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thornyrose42) wrote2009-07-11 01:41 am
Fic: The Many
Two weeks later Martha rings the Doctor.
“You did that on purpose didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
His sigh is a crackle of static in her ear.
“We could have been here, we could have helped, you could have fixed this.” Her voice cracks.
“Martha, I…”
“You whisked us away, half way across space and time, and brought us back when it was all over. Convenient that you came on that week wasn’t it? And you just happened to have Sarah Jane and the kids with you? What a coincidence! God I should have know something was up, I should have…”
“I had to.”
“Don’t you dare!” He breaths in, sharply, and there is a knife edge silence for a moment. She draws her anger back in, then says quietly, “You know where you found us? All those kids we were working with at the aid outpost? We got back, we waved you off and we walked back. There was nothing left. The whole place was deserted. The army had taken them. Gwen tells me that back home they took the bottom ten percent, the league tables you know, but here… here everyone is the bottom ten percent. I bet they didn’t even debate it; they just went out and rounded them up. Child-catchers!”
“I’m sorry, I’m so…”
“Please, no, just no.”
His voice continues relentless.
“It was a fixed point. It was… it, it needed to happen. Somethings, some events, history revolves around them. I can’t change that.”
“But what about, all the stuff you’ve said about it being a ball, like jelly…” She could feel herself starting to plead and stopped.
“I didn’t want… I knew you would, that you would all fight, but this wasn’t your fight, Martha. Dr. Jones, you know that sometimes, sometimes there isn’t anything you can do, not everybody lives.”
“Like Ianto. Did you know that he died? I talked to Jack, he wouldn’t answer my calls but I got through to Gwen and she forced the phone into his hand or something. He wouldn’t say much, but it isn’t just Ianto he had to, he had to…”
Her tears are choked up in the back of her throat. It feels like she’s swallowed a pine cone.
“I know.”
“I don’t know how he did it. I keep trying to imagine what I would have done. If it was Keisha looking at me as I killed her. And I don’t know. I don’t know…”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. She counts the static bursts in her ear. Twenty breaths later he says:
“You saved a hundred and six people, you and Tom and Sarah Jane and Luke and Rani and Clyde, you saved that colony. You were brilliant. If you hadn’t been there...”
Another stomach punch of guilt and anger hit her. She almost laughed with the shock.
“There are no easy choices are there Doctor?”
“Sometimes...I have found them too easy.”
She hangs up shortly afterwards. It is too hard to talk to the Doctor now. She goes back to hunting down her missing children and that night she tells Tom what she couldn’t tell the Doctor. She is glad, guiltily glad, that she didn’t have to choose between the many and the few. She is too sure that she would have made the wrong choice.
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I had wondered if that was the reason he was conveniently absent when this is exactly the sort of situation he usually shows up for.
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But I still think that if he could have stepped in he would have.
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And of course you can't cross your own timeline or something...
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:)
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the one about the Great Cobalt Pyramid being built on the ruins of the Torchwood Institute. They never specified WHICH branch of Torchwood it was. So... because 3 was absolutely without question obliterated while Canary Wharf may have had only some structural damage... yeah. it had to happen because he'd already crossed that timeline where it was fact? and at the time had jack with him making it fact for him too?... coupled with the problem of jack being a fact himself? god, not i'm confusing myself!
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:)
Though I hadn't remembered that been so long since I watched season one.
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