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doyleTitle: As Ordinary Things Often Do
Author: Doyle
Pairings: Rose/Benton, Martha/Harry
Rating: PG
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
livii for the Martha and Rose ficathon. Combining two requests, one for a fic with these pairings and one for ‘"genetic transfer" through kissing = Rose and Martha, part-alien, time-travelling, crime-fighting lesbians!’ Unsurprisingly, it’s all rather silly… (there’s a little bit of angst, quickly gotten over, sorry about that). Title's nicked from a Wendy Cope poem.
Length: 3500 words
Summary: Benton and Harry need a TARDIS. Rose and Martha have one.
All right, so on the surface things didn’t look good; they were in the future, if those cars soaring past the window were any indication, with no way back to their own time or means of contacting HQ, and Benton was feeling more than a bit queasy – going however many centuries in half a second would do that, he supposed – and Dr Sullivan looked green too but… it had to be said, this was inarguably a grade A, first class Torchwood cock-up. And that was always something to feel smug about.
And add another one to the silver lining column – the two girls gawping at them from behind the bank of gleaming control panels were a sight more interesting to look at than the boffins who’d been working the machine back in their time. Both in their early twenties, assuming future-possibly-alien women aged the same as the normal sort, both on the small side, one of them a black girl in a leather jacket with her hair swept up into spikes, the other one white and blonde and wearing… Benton frowned. Not that he had a much of a memory for this sort of thing, but he was sure Jo Grant had owned a coat exactly like that.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Dr Sullivan said, swaying at Benton’s side, “but I don’t think that was supposed to happen. Unless I wasn’t listening when the Torchwood bod was explaining how it all worked.”
And then everybody was speaking at once:
“Where’s she gone? And who are you two?”
“Wait, what did you say about Torchwood?”
“Don’t suppose either of you girls knows how to reverse the… thingummy… polarity on that thing and send us back?”
“I know I’m not what you’d call an expert on this time travel business but on the whole, I have to say I preferred the TARDIS.”
The girls – who might have been futuristic but were probably not alien, Benton had decided, based on close observation of the fact that they possessed the correct number of limbs, eyes and breasts – both shut up sharpish.
“You travelled in a TARDIS?” the blonde one asked.
Sullivan blinked. “I did, yes. With some colleagues – well, friends. It stands for Time And Something Something Something Space. It’s a sort of time and space travel machine.”
“Yeah, we know,” she said, utterly incredulous. “We’ve got one.”
**
The two women, it transpired, were called Martha and Rose. They were futuristic, though not by much; early 21st century, which they both claimed to be overrated and not like the films said it would be.
And they really did have a TARDIS. Blue, police box shaped, bigger on the inside and everything. They also, to Harry’s supreme delight, had a robot dog standing guard just inside the doors.
“Hello! Who’s this little fellow?” he asked, kneeling on the grille deck to pat it. It nudged his hand with its metal nozzle of a nose in what he took to be a friendly hello. “There’s a clever chap.”
“Greetings, Harry-Master.”
“I say,” Harry said, wondering, “that’s a clever trick. Can he guess anyone’s name like that?”
“He’s never done it before.” Martha knelt beside him. Her arm brushed his as she reached out to tap the little robot on the head. Pretty girl, Harry thought absently. “How’d you know him, K9?”
“Doctor Harry Sullivan,” the dog recited. “UNIT medical officer, dates unknown due to localised temporal anomaly.”
“You’re a doctor? Me too, sort of, never took my final exams…”
“Long-term friend of Sarah Jane Smith,” K9 finished, sounding a bit put out at the interruption.
“Oh, you’re kidding.” Martha gave him a huge grin. “You know Sarah?”
“Bosom chums with the old girl,” Harry said, cheerfully unaware that behind him Rose’s eyebrows had shot up and Benton had shaken his head at her: no, he doesn’t mean that way. “That was who I travelled in one of these with. Sarah and the Doctor. Only left them off in Scotland last week.”
“But we know Sarah,” Martha said. “And it’s not one of these, it’s this one. It’s the same TARDIS. God, talk about a small world.”
“Small universe,” said Rose. She’d moved to the console in the centre of the room and had started flipping switches, Benton leaning over her shoulder to watch. She certainly looked like she knew what she was doing, although the yellow notes stuck all over the controls probably helped. DON’T EVER TOUCH THIS BUTTON said one, and Benton obediently didn’t. A bloke could get in trouble, going around pressing buttons like that.
“Can you really fly this thing?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks pretty complicated.”
“TARDIS – flying – right now, soldier-boy.”
“Really?” he asked, because she did seem to be hovering a bit over certain buttons.
“Well, K9 has to help a bit,” she admitted. “That’s why Sarah let us borrow him. We were on time-rings before we got the TARDIS back.”
