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The Doctor is a reckless driver, but he’s not careless one.
They have never, truly, landed exactly where he wanted them to. Every trip has always started with the TARDIS landing between two blocks or two galaxies to the left of where it was supposed to, and she was certain it had to do more with his skills as a pilot than it did the TARDIS’ reliability, but Martha never minded it.
There was no point in traveling if you knew what was waiting on the other side of the door. She watched him press buttons and pull random levers like a child with a new toy and she smiled her way through the turbulence.
It was fun. It was adventure. She loved it.
But this–
“Martha,” and her heartbeat stops when she realizes he’s trying to open the door before they’ve even landed, “Martha, come look, you wanted to see.”
She can’t do this. The TARDIS is flying on its own and the Doctor keeps fiddling with the door and Martha is hunched over in the corner, too scared to stand up and scream at him for bringing her here.
She’d asked so long ago. He said it was all gone.
Is he actually taking her? To Gallif–
The Doctor opens the door to a blinding orange glow and, maybe because he’s drunk, or maybe because he wants to scare her, or maybe because this is just what the Doctor does, he loses his balance.
He doesn’t close his eyes when his weight drags him over the edge.
Martha screams.
It’s not much, in the end, and twenty feet down is over before Martha can blink, but the image of the Doctor in free fall will be burned into her mind for the rest of her life, his body dangling from the edge, not even pretending to reach for safety.
That’s enough to snap her out of it.
“Fuck, fuck, is he dead?” she asks the empty TARDIS.
He could be dead.
No. Time Lords can’t die that easily.
Can they?
Martha, never a coward, always just a step behind, waits for the TARDIS to land properly before she runs towards him. The TARDIS has been screaming along with Martha for the entire trip, red lights and alarms flashing the second the Doctor typed in their coordinates. When he pilots the ship, it’s usually a dance; push and pull, easy does it, grand finale – today it was all push. The TARDIS said no and Martha said no and he didn’t care.
When does he ever?
The TARDIS finally does land, albeit a little wobbly and harshly without anyone at her controls, and opens her doors to Martha with a creek that feels oddly like pity. Martha doesn’t even think about if humans can breathe on Gallifrey before she’s out the door, a field of red grass towering over her.
Her first thought is that it’s itchy, the second is that it’s contagious, and the third is that Gallifrey burns. The adrenaline has clogged up her ears, a faint ringing instead of what’s actually going on around her, but two suns above her and a ground made up of ashes is beyond anything she could’ve imagined. She doesn’t so much run as she does pant around, screaming for the Doctor whenever she gets an extra breath in her lungs.
She does eventually find him, a lump of limbs tattered on dirt, calling her name through crooked teeth.
“Mar…” is all he gets through before he starts coughing into the dirt, ashes filling up his lungs.
“Doctor,” and she wants to say you’re stupid or you’re terrible or I hate you but she needs to breathe more than she needs him to know that, and she can see his chest stuttering out breaths, ribs that are digging into the wrong places, so she shuts up. She takes a big breath, leans in, and gives it to him.
They always end up like this, one way or another. CPR connects their lips as Martha’s lungs burn and she begs him to take it. It’s the only thing Martha has to give him. If he won’t accept this, if– If he won’t–
He collaborates, after a while. The Doctor’s eyes slowly drift open and not long after he’s got his hand on the back of Martha’s head as they breathe into each other’s mouths, perfectly in sync.
Gallifrey burns but the Doctor is holding her like she’s the only thing in the universe and she stays right there, letting him turn their breaths into crashing lips into a tongue inside her mouth, trying to swallow her whole.
Martha almost misses it until she can’t. There’s blood in her mouth that doesn’t taste like regular blood should and the Doctor’s got his hand tangled in her hair, taking her in like strong liquor; all at once, to the back of his throat.
She pushes him away once her tears mix into the taste. “No, no, stop it.”
“Please,” and those eyes, he’s acting like Martha’s mouth is sacred.
“No, don’t do that. You can’t do that to me.”
She’s sitting him up before he can squeeze in another jab at her heart, ignoring how the red grass around them is sticking to her skin and the sky is dancing in a flash of colors. She has a hand on his wrist, monitoring that tittering double–pulse as it goes slower and slower and…
“You’re doing that to scare me, aren’t you?” she accuses, rage slipping through.
The Doctor, facade melting away behind the dirt on his face, cracks a little smile. Suddenly, his pulse goes back to the rhythmic du–du–du–dum she’s come to learn. “Alright, I was. I like it when you’re worried about me.”
Martha lets her weight bring her to her knees, arms dropping to her sides with defeat. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in…
It takes her a while to see the Doctor, not observing, but copying. He lifts his chest not with a practiced, instinctual need for it but with the imitation of Martha’s shoulders hunching up as she catches her breaths.
Martha stops breathing all together, just to see what he’ll do.
The Doctor loses his pace.
It’s subtle, at first. It gets a little all over the place, audible, shifting on the ground like it’ll help him somehow. Martha doesn’t breathe and it’s faster now, and Martha doesn’t breathe and he’s digging his nails into the dirt and huffling like a rabid animal, eyes fixated on her.
Martha watches orange consume those doe eyes; burn them from the inside out.
“Is this what you wanted?” he slurs, whatever he drunk still luring heavy over his conscious.
She only stares, allowing herself to breathe again, trying to figure out what he means.
“Is this what… What I–”
“You wanted this.”
And… He’s not looking at her anymore. He’s looking at the sky.
Martha, never a coward, always just a step behind, slowly gets up and turns to the landscape.
