writers_muses Prompt 131

In the end, it happened by accident.

It took Martha a long time to realise that she’d fallen in love with Mickey. She’d fallen in love with Tom suddenly and sharply and desperately, because he’d been so normal. He’d been what she’d needed, even if, in the long term, he probably wouldn’t have been what she’d wanted. (She could think that now, even if she couldn’t say it. It had been over a year, after all.) With Mickey, things moved slowly. So slowly that it took her a while to realised that they’d moved at all.

She let him crash on her couch after the Dalek invasion. He never left.

He told her about traveling a paralell planet in a battered van, destroying cyber conversion units and ending the lives of the people they’d been too late to save. In return, she told him about walking the Earth, telling her stories and praying that the Doctor’s plan would work.

They talked about the planets they’d visited and the things they’d seen with the Doctor. They didn’t mention the things that had gone wrong. Unrequited love and loss and the feeling of always being second best. They didn’t need to.

He made her laugh. She’d almost forgotten she was capable of that.

Sometimes, they talked about Tom. Eventually, it stopped hurting as much as it had.

When they kissed for the first time, Martha wondered what they’d been waiting for.

***

“Did you love him? The Doctor?”

Martha raised an eyebrow, giving Mickey an arch look over the rim of her mug of instant coffee. They’d been talking about Rose and the parallel universe, so the question wasn’t wholly surprising. She had a feeling that he’d wanted to ask it for a while.

Her answer to that particular question had changed over time. Once, she’d have responded with an emphatic, embarrased ‘no’. During the year that the planet no longer remembered, it had changed into an almost desperate ‘yes’, as if loving him and fighting for him was enough to guarantee success and survival. Now:

“I don’t know,” she replied honestly, “Maybe I was just in love with what he showed me. All that life … all those planets … it was more than I’d ever dreamed of seeing.”

“And you still walked away from him.”

It wasn’t a question, but it felt like one. She put down her mug and turned to face Mickey – sitting next to her on a battered sofa that would never be as comfortable as the one that had been destroyed in the Master’s explosion – properly.

“I don’t regret it,” she said, emphatically. “I wasn’t going to spend my whole life pinning after someone who wouldn’t love me back. I had to get over him. Besides, my family needed me. The Earth needed me.”

That was why her job at UNIT was so important. Every week she fought dozen of small battles. Battles that helped to maintain the safety and security of the planet she loved, even if the Doctor wouldn’t have been interested in them.

“Martha Jones, saviour of the Earth,” said Mickey, giving her a grin that was affectionate as well as teasing.

“That’s Doctor Jones, actually,” she retorted, before adding: “Mickey Smith, defender of the Earth.”

“That’s why you should go freelance. We’d make a great team.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

She answered quickly, then realised that, somehow, her hand had found his during the course of the conversation. She could smell his aftershave and their cooling cups of coffee and the smell of their nextdoor neighbour’s barbaque through the open window. The TV murmured quietly in the background. It was so normal that, for Martha and Mickey, it was almost abnormal.

“We’re still a team.”

“Except when you refuse to do the washing up.”

“Even when I refuse to do the washing up.”

Martha laughed – abnormally loud and a little too long – at that. The sound lapsed into a silence that wasn’t as companionable as it usually was. There was a certain … not uneasiness in it, but certainly a confusing anticipation. Part of her wondered if Mickey kissed her just to break it, but not for long. Not for long.

Prompt: "I held a moment in my hand. Brilliant as a star and fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour. I didn't know I held opportunity."
Word Count: 701