“That was a right laugh,” Martha put in. “Couldn’t control where we were going and the rings kept homing in on places where the Doctor was, so we spent half our lives legging it round corners so he didn’t see us in case the universe ripped apart…”
“No money, no wardrobe room…”
“Ending up places where we didn’t speak the language…”
“That might’ve been us,” Benton said. “Stuck in this century, no way back. Lucky thing you two were on site.”
Rose shrugged. “We got a message telling us to go to those coordinates, we found the machine, it turned on, our other friend disappeared, you two turned up. She must have landed back in your time and sent the message to herself.”
“I hate those predestination things,” Martha complained.
Their other friend, Benton thought. The Doctor? Rose called their friend ‘she’ but he’d had three different faces in the time Benton had known him. Maybe turning into a woman wasn’t out of the question. If she’d swapped places with them… oh, the thought of the Brigadier confronted with a female Doctor was going to keep him entertained for a good long while.
“Still,” Rose said, “we can leave you back, pick her up. What date did you two come from?”
Benton told her.
“Oh.” It would have sounded ominous just from Rose. The way she and Martha said it together, and K9 just made a whirring noise, was very troubling indeed.
“What? The world doesn’t end next year or anything, does it?”
“Hope not, neither of us have been born,” Martha said. “But it’s like K9 said. There’s a temporal anomaly all around England in the Seventies, early Eighties. It’s really hard to get the coordinates right, or something.”
“We’ll try, though,” Rose said. “It just might take a while.”
Not that he wasn’t raring to get back on duty, but as she smiled reassuringly at him, pushing her hair back from her face, Benton decided he didn’t mind if it took a day or two. Maybe three.
**
“Well?”
“Well?” Martha mimicked. “Well what? We just went for a walk.”
“Oh, just a walk. ‘Cause by complete coincidence we landed on that really romantic planet even though we’re meant to be getting back to Earth, so you and Harry decided to go for a walk…” The pillow smacked her full in the face and she collapsed on Martha’s bed, giggling. Twenty-three years old, accidentally part-alien, and stuck a universe away from her family she might be, but that was no excuse for acting all grown up.
Martha flopped down beside her, her chin propped on her fists. “The sad thing is, it really was just a walk. D’you think he might be gay?”
“Dunno. Can robots be gay?”
“Not K9. Idiot.”
Rose stuck out her tongue. “He is in the navy.”
“That’s true,” Martha said sadly. She rolled onto her back, worrying the duvet with her heels. “It’s not as if I’m asking him to marry me! Short of writing ‘Doctor Sullivan, please shag me now’ across a t-shirt, what more can I do?”
“John’s as bad,” Rose said consolingly.
Martha looked at her, momentarily raised out of her Harry ennui. “It’s ‘John’ now, is it?” Bit of an unfortunate name, considering what had happened with the Doctor, but that couldn’t be helped. “Has he snogged you yet?”
“No.”
“Have you told him about the genetic-transfer-part-alien thing?”
“Course.”
“Have you, though?”
“Have you told Harry?”
“No chance.”
“Me neither.”
They sighed.
“Aren’t UNIT like Torchwood? Not your dad’s one. This universe’s Torchwood. Sort of against aliens, I mean.”
“John hasn’t said much about it. And Sarah’s never mentioned it. Jo used to work for them, didn’t she? John’s mentioned her.”
“She didn’t say anything about it.” Martha looked over at her. “Did Benton go to her wedding? You might have met him there. If you hadn’t been busy trying to get off with the best man, obviously.”
“I wasn’t the one who caught the bouquet.”
“So, no luck with Benton, then,” she said hastily, hoping Rose wouldn’t look over to her desk and realise she’d kept that bloody bouquet in a fit of sentiment and nostalgia. “It’s been three days. K9 might crack the coordinates tomorrow and they’ll be off. You’d think they’d show some interest.”
“It’s probably the time they’re from or something,” Rose said. “I mean, if you think about it, they’re old enough to be our granddads.”
They were silent for a minute, absorbing this quite horrible thought. Still, it wasn’t as if they were up to their eyes in nice, non-psychotic men who didn’t mind the time-travelling thing, and you had to make allowances.
“I’ve got this funny feeling,” Martha said, “that we might be taking a detour to that planet with the four moons and all the beaches. That all right?”
**
“Are you ever changing out of that uniform?”
Benton made a face. “No thanks. I had a look in your wardrobe room. Ruffled shirts as far as the eye can see. And a kilt.”
Rose eyed him, paying particular attention to his legs. “I don’t know. I think you’d look good in a kilt.”
“I would and all, but Dr Sullivan baggsied it. Where have they disappeared to, anyway?”
“Martha said something about going to get ice cream,” she said. “And there’s no ice cream on this planet, so they might be a while. Let’s sit here for a bit, yeah?”
It was a gorgeous view; three of the planet’s moons rising over the silver sea, the long grass around them waving gently in the breeze. It’d be almost perfect if it wasn’t for the commerciboats skimming across the water flashing hundred-foot high ads for Jelznek’s Emporium of Seaweed-Based Food Products.