Gallifrey is…
Gallifrey is.
Martha had expected something along the lines of pin-drop silence or full blown war but what’s in front of her is neither. The War is far away – the explosion of purples and greens above her are indication enough that somewhere in some time, there is a War. But this isn’t the desolate graveyard the Doctor had described to her, either.
Far enough that nobody notices them is a camp and… Weapons. Martha knows that those are weapons. The Doctor never showed her blueprints but the medic in her feels it, the intent to harm, the carelessness of who it could reach.
These are scientists.
They–
“It’s called a ‘chronon mine’,” the Doctor explains, barely making it upright. He tries to lean on her subtly, and when that doesn’t work, he simply raises to rest his arm on her shoulder.
“It’s meant to launch whoever steps on it back in time but the logistics of where got a little difficult. If you sent a Dalek back in time, say, a hundred years before it planting a bomb, nothing stopped it from doing it earlier. They had to think of some place disposable, or to get generators for the bombs on Skaro itself to send them back to where it came from. It was all a bit complicated.”
“And this is?”
“Late development stages. They’re trying to find a way to send someone back without melting them. Velocity will do that, you know. That’s why TARDIS’ have cases.”
Martha bites her tongue. “Why wouldn’t they just let the mine kill the Daleks?”
“It’s not a very good mine if it’s visible. If a Time Lord stepped on it by accident, the worst case scenario is that they rewrote a bit of their own history until their timeline settled. It was the best you could ask for, back then. A rewritten timeline was better than no timeline at all.”
“It wasn’t exactly a… A weapon, then.”
“It was more of a delay. Trying to buy time.”
“The Time Lords must’ve been a little desperate if they wanted to buy time.”
The Doctor let out a little laugh. “Yeah, they were.”
Martha and the Doctor stay there, side by side, breathing in smoke and residue from the test mines for what feels like a thousand years.
The Doctor isn’t going to talk first and Martha knows exactly what she’s supposed to ask but she doesn’t want to know the answer.
She asks anyway.
“I thought you couldn’t travel back in time to Gallifrey. You said it was gone forever.”
The Doctor stares ahead. A dazed stare that she would’ve laughed at if it hadn’t been now, when he’s drunk out of his mind on god knows what.
“I guess I’m just clever.”
He smiles, lopsided and proud and Martha feels a disgusting pit in her stomach for just being next to him.
“When… When I said I wanted–”
“You wanted to see Gallifrey. You’re here.”
“I didn’t know it was like this. I didn’t know you’d– Doesn’t this hurt?”
It’s a stupid question, really. She can see that stupid blue button up turn a dark shed of crimson around his ribs and he can barely hold it together without coughing or twitching at a different pain, but… But she doesn’t want to know about those. He did all of that to himself.
What she does worry about is, “you said your timeline could shatter. You said if, somehow, in the grand scheme of things, you could come back… You’d break. You’d burn from the inside out. You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Neither are you,” he says, and Martha remembers that haunting glare he gave her when he said no humans on Gallifrey, “so question is, Martha Jones, would you burn with me?”
It’s not supposed to be a literal question but it feels literal, twin suns searing themselves onto her back.
The Doctor also said that if he could go back, ever, he’d change it. Do it ‘right’ this time, whatever that meant. End it properly. End himself with Gallifrey’s sins.
Is… Is he going to?
Did he drag Martha into the universe’s most convoluted paradox?
“Are you asking me to… To come with you?”
“Every war needs a doctor.”
“That’s you.”
“No. Not here, not now. I ruined that name a long time ago. The doctor Gallifrey needs is you. I need you.”
I want you is left unsaid. The taste of blood is still swimming in her mouth, the ghost of his hand cradling her neck.
Martha lets it consume her. Twin suns, the Doctor’s glare, the explosion of a mine to her left.
“I don’t want to die,” Martha cries. “Not alone. I can’t disappear. If I– When” because she’s not like him, she knows death doesn’t spare a single thing, “I die, it will be with my family. They’ll know where I am. They’ll see me smile and hold my hand and you are not taking that away from me. I won’t die here. This war isn’t mine. I’m not fighting it for you.”
The Doctor stares at her and she sees it, clear as day, how his eyes hollow out. The drink leaves his body or his mind is screwed on right or something happens, because the manic in his eyes is gone. He hollows out completely, his limbs going a little weak, breathing going faint at the edges. He drops into a lifeless thing, lets the rage and the fear of it all drip away.
“I… I killed it. It’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s not your burden to bear.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I could’ve… I will fix it. Somehow. Some day.”
“Okay.”
The Doctor asks to hold Martha’s hand, wordless but so excruciatingly clear that it hurts. It doesn’t even occur to Martha until she’s holding it that it was telepathic. He went into her mind, let her into his, for a split second. They both turn around, away from the camp, to stare ahead at the fields of Gallifrey’s country side. The red goes on for miles, trees twinkling in that silver he’d been so excited to tell her about.
Ignoring the sounds of exploding mechanics and the ever–changing sky as Time Lords and Daleks alike fight for a day, a year, a lifetime and yet no time at all – it really is quite beautiful. Just like he said.
“I would.”
“Hm?” The Doctor turns to her, a little glint in his eye.
“Burn with you. If you asked. Just… Just not like this. I can’t be part of this.”
The Doctor squeezes her hand a little tighter, so much so that she can feel the fractures in his hand against her skin, and smiles.
It’s a dirty promise to make.
But in this sunset, Martha can at least say it’s honest.