taxonomites | 004 ∞ [voice || location: Amy's house in Shelley]

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004 ∞ [voice || location: Amy's house in Shelley]

Stirring her tea with a spoon, Amy idly listened to the sound of the metal hitting the ceramic sides of her cup. She was thinking.

The Doctor had been gone... well, she didn't know how long, but it seemed to her she'd just become aware of it. When had she last spoken to him? Or even seen him? Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recalled brushing aside ideas of calling out to him from the living room, or knocking on his bedroom door. But why? What had held her back?

She stopped stirring and left the spoon in her cup as she picked her tablet off the kitchen table and turned it on. She searched the map for him again, and again it told her he wasn't there. The Doctor was clever though, so very, very clever, so if he had reason to, he could easily hide himself from the tablet's map. But for what reason? And why wouldn't he tell her before he rushed off to do whatever it was that he was secretly doing?

A little voice in her head said that the reason he wasn't on the map was because he was taken out of Taxon. The feeling of tears started behind her eyes, but she held them back and grew angry instead. The Doctor wouldn't abandon her. Not again. Not after twelve years of waiting the first time, then two more years after that.

Of course, that wretched little voice said, the Doctor wouldn't have a choice. The hamsters would take him away against his will.

"Shut it, you," she grumbled, then pressed a hand to her forehead because she was talking to herself.

Straightening up and clearing her throat, she turned the tablet over to the voice section and tried to sound like she wasn't upset at all.

"Hello, fellow Taxon residents! Anybody seen the Doctor 'round recently? He seems to be playing a very intricate game of hide and seek."

[ooc: Amy was glitched by the hamsters to not notice the Doctor's disappearance until after Christmas, so she could enjoy it and not be mopey. But now he's gone and it's time to feel abandoned. ;_;]

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That was a very good question and Martha wished that there was an obvious answer. But nothing was obvious or simple in Taxon - or when it involved in the Doctor - and, in the end, they could only do there best.

"The other Doctor," she said, after a moment of consideration, "She's still here. She can help."

"Yeah, I guess there's no one better at being able to find the Doctor than the Doctor," she answered. "Though she's a bit, well... scatterbrained. Hopefully we can get her to focus enough to do something useful."

"She's still the Doctor," said Martha with a slight shrug. She didn't need to point out that, in these circumstances, that made her the best chance they had of finding a way home. "Even if she can't help us, it's better than sitting around and doing nothing."

She'd never been very good at that. She didn't think that Amy would be either.

"Right, well, how well do you know her? We chatted for a bit just today, but it sort of... tapered off. You might have better luck talking to her."

Amy certainly was impatient, and not knowing much about this female Doctor besides her being a bit scatterbrained meant that Amy was more likely to lose her patience with her.

"As well as you can ever know the Doctor," she offered, after a moment of consideration. Martha didn't know her as well as she knew the Doctor that she'd travelled with - that she'd trusted to the end of the world and walked across a dying planet for - but some things, the really important things, didn't change.

"Then let's see what she can come up with. She probably has some strange, handmade thing made of bips and bobs that can track a person."

"Made out of tin cans and bits of string, probably," she said, with obvious affection. Martha found herself thinking of 'timey wimey detector' that the Doctor - the Doctor she'd travelled with, that is - had whipped up when they were trapped in the 1960s. "And it'll still work better than anything a company on Earth could make."

"Yeah," Amy mused. "I've seen a couple of his contraptions before. They look mad, but they get the job done."

"I remember one he built in London," she said, "It could boil an egg from the other side of the room, but it still managed to detect when someone had been travelling in time."

It was strange to talk to someone who understood the strangeness of the Doctor's life. Strange, but nice.

Amy laughed. She hadn't come across that particular device yet.

"He had this one, had a mirror on it. But somehow it could see invisible creatures in it."

"Invisible creatures?" That sounded like the sort of ridiculous scheme that her version of the Doctor had favoured as well. It was difficult to think about it - since he wasn't here and they definitely needed him in Taxon - but it wasn't impossible. It was almost ... nice, really. A reminder of what he was and who he was and what he could do. He'd find a way to get back to them. "He took you hunting for invisible creatures?"

"Well not hunting, no. I was attacked by something I couldn't see and the Doctor and Vincent, Vincent van Gogh, that is, came out to see what had happened. The Doctor couldn't see the thing, but Vincent could. So the Doctor ran back to the TARDIS and grabbed this thing cobbled together out of strange parts that let him see the thing through a mirror." Telling this to anyone else would, of course, sound crazy. But she knew Martha would understand.

"You've met Vincent Van Gogh?" asked Martha, with the wide eyed expression of someone who would never get tired of hearing stories like that. (It was impossible to ever really get used to the wonders of travel through time and space, wasn't it? Even after you ended up experiencing the darker sides of it?) "What was he like? Why could he see the monster?"

"Yeah!" She smiled a bit sadly at the memory. "He was a dear. So passionate, so kind, but so tragic too." She thought back to those two days spent with him. "I'm not really sure how. His mind... was special. Well, that was obvious from how he painted."

"I bet," she said, giving Amy a sad smile of her own. Travelling was wonderful, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with the things that you couldn't change. The fixed events. The inevitable deaths. "My Mum took my to the Van Gogh Gallery once. Years ago, now. The reproductions don't do them justice."

"Oh, his paintings were just hanging up all over the place! Some were still wet." She grinned. "It was one of the best trips I've ever been on with the Doctor."

"Wow," Martha breathed. Before she could say anything else, she remembered the nature of one of the paintings she'd seen at the gallery.

"Oh my god!" she exclaimed, "You're the one he dedicated his sunflower painting to, aren't you? You're that Amy!"

She preened slightly, touching her hair. "That would be me, yeah. If I had stayed there with him, I would have rewritten history, but our babies would have been the ultimate gingers."

"I don't think history could cope," she said, although it was strange to think how different the world would be if that had happened. Would Van Gogh still be famous?

"Probably not. Our children would have been world famous, I'm sure." She stuck her nose in the air with a bit of fake haughtiness, but her voice had a tinge of sadness to it. He had wanted her to stay, and it broke her heart that she couldn't.

Martha couldn't help but notice the tinge of sadness. It was a feeling she knew all to well. They'd rewritten one year, but that had only been possible because of the Master's paradox machine.

"That's the only thing I didn't like about time travel."

"What?" she asked, but deciding on what Martha meant, she continued. "You mean getting to know someone and growing close but then having to walk away."

"Exactly. I've lost count of the number of times that's happen." A beat. "It's one of the reasons I couldn't keep travelling with the Doctor."

"Well, I suppose I can understand that. For me though, it's hard to imagine ever getting tired of it." She knew that Rory would want to stop eventually, and go on to get his medical degree, but even though she'd stop traveling, it wouldn't be because she was tired of it. Besides, it was hard to imagine leaving the Doctor all alone.

"I didn't really get tired of it," Martha confessed, "I still miss it, sometimes. But I couldn't stay. I had to find my own place on Earth."

She hadn't wanted to spend the rest of her life pining over someone who would never be able to love her in the same way. It wouldn't have been fair on either of them.

004 ∞ [voice || location: Amy's house in Shelley]

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