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The thing about being a freelancer who’s occasionally responsible for saving the world, Martha reflects as she fumbles for her buzzing mobile, is that she always feels obligated to answer calls from unknown numbers, no matter how often they turn out to be spam.
The area code says London, not that that means much. “Dr. Jones speaking,” she says, hoping for a robocall rather than an alien invasion.
It turns out to be neither. “Martha!” the caller exclaims, in a voice both familiar and startling. “It’s Donna, Donna Noble!”
Martha comes to an abrupt halt on the pavement, oblivious to the people who have to swerve to avoid walking into her. It’s not a voice she thought she would ever hear again, not after Colonel Mace had informed her of the consequence of the metacrisis, and what would happen if Donna ever remembered any of her time with the Doctor. Martha had wept, afterwards, for what Donna no longer knew she had lost.
If Donna’s remembered her, Martha thinks, her mind racing, is she in danger? Is she dying? She wants to ask what’s happening, how Donna’s feeling, but she’s not sure if it’s safe. If she calls UNIT, could they help? Could the Doctor, assuming he even still has her old mobile?
“My brain’s not going to explode if you say hi, you know,” Donna says.
“Are you sure?” Martha can’t stop herself from asking.
Donna laughs a little, and it’s one of the most beautiful sounds Martha has ever heard. “Yeah, I’m really sure,” she promises.
“How?”
“It’s a long story,” Donna says. “How much time have you got?”
She was on her way to investigate alleged lights in the sky, centred around a hospital reporting an outbreak of strange symptoms. Soon, Mickey and August will be waiting for her at home. Tomorrow, said hospital is going to expect an update on her progress.
“I’ve got all the time in the world.”
A long story might have been underselling it, she thinks, by the time Donna’s finished explaining. Beep the Meep and Wrarth Warriors, giving up the knowledge of a Time Lord, Isaac Newton and a line of salt at the edge of the universe, a cosmic toymaker and bigeneration and betting the universe on a game of catch -
“And the Doctor lives in your back garden now?” she says dubiously, sure she’s misunderstood.
“That makes it sound like he’s a stray dog,” Donna objects with a laugh. “But yeah, more or less.”
“I can’t imagine the Doctor staying in one place.”
“Well, come see it for yourself. Sunday afternoon, we always do a big family lunch. Oh, please say you’ll come,” she adds when Martha doesn’t immediately respond. “The Doctor would love to see you, and more importantly, so would I.”
Martha smiles into the phone. “You just try and keep me away.”
Four days later, she arrives at the address Donna had texted her. She’s barely knocked on the door before it opens, and Donna greets her with a hug as soon as she’s stepped over the threshold. “It’s so good to see you again.”
“And you,” Martha returns warmly. She had thought of Donna occasionally over the last fifteen years - when she noticed an old ATMOS sticker in a car, or someone brought up the planets in the sky of 2008, or even just saw a shock of red hair in her peripheral vision - but she never expected to see her again, let alone join her for a meal. She pulls back enough to finally take a proper look at Donna. “I still can’t believe it.”
“How do you think I feel?” Donna responds with a laugh. “Come on, everyone’s -” she starts to say, but is interrupted by the Doctor stepping into the hallway.
His trousers are plaid rather than pinstriped, he’s lost the suit jacket and tie, and he looks older, she takes in as she closes the distance between them, but none of it matters because it’s him, wearing a face she thought she’d seen for the last time standing over an unconscious Sontaran. And he’s still a hugger, she thinks as he lifts her in an embrace and spins her around.
“Long time no see,” she says when he finally puts her down. He just smiles at her, with that same wild, enthusiastic grin that had made all the monsters and running and danger worth it.
“As I was saying,” Donna interjects, pretending, very badly, to sound annoyed, “everyone else is out back, if you’d like to join them.”
Everyone else turns out to be Donna’s daughter Rose (and doesn’t that name make her do a double-take, given the circumstances), her husband Shaun, her mother Sylvia, and her grandad Wilf. It’s good-natured chaos as they all settle at the table and serve themselves, passing dishes back and forth and bumping elbows, and it doesn’t escape Martha’s notice that the Doctor seems perfectly at home in the middle of it.
They all seem eager to meet another of the Doctor’s companions, and they quickly have her sharing stories of her own adventures in time and space. She sticks to the lighter moments - flirting with Shakespeare, ice skating on the mineral lakes of Kur-ha, watching the moon landing live (four times) - and it’s surprisingly fun to revisit those memories with a new audience.
Eventually, well after their plates are clean and their bellies full, Sylvia leaves to take Wilf home, and Donna and Rose rise to clear away the dishes. Martha tries to help and is sternly told that as a guest she’ll do no such thing; she suspects the actual reason is to give her and the Doctor an opportunity to talk without spectators.
Yet once they’re alone, Martha finds she doesn’t know what to say. It’s silly, it’s been fifteen years for her and god only knows how long for the Doctor; surely there’s no shortage of things for each of them to tell the other. But maybe all that time is the problem - where is she supposed to start?
