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"The Doctor is here," Joan says, and at first John thinks she's talking about that pleasant young man from the surgery who calls in every other day to take his blood pressure and give him more pills. But those visits have become a part of the normal routine of their lives since John became ill, so John can't understand why Joan appears so agitated. Oh, she's trying to hide it, but after forty years he can read the signs: it's in the way she's tugging at her wedding ring, twisting it round and round on her finger as if trying to reassure herself of its solidity. Something is wrong, and John feels sure he should know what it is, but he often finds it hard to concentrate, these days, and his brain stubbornly refuses to provide him with anything beyond a vague sense of apprehension.
But still he can't think why, so: "Best send him up, then."
Joan tugs at her wedding ring again. She glances down, notices what she's doing, and pushes both hands into the pockets of her house-apron. "Her. The Doctor's come to see you, John. She's downstairs."
He is about to tell her not to be so foolish—a woman doctor, of all things—but at last his sluggish brain makes the right connections and he remembers. Or perhaps 'remember' is not the right word, because he has carried within himself what happened that night at a level too deep for mere memory. It's like a fingerprint on his soul, the one remaining touch of the fantastic on a life which has been in every other respect absolutely and perfectly unremarkable. He can't forget where he came from, as much as he has sometimes wished he could.
What he has been more successful in forgetting in the last forty-three years is the other choice which was made that night. He had hoped that with so little time remaining to him, he wouldn't have to think about it again.
"You don't have to see her," Joan says. Her voice sounds odd, and John realises she is pleading, just a little. "I could tell her to go away."
He does have to see her, though; deep down, John knows that. Even on the night they parted, the night John became real, he'd known he would have to face the Doctor again eventually, that they were too tightly bound together for their separate paths never to touch again. She's left him alone and he's been grateful for that, and there must be a reason why she's chosen now—this cold February day in 1956—to walk up his street and knock on the front door of the Smiths' neat little end-of-terrace house. He owes her the courtesy of an invitation to tea at the very least.
Keeping his voice even—or as even as he can, now that age makes it betray him with catches and quavers—he says, "Tell her to come up."
Joan doesn't look happy, but she will do as he says. Younger women—the ones who went out to work while their husbands were off fighting Hitler—might have new-fangled ideas about a woman's place, but John and Joan were married the year the Great War started. It's not that they're behind the times, exactly, but increasingly John feels as if they're no longer in perfect step with the world outside their door.
He lies in the bed and listens to the sound of Joan descending the stairs and going into the front parlour. He can hear her voice, muffled by the floorboards so that the words are indistinct. He knows that tone, though: controlled and tight, it means she's laying down rules. The Doctor's domain is all of time and space, but Joan's is the space within these four walls, and here her power is absolute. He strains to hear what replies are being made, but if there are any, they are too soft to be heard upstairs.
Then, after a moment's silence, he hears two sets of footsteps climbing the stairs and approaching the bedroom. Joan's tread is familiar; what takes him aback is that so is the other.
As the door starts to open, a brief but fierce moment of doubt hits him, and he is no longer certain he can do this. It's the fearfulness of an old man, and he is old man enough both to recognise that and to feel it anyway. He suddenly wishes he had let Joan tell her to leave them alone.
And then it is too late, because she is standing just inside the door, behind Joan. On the surface, she's barely changed since the last time he saw her: her face is as unlined as his is wrinkled, her hair as dark as his is grey. But there's something indefinably different about her all the same. The girl John remembers was a girl, and this person in front of him... is not. She is wearing a long coat; it looks much like the ex-military greatcoats left over from the war which are still commonly seen, except that it's lined with an oddly iridescent material which is not like anything John has ever seen before. The faint scent of unidentifiable spices has followed her into the bedroom, as if she's just come from some unimaginably exotic bazaar. For all John knows, she has. The simple fact of her presence makes the room around her—and the house, and himself, and even dear Joan—appear grey and drab in comparison.
He's surprised by how much he resents that.
The Doctor smiles expansively. "John! Good to see you again. Been meaning to catch up for years."
