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In one reality there is a man called John Smith, and he is afraid. He is supposed to be something called a Time Lord, but when he sees a vision of a normal life it is something he desires with a desperation he never knew he was capable of.
And then he sees the village burning. In one reality, Martha Jones makes a choice.
There is a man called John Smith, and he is afraid, and he is also her friend—or he was, once, in another time and place. He is human, and he very much wants to remain that way, but Martha is smart and knows that what the Doctor wants is not always what the world needs.
She also knows that if he returns it will break both of their hearts.
“Why can’t I stay?” John Smith asks, and Martha knows what she must do.
In one reality, there is a man called John Smith, and he remains human. When Latimer arrives with the fob watch it is Martha Jones who takes it, fingers shaking, and pries off the cover. She stares into the vortex and lets it consume her because this is what she will do for love—this is what the Doctor means to her.
She sees his image standing in the surrounding glow.
“This shouldn’t be possible,” he says.
All she can do is shrug. “You shouldn’t be either.”
“I’m not really here. This is my Time Lord consciousness, sent as a warning. You don’t want to do this, Martha.”
“You wanna bet?”
“I’m serious. If you go through with this you could do worse than die. You could lose all sense of yourself, any idea that you ever existed.”
She squares her shoulders. “Then that’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
And this is how Martha Jones becomes a Time Lord.
“Or Time Lady, I suppose,” she says aloud, once the transformation is complete. “Although gender isn’t s binary as people on this planet like to believe. It’s all wibbly-wobbly. Have I used that phrase before, wibbly-wobbly? It seems so familiar. Maybe it’s from the future.”
The others in the room are staring at her like she’s gone mad, and she can’t really blame them. She feels—well, she doesn’t really know how to describe it. It’s like she’s alive for the first time, all her senses tingling, bursting with this new awareness of the universe around her, a whole cloud of people and pasts and futures and maybes.
“Who are you?” John Smith asks.
She is the Doctor and not the Doctor. She is Martha Jones, but more.
She grins at him. “I’ll figure that out along the way.”
After she has dealt with the Family of Blood, she wishes John Smith well and goes traveling. She lets Latimer keep the watch.
“Keep an eye on him for me,” she says. “Call me if there’s any trouble.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You’re a bright kid. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
She doesn’t stop moving for a long time. It unsettles her, the man with the face that was once her own making a life for himself back in England, 1913. She has been running since before she stole the TARDIS. Now she runs with a purpose.
When she does come to a halt—a pause, perhaps—she’s back in London, and her mother is inviting her round for dinner. She spends several days attending graduate classes and listening to her parents bicker, trying to be Martha Jones again.
There’s a thought she’s been pushing to the corner of her brain, nagging at her unbidden even as she tries to squirm out of its reach. Rose Tyler. Of all the names of all the companions she’s kept by her side, she’s not quite sure why this one keeps coming back. Perhaps it is her connection to Martha Jones and not the Doctor that is keeping her in the foreground, because however hard she tries to pretend otherwise, Rose has altered the course of both their lives. Martha wants or needs to find her, and doesn’t know why.
When she can’t take any more of her daily routine she takes off again. She stops by to visit John Smith—it’s barely a year after she left for him, and perhaps an eternity more than that for her. It’s distinctly strange, being confronted with a face she remembers wearing but also loving. She offers him the chance to take the Doctor back, and he declines.
“We’ve got a baby on the way,” he says. “That’s something the Doctor could never have.”
Martha can’t disagree with him. She scans him throughout their conversation for any sign of the Doctor, but she is the Doctor now, and John Smith is almost a stranger. She gets up to leave, thanking him for the tea, and he stops her in the doorway.
“Our daughter,” he says, “do you know what we’re naming her?”
She hesitates, turning back to him and shaking her head.
“Martha. Martha Smith.”
He smiles, then, and she smiles too. And then she walks back to the TARDIS.
