Fic - "In That Year" - Martha/Romana
Nov. 13th, 2009 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseTitle: In That Year
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
magicallaw
Pairing: Romana/Martha
Rating: PG-13.
Word Count: 3247
Summary: Wherever she went as she traveled, she heard one name over and over: Martha Jones.
Spoilers: Through "Last of the Time Lords."
Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dw_femslash. :)
The Earth was dying. The Master’s psychotic plans had dragged it to the brink of disaster, its people enslaved and its resource pillaged for use making weapons of war and destruction. “Don’t you remember anything before you woke up here?” the medic asked her as he leaned over to retie her ragged bandage and check her pulse.
She thought about it. She remembered... fire. Fire and ash, explosions, a friend - a voice she recognized though she couldn’t remember the name that went with it - yelling at her to get down, to stay out of the line of fire. “Were there metal things?” she asked. “Horrible metal things with... voices. They were killing everyone.”
The medic gave her a tight, unhappy smile. “The Toclafane. Terrible creatures. But that’s a good sign for you, I guess, that you remember that much.”
Something about that name doesn’t sit right with her, but it sounds strangely familiar nonetheless, and anyway, who is she to question? She had to learn her own name off the ID paperwork that was in her pocket when she was found. Winifred Clark. The student ID card in her wallet said that before the Master’s reign of terror began, she’d been a graduate student reading theoretical physics at the University of Bristol.
“You’re lucky, you know,” the medic told her as he packed his equipment into the old duffel bag he carried between work camps. “Most of the scientists were rounded up right at the beginning, and either sent to work in the Master’s labs or killed if they refused.”
“Maybe I wasn’t any good. Or maybe he just didn’t need physicists,” Winifred suggests.
The medic shakes his head. “Well, whatever it was, you’re better off. They don’t let the techs use radiation protection or anything in those labs, I’ve heard. Okay - that’s the best I can do for you, Miss Clark. You take care of that arm, and with a little more luck your memory will start coming back in time. You may never remember everything, but... honestly, I wish I could be so lucky as to not remember parts of these past two months. You know, they say...” He frowned and pressed his lips together tightly.
“What? Who says, and what?”
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “But they say there’s a woman out there, walking the world. They say she might know a way to defeat him. Martha Jones is her name.”
That was the first time Winifred heard of her, but it wasn’t the last. Wherever she went as she traveled, she heard one name over and over.
Martha Jones.
* * *
A month and a half later and some thousands of miles away, Martha Jones was not feeling particularly heroic. In fact, she felt miserable. She was holed up in a sanctuary provided by a small resistance cell in Mongolia - a tiny little hut made of corrugated metal and sod, hidden in a tiny valley in the mountains. It was meant to be just a stopping-point on the way to China and beyond that to Japan, but she’d gotten stuck in a tiny hut during some of the worst weather she’d ever seen, and had no idea when it would clear up enough for her to keep walking. All she knew at that moment was that every time she suggested leaving, the woman who’d appointed herself Martha’s unofficial interpreter went pale and shook her head very, very quickly. “Not now, not now,” everyone told her.
“If not now,” she asked, “then when?”
That, they couldn’t seem to tell her.
“The Doctor sends me out on this thing, trusts me to save the world, and I’m going to spend the rest of the year stuck in Mongolia,” Martha muttered to herself. “Very useful.”
Just as she was thinking about curling back into her blankets to try to sleep through the bad weather, someone knocked on the piece of sheet metal that served her hut as a door. Martha crouched back, immediately wary. Everyone in the nearby village was supposed to be at the work camp all day, but if one of them had got sick they might have made their way back to her for what little treatment she could provide - although she didn’t have much in the way of supplies, many of the people she’d met in her travels preferred her to the official work camp doctors on the basis that she was under no obligation to report injuries or ills to the camp overseers. On the other hand, it could just as likely be a particularly zealous guard out hunting for ‘deserters’ who’d tried to skip out on their holy duty to serve their lord and Master.
Thinking quickly, Martha snatched up the heavy teakettle she’d been using to boil her water, and leaned against the wall, waiting. After a long moment, the door opened and admitted a slightly-built figure wrapped in a heavy, patched coat. Martha grabbed the figure’s shoulder and spun them around to face her, still holding the kettle.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
The woman - mid-thirties, Caucasian, with delicate features and bits of long dark blonde hair sticking out from under her hood - blinked but otherwise looked unnervingly unintimidated. But, then, she was being threatened by a woman whose only weapon was a kettle, Martha reminded herself. “I’m looking for someone,” the woman told her calmly. “My name’s Winifred.”
“Winifred.” Martha raised an eyebrow.
“That’s what it said on the card.”
“So it’s a code name of some kind?”
The woman shrugged. “No, but I’m afraid I had a bout of amnesia a month or two back. I don’t remember much of anything before that. My ID--” she pulled out a battered leather wallet and flashed a student card that showed a brilliant grin that seemed to have far too many teeth, “says my name’s Winifred. Winifred Clark, from Bristol University. That’s all I’ve got to go on, so I have to believe it.”
“And who’s this you’re looking for, then? Do you know their name, or do you only have that on a card, too?” Martha asked. And then immediately felt guilty. “Sorry. Sorry, I just...”
Winifred shrugged. “It’s a fair question. I do know their name, as a matter of fact. I’m looking for a Martha Jones. I was told I might find her here.”
Martha tensed again. “Why are you looking for her?” she asked, trying - and probably failing, she suspected - to sound only vaguely interested.
