II.

Martha wasn't very good at brewing her own coffee. As much as she hated to admit it, she did rather rely on Costa Coffee to get her through exams. Her mother made good coffee, when she wasn't yelling at her ex-husband, and the stuff in the hospital was, surprisingly, passable. The TARDIS, on the other hand, made very strong black coffee. She hadn't convinced the Doctor to install a cappuccino machine, yet.

She'd clocked in several hours in bed, the embarrassing affair of the card forgotten in an exciting fly-by through rings twice the girth of Saturn's. Yet it was in the kitchen, fussing over her coffee because she was not used to staying still, that she yawned and the Doctor took notice.

He was gushing about the rings, and wasn't quite pleased that she had interrupted. "Sorry, I thought this was interesting?"

She yawned again—she couldn't help it—and said, "Sorry, Doctor. I didn't get much sleep last night."

He sniffed her coffee, then poured himself tea from a brown teapot. "What do you mean? How much do you humans have to sleep then? Rose was always going around with dark circles, never enough . . ."

Martha looked at her coffee. "My REM sleep kept getting interrupted."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "Oh yes? By what?"

"Did you know," she said slowly, "that about 80 of all dreams are marked by negative emotions?"

The Doctor smiled, sat down next to her; she could tell he was pleased. "Do go on, Doctor Jones."

Psychology had only amounted to a bit of space on exams, but she'd done well on it, it interested her, she remembered her consciousness lectures. "For humans," she began, with a nod in his direction, "every ninety minutes, there's a cycle of five sleep stages."

"Yeah, you and your circadian rhythms," said the Doctor. "It's a bit limiting, isn't it?" She cleared her throat, looked at him expectantly. "Oh, sorry."

"Some children have night terrors in Stage Four, but the majority of nightmares occur in Stage Five, REM sleep."

He nodded at her. "That's quite brilliant. Anyone else, they just say, 'I'm having nightmares,' but not you. You're scientific about it. Good on you, Martha Jones."

Surprise and pleasure crossed Martha's face, unused to the Doctor's praise, but also confusion. "Nightmare, from the Middle English," he announced. "A sort of incubus figure—"

"You're sort of paralyzed," Martha said suddenly. "There's nothing lyrical about that. Your motor cortex is functioning but there's some sort of block at your brain stem. So you're scared and you can't wake up, your brain waves are racing . . ."

The Doctor's look darkened. "What did you dream about, then?" Martha was reticent, seeming to consider. "Or perhaps you don't want to say."

"Most people," she said, "dream of their daily lives. The office, at home. But lately 'daily life' has been a little different for me. If that's life on a regular basis . . . one wonders what you dream about, Doctor."

He looked beyond her, wrapped his hands around his tea cup. She was fairly certain he wasn't going to answer when he said, "I don't sleep much. And I'm not human." Her coffee now cool enough to drink, she slurped loudly to cover the silence. He got up in a flash, clapped his hands together. "If you're having trouble sleeping—" he started going through cupboards—"we can find something here to help."

"No!" Martha snapped, getting out of her chair. "That's just treating the symptoms, not the cause. You, of all people—I thought—wouldn't just start throwing pills at people!"

The Doctor smiled. "You're very passionate. Tell me, Martha, what made you want to be a doctor?"

She stared. "Oh, I dunno."

"Tell me." He was playful now, more seductive than he realized.

"It wasn't much of a choice, really. I was always pretty good at maths and science. It just seemed the thing to do. I did five A-levels, I did really well in biology and chemistry—"

"That's not true," he said with an uncanny tilt of his eyebrow.

"You questioning what A-levels I got?!"

"Nah, I'm sure you did brilliantly. I mean, that isn't the reason you became a doctor." It was hard to lie to that face, so old and so young at the same time.

"It . . . it's stupid, really," she said, dumping the contents of her mug into the sink. But since he'd asked . . . "It was Christmas one year, Leo was just a toddler. Mum and Dad were having a row, as usual. Dad slammed the door and ran out, and I don't remember too clearly what happened—except there was Dad, in hospital, with a huge white cast around his leg, surrounded by all these people in coats.

"They still argue to this day about whose fault it was. A slick patch of ice. Now, obviously, I was grateful to the hospital for taking care of Dad—but when you're that little, your mind doesn't have that grip over cause and effect. But I thought at the time, how cool to put a cast on somebody. To repair, to improve." She looked up at him for approbation. He was smiling rather tenderly, but it was some kind of affection for the human race as a whole. That was the way he thought.

"I knew another doctor," he said. "Pragmatic, always running about a bit exasperated. But with her heart in the right place." Rather involuntarily, she thought, his hand went to his chest, where, improbably, two hearts were beating. "Compassionate and brave. She became a doctor because she wanted to hold back death."

Were you in love with her two? Martha wanted to ask. "She didn't want to travel with me," said the Doctor, a little forlornly, she thought.

"Doctor," she ventured, her voice shaky, "I'm not the only one having nightmares."

"What?" he asked, his voice high-pitched.

"Classic signs of sleep deprivation," she said boldly. "Lack of concentration, irritability, tendency to make mistakes—"

"I just said I'm not human," he said, his voice tight. "Your diagnosis is very good, but—"

"You do sleep, Doctor. But you haven't been lately. Not since we got off the spaceship heading for the sun." She bit her lip and moved closer. "It disturbed you, I know it did, and it's no use hiding it from a medical student."

He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "I appreciate what you're trying to do. But if you don't like how I fly the TARDIS, you can leave."

She stared at him coolly. "Oh, I see. With the ailing human, it's Fix-Her-Up-Quick, but you're so different, you're so alien . . ." She took a deep breath. "I don't want to leave. The world's wide and terrible and beautiful. But I . . ."

"Martha," he said kindly, "I can promise you nightmares are the least of my worries." And he looked transcendent then, a living embodiment of past, present, and future. She knew he would never admit to fears of losing self-control, of things worse than death.

"Fine," she said, putting her mug away. "I understand you don't want to be diagnosed and observed. I wouldn't either. Just don't keep me up at night with sleep-talking and I don't know what." His face was blank and very white when she closed the door.