"It's good to see you, too," John replies, although he's in no way sure it is. "You look..." He starts the sentence but quickly realises he has no idea how to end it. You look exactly the same. You look completely different. You look like something immensely old and immensely powerful, wearing the body of a young woman. In the end, he takes refuge in banality: "You look well."
The Doctor, in the meantime, has wandered over to the dresser by the window and is investigating the collection of keepsakes and framed photographs set out on it. "Is this the family?" She reaches for a picture of George, posing smartly in his RAF uniform in 1940, clearly intending to pick it up and examine it more closely.
"Don't," Joan says, her voice sharp. "Don't touch those."
The Doctor pulls her hand back. "Sorry. Just like me, always poking into things."
Joan colours a little. "I'm not—I don't want to be rude. It's just—" She doesn't finish, but instead looks at John in appeal. The meaning is clear. Don't let her stay. Don't let her talk. Most of all, don't let her near our family.
He understands Joan's need to protect him, but he understands equally that there's nothing she can do here except watch, and the tension in the room is giving him a headache. "How about a cup of tea?" he suggests.
The Doctor brightens. "Now there's a good idea. And, oh, a biscuit would be nice. Maybe something with currants in it? I always like the ones with currants."
"I'll see what we've got," Joan says frostily. She meets John's gaze again. "You're...?"
He forces a smile, and nods. "I'm fine. Go on, now."
Joan goes, but leaves the door open behind her. The Doctor waits until she's gone, then recommences her exploration of the room, pulling back the net curtains at the window to gaze out as if fascinated by the view of the quiet street outside, before turning her attention to the bookshelf, where she fingers the spines of the books and pulls out volumes at random. She's looking everywhere except at John, and he realises suddenly that he makes her as uncomfortable as she makes him.
The Doctor pulls a book from the shelf and leafs through it; although his eyesight is not what it once was, John can tell from the colour of the spine that it's his ancient and battered Anthology of English Verse. She stops at a page about half-way through, and begins to read the lines out loud: "This grey spirit, yearning in desire, to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought..." She stops reading and smiles fondly. "Good old Alfred. He told me later he'd been thinking about me when he wrote that. Then again, he was an incorrigible charmer, so he might have been making it up. But we had been talking about Ulysses before he wrote it. Or Odysseus, I should say. You'd be surprised at how much of that actually happened. The Cyclops, for example. Really a large, one-eyed humanoid alien from the Akillian system who got stuck on Earth when his ship crashed. Just good luck I happened to be passing by at the right moment..."
She talks on, and it's like listening to a story—an incredible fireside tale that begins with taking tea with Tennyson and ends with sharing in a meal of roasted suckling pig with an ancient Ithican king, lost on his way home from the siege of Troy. It's the kind of story she belongs in, John thinks: like Odysseus, the Doctor is more myth than flesh-and-blood.
And the most powerful myth, of course, is the myth of origins.
"Do you still have it?" he asks.
The Doctor breaks off from the story; sensibly, she doesn't try to pretend she doesn't know what he's talking about. She reaches into her coat pocket and takes out the fob watch. When she holds it in her palm, he imagines that her hand sinks just a little under its weight. Even now, the sight of it fills John with a sense of fear, and he cannot help but draw back from it. It both fascinates and repels him. In that, it's a little like her.
She notes his reaction. "It's all right. It's just a watch."
He could ask why, if it's just a watch, she's still carrying it with her after all this time. But that would be an unfair question: she needs to carry it for the same reason he needed to ask about it. They are as different as two thinking creatures can be, but they always have been and always will be united by their shared origin.
At last John says, "I would have liked to ask her why."
"I'm still here, you know. I haven't gone away."
John eyes her. "Are you? Are you really?"
"I am Martha Jones," the Doctor says. "My father was Clive and my mother was Francine, and I used to spend every Saturday afternoon making up soap operas with Barbie dolls with my sister Tish. When I was eight I fell off my bike and broke my arm and had to spend the night in hospital. The doctor who set my arm was called Sheila Mackenzie; she talked to me and explained what she was doing and why she was doing it and I thought she was the most amazing person I'd ever met. She wrote her name on my cast and I told her I was going to be a doctor someday, and she told me I could be anything I chose to be. She wasn't wrong."