“Because everyone says she can defeat the Master. And also because something about her sounds very familiar to me. I’m hoping maybe we’ve met before - like we knew each other in school or something. Maybe she can help me remember more about myself. And maybe I can help her, too,” Winifred added with a shadow of that brilliant smile in the photograph.
“Oh yeah? Fancy yourself a hero, do you?” Martha shook her head. “You can have it, if you ask me.”
“No, I don’t fancy myself a hero. I fancy myself a physicist. At least that’s what--”
“--The card tells you. Of course.” Martha chuckled softly. “All right, Winifred Clark from Bristol University. What if I know how to take you to Martha Jones?”
“I should certainly hope you know,” Winifred told her. This time the smile was more than a shadow.
“How do you mean?”
“I told you. There’s something about her that’s weirdly familiar to me. Something weirdly familiar about you, I should say. I knew it was you the minute I saw you. And don’t worry, I’m not about to get the Master’s men onto you. For one thing, they might make me walk outside again, if I did that, and I think my feet will freeze off if I go any further today.” Winifred dropped unceremoniously onto the pile of blankets Martha used for a bed. “But I take it you don’t recognize me?”
“Not a bit, sorry.”
Winifred shrugged. “No harm done. It’s just another mystery, I guess.”
“You said you’d had amnesia. Have you been seen by a medic?” Martha asked, sitting down on the bed, too, so that she could take a closer look at her mysterious visitor. No sign of contusion on the forehead, although that would probably have healed in more than a month...
“I have, for all the good they can do under these circumstances.” Winifred shook her head. “The best they could tell me was that it looked like their hadn’t been permanent damage to anything other than my memory, that my vision and reflexes and all that seemed fine, and that they couldn’t identify an obvious source of the impairment. If you want the truth, I think they all assumed I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome - disassociating myself from something terrible I saw in the first month of the Master’s campaign of terror, something like that.”
“Do you remember anything like that?”
“I remember fire, and someone shouting. And the Toclafane.”
“When they carried out the decimation order, maybe,” Martha suggested.
“Maybe,” said Winifred, her eyes narrowing as she stared into the middle distance, obviously hunting her dampened memory.
* * *
Decimate.
It wasn’t quite right. There was something in it, something familiar, something like the way she’d felt when she heard the name Martha Jones, or the first time she’d seen the other woman’s face. But the word wasn’t quite right.
Everything else, however, was going rather well, all things considered. When she took into account the world being controlled by a psychotic, megalomaniacal alien bent on interplanetary destruction and the wholesale slavery of the human race, when she considered that she was always cold and hungry, that her clothes were all dirty and that she hadn’t had a proper bath in as long as she could remember... Taking all of that into account, there was no rational reason that Winifred could think of for her to be so happy. But she was just that - genuinely happy for the first time that she could remember. Granted, that only accounted for the last two and a half months, but it was still fairly remarkable.
After a month holed up in the Mongolian mountains, she and Martha had managed to meet up with a small cell of resistance members who arranged transit for them over into China. The people there were in the same sort of situation they’d both seen everywhere else they’d been, but the fact that they were together seemed somehow to lighten the load for both of them. They split the weight of their supplies, traded off keeping guard when they didn’t feel safe enough to both sleep, and when they did... Well.
“You’re sure this is okay?” Winifred asked for the third time, as she laid her own blankets on top of Martha’s.
“Of course it is. God, it’s freezing in here. Come on, get under here.” Martha lifted up the blankets. She was fully dressed underneath them of course - it was too cold in the warehouse closet they’d requisitioned as a shelter to even think of undressing - but it still felt strange, getting into bed with her. “It’ll be like a sleepover,” Martha continued. “Or, you know - did you have sisters? Oh... God, I’m sorry, Win. You don’t remember, do you?”
Winifred shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But I’d feel horrible if I couldn’t remember Tish. That’s my sister, Laetitia. Tish.” Martha shook her head. “She’s up there, you know. With him, on that stupid ship.”
“I hope she’s all right.”
“Me, too. She’s a spitfire, though, our Tish.” Martha yawned, and then frowned deeply. “What’s wrong with me? My sister is up there, my parents, my friends... and I’m sitting here thinking that I wish we had some fuel for a fire, so that we could be warm and maybe heat up our water. They could be getting tortured every day... and I’m wishing we had a few packets of tea. They could be dead!”
“Shhh. You’ve got a lot on your mind. You’ve got the whole world hanging on your shoulders, Martha - you’re allowed to forget a bit of it every now and then.”
“But they’re my family--”
“Shhhh...” Winifred tapped her finger on Martha’s lips, and that... was probably a mistake, she realized as soon as she’d done it. Martha’s lips were a little chapped from the cold, but still unbelievably soft, and Winifred suddenly feels awkward in her own skin, as though her body remembers something her mind doesn’t yet. It probably remembers a lot of things that her mind doesn’t, she reminded herself, but at the moment only this bit is important.
Apparently, she thought with a moment of intensely ironic clarity, I fancy girls. The issue had never really come up, in the two months that she’d been traveling. She’d felt extremely fond of Martha - attached to her immediately, yes, she’d thought that had something to do with her memories and the way the other woman seemed immediately familiar to her. As for anything else... they’d been too busy trying to stay warm and safe and alive and away from the Master’s patrols to really get too interested in anything else. Granted, this was probably not the best time to come to that conclusion. But she felt sure she could work with it. Quick - while you’ve got her attention, say something intelligent. You’re clever! You can come up with something to disarm the situation!
What she meant to say, Winifred thought later, was something very intellectual and clever, possibly even philosophical, about how the sort of pressure that Martha was under makes it nearly impossible for her to cope simultaneously with all the pressures being placed on her. There might even have been a metaphorical connection to quantum physics involved somehow.