After that she travels again, at first to the far reaches of the universe, to the end and the beginning and back again, to every planet she’s promised herself she’d ever visit or never visit. She finds herself in London again and meets a woman called Donna Noble for the second time after she sees the TARDIS and starts shrieking in the middle of a crowded pavement. She joins Martha in her adventures, only questioning the Doctor’s new face once, and Martha tells her about regeneration because that seems like the simplest way of explaining things.
Things are simpler with Donna than they were when Martha was human and the Doctor’s companion. She’s a paradox now, she thinks—she has become the person she once loved, and sometimes her own multiplicity frightens her. But Donna never loved the Doctor the way Martha did, and the two of them are well-suited to travelling together.
(And when they stop the end of the universe together, when Donna Noble stares into the vortex, this is why Martha blames herself. Because Martha too was a human who saw the power of time, and she should have given warning about the consequences.)
It’s when they stop the end of the universe together that she meets Rose.
She’s just put the Earth back in its place, and Donna Noble back in her ordinary life, when she sees a familiar face standing at the end of the road. For a long while neither of them does anything, too transfixed to move, and then as if in a trance they move toward one another.
It’s funny, though, because as soon as she sees her Martha feels the same way about Rose as she did when she was human. She still feels envious, and wounded, and even a little guilty. But it isn’t so simple anymore. The Doctor is inside her—is her, now, and the Doctor’s history with this London shop assistant is as seared into her skin as her own.
Rose doesn’t say anything at first. She stares at Martha hard enough to make a dalek tremble and purses her lip. When at last she does speak it’s in a quiet, monotone voice.
“You’re him.”
It isn’t a question, and Martha doesn’t ask her how she knows, only nods.
“I suppose you want to know how this happened.”
Rose shakes her head.
“What I want to know,” she says, “is how to get him back.”
And the Time Lord in Martha has no ability to read minds, is rather bad at emotion in general, really, but the human remembers the experience of empathy. She remembers being in the same place, not so many years ago, willing to do anything to see the Doctor again.
“It’s not so simple,” she says, and receives a glare.
“Then make it simple.”
“Rose Tyler,” says Martha, and there must be something familiar in her tone, a trace of the old Time Lord shoving its way to the surface, because the girl takes a step back, for a moment all of the fight going out of her.
“Doctor?”
“It’s me, Rose.” And suddenly Martha is fighting to force the words past the stop in her throat, because she remembers how much she’s missed this human girl, how much she has longed to be near her again, even if this form is a stranger to her. Because Martha is the Doctor now, and for the first time it feels like she always has been.
And Rose Tyler embraces her.
“At first I thought this was just another regeneration,” she whispers into Martha’s coat. “Back when I saw you and that other woman saving the universe together. But that human girl, Martha Jones, I looked her up. She was real once. So it has to be something else.”
This is how Rose becomes the first person in this century to know the truth. They wind up sitting on a park bench, watching the wind make ripples on a duck pond void of ducks.
“I’ve—got an apartment,” Martha says suddenly. “For when I’m trying to be normal. From back when I was. If you want…we can go there.”
Rose bites her lip and nods hesitantly. They walk, because the apartment isn’t just where Martha sometimes lives but also where she stores the TARDIS. They hardly speak along the way, though every so often Martha catches Rose studying her out of the corner of her eye. Every so often she finds herself doing the same.
It’s a relief when they reach the building and Martha can distract herself by fumbling with her keys. They order pizza, and that night Rose sleeps in Martha’s bed, while the Time Lord stretches out on her couch and stares at the ceiling for hours.
She wakes the next morning to the smell of waffles. Rose is in the kitchen, and hands her a plate.
Without really discussing it they move in together. Rose has nowhere to go in this dimension—all of her family now forsaken in an alternate universe—and Martha likes having someone there to mind the apartment while she’s off adventuring. (In her head she pretends that’s all it is, that Rose is useful, and that’s why she wants to keep her around.) They begin to form a sort of routine. Martha will take the TARDIS out to save the universe, and in a few hours or days she’ll be back in time for supper. She is less absentminded than the old Doctor—perhaps because she is still a real medical student, when she’s able—and her calculations are more often correct.