“You look happy,” is what ends up coming out of her mouth, because she’s been thinking it since she arrived. He seems more relaxed than she’d ever known him to be, and it’s not just that he’s given up the full suit-and-tie look. He’s settled, somehow.
“I am,” he says, with a smile so earnest it hurts a little to look at it. “I never thought I’d have anything like this. I never thought I’d want anything like this. Parked in a back garden when there’s a whole universe out there?” He gestures upwards, as if to encompass the whole sky. “But here I am,” and the laugh lines around his eyes crinkle again.
“I’m glad. I worried about you, you know, after the last time I saw you.” She still doesn’t know how she’d known it, from fifty metres away and without any words, but she’d known it was a goodbye. She just hadn’t known whether or not it would be permanent.
“Sorry,” the Doctor says, though she hadn’t meant it as a criticism. “For rather a lot of things, I think.”
“Feel like being more specific?” she prods, raising an eyebrow.
“1913, 1969, the Year That Never Was, quite a few near-death experiences now that I’m thinking about it -” he reels off, faster than Martha had expected.
“Do you really think those things were your fault?”
“Weren’t they?”
“You didn’t make the Family of Blood hunt you, or the Weeping Angels send us back in time, or the Master take over the Earth,” Martha reminds him. “And you didn’t make me come with you, either. I knew it was dangerous, and I decided it was worth it, to see what was out there.”
He’s quiet for a moment, but something in his expression makes her think that he’s not about to concede the point. “What about the way I treated you?”
She knows what he means from the way he’s not quite meeting her eyes. Fifteen years ago she would’ve blushed, but now she laughs. “Doctor, I know you like apologising for things that aren’t your fault, but if you’re apologising for not loving me back, that’s a bit much even for you. I fancied you and you didn’t fancy me; it was hardly the tragedy of the ages,” she says, but he still looks so serious. She hadn’t expected to have this conversation fifteen years after the fact, but better late than never, as the saying goes. “It’s not like you led me on,” she adds, quieter. “You told me at the start that wasn’t on the table. If I ignored that, it’s on me.”
“But I knew, though. I knew what you wanted and I knew I couldn’t give it to you and I ignored it, because I didn’t want you leave, because -”
“Because you didn’t want to be alone,” she finishes for him. It’s hardly a revelation - she had said as much to John Smith, during that horrible scene around a dead family’s table - but it’s different to hear the Doctor state it so plainly. “That’s not a sin, you know.”
“Selfish, though,” he persists.
“Did you think I was being selfish when I left?” she tries, which at least gets him to look at her.
“Of course not. Your family needed you.”
“We both know that’s not why I left. I left because it was the right thing for me, even though I knew you didn’t want me to go.” She shrugs a little. “You couldn’t be what I wanted, and I couldn’t be what you wanted, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault. That’s just how it happens sometimes. And it doesn’t mean I regret travelling with you.”
“No?”
“No,” she confirms, and that finally seems to work, because his expression relaxes.
“Oh, Martha Jones,” he says, in the same tone he’d used when she did something brilliant. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”
“We could have more,” Martha says. “Not hopping around the universe looking for trouble, but… this. Having a meal together, hanging out. Maybe go really crazy and see a film together.”
It’s a little surreal to even suggest it, banal though it would be to anyone else. The Doctor doesn’t do casual, doesn’t coordinate schedules to arrange meet-ups, doesn’t do anything as pedestrian as going to the cinema, or at least the Doctor she had travelled with hadn’t. But this Doctor, who lives in Donna’s back garden and seems to have been folded seamlessly into her family, grins broadly and says, “I’d like that.”
“Good,” she says, returning the smile, and gives herself a minute to linger in the warm feeling the prospect of seeing the Doctor semi-regularly, outside the circumstances of an alien invasion, engenders in her, before reluctantly rising to leave. The Doctor rises too, and she prepares to make her goodbyes, but he speaks first.
“I did, you know,” he says; Martha raises an eyebrow at the non sequitur. “Love you,” he clarifies, and it’s quite literally the last thing she would’ve expected him to say. “Not the way you wanted, and probably not very well, but I did,” he repeats, meeting her gaze with an intensity she can’t look away from. “I do. And I am sorry, if I didn’t show it.”
“You did,” Martha says, realising as she does that it’s true. Maybe not always - Rose would know leaps to mind, as does the moment in a damp alley in New New York, when the Doctor had just about scoffed at the idea that the Face of Boe’s dying words, you are not alone, could’ve meant her. But enough of the time. Martha Jones, you’re a star. Acknowledging that she was never really “just a passenger.” Thanks for looking after me, in a soggy field in 1913. The Doctor clutching her hands so tight as time rewound around them. “But it’s nice to hear it.”
She’s not sure which of them moves first, but either way they end up in a hug. He doesn’t lift her off her feet this time, just holds her close enough that she can hear that familiar double heartbeat. She closes her eyes and wonders about the intervening years, what might’ve happened to cause him, all this time later, to make sure she knows how important she is to him, and the thought makes her tighten her grip.
When she finally releases him she has to wipe away the dampness at her eyes, and notes as she does that his look rather shiny, too. But when he speaks, there’s nothing but fondness in his voice. “I’ll see you around, Dr. Jones.”