What came out of her mouth was, “Um.”
That was it. Um.
It was at that moment that it occurred to Winifred that a degree in physics did not necessarily indicate any degree of fluency with emotions or interpersonal communication.
“So basically... What I’m trying to say is... you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” she forced out. In too low a tone. It sounded like she was whispering. Why was she doing that? “You’ve got a lot on your mind, I mean, what with saving the world and all, and there’s no reason for you to be upset with yourself, because you’re remarkable. Really fantastic. And amazing. And also beautiful. At least I really think you are, and... I’m meant to be quite clever, so it must be true,” she finished, feeling slightly panicked and desperate to cut off the idiotic flow of words that was stemming from her mouth.
Martha, unsurprisingly, was staring at her. Looking, in fact, rather as though she thought Winifred had entirely lost her mind. Winifred wasn’t sure what to expect after that - maybe that the other woman would push her out of bed - ‘go sleep on the other side of the room, you freak,’ or something like that - or that she’d start crying, which would really put the whole lack of emotional intelligence thing into a bind. Instead, Martha did something that Winifred would never have guessed would happen: she kissed her.
“You never said anything about fancying girls,” Winifred accused when they parted for breath.
Martha smiled. “Neither did you.”
“Well, I haven’t before. At least not that I can remember.”
Martha’s smile broadened, and her eyes sparkled in the darkness. “Neither have I.”
“Could we try that kiss again, then? I have a feeling I could do better now that I’ve had a moment to get used to the idea,” Winifred suggested.
Martha laughed, and pulled her down into the blankets. Even with both of them under the covers, it was too cold to take off their clothes - which was a pity, Winifred thought. She would have loved to see Martha, preferably sprawled out on a brightly colored velvet bedspread on top of a fluffy feather mattress, her black hair clean and shining in the light of a brisk, sunny morning. Bright blue would suit her, Winifred thought - turquoise. That seemed just the color for Martha, although she had no idea why. They could lounge in a bed full of pillows, blissfully naked, and explore each other at their leisure. But that kind of pleasure would have to be for sometime in the future. Still, there was nothing wrong - nothing at all! - with shimmying her hands up Martha’s shirt, cupping her breasts, and then slipping her thumbs up beneath the underwires to get under her bra and tease her bare nipples. There was a unique sort of pleasure in the way Martha’s rough dark jeans scraped against Winifred’s chest as she slid down so that she could kiss Martha’s stomach, or the way Martha tugged the collar of Winifred’s shirt over her shoulder so that she could nip playfully at the sensitve skin there.
Under the cover of the rough old blankets that smelled of mildew, Winifred unbuttoned Martha’s jeans and slipped her hand down the front, and laughed out loud when Martha gasped. They pulled the blankets over their heads, and breathed on their hands so they wouldn’t be cold when they touched each other.
* * *
“They’re going to catch us up,” Winifred hissed between clenched teeth, clinging tightly to the rails of the little boat. “They’re too close not to.”
“I know, I know...” Martha leaned over the water. Out there, somewhere, the shore waited for them. But she couldn’t see it, and the boat pursuing them was faster, better-equipped, and had search lights. “We just need to get a little further...”
“Martha, this is insane. You have to get out. I’ll pull the boat over to that island - you can climb up onto the rocks, and I’ll be away before they see that you’ve got off.”
“Then they’ll chase you.”
“That’s the idea.”
“No. No, absolutely not, I--”
“You’re the one with the quest, Martha Jones. I’m just along for the ride.”
“You know you’re not. That’s not how it is.”
“But it is, if we ever want to be free of him. Look... you trust this Doctor bloke, right?” Saying his name, Winifred shivered. She always told herself that it was the obvious love in Martha’s voice when she talked about him that made her uncomfortable - that she was jealous of this man who had so much of Martha’s loyalty. In reality, though, she felt like the name... did something to her. It was like poking at a healing wound - it itched and niggled, and she knew it would only hurt if she pressed at it, but she couldn’t seem to leave it alone.
“Of course I do. I told you, he can fix it all.”
“I know.” Strangely, Winifred felt as though she really did. And yet she also felt as though Martha was missing some piece of the puzzle. Thinking about the Doctor made Winifred feel oddly tired. But this wasn’t about the Doctor. This was about Martha. “You believe in him. So do I. But more than that, I believe in you. And that means we have to get you across. We have to get you back to England so that you can stop the Master and put things right. And I’m not going to let some little boat of guards get in your way, all right?”
Martha nodded, looking miserable.
“I’ll come in as close as I can to this peninsula, all right? And I’ll drop you off. In the morning, you can find the contact the same as we originally planned - you’ll just have a little bit longer walk to meet her. When you get it all fixed and find the Doctor, you look me up, all right? I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Promise?”
“Of course I promise.”
Rock scraped against the bottom and side of the aluminum boat, and Winifred held Martha’s arm as she clambored over the side, and handed her backpack over once she was safely on the ground. She kissed her quickly, and then pushed off before Martha could demand that she come, too. Their pursuers - the Master’s men for sure - would be bound to catch them if the the boat obviously stopped there, or if it was clearly unmanned. As it was, there was a possibility Winifred could convince them that she’d run aground accidentally and then continued without letting anyone off. At least she hoped she could.
As she piloted the boat on an erratic course into the night, she pictured Martha alone on a strange shore. Alone for the rest of her walk. Only a few months left.
