for charloft: Measure

Companion piece to this brilliant story by savagestime.

First, do no harm.

She hates him.

She hates every moment of being around him. She washes her hands and scrubs the dirt underneath her nails away but she can never quite clean up the blood. He watches her with those small, piercing eyes. Like slivers of glass, they glitter and cut.

He looks at her as if he's waiting for her to speak. She won't. She's just his doctor, she's just doing her job. But she isn't going to speak. Not to him. Not to Saxon.

He'll always be Saxon to her, no matter how many times the Doctor corrects her and tells her he's the Master. He's not her Master.

"Oh, yes, question the name why don’t you, everyone else does!" he says, brightly. This is something Martha has come to expect of him. When she doesn't speak like he wants her to, he talks as though she's spoken. Responds as though she's still talking, still asking the questions he wants to hear. It would be disconcerting if she wasn't certain he was completely and utterly mad. She rolls her eyes and grabs the blood pressure monitor. He extends his arm without protest.

"You know, people don’t question the Doctor’s name half as much as they do mine, and his is just as arrogant, if not more so. Hello, ‘the Doctor’? He doesn’t even know medicine! Not enough that he could save a man’s life – thanks for that, by the way – and he hardly has the demeanor of a doctor. If I had a doctor like him, I’d have fired him ages ago."

( His eyes glitter again. 'Lucky that I get you, isn't it?' )

Muse: Martha Jones
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 1,569 not including lines from the Hippocratic Oath