“What do those lights coming from the boat mean?” Benton asked, and Rose remembered the TARDIS wouldn’t be translating for him; it’d taken long enough to get it working for the three of them.
“It’s… poetry,” she improvised, hoping to God he wouldn’t ask what it said. “Like Poems on the Underground. Only here it’s on the sea.”
“Clever.”
“Getting chilly,” she said, and he put his arm around her shoulders, right on cue. There you go, she thought smugly. No ‘shag me now’ t-shirt needed. Though the swimsuit probably helped. “What are you thinking about?”
She was expecting a flirty answer, not an honest one – if she’d thought honesty was on the cards she would’ve put sex and football as options one and two, not in that order. But what he said floored her: “Just wondering if we’ll get back the same day we left. I’m meant to be taking my kid sister out tonight – that night. Poor kid’ll be gutted if I’m missing.”
“That’s really sweet,” Rose finally said. Shouldn’t be surprised, she thought. A couple of days, that was nothing. You could know people years and there’d be whole oceans of things you didn’t know. “Is she much younger than you?”
“Fifteen years. She was barely walking when our mum and dad died.”
“Sorry,” she said, inadequate but sincere.
“You’ve never mentioned your family.”
She looked out to sea, keeping her eyes trained on the silver waves and that stupid ad. “Well, my real dad died when I was a baby. Now my mum’s in another universe with the other universe’s version of him. My baby sister was two when I left – she’d be six now. God, she’ll be at primary school. Probably already giving Mum grief.”
Good old John. He didn’t even blink at her family being a universe away. “Do you get to see them much?”
“Not really.”
“Not as often as you’d like?”
“Not ever.” And she could have explained all of it, the Judoon invasion, being told she wasn’t as hundred-percent human as she’d thought, and the realisation that she might just be able to get back – and then the machine that had taken Torchwood years to build burning out the second she got back into the universe where she’d been born. The awful moment she’d known she was on one side and Mum and Dad and Annie and Mickey were on the other, and that there was no way back this time.
She could have explained all that, but she’d decided ages ago she was finished crying for what couldn’t be changed. “You know what?” she said. “I miss my family, all the time. And I miss the Doctor. I hate that I tried to keep them both and I ended up with neither. But I love my friends. I love travelling in the TARDIS. I love that sometimes we end up saving people, just by accident, and that maybe it’s okay the Doctor’s gone because we’re still doing what he did. And are you ever going to snog me? Because I don’t think I can actually shut up till you do.”
“Fair enough,” he said, shifting his arm down her back and pulling her closer.
By the time she remembered she’d meant to mention the part-alien thing, it was a bit late to worry about it.
**
“By the way,” Martha said as she and Harry made for one of the umbrella-covered tables outside Jelznek’s Emporium of Seaweed-Based Food Products, “I’m part alien. Not an important part or anything. Just some mutating Time Lord DNA got into mine about four years ago. Thought I should mention it, since we got it from being snogged and we don’t know if it can get passed on the same way.”
“Jolly good,” Harry said. “This doesn’t look much like ice cream to me.”
“Let me try?” She leaned across and licked the green cone. “Nope. That is definitely ice cream. Seaweed flavoured.”
“It’s probably a taste that grows on you.” He gave it another tentative try while Martha attacked her own. “So, part alien, then?”
“Genetic transfer thing. Basically if I get cut it heals really quickly, I can sort of sense weird things happening with time, and I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’m aging. Which is great, obviously. If it does pass on through kissing we could open a booth and rake it in.”
“Do you ever think about packing this all in, the time-and-space travelling lark? Maybe giving Earth another go? I’m assuming you’re originally from Earth.”
“Oh, yeah. London, 2007.” She took a nibble of the tough kelp cone. “I keep saying I’ll go back some day. See my mum before she goes completely ballistic at me for not ringing her in… ever. Make up my mind whether I want to go back and finish my exams.”
“Not thinking of chucking in medicine altogether?”
Her ice cream was almost halfway gone before she answered. “I’d been working as a doctor for a couple of years when Rose found me,” she said. “John Smith – the Doctor, only he doesn’t know he’s the Doctor, very long story – got called up. Nineteen fifteen. And like a complete idiot I followed him. Thought I could do more good in France. Like I could do anything against all that blood and disease and death.”
“Where’s the Doctor now?” Harry asked, at a loss for anything else to say.
“A shell got him at Paschendale. Bad enough to get him sent home. He’s fine now, though, apart from the limp. Nice wife, couple of kids. No idea who Rose is, thinks I’m his ex-maid who went a bit mad once and followed him to France. We drop in sometimes. Joan makes good cakes.”
Harry nudged her hand with his knuckles, hating to see her look downhearted. “Chin up, old girl. Life goes on, so sing as well, or whatever that saying is.”
She closed her fingers over his, gave him one of those radiant smiles. “Oh, doesn’t it just? On and on and it’s brilliant, Harry, you wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen. I suppose you would, though, you travelled with the Doctor as well.”