* * *
Day zero dawned bright and sunny, and for the first time in a year, the Human race had a reason to think that might be a good sign. A full year since the Master overtook the Earth. A full year since Martha Jones escaped the Valiant and began her quest. Three-hundred and sixty days since Winifred Clark woke up, dazed and confused in a medic’s tent outside a work camp in Sheffield with only the contents of her pockets to her name. A battered leather wallet with her student ID, a bus-ticket and a few old receipts, a paper sack with a few sweets left in it, and an old, broken pocket-watch.
On day zero, Winifred Clark remembered that dented old pocket-watch, and pulled it out of where she’d shoved it carelessly in with old maps and empty candy bar wrappers, at the bottom of the outside pocket of her backpack.
On day zero, while everyone around her shouted the Doctor’s name, Winifred Clark held the old watch tightly, and thought another name - “Martha Jones” - with all her strength and hope.
On day zero, time moved backward. And Winifred Clark saw it.
She felt it like the unwinding of a spring in her stomach, like waking up from a long sleep and realizing that the strange and terrible dreams are just that, and that they don’t mean anything in the real world. If she’d wanted to, she could have reached her hand out and caught protons in her hand, teased out the smallest particles in the air around her and made them dance. At last, she was in her element. In the middle of it all, while the year ticked backwards around her, Winifred Clark opened up the old pocket-watch, and remembered everything.
* * *
One Month Later
Leo was supposed to be bringing over the extra television he had leftover from his college days that morning, but he wasn’t supposed to be over for another hour, so when the doorbell rang at precisely eight, Martha wasn’t awake yet. It was her only day off that week, after all, and she’d felt entitled to just a little bit of sleeping in.
“Hold on!” she shouted at the door, scrambling to pull on pyjama bottoms, and grateful she’d at least slept in a vest. Everyone said it was getting colder, but with the memory of the year that never happened living in her skin, Martha doubted she’d ever really feel cold ever again. She glanced in the mirror as she passed the new flat’s tiny bathroom. Her hair looked an absolute fright, but her brother could cope with that. “Not like you to be out of the house before nine,” she teased as she opened the door. “I thought you said--”
A ghost from the past raised one delicate hand and grinned, toothy and brilliant. “Hi, Martha. Sorry, I didn’t wake you, did I? It’s not like you to sleep in.”
“Not...” Not while I was walking the Earth to stop the Master, Martha thought. But that couldn’t be what the girl meant - she’d never met Winifred Clark before the Year that Wasn’t, and nobody but the people who’d been on the Valiant remembered that year, so how could she possibly know who Martha was? “Not usually,” she amended, stepping back and gesturing her old friend into the living room that’s still full of boxes of unmade flat-pack furniture and second-hand-shop lamps. It takes a lot of work, Martha’s discovered, to start living arrangements from scratch again. “Come in. I’m sorry, but... Winifred, what are you doing here?”
“It’s not Winifred. Not really. That was someone’s idea of a joke, I think.” The woman smiled. “You can still call me that if you like, though. My name’s Romana. Well... Romanadvoratrelundar, but people always said even Winifred was long, so...” she shrugged. “Whichever you prefer. Nice walls, by the way. Paint them yourself?”
“I like turquoise," Martha replied, distracted. "I don’t understand... How do you remember any of that?”
“Of the year?” Winifred - Romana, Martha corrected herself - dropped lightly to the ground and folded her legs up beneath her, looking up at Martha with a strangely cheerful expression, as though everything that had happened to them was some kind of amusing little game. “It was the breaking of the paradox machine that did it, I think. Well, and this little toy.” She lifted the old pocket-watch, swinging it like a pendulum on its chain.
Martha felt a shiver of fear run down her spine. “You’re another one. Another Time Lord. Like the Doctor and--”
“Got it in one. And when the Master’s house of cards started to fall apart, something in me must have recognized that the time was right for me to remember myself. It was safe again, I suppose. The unmaking of the paradox machine was the last piece of the puzzle, but I’d already started to click before that - too many little things were familiar. There were too many reminders, and my mind was starting to catch up to the programming the Tardis circuits had used to replace my own memories. Everyone kept asking me what I remembered, and I said fire and ash, and a metallic voice shouting. It wasn’t the Toclafane. It was the Daleks.”
“Eugh.”
“You’ve met them, then. I’m sorry to hear that. I’d hoped they might not exist anymore... but I suppose that’s too much to ask.”
“So you were killed by the Daleks? Or your friends were, in... oh, in the war the Doctor used to talk about. The war with the Daleks. But how did you escape?”
“I didn’t. A friend did it for me.”
“A friend?”
Romana nodded. “That was the other thing I remembered. I heard a voice, shouting at me. A woman’s voice. She saved me. Do you know who that voice was, Martha Jones?”
Martha shook her head in mute wonder. It was too much to think...
“It was you. You saved me. You knew how the Chameleon Arch worked, and you made me get into it, and found a way to send me back to Earth... to exactly where I’d need to be to meet you again, for your first time. For me...” She laughed softly. “Well. I shouldn’t tell you too much. It wouldn’t do to let you in on too many anachronistic secrets. But suffice to say, I was right when I said that you were familiar to me. Very.”
“When all of that was over, I told the Doctor I couldn’t travel with him anymore.” Martha looked like she wanted to say that wasn’t true anymore, but couldn’t make herself frame the words. “My family need me...”
“Of course. Don’t worry.” Romana grins at her - the same toothy grin as before. “When you’re ready, you’ll find me. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Recipient:
magicallawPairing: Romana/Martha
Rating: PG-13.
Word Count: 3247
Summary: Wherever she went as she traveled, she heard one name over and over: Martha Jones.
