Wildthyme. Vaguely referenced tie-in novels include The Blue Angel, Nightshade, Love and War, City of the Dead, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Festival of Death, Vampire Science, Unnatural History and Combat Rock. Tlalocan is the fourth level of heaven in Aztec mythology, a paradise of flowers and eternal spring. The "river of orchids" line is from the XTC song of the same name. The pangrams on the Dryope-9 brick wall are taken from Mark Dunn's novella Ella Minnow Pea; the pay phone plague is of course stolen from Douglas Adams. The regrettable first name "Mellersh" taken from Enchanted April. "Oop-a-doop-whango" nicked from the novel Mildred Pierce because it made me laugh. The bits about interspecies children, the neck as Gallifreyan erogenous zone and all Romana-related angst are solely my own invention and/or wishful thinking. The bit about Martha refusing to get back on the TARDIS before getting some answers was written before "Gridlock" and Russell T. Davies stole it from me. Special thanks to Viedma, the better half, for read-through and some helpful comments on the smut bits such as "Wait, whose hand is that again?"

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