“Not for very long. Were you in love with him?” he asked, out of curiosity rather than any sort of jealousy, and she looked at him as if she knew exactly why he asked.
“I thought so. Rose did too. And Sarah.”
He nodded. He’d expected that.
“Did she break your heart?”
“Lord, no. Might have dented it a bit.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.” She’d kept hold of his hand and now she stood up, tugging him along with her. “Come on. Come back to the TARDIS with me. Those two’ll be ages yet, it takes Rose about seven hours to do up that swimsuit once she takes it off.”
**
Looking at it from a strictly linear point of view, Benton and Harry had only been gone for a little over a day. This triumph of temporal navigation wasn’t enough to satisfy the Brigadier, who’d arrived from Geneva only hours after they’d vanished and hadn’t been best pleased about the unauthorised time experiment carried out while he’d been away.
“Twenty-six hours.”
“Yes sir,” Benton said.
“It occurs to me,” said the Brigadier, “that on your twenty-six hour trip both you and Dr Sullivan appear to have cultivated rather impressive suntans.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
That glare could turn you to stone, so canteen gossip said. “That wasn’t a compliment, Mr Benton. What were Torchwood personnel doing on UNIT property in the first place? And how…”
The door to the inner office opened. Benton had been maintaining a level stare fixed to a spot on the wall, but there was no chance of keeping that up. The woman in the doorway was gorgeous. She swept into the room, holding her long dress above the floor and said, “Alistair, either your accent has improved beyond measure or the Ship is translating for me. I think I’ll have to take my leave now.”
He swore he could see the Brigadier go pink beneath his moustache. “This is RSM Benton, one of my officers,” he said, “Benton, this is Madame de Pompadour. She’s visiting us from the eighteenth century. Torchwood’s fault, of course.”
“You must be Reinette,” was all he could think to say. “Rose and Martha’s other friend. They talked a lot about you.”
“Anyway,” the Brigadier said, “I’ll look forward to your report. That’ll be all. I’ll see that Jeanne… that the young lady gets safely to her ship.”
From behind his head, Reinette – or whatever her name was - winked at him, with a smile that reminded him an awful lot of Rose’s. Benton tried hard not to smile back.
**
“Where to now?” Rose asked, once Reinette was back on board and the Seventies – or Eighties, K9 didn’t seem too sure – were well behind them, the viewscreen filled with the reassuring whirls of the vortex.
“Pity they couldn’t stay,” Martha said. “They were nice. They were both really nice.”
“There’s something so commanding about Englishmen,” Reinette said, smirking at some happy memory neither of them quite liked to ask about.
Martha yawned and stretched her arms over her head, enjoying the feel of it along her spine. “Anyway. Rose’s turn to pick. I’m going to bed.”
“I’m going to the library,” Reinette said. “Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s such a regal name. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere before.”
Which left Rose alone with a tin dog and a time machine and all of space and time to choose from.
“He probably didn’t even mean it,” she told K9. “I mean, it’s just the sort of thing you say. ‘I’m leaving the army in a couple of years anyway, come and see if I’m free’. Bet he says that to all the time-travelling girls.”
“Coordinates, Mistress?”
Oh, what the hell. At least if she did it quickly while the other two were asleep they couldn’t spend the next hundred years taking the piss. “Where we were, plus three years. And just don’t say anything, K9, all right?”
**
A corporal he didn’t even recognise – not much more than a kid, really – walked him off the base. “What do you think you’ll do now, sir?” he asked, all formality and disinterest.
Across the road, something was making the fallen leaves on the pavement dance, and a sound like nothing else on Earth seemed to slide sideways from the air.
“Oh,” ex-Sergeant Benton (rtd) said, enjoying the look on the terrified young man’s face, “I've been thinking I might travel.”
Author: Doyle
Pairings: Rose/Benton, Martha/Harry
Rating: PG
Notes: For
livii for the Martha and Rose ficathon. Combining two requests, one for a fic with these pairings and one for ‘"genetic transfer" through kissing = Rose and Martha, part-alien, time-travelling, crime-fighting lesbians!’ Unsurprisingly, it’s all rather silly… (there’s a little bit of angst, quickly gotten over, sorry about that). Title's nicked from a Wendy Cope poem.Length: 3500 words
Summary: Benton and Harry need a TARDIS. Rose and Martha have one.
All right, so on the surface things didn’t look good; they were in the future, if those cars soaring past the window were any indication, with no way back to their own time or means of contacting HQ, and Benton was feeling more than a bit queasy – going however many centuries in half a second would do that, he supposed – and Dr Sullivan looked green too but… it had to be said, this was inarguably a grade A, first class Torchwood cock-up. And that was always something to feel smug about.
And add another one to the silver lining column – the two girls gawping at them from behind the bank of gleaming control panels were a sight more interesting to look at than the boffins who’d been working the machine back in their time. Both in their early twenties, assuming future-possibly-alien women aged the same as the normal sort, both on the small side, one of them a black girl in a leather jacket with her hair swept up into spikes, the other one white and blonde and wearing… Benton frowned. Not that he had a much of a memory for this sort of thing, but he was sure Jo Grant had owned a coat exactly like that.