Spoilers: Through "Last of the Time Lords."
Written for
dw_femslash. :)The Earth was dying. The Master’s psychotic plans had dragged it to the brink of disaster, its people enslaved and its resource pillaged for use making weapons of war and destruction. “Don’t you remember anything before you woke up here?” the medic asked her as he leaned over to retie her ragged bandage and check her pulse.
She thought about it. She remembered... fire. Fire and ash, explosions, a friend - a voice she recognized though she couldn’t remember the name that went with it - yelling at her to get down, to stay out of the line of fire. “Were there metal things?” she asked. “Horrible metal things with... voices. They were killing everyone.”
The medic gave her a tight, unhappy smile. “The Toclafane. Terrible creatures. But that’s a good sign for you, I guess, that you remember that much.”
Something about that name doesn’t sit right with her, but it sounds strangely familiar nonetheless, and anyway, who is she to question? She had to learn her own name off the ID paperwork that was in her pocket when she was found. Winifred Clark. The student ID card in her wallet said that before the Master’s reign of terror began, she’d been a graduate student reading theoretical physics at the University of Bristol.
“You’re lucky, you know,” the medic told her as he packed his equipment into the old duffel bag he carried between work camps. “Most of the scientists were rounded up right at the beginning, and either sent to work in the Master’s labs or killed if they refused.”
“Maybe I wasn’t any good. Or maybe he just didn’t need physicists,” Winifred suggests.
The medic shakes his head. “Well, whatever it was, you’re better off. They don’t let the techs use radiation protection or anything in those labs, I’ve heard. Okay - that’s the best I can do for you, Miss Clark. You take care of that arm, and with a little more luck your memory will start coming back in time. You may never remember everything, but... honestly, I wish I could be so lucky as to not remember parts of these past two months. You know, they say...” He frowned and pressed his lips together tightly.
“What? Who says, and what?”
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “But they say there’s a woman out there, walking the world. They say she might know a way to defeat him. Martha Jones is her name.”
That was the first time Winifred heard of her, but it wasn’t the last. Wherever she went as she traveled, she heard one name over and over.
Martha Jones.
* * *
A month and a half later and some thousands of miles away, Martha Jones was not feeling particularly heroic. In fact, she felt miserable. She was holed up in a sanctuary provided by a small resistance cell in Mongolia - a tiny little hut made of corrugated metal and sod, hidden in a tiny valley in the mountains. It was meant to be just a stopping-point on the way to China and beyond that to Japan, but she’d gotten stuck in a tiny hut during some of the worst weather she’d ever seen, and had no idea when it would clear up enough for her to keep walking. All she knew at that moment was that every time she suggested leaving, the woman who’d appointed herself Martha’s unofficial interpreter went pale and shook her head very, very quickly. “Not now, not now,” everyone told her.
“If not now,” she asked, “then when?”
That, they couldn’t seem to tell her.
“The Doctor sends me out on this thing, trusts me to save the world, and I’m going to spend the rest of the year stuck in Mongolia,” Martha muttered to herself. “Very useful.”
Just as she was thinking about curling back into her blankets to try to sleep through the bad weather, someone knocked on the piece of sheet metal that served her hut as a door. Martha crouched back, immediately wary. Everyone in the nearby village was supposed to be at the work camp all day, but if one of them had got sick they might have made their way back to her for what little treatment she could provide - although she didn’t have much in the way of supplies, many of the people she’d met in her travels preferred her to the official work camp doctors on the basis that she was under no obligation to report injuries or ills to the camp overseers. On the other hand, it could just as likely be a particularly zealous guard out hunting for ‘deserters’ who’d tried to skip out on their holy duty to serve their lord and Master.
Thinking quickly, Martha snatched up the heavy teakettle she’d been using to boil her water, and leaned against the wall, waiting. After a long moment, the door opened and admitted a slightly-built figure wrapped in a heavy, patched coat. Martha grabbed the figure’s shoulder and spun them around to face her, still holding the kettle.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
The woman - mid-thirties, Caucasian, with delicate features and bits of long dark blonde hair sticking out from under her hood - blinked but otherwise looked unnervingly unintimidated. But, then, she was being threatened by a woman whose only weapon was a kettle, Martha reminded herself. “I’m looking for someone,” the woman told her calmly. “My name’s Winifred.”
“Winifred.” Martha raised an eyebrow.
“That’s what it said on the card.”
“So it’s a code name of some kind?”
The woman shrugged. “No, but I’m afraid I had a bout of amnesia a month or two back. I don’t remember much of anything before that. My ID--” she pulled out a battered leather wallet and flashed a student card that showed a brilliant grin that seemed to have far too many teeth, “says my name’s Winifred. Winifred Clark, from Bristol University. That’s all I’ve got to go on, so I have to believe it.”
“And who’s this you’re looking for, then? Do you know their name, or do you only have that on a card, too?” Martha asked. And then immediately felt guilty. “Sorry. Sorry, I just...”
Winifred shrugged. “It’s a fair question. I do know their name, as a matter of fact. I’m looking for a Martha Jones. I was told I might find her here.”
Martha tensed again. “Why are you looking for her?” she asked, trying - and probably failing, she suspected - to sound only vaguely interested.
“Because everyone says she can defeat the Master. And also because something about her sounds very familiar to me. I’m hoping maybe we’ve met before - like we knew each other in school or something. Maybe she can help me remember more about myself. And maybe I can help her, too,” Winifred added with a shadow of that brilliant smile in the photograph.