It’s been several months, Earth-time, when she realizes Rose has become indispensable. Slowly the envy fades away, replaced by something neither the human nor the Time Lord in Martha can name, but that makes both of her hearts feel strangely light whenever she walks into a room and the other girl is there waiting for her.
Her sister confronts her about it one day.
“Don’t think you can keep secrets from me,” she says. “You’ve been acting all funny lately, everyone’s noticed. And now you have that girl living with you that you won’t tell us about.”
“She’s just a friend,” says Martha. “Someone I met while I was traveling.”
Tish gives her a very skeptical look. “Sure. And when you’re ready to tell us why that’s not true just let me know.”
She wishes she could explain that she’s never been in this situation before. The Doctor’s family were all Time Lords, and now they’re dead. But Martha still has a family, and this is a problem none of her past experiences have prepared her for.
That didn’t even occur to him? What sort of man is that?
Martha knows now why the Doctor couldn’t afford to think about love. She remembers how tired she is of watching people die.
“My sister was asking about you,” she tells Rose when she gets home. “She thinks you’re my secret.”
Rose almost smiles at her. “Aren’t I?”
“If you want to explain to my family what you’re doing here and how we know each other, be my guest.”
“You could always make something up.”
“Never been much good at that.”
Rose won’t look at her. “The Doctor tells all sorts of lies.”
Martha swallows.
“And this isn’t one of them,” she says quietly.
And the thoughts are there between them that neither will dare to speak, all of the things this is supposed to be but isn’t. Martha sets a pot on the stove to boil, and they don’t say anything else. But the following evening she pulls Rose aside on the stair.
“I’ve lived so long like this,” she says softly. “Doctor and companion rolled into one. My head can’t keep it straight sometimes—sometimes it’s like there’s two people inside of me, only they’re both me now. I wouldn’t mind some company.”
She expects Rose to decline, to say she isn’t ready yet, or that she left that life behind a long time ago, but she only nods.
When she steps into the TARDIS for the first time in an age, she actually smiles.
They go adventuring to start. The Doctor has never been able to avoid it, and Martha thinks it makes things easier on Rose. It is a routine they are both used to, and leaves little time for conversation.
“Where do you want to go?” Martha asks. Rose considers the question a moment.
“I want to go everywhere.”
And they do. They bust another crime family on Raxacoricofallapatorius, spend a weekend in Space Vegas, and visit the biggest library in the galaxy, somewhere Martha had been meaning to take Donna, but somehow the two of them never got around to it. They meet an archaeologist named River Song who knows more about the Doctor than Martha herself, and when she sacrifices herself to save them all from the Vashta Nerada Martha takes off to Darillium and cries in front of the Signing Towers.
She reunites with Rose back at the apartment, and the human girl says nothing, hands her a cup of tea and puts on a film.
One night they’re eating dinner together when Martha stops suddenly.
“I want you to meet someone.”
Rose tilts her head. “Should I be worried?”
“Maybe,” says Martha, and her voice is too serious. Rose’s smile drops.
“What is it?”
“I want you to remember that I gave you a choice.”
She opens the doors on England, 1913.
The path to John Smith’s house is one she’s only walked a handful of times, but she knows it well. To him it will be a mere month since her last visit. She wonders how many human lifetimes she’s burned through since then.
Joan greets them warmly and ushers them inside, where her husband is working over some papers at the kitchen table. Rose can’t stop staring. Martha introduces her as her companion.
They make quiet conversation for about an hour, discussing the weather or the crops coming in, the new gender-inclusion program at the academy. Rose is silent the entire time; still as a statue until her hand shoots out to grip Martha’s arm, hard, and the Time Lord understands this is a signal. She excuses them and they walk back to the TARDIS.
Outside, Rose turns away from Martha and pulls out an old handkerchief. When she faces the Doctor again her eyes are bright.
“Where to next?”
Martha looks down, bites her lip. “Wherever you’d like to go.”
Rose takes her hand, and Martha glances up at her.
“I’m right where I want to be.”
Martha stretches out a hand to brush her cheek with shaking fingers.
And when she kisses Rose for the first time she thinks she understands why the Doctor always cared so much about a normal life.