“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Dr Sullivan said, swaying at Benton’s side, “but I don’t think that was supposed to happen. Unless I wasn’t listening when the Torchwood bod was explaining how it all worked.”
And then everybody was speaking at once:
“Where’s she gone? And who are you two?”
“Wait, what did you say about Torchwood?”
“Don’t suppose either of you girls knows how to reverse the… thingummy… polarity on that thing and send us back?”
“I know I’m not what you’d call an expert on this time travel business but on the whole, I have to say I preferred the TARDIS.”
The girls – who might have been futuristic but were probably not alien, Benton had decided, based on close observation of the fact that they possessed the correct number of limbs, eyes and breasts – both shut up sharpish.
“You travelled in a TARDIS?” the blonde one asked.
Sullivan blinked. “I did, yes. With some colleagues – well, friends. It stands for Time And Something Something Something Space. It’s a sort of time and space travel machine.”
“Yeah, we know,” she said, utterly incredulous. “We’ve got one.”
**
The two women, it transpired, were called Martha and Rose. They were futuristic, though not by much; early 21st century, which they both claimed to be overrated and not like the films said it would be.
And they really did have a TARDIS. Blue, police box shaped, bigger on the inside and everything. They also, to Harry’s supreme delight, had a robot dog standing guard just inside the doors.
“Hello! Who’s this little fellow?” he asked, kneeling on the grille deck to pat it. It nudged his hand with its metal nozzle of a nose in what he took to be a friendly hello. “There’s a clever chap.”
“Greetings, Harry-Master.”
“I say,” Harry said, wondering, “that’s a clever trick. Can he guess anyone’s name like that?”
“He’s never done it before.” Martha knelt beside him. Her arm brushed his as she reached out to tap the little robot on the head. Pretty girl, Harry thought absently. “How’d you know him, K9?”
“Doctor Harry Sullivan,” the dog recited. “UNIT medical officer, dates unknown due to localised temporal anomaly.”
“You’re a doctor? Me too, sort of, never took my final exams…”
“Long-term friend of Sarah Jane Smith,” K9 finished, sounding a bit put out at the interruption.
“Oh, you’re kidding.” Martha gave him a huge grin. “You know Sarah?”
“Bosom chums with the old girl,” Harry said, cheerfully unaware that behind him Rose’s eyebrows had shot up and Benton had shaken his head at her: no, he doesn’t mean that way. “That was who I travelled in one of these with. Sarah and the Doctor. Only left them off in Scotland last week.”
“But we know Sarah,” Martha said. “And it’s not one of these, it’s this one. It’s the same TARDIS. God, talk about a small world.”
“Small universe,” said Rose. She’d moved to the console in the centre of the room and had started flipping switches, Benton leaning over her shoulder to watch. She certainly looked like she knew what she was doing, although the yellow notes stuck all over the controls probably helped. DON’T EVER TOUCH THIS BUTTON said one, and Benton obediently didn’t. A bloke could get in trouble, going around pressing buttons like that.
“Can you really fly this thing?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks pretty complicated.”
“TARDIS – flying – right now, soldier-boy.”
“Really?” he asked, because she did seem to be hovering a bit over certain buttons.
“Well, K9 has to help a bit,” she admitted. “That’s why Sarah let us borrow him. We were on time-rings before we got the TARDIS back.”
“That was a right laugh,” Martha put in. “Couldn’t control where we were going and the rings kept homing in on places where the Doctor was, so we spent half our lives legging it round corners so he didn’t see us in case the universe ripped apart…”
“No money, no wardrobe room…”
“Ending up places where we didn’t speak the language…”
“That might’ve been us,” Benton said. “Stuck in this century, no way back. Lucky thing you two were on site.”
Rose shrugged. “We got a message telling us to go to those coordinates, we found the machine, it turned on, our other friend disappeared, you two turned up. She must have landed back in your time and sent the message to herself.”
“I hate those predestination things,” Martha complained.
Their other friend, Benton thought. The Doctor? Rose called their friend ‘she’ but he’d had three different faces in the time Benton had known him. Maybe turning into a woman wasn’t out of the question. If she’d swapped places with them… oh, the thought of the Brigadier confronted with a female Doctor was going to keep him entertained for a good long while.
“Still,” Rose said, “we can leave you back, pick her up. What date did you two come from?”
Benton told her.
“Oh.” It would have sounded ominous just from Rose. The way she and Martha said it together, and K9 just made a whirring noise, was very troubling indeed.
“What? The world doesn’t end next year or anything, does it?”
“Hope not, neither of us have been born,” Martha said. “But it’s like K9 said. There’s a temporal anomaly all around England in the Seventies, early Eighties. It’s really hard to get the coordinates right, or something.”