“Oh yeah? Fancy yourself a hero, do you?” Martha shook her head. “You can have it, if you ask me.”
“No, I don’t fancy myself a hero. I fancy myself a physicist. At least that’s what--”
“--The card tells you. Of course.” Martha chuckled softly. “All right, Winifred Clark from Bristol University. What if I know how to take you to Martha Jones?”
“I should certainly hope you know,” Winifred told her. This time the smile was more than a shadow.
“How do you mean?”
“I told you. There’s something about her that’s weirdly familiar to me. Something weirdly familiar about you, I should say. I knew it was you the minute I saw you. And don’t worry, I’m not about to get the Master’s men onto you. For one thing, they might make me walk outside again, if I did that, and I think my feet will freeze off if I go any further today.” Winifred dropped unceremoniously onto the pile of blankets Martha used for a bed. “But I take it you don’t recognize me?”
“Not a bit, sorry.”
Winifred shrugged. “No harm done. It’s just another mystery, I guess.”
“You said you’d had amnesia. Have you been seen by a medic?” Martha asked, sitting down on the bed, too, so that she could take a closer look at her mysterious visitor. No sign of contusion on the forehead, although that would probably have healed in more than a month...
“I have, for all the good they can do under these circumstances.” Winifred shook her head. “The best they could tell me was that it looked like their hadn’t been permanent damage to anything other than my memory, that my vision and reflexes and all that seemed fine, and that they couldn’t identify an obvious source of the impairment. If you want the truth, I think they all assumed I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome - disassociating myself from something terrible I saw in the first month of the Master’s campaign of terror, something like that.”
“Do you remember anything like that?”
“I remember fire, and someone shouting. And the Toclafane.”
“When they carried out the decimation order, maybe,” Martha suggested.
“Maybe,” said Winifred, her eyes narrowing as she stared into the middle distance, obviously hunting her dampened memory.
* * *
Decimate.
It wasn’t quite right. There was something in it, something familiar, something like the way she’d felt when she heard the name Martha Jones, or the first time she’d seen the other woman’s face. But the word wasn’t quite right.
Everything else, however, was going rather well, all things considered. When she took into account the world being controlled by a psychotic, megalomaniacal alien bent on interplanetary destruction and the wholesale slavery of the human race, when she considered that she was always cold and hungry, that her clothes were all dirty and that she hadn’t had a proper bath in as long as she could remember... Taking all of that into account, there was no rational reason that Winifred could think of for her to be so happy. But she was just that - genuinely happy for the first time that she could remember. Granted, that only accounted for the last two and a half months, but it was still fairly remarkable.
After a month holed up in the Mongolian mountains, she and Martha had managed to meet up with a small cell of resistance members who arranged transit for them over into China. The people there were in the same sort of situation they’d both seen everywhere else they’d been, but the fact that they were together seemed somehow to lighten the load for both of them. They split the weight of their supplies, traded off keeping guard when they didn’t feel safe enough to both sleep, and when they did... Well.
“You’re sure this is okay?” Winifred asked for the third time, as she laid her own blankets on top of Martha’s.
“Of course it is. God, it’s freezing in here. Come on, get under here.” Martha lifted up the blankets. She was fully dressed underneath them of course - it was too cold in the warehouse closet they’d requisitioned as a shelter to even think of undressing - but it still felt strange, getting into bed with her. “It’ll be like a sleepover,” Martha continued. “Or, you know - did you have sisters? Oh... God, I’m sorry, Win. You don’t remember, do you?”
Winifred shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But I’d feel horrible if I couldn’t remember Tish. That’s my sister, Laetitia. Tish.” Martha shook her head. “She’s up there, you know. With him, on that stupid ship.”
“I hope she’s all right.”
“Me, too. She’s a spitfire, though, our Tish.” Martha yawned, and then frowned deeply. “What’s wrong with me? My sister is up there, my parents, my friends... and I’m sitting here thinking that I wish we had some fuel for a fire, so that we could be warm and maybe heat up our water. They could be getting tortured every day... and I’m wishing we had a few packets of tea. They could be dead!”
“Shhh. You’ve got a lot on your mind. You’ve got the whole world hanging on your shoulders, Martha - you’re allowed to forget a bit of it every now and then.”
“But they’re my family--”
“Shhhh...” Winifred tapped her finger on Martha’s lips, and that... was probably a mistake, she realized as soon as she’d done it. Martha’s lips were a little chapped from the cold, but still unbelievably soft, and Winifred suddenly feels awkward in her own skin, as though her body remembers something her mind doesn’t yet. It probably remembers a lot of things that her mind doesn’t, she reminded herself, but at the moment only this bit is important.
Apparently, she thought with a moment of intensely ironic clarity, I fancy girls. The issue had never really come up, in the two months that she’d been traveling. She’d felt extremely fond of Martha - attached to her immediately, yes, she’d thought that had something to do with her memories and the way the other woman seemed immediately familiar to her. As for anything else... they’d been too busy trying to stay warm and safe and alive and away from the Master’s patrols to really get too interested in anything else. Granted, this was probably not the best time to come to that conclusion. But she felt sure she could work with it. Quick - while you’ve got her attention, say something intelligent. You’re clever! You can come up with something to disarm the situation!
What she meant to say, Winifred thought later, was something very intellectual and clever, possibly even philosophical, about how the sort of pressure that Martha was under makes it nearly impossible for her to cope simultaneously with all the pressures being placed on her. There might even have been a metaphorical connection to quantum physics involved somehow.
What came out of her mouth was, “Um.”
That was it. Um.