All the time she is talking, John looks steadily at her. When she's finished, he says, "You can't fool me. Anyone else, but not me. You can say it, but you can't believe it anymore. It's no more real to you than my life before my first day at Farringham School."
"At least my memories actually happened," the Doctor shoots back. She stops, her expression quietly appalled. "I'm sorry. That wasn't fair."
"It was perfectly fair. I am a fabrication. So are you, in a different way." He eyes her. "I still want to know why. If you can tell me."
The Doctor's eyes flash angrily, and then, without warning, she changes. It's subtle, like an actor slipping out of one character and into another, but when she speaks the difference is clear. "The universe needed a Doctor, and she was naïve enough—young enough, human enough—to think she wasn't that far from being one anyway."
A picture flashes into his mind, the memory as clear as if it had happened minutes rather than decades ago. He hears the explosions outside the cottages, feels the earth under his feet tremble, sees the distant flames as the village burns.
He remembers Martha Jones, standing at the centre of the chaos, her hands cupped in front of her, holding the watch she has just snatched back from him. The light is pouring out of it and into her, filling her up to the brim and beyond, burning away whatever was there before and replacing it with something else. She is screaming and screaming and screaming and John hates himself because mingled in with his horror is a kind of relief that now it won't have to be him.
"I wish I could say I was sorry and mean it. If I were a better man I could." The irony strikes him, and he half-laughs. "Then again, if I were a better man, none of this would have happened."
"She chose," the Doctor says, with a edge of harshness that will brook no dispute. But of course, John thinks, she would say that. Martha must have chosen, because if she didn't, there's a chance that what happened that night wasn't heroic at all. It's not something John wants to think about.
John leans back into the pillows and allows himself to close his eyes for a moment. He is very tired.
"You're not well," the Doctor says.
He opens his eyes again, and focuses, with a little difficulty, on the Doctor. "I'm old."
"It's more than that, though, isn't it?" Her voice is soft, and full of compassion.
"My choice," John says. "I've had my three score years and ten. Or two score and three, depending on where you start counting from."
"It's not very long, whatever way you count it."
"Long enough to marry. To raise a family. Long enough to live."
"Is it enough?"
She is looking at him now; looking directly at him, her gaze questioning, penetrating, alien. Suddenly John thinks he understands.
"That's why you came, isn't it? I'm a part of you that got amputated, cut off from the rest, and I did something you never could. Something you can't even understand. And you can't stand the idea of not knowing."
"You began as a story I told," the Doctor says. "I think I have the right to know how it ends."
John smiles a little. "You want to hear a story? All right, then, I'll tell you one." He lifts a hand and points one arthritis-bent finger at the picture sitting on the dresser. "That's our eldest, George. Flight Lieutenant George Smith, as he was during the war. He flew in the Battle of Britain. People forget, you know. You hear people talking now as if it was one day or a week at most. It wasn't. It was more than four months, every single night. Waves and waves of them. Joan and I would go down to the shelter; we'd be sitting there in the dark, holding hands, and she'd ask me if I thought George was all right up there, and I'd say, Of course he is. And all the time I'd be thinking: he'd be dead now and I wouldn't even know. My son could be killed while I'm squatting here, in the dark, frightened and useless." John lowers his voice. "I was sorry then. I wished I had the power to change the world. I wished I could be you." He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and looks straight at the Doctor. "If you came to find out if I regretted it, then yes, I did. That night, and every night like it."
"But George survived."
"Yes," John says. "George came home. He married a lovely girl and every Sunday they come for lunch and bring the boys. But I didn't know that on those blacked-out nights. I couldn't know it—I'm not like you. All I knew was that I could lose so much, and that I was powerless. Helpless. That's how it is for us human beings, Doctor. And if you want to know if what I had was enough? There's your answer. It was everything."
The Doctor is silent for a long time. "Thank you," she says softly. "It's been a very long time, and sometimes... I forget."
"We've had a question for Martha, and a question for me," John says. "Now it's your turn."