“We’ll try, though,” Rose said. “It just might take a while.”
Not that he wasn’t raring to get back on duty, but as she smiled reassuringly at him, pushing her hair back from her face, Benton decided he didn’t mind if it took a day or two. Maybe three.
**
“Well?”
“Well?” Martha mimicked. “Well what? We just went for a walk.”
“Oh, just a walk. ‘Cause by complete coincidence we landed on that really romantic planet even though we’re meant to be getting back to Earth, so you and Harry decided to go for a walk…” The pillow smacked her full in the face and she collapsed on Martha’s bed, giggling. Twenty-three years old, accidentally part-alien, and stuck a universe away from her family she might be, but that was no excuse for acting all grown up.
Martha flopped down beside her, her chin propped on her fists. “The sad thing is, it really was just a walk. D’you think he might be gay?”
“Dunno. Can robots be gay?”
“Not K9. Idiot.”
Rose stuck out her tongue. “He is in the navy.”
“That’s true,” Martha said sadly. She rolled onto her back, worrying the duvet with her heels. “It’s not as if I’m asking him to marry me! Short of writing ‘Doctor Sullivan, please shag me now’ across a t-shirt, what more can I do?”
“John’s as bad,” Rose said consolingly.
Martha looked at her, momentarily raised out of her Harry ennui. “It’s ‘John’ now, is it?” Bit of an unfortunate name, considering what had happened with the Doctor, but that couldn’t be helped. “Has he snogged you yet?”
“No.”
“Have you told him about the genetic-transfer-part-alien thing?”
“Course.”
“Have you, though?”
“Have you told Harry?”
“No chance.”
“Me neither.”
They sighed.
“Aren’t UNIT like Torchwood? Not your dad’s one. This universe’s Torchwood. Sort of against aliens, I mean.”
“John hasn’t said much about it. And Sarah’s never mentioned it. Jo used to work for them, didn’t she? John’s mentioned her.”
“She didn’t say anything about it.” Martha looked over at her. “Did Benton go to her wedding? You might have met him there. If you hadn’t been busy trying to get off with the best man, obviously.”
“I wasn’t the one who caught the bouquet.”
“So, no luck with Benton, then,” she said hastily, hoping Rose wouldn’t look over to her desk and realise she’d kept that bloody bouquet in a fit of sentiment and nostalgia. “It’s been three days. K9 might crack the coordinates tomorrow and they’ll be off. You’d think they’d show some interest.”
“It’s probably the time they’re from or something,” Rose said. “I mean, if you think about it, they’re old enough to be our granddads.”
They were silent for a minute, absorbing this quite horrible thought. Still, it wasn’t as if they were up to their eyes in nice, non-psychotic men who didn’t mind the time-travelling thing, and you had to make allowances.
“I’ve got this funny feeling,” Martha said, “that we might be taking a detour to that planet with the four moons and all the beaches. That all right?”
**
“Are you ever changing out of that uniform?”
Benton made a face. “No thanks. I had a look in your wardrobe room. Ruffled shirts as far as the eye can see. And a kilt.”
Rose eyed him, paying particular attention to his legs. “I don’t know. I think you’d look good in a kilt.”
“I would and all, but Dr Sullivan baggsied it. Where have they disappeared to, anyway?”
“Martha said something about going to get ice cream,” she said. “And there’s no ice cream on this planet, so they might be a while. Let’s sit here for a bit, yeah?”
It was a gorgeous view; three of the planet’s moons rising over the silver sea, the long grass around them waving gently in the breeze. It’d be almost perfect if it wasn’t for the commerciboats skimming across the water flashing hundred-foot high ads for Jelznek’s Emporium of Seaweed-Based Food Products.
“What do those lights coming from the boat mean?” Benton asked, and Rose remembered the TARDIS wouldn’t be translating for him; it’d taken long enough to get it working for the three of them.
“It’s… poetry,” she improvised, hoping to God he wouldn’t ask what it said. “Like Poems on the Underground. Only here it’s on the sea.”
“Clever.”
“Getting chilly,” she said, and he put his arm around her shoulders, right on cue. There you go, she thought smugly. No ‘shag me now’ t-shirt needed. Though the swimsuit probably helped. “What are you thinking about?”
She was expecting a flirty answer, not an honest one – if she’d thought honesty was on the cards she would’ve put sex and football as options one and two, not in that order. But what he said floored her: “Just wondering if we’ll get back the same day we left. I’m meant to be taking my kid sister out tonight – that night. Poor kid’ll be gutted if I’m missing.”
“That’s really sweet,” Rose finally said. Shouldn’t be surprised, she thought. A couple of days, that was nothing. You could know people years and there’d be whole oceans of things you didn’t know. “Is she much younger than you?”
“Fifteen years. She was barely walking when our mum and dad died.”
“Sorry,” she said, inadequate but sincere.
“You’ve never mentioned your family.”