It was at that moment that it occurred to Winifred that a degree in physics did not necessarily indicate any degree of fluency with emotions or interpersonal communication.
“So basically... What I’m trying to say is... you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” she forced out. In too low a tone. It sounded like she was whispering. Why was she doing that? “You’ve got a lot on your mind, I mean, what with saving the world and all, and there’s no reason for you to be upset with yourself, because you’re remarkable. Really fantastic. And amazing. And also beautiful. At least I really think you are, and... I’m meant to be quite clever, so it must be true,” she finished, feeling slightly panicked and desperate to cut off the idiotic flow of words that was stemming from her mouth.
Martha, unsurprisingly, was staring at her. Looking, in fact, rather as though she thought Winifred had entirely lost her mind. Winifred wasn’t sure what to expect after that - maybe that the other woman would push her out of bed - ‘go sleep on the other side of the room, you freak,’ or something like that - or that she’d start crying, which would really put the whole lack of emotional intelligence thing into a bind. Instead, Martha did something that Winifred would never have guessed would happen: she kissed her.
“You never said anything about fancying girls,” Winifred accused when they parted for breath.
Martha smiled. “Neither did you.”
“Well, I haven’t before. At least not that I can remember.”
Martha’s smile broadened, and her eyes sparkled in the darkness. “Neither have I.”
“Could we try that kiss again, then? I have a feeling I could do better now that I’ve had a moment to get used to the idea,” Winifred suggested.
Martha laughed, and pulled her down into the blankets. Even with both of them under the covers, it was too cold to take off their clothes - which was a pity, Winifred thought. She would have loved to see Martha, preferably sprawled out on a brightly colored velvet bedspread on top of a fluffy feather mattress, her black hair clean and shining in the light of a brisk, sunny morning. Bright blue would suit her, Winifred thought - turquoise. That seemed just the color for Martha, although she had no idea why. They could lounge in a bed full of pillows, blissfully naked, and explore each other at their leisure. But that kind of pleasure would have to be for sometime in the future. Still, there was nothing wrong - nothing at all! - with shimmying her hands up Martha’s shirt, cupping her breasts, and then slipping her thumbs up beneath the underwires to get under her bra and tease her bare nipples. There was a unique sort of pleasure in the way Martha’s rough dark jeans scraped against Winifred’s chest as she slid down so that she could kiss Martha’s stomach, or the way Martha tugged the collar of Winifred’s shirt over her shoulder so that she could nip playfully at the sensitve skin there.
Under the cover of the rough old blankets that smelled of mildew, Winifred unbuttoned Martha’s jeans and slipped her hand down the front, and laughed out loud when Martha gasped. They pulled the blankets over their heads, and breathed on their hands so they wouldn’t be cold when they touched each other.
* * *
“They’re going to catch us up,” Winifred hissed between clenched teeth, clinging tightly to the rails of the little boat. “They’re too close not to.”
“I know, I know...” Martha leaned over the water. Out there, somewhere, the shore waited for them. But she couldn’t see it, and the boat pursuing them was faster, better-equipped, and had search lights. “We just need to get a little further...”
“Martha, this is insane. You have to get out. I’ll pull the boat over to that island - you can climb up onto the rocks, and I’ll be away before they see that you’ve got off.”
“Then they’ll chase you.”
“That’s the idea.”
“No. No, absolutely not, I--”
“You’re the one with the quest, Martha Jones. I’m just along for the ride.”
“You know you’re not. That’s not how it is.”
“But it is, if we ever want to be free of him. Look... you trust this Doctor bloke, right?” Saying his name, Winifred shivered. She always told herself that it was the obvious love in Martha’s voice when she talked about him that made her uncomfortable - that she was jealous of this man who had so much of Martha’s loyalty. In reality, though, she felt like the name... did something to her. It was like poking at a healing wound - it itched and niggled, and she knew it would only hurt if she pressed at it, but she couldn’t seem to leave it alone.
“Of course I do. I told you, he can fix it all.”
“I know.” Strangely, Winifred felt as though she really did. And yet she also felt as though Martha was missing some piece of the puzzle. Thinking about the Doctor made Winifred feel oddly tired. But this wasn’t about the Doctor. This was about Martha. “You believe in him. So do I. But more than that, I believe in you. And that means we have to get you across. We have to get you back to England so that you can stop the Master and put things right. And I’m not going to let some little boat of guards get in your way, all right?”
Martha nodded, looking miserable.
“I’ll come in as close as I can to this peninsula, all right? And I’ll drop you off. In the morning, you can find the contact the same as we originally planned - you’ll just have a little bit longer walk to meet her. When you get it all fixed and find the Doctor, you look me up, all right? I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Promise?”
“Of course I promise.”
Rock scraped against the bottom and side of the aluminum boat, and Winifred held Martha’s arm as she clambored over the side, and handed her backpack over once she was safely on the ground. She kissed her quickly, and then pushed off before Martha could demand that she come, too. Their pursuers - the Master’s men for sure - would be bound to catch them if the the boat obviously stopped there, or if it was clearly unmanned. As it was, there was a possibility Winifred could convince them that she’d run aground accidentally and then continued without letting anyone off. At least she hoped she could.
As she piloted the boat on an erratic course into the night, she pictured Martha alone on a strange shore. Alone for the rest of her walk. Only a few months left.
* * *
Day zero dawned bright and sunny, and for the first time in a year, the Human race had a reason to think that might be a good sign. A full year since the Master overtook the Earth. A full year since Martha Jones escaped the Valiant and began her quest. Three-hundred and sixty days since Winifred Clark woke up, dazed and confused in a medic’s tent outside a work camp in Sheffield with only the contents of her pockets to her name. A battered leather wallet with her student ID, a bus-ticket and a few old receipts, a paper sack with a few sweets left in it, and an old, broken pocket-watch.
