Chapter Text
It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuit or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact and a plain soundness of judgment which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man.
A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing; for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.
-The Earl of Lytton (1831-91)
Always make new mistakes.
-Esther Dyson
When it comes to Time Lords, there is no barometer. No standard of measure, no comparison to help the infinitely less-complex human brain comprehend them. They are a species entirely to themselves, and what's more, they are one of the universe's most endangered species, at that. The old descriptive standby, "imagine if you will" is null and void, here. You, as a human being, cannot imagine it accurately anymore than you can comprehend being another animal entirely. While the Time Lord genus shares many of the traits of a human, the two should never be confused.
Such a singular, pedigreed race, whittled down to one last example -- A lone man, typically judged the best or worst example of what Gallifrey had to offer the universe, depending upon whom you asked. To be him, the last of his kind -- The last of the Time Lords -- could only be like the most acute type of mortal epiphany. In a race so revered for its ability to stave off death, being the very last could only be a complete mind fuck, and that's without knowing you're the reason all the others are gone.
Guilt was not a trait especially associated with Time Lords, although you might have thought so with the particular talent the Doctor had for it. This version of the Doctor, anyhow, as the others didn't have quite the same knack for emotional masochism. For this, his Tenth body, Tenth awareness, Tenth personality, it came as naturally as breathing, that impenetrable sense of regret that things could not have gone differently. Not simply with the end of Gallifrey, but anything of emotional significance done in this lifetime or another. To the untrained eye it leant the appearance of depth, but more and more he suspected it had to do with stoking his own sense of importance. This version of himself had a penchant for pretension disguised as benevolence. Being the last of the Time Lords was conducive to it.
Reflecting on any sort of emotional ties or feelings was therefore doomed to be an affair mired in self-condemnation, and as a general rule, the Doctor avoided it completely. Better to be on the go, really, than think about what was done and over. Typically, it worked. Typically, he could shut not only other people but himself out with all the finesse of a pro, but things were different now. The world had changed, and he with it, but when the world leapt back, there was no way to rewind his psyche. The damage, as they say, had been done, and within the space of a year, held hostage by his most loathed and loved enemy, the Doctor had very little to do but think.
Habits are habits, you see, and regardless of the saying, new ones are just as tenacious as old.
With three hundred sixty-five days to ponder, you might contemplate a great many things. The Doctor spent most of that time contemplating Martha Jones, because even in an expansive mind filled with a great many more things than you or I could fathom, she still seemed the most important, and rightly so. She was.
Headstrong, determined and so very loyal, it was no surprise to the Doctor that Martha Jones was not only capable of saving the world, but that she did. Saved him, too, as a matter of fact, and if that can't humble the last of the Time Lords, nothing can. He should have done more, said more, because really, what are words in comparison to that sort of sacrifice? She'd walked the Earth for an entire year, would never be the same, and that deserved more than simple recognition of the act. Still, he'd slighted her, there at the end. Unintentional though it was, he couldn't blame her for leaving.
Trouble was he couldn't stop thinking about her. A whole year he'd gone, imagining Martha, meditating on Martha, remembering Martha in every possible context, and now with the year snuffed out of existence and Martha well and gone, he couldn't not think about Martha. It was a sad state of affairs, he decided, when a Time Lord was obsessed with his ex-companion. Probably his own fault for choosing humans; next time, he'd go with another species. Something with fur, maybe, but not cats. He'd had enough of cats.
Perhaps it had to do with the way she'd left. A mobile phone tossed casually his way, with a directive to come running when she called. Of course he'd agreed -- What else could he do, under the circumstances? -- but in retrospect he recognized it less as emergency protocol and more as a leash. Martha Jones, petite with honeyed skin and flyaway smiles, never as innocuous as she seemed, had put the Doctor on a leash, and he'd gone willingly. The beauty of the situation was how inherently artless it all was -- The Doctor knew she'd had no concept of what she was actually doing to him.
The telephone stayed with him at all times, tucked into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, over his left heart. He found the ever-present weight of it comforting, although he suspected if it ever did ring, it would startle the hell out of him. At odd moments when he was alone, or deep in thought, he found his hand creeping up to his chest to feel the outline of it through the heavy fabric, as if he were preparing to pledge allegiance to something. It had taken nearly three months for him to accept the idea that he was waiting on the phone to ring, and another month and a half to reconcile himself with the idea that he wanted it to. Nearly a year later, it was beginning to dawn on him that it might not.
Just now, he was to a point where during any free moments he had (Which were, admittedly, not all that many, for all that he excelled at pushing aside his personal problems by staying busy) he was constantly having to restrain himself from pulling out the mobile and calling Martha himself. The best argument he had thus far for avoiding that dubious task was that he had no idea at all what he might say. “Oh, hullo Martha, I just thought I’d ring after a year, to catch up.” It sounded so trite, and not at all what he wanted to say anyhow, although he still wasn’t certain exactly what that was. He’d begun to have entire conversations with the telephone, which he regarded as something of a nemesis (A poor replacement for the Master, all said, but almost as manipulative), in which he detailed his myriad reasons for not doing what it clearly wanted him to, which was ring Martha Jones. It was during one of these conversations that the Doctor decided he could use some advice on the matter from someone less inanimate.