She looked out to sea, keeping her eyes trained on the silver waves and that stupid ad. “Well, my real dad died when I was a baby. Now my mum’s in another universe with the other universe’s version of him. My baby sister was two when I left – she’d be six now. God, she’ll be at primary school. Probably already giving Mum grief.”
Good old John. He didn’t even blink at her family being a universe away. “Do you get to see them much?”
“Not really.”
“Not as often as you’d like?”
“Not ever.” And she could have explained all of it, the Judoon invasion, being told she wasn’t as hundred-percent human as she’d thought, and the realisation that she might just be able to get back – and then the machine that had taken Torchwood years to build burning out the second she got back into the universe where she’d been born. The awful moment she’d known she was on one side and Mum and Dad and Annie and Mickey were on the other, and that there was no way back this time.
She could have explained all that, but she’d decided ages ago she was finished crying for what couldn’t be changed. “You know what?” she said. “I miss my family, all the time. And I miss the Doctor. I hate that I tried to keep them both and I ended up with neither. But I love my friends. I love travelling in the TARDIS. I love that sometimes we end up saving people, just by accident, and that maybe it’s okay the Doctor’s gone because we’re still doing what he did. And are you ever going to snog me? Because I don’t think I can actually shut up till you do.”
“Fair enough,” he said, shifting his arm down her back and pulling her closer.
By the time she remembered she’d meant to mention the part-alien thing, it was a bit late to worry about it.
**
“By the way,” Martha said as she and Harry made for one of the umbrella-covered tables outside Jelznek’s Emporium of Seaweed-Based Food Products, “I’m part alien. Not an important part or anything. Just some mutating Time Lord DNA got into mine about four years ago. Thought I should mention it, since we got it from being snogged and we don’t know if it can get passed on the same way.”
“Jolly good,” Harry said. “This doesn’t look much like ice cream to me.”
“Let me try?” She leaned across and licked the green cone. “Nope. That is definitely ice cream. Seaweed flavoured.”
“It’s probably a taste that grows on you.” He gave it another tentative try while Martha attacked her own. “So, part alien, then?”
“Genetic transfer thing. Basically if I get cut it heals really quickly, I can sort of sense weird things happening with time, and I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’m aging. Which is great, obviously. If it does pass on through kissing we could open a booth and rake it in.”
“Do you ever think about packing this all in, the time-and-space travelling lark? Maybe giving Earth another go? I’m assuming you’re originally from Earth.”
“Oh, yeah. London, 2007.” She took a nibble of the tough kelp cone. “I keep saying I’ll go back some day. See my mum before she goes completely ballistic at me for not ringing her in… ever. Make up my mind whether I want to go back and finish my exams.”
“Not thinking of chucking in medicine altogether?”
Her ice cream was almost halfway gone before she answered. “I’d been working as a doctor for a couple of years when Rose found me,” she said. “John Smith – the Doctor, only he doesn’t know he’s the Doctor, very long story – got called up. Nineteen fifteen. And like a complete idiot I followed him. Thought I could do more good in France. Like I could do anything against all that blood and disease and death.”
“Where’s the Doctor now?” Harry asked, at a loss for anything else to say.
“A shell got him at Paschendale. Bad enough to get him sent home. He’s fine now, though, apart from the limp. Nice wife, couple of kids. No idea who Rose is, thinks I’m his ex-maid who went a bit mad once and followed him to France. We drop in sometimes. Joan makes good cakes.”
Harry nudged her hand with his knuckles, hating to see her look downhearted. “Chin up, old girl. Life goes on, so sing as well, or whatever that saying is.”
She closed her fingers over his, gave him one of those radiant smiles. “Oh, doesn’t it just? On and on and it’s brilliant, Harry, you wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen. I suppose you would, though, you travelled with the Doctor as well.”
“Not for very long. Were you in love with him?” he asked, out of curiosity rather than any sort of jealousy, and she looked at him as if she knew exactly why he asked.
“I thought so. Rose did too. And Sarah.”
He nodded. He’d expected that.
“Did she break your heart?”
“Lord, no. Might have dented it a bit.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.” She’d kept hold of his hand and now she stood up, tugging him along with her. “Come on. Come back to the TARDIS with me. Those two’ll be ages yet, it takes Rose about seven hours to do up that swimsuit once she takes it off.”
**
Looking at it from a strictly linear point of view, Benton and Harry had only been gone for a little over a day. This triumph of temporal navigation wasn’t enough to satisfy the Brigadier, who’d arrived from Geneva only hours after they’d vanished and hadn’t been best pleased about the unauthorised time experiment carried out while he’d been away.
“Twenty-six hours.”
“Yes sir,” Benton said.
“It occurs to me,” said the Brigadier, “that on your twenty-six hour trip both you and Dr Sullivan appear to have cultivated rather impressive suntans.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
That glare could turn you to stone, so canteen gossip said. “That wasn’t a compliment, Mr Benton. What were Torchwood personnel doing on UNIT property in the first place? And how…”
The door to the inner office opened. Benton had been maintaining a level stare fixed to a spot on the wall, but there was no chance of keeping that up. The woman in the doorway was gorgeous. She swept into the room, holding her long dress above the floor and said, “Alistair, either your accent has improved beyond measure or the Ship is translating for me. I think I’ll have to take my leave now.”