On day zero, Winifred Clark remembered that dented old pocket-watch, and pulled it out of where she’d shoved it carelessly in with old maps and empty candy bar wrappers, at the bottom of the outside pocket of her backpack.
On day zero, while everyone around her shouted the Doctor’s name, Winifred Clark held the old watch tightly, and thought another name - “Martha Jones” - with all her strength and hope.
On day zero, time moved backward. And Winifred Clark saw it.
She felt it like the unwinding of a spring in her stomach, like waking up from a long sleep and realizing that the strange and terrible dreams are just that, and that they don’t mean anything in the real world. If she’d wanted to, she could have reached her hand out and caught protons in her hand, teased out the smallest particles in the air around her and made them dance. At last, she was in her element. In the middle of it all, while the year ticked backwards around her, Winifred Clark opened up the old pocket-watch, and remembered everything.
* * *
One Month Later
Leo was supposed to be bringing over the extra television he had leftover from his college days that morning, but he wasn’t supposed to be over for another hour, so when the doorbell rang at precisely eight, Martha wasn’t awake yet. It was her only day off that week, after all, and she’d felt entitled to just a little bit of sleeping in.
“Hold on!” she shouted at the door, scrambling to pull on pyjama bottoms, and grateful she’d at least slept in a vest. Everyone said it was getting colder, but with the memory of the year that never happened living in her skin, Martha doubted she’d ever really feel cold ever again. She glanced in the mirror as she passed the new flat’s tiny bathroom. Her hair looked an absolute fright, but her brother could cope with that. “Not like you to be out of the house before nine,” she teased as she opened the door. “I thought you said--”
A ghost from the past raised one delicate hand and grinned, toothy and brilliant. “Hi, Martha. Sorry, I didn’t wake you, did I? It’s not like you to sleep in.”
“Not...” Not while I was walking the Earth to stop the Master, Martha thought. But that couldn’t be what the girl meant - she’d never met Winifred Clark before the Year that Wasn’t, and nobody but the people who’d been on the Valiant remembered that year, so how could she possibly know who Martha was? “Not usually,” she amended, stepping back and gesturing her old friend into the living room that’s still full of boxes of unmade flat-pack furniture and second-hand-shop lamps. It takes a lot of work, Martha’s discovered, to start living arrangements from scratch again. “Come in. I’m sorry, but... Winifred, what are you doing here?”
“It’s not Winifred. Not really. That was someone’s idea of a joke, I think.” The woman smiled. “You can still call me that if you like, though. My name’s Romana. Well... Romanadvoratrelundar, but people always said even Winifred was long, so...” she shrugged. “Whichever you prefer. Nice walls, by the way. Paint them yourself?”
“I like turquoise," Martha replied, distracted. "I don’t understand... How do you remember any of that?”
“Of the year?” Winifred - Romana, Martha corrected herself - dropped lightly to the ground and folded her legs up beneath her, looking up at Martha with a strangely cheerful expression, as though everything that had happened to them was some kind of amusing little game. “It was the breaking of the paradox machine that did it, I think. Well, and this little toy.” She lifted the old pocket-watch, swinging it like a pendulum on its chain.
Martha felt a shiver of fear run down her spine. “You’re another one. Another Time Lord. Like the Doctor and--”
“Got it in one. And when the Master’s house of cards started to fall apart, something in me must have recognized that the time was right for me to remember myself. It was safe again, I suppose. The unmaking of the paradox machine was the last piece of the puzzle, but I’d already started to click before that - too many little things were familiar. There were too many reminders, and my mind was starting to catch up to the programming the Tardis circuits had used to replace my own memories. Everyone kept asking me what I remembered, and I said fire and ash, and a metallic voice shouting. It wasn’t the Toclafane. It was the Daleks.”
“Eugh.”
“You’ve met them, then. I’m sorry to hear that. I’d hoped they might not exist anymore... but I suppose that’s too much to ask.”
“So you were killed by the Daleks? Or your friends were, in... oh, in the war the Doctor used to talk about. The war with the Daleks. But how did you escape?”
“I didn’t. A friend did it for me.”
“A friend?”
Romana nodded. “That was the other thing I remembered. I heard a voice, shouting at me. A woman’s voice. She saved me. Do you know who that voice was, Martha Jones?”
Martha shook her head in mute wonder. It was too much to think...
“It was you. You saved me. You knew how the Chameleon Arch worked, and you made me get into it, and found a way to send me back to Earth... to exactly where I’d need to be to meet you again, for your first time. For me...” She laughed softly. “Well. I shouldn’t tell you too much. It wouldn’t do to let you in on too many anachronistic secrets. But suffice to say, I was right when I said that you were familiar to me. Very.”
“When all of that was over, I told the Doctor I couldn’t travel with him anymore.” Martha looked like she wanted to say that wasn’t true anymore, but couldn’t make herself frame the words. “My family need me...”
“Of course. Don’t worry.” Romana grins at her - the same toothy grin as before. “When you’re ready, you’ll find me. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-14 11:14 am (UTC)I'm not sure about your Romana voice: there are bits where she sounds very much like herself and bits where she doesn't. On the other hand, you have some of her mannerisms down pat, and as for the idea that Martha saved her from the War... that's brilliant, that is.
Plus, y'know, Who femslash. A thing the world needs more of, if you ask me.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-15 01:30 am (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed it, though!