"Fair's fair, in a 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' kind of way, I suppose," the Doctor says, as frivolous as she was sombre a moment ago. "What is it?"
"What about you? Is what you chose enough?"
In answer, the Doctor puts her head slightly to one side, expression pensive. John waits. She will answer him honestly, he knows, just as he has been honest with her. They know each other's story too well to be anything but truthful with each other.
At last the Doctor says, "All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move." Then she grins widely. "Yes. Yes, that more or less covers it. Thank you, Alfie." The grin vanishes. "Goodbye, John Smith."
She is letting go of him; casting off this her one remaining connection to human mortality and setting sail, like Odysseus, into unknown waters where he neither can nor wants to follow. John has his own journey to complete, his own unknown and unknowable destination. He knows now why the Doctor left him alone for his entire life, then chose today, of all days, to come and visit him. Today must be the day their paths diverge permanently. In all of space and time, this is the last day and the last place she can come to him.
Myths cannot die; people can. Whatever choice Martha Jones made, John thinks what happened that night reflected this simple truth more than anything else. The myth of the Doctor had to survive. A sacrifice was required. Martha Jones made it, and in doing so became a myth herself.
He wonders if the Doctor has come to the same understanding and thinks that perhaps, in spite of her huge span of life and experience, she has not. But when he looks again to the bedroom door to share the insight, she is no longer there. She has gone.
"Goodbye, Doctor," he whispers quietly to the empty space. "Goodbye, Martha."
A few minutes later, he hears Joan's footsteps slowly approaching. When she appears in the bedroom, she is carrying a tray bearing two cups, a pot of tea snug beneath a knitted cosy, a small jug of milk and a pot of sugar. There is also a plate, lined with a paper doily and stacked with biscuits. The biscuits on the top layer, John notices, are all flecked dark with currants.
"Oh," Joan says, looking around in surprise. "Where is she?"
"She left," John says.
Joan looks confused. "I didn't hear her leave. Are you sure—"
"I'm sure," he says. "She's gone. She won't be back."
Joan sets down the tray on the dresser and makes a small noise of disapproval. "If she wasn't planning to stay for tea, she could have said as much."
"Joan..."
She gestures at the plate of biscuits. "These will all have to go back in the tin now before they go soft."
"Joan..." he says again.
Joan stops, looks away, then back at him. "I thought... she'd come to take you away. All those years ago, she gave you to me, and a part of me thought one day she'd come to claim you back. Like in a fairy story."
"She couldn't," John says.
"No," Joan agrees. "I know that now," she adds, and something in the way she says it makes him wonder if she was standing outside the door listening for any part of his conversation with the Doctor.
He looks at her, and for a brief second sees her just as she was when he knew her first: Nurse Redfern, smart in pinafore and starched apron, her hair tied up. The same hair is white now, her face as wrinkled as his, her figure stout. Myths and legends stay young forever, but in the real world men and women grow old, and die, and John would not have it any other way, because it is real.
Martha Jones chose to be a story; John Smith chose not to be. He cannot say if either of them was right or wrong, only that he does not regret his choice and he does not envy Martha hers.
"Well," Joan says, "I suppose we'll have to drink up this tea ourselves."
"Don't put the biscuits away just yet, love," John says.
Joan makes the familiar cluck of disapproval. "What shall we do with that sweet tooth of yours?"
"Indulge it," he says. "Give me one with currants in it. I always like the ones with currants."
She smiles, acknowledging a joke which only a few minutes ago would not have been funny in the least. Then she sees the book the Doctor took from the shelf, sitting out of place on the dresser. She moves to put it back where it belongs, then pauses when she notices the copperplate inscription on the inside front cover.
"To the Headmaster and Miss Redfern," she reads, "on the occasion of your marriage, on this 8th day of July, 1914, from the masters and boys of Farringham School." Her wedding ring, dulled from age and wear, no longer sparkles in the light, but there's something comforting in its burnished glow that John almost prefers. Though much is taken, much abides, he thinks. Good old Alfred, indeed.
"Read me something," he says. "I'd like that."
"Anything in particular?"
"You know," John says, "I think I'm in the mood for some Tennyson."