He swore he could see the Brigadier go pink beneath his moustache. “This is RSM Benton, one of my officers,” he said, “Benton, this is Madame de Pompadour. She’s visiting us from the eighteenth century. Torchwood’s fault, of course.”
“You must be Reinette,” was all he could think to say. “Rose and Martha’s other friend. They talked a lot about you.”
“Anyway,” the Brigadier said, “I’ll look forward to your report. That’ll be all. I’ll see that Jeanne… that the young lady gets safely to her ship.”
From behind his head, Reinette – or whatever her name was - winked at him, with a smile that reminded him an awful lot of Rose’s. Benton tried hard not to smile back.
**
“Where to now?” Rose asked, once Reinette was back on board and the Seventies – or Eighties, K9 didn’t seem too sure – were well behind them, the viewscreen filled with the reassuring whirls of the vortex.
“Pity they couldn’t stay,” Martha said. “They were nice. They were both really nice.”
“There’s something so commanding about Englishmen,” Reinette said, smirking at some happy memory neither of them quite liked to ask about.
Martha yawned and stretched her arms over her head, enjoying the feel of it along her spine. “Anyway. Rose’s turn to pick. I’m going to bed.”
“I’m going to the library,” Reinette said. “Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s such a regal name. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere before.”
Which left Rose alone with a tin dog and a time machine and all of space and time to choose from.
“He probably didn’t even mean it,” she told K9. “I mean, it’s just the sort of thing you say. ‘I’m leaving the army in a couple of years anyway, come and see if I’m free’. Bet he says that to all the time-travelling girls.”
“Coordinates, Mistress?”
Oh, what the hell. At least if she did it quickly while the other two were asleep they couldn’t spend the next hundred years taking the piss. “Where we were, plus three years. And just don’t say anything, K9, all right?”
**
A corporal he didn’t even recognise – not much more than a kid, really – walked him off the base. “What do you think you’ll do now, sir?” he asked, all formality and disinterest.
Across the road, something was making the fallen leaves on the pavement dance, and a sound like nothing else on Earth seemed to slide sideways from the air.
“Oh,” ex-Sergeant Benton (rtd) said, enjoying the look on the terrified young man’s face, “I've been thinking I might travel.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2007-06-18 02:51 am (UTC)“Did she break your heart?”
“Lord, no. Might have dented it a bit.”
*squishes Harry*
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on 2007-06-18 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-18 04:09 am (UTC)I hate that I tried to keep them both and I ended up with neither. But I love my friends.
I love this concept, too . . . so bitterly sad, and yet the Rose you've got here seems to have actually LEARNED sometihng instead of being emo depressed and how I appreciate that <3
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on 2007-06-18 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-18 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-18 09:55 am (UTC)REINETTE/BRIG! theirloveissoimprobableyetperfect
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on 2007-06-18 03:28 pm (UTC)This is just...ideal. Fantastic. Perfect. A million more adjectives. It's time travelling part-aliens AND Harry/Martha, Rose/Benton! With the bonus of Harry really still being in the navy and Benton with that last line!! My god, they're both perfectly written, and so are Rose and Martha and Reinette/Brig is the best thing EVER.
Love the story, love the bit about the UNIT dating problems!!, love the suntans and the cracks on Torchwood. And now I'll stop babbling, but oh, yay!
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on 2007-06-23 07:50 am (UTC)So, thanks again - this is a marvellous treat and I will be enjoying it for a long time to come.
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on 2007-06-23 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-24 08:33 am (UTC)I am so happy I gave you the chance to write them, then! I am still in awe of how perfectly you got them both down. :)
want AU fic where 60-something retired Harry and his glamorous young protege solve alien medical mysteries...
...I...I might have started writing that in my head already, or something. Er. Not for real as I have loads else to write but, erm, yeah. SO. AWESOME.
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on 2007-06-18 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-19 04:21 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-20 11:15 am (UTC)Oh, I lovelovelove this. Martha and Rose doing the time-travelling business (with Reinette, oh yay, and I totally couldn't figure out who it was and then that was perfect), and dear beloved Harry being so wonderful, and Benton and Rose's swimsuit which she can't do up and Martha knows that and woo. And the Brig being narky about suntans, and K9! and they all know Sarah and went to Jo's wedding and Still, it wasn’t as if they were up to their eyes in nice, non-psychotic men who didn’t mind the time-travelling thing, and you had to make allowances. Brilliantness. :D
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on 2007-06-20 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-06-26 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-15 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-15 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-16 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-17 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-03 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-03 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-03 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-08 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-09 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-05-15 02:18 pm (UTC)This was LOVELY! I want more so bad, it's kind of ridiculous.