fatemarked_logs | meet-and-greet

Martha had been about to correct the honorific that he had placed before her name, because the doctor piece of her identity was Important, it was something that she had worked very hard for indeed, even if UNIT had pushed it through based upon the year that wasn't. She was a doctor and she wasn't a soldier and she definitely was not a 'miss'.

Well, she couldn't deny that the longer the two of them stood there, something familiar prickled around the edges of her consciousness. At first, Martha shoved it away, because there simply wasn't anyway that she would have been able to believe it was true. The Doctor had told her once upon a time (or more than once) that while witches were real, the ones from the novels that she loved so much were not.

Save for when they were like right at this moment.

What she was was shocked when his name hit her ears and Martha just stared at him for a moment, taking in his clothing and his hair and everything about him before she just managed to come out with a single question. "Are you really?"

Severus had heard that phrase numerous times in his life: some variant of good lord, are you really? However, it had always been directed at Harry Potter. People always seemed so surprised to meet the boy after hearing his name traded in gossip and rumor, as though despite all they'd heard, they hadn't realized Harry Potter actually existed.

It had sounded like this, as though this young lady had often heard stories about him, and was surprised now to find him standing before her in this tacky little room. He shifted uncomfortably and withdrew his hand, unsure why she should be staring at him so intently, why his name should surprise her. Was she going to raise a cry of alarm? She didn't seem frightened - not yet, anyhow.

"It would be rather awkward to find I'm not," he replied. The bite in his tone was gone, revealing a level of uncertainty that he wished he could have hidden better. There were large gaps in his memory thanks to the events immediately preceding his abduction to the Facility, but he was pretty sure he remembered his own name. More than that, however, was her unnerving surprise. How did she know who he was?

For a moment, Martha didn't know what to say. In the back of her mind she heard herself telling the Doctor that one should never meet your heroes. Severus Snape had never been her hero, not really, but as someone who always wanted to help broken creatures, he'd been her favorite. It felt weird to be in front of him now, gaping like some sort of fish or a teenage girl meeting a member of One Direction! No, she needed to keep it cool.

And more than that, he needed to know what it was that had caused her to act like a large idiot! As he started to withdraw his hand, Martha reached out and caught it, holding onto it without a bit of shame. Being here at this party didn't seem like the place to have the conversation with it's slumber party theme, and given how many of them happened to be here, Martha was betting that most other places happened to be rather vacant.

"Follow me," she said softly but calmly over her shoulder, giving him one of her best reassuring smiles. "It's probably better explained somewhere more adult, I think." Which almost everywhere was, Martha thought.

At first, Severus was too surprised by the sudden contact to withdraw his hand. It was forward of her, and he wasn't entirely sure how to handle it while in the middle of a room full of people trained to fight and kill. He didn't want to draw unnecessary attention. If these people were anything like him, they might "hesitate" the next time his life was on the line if they saw him being unnecessarily cruel to a woman nearly a foot shorter than he was.

It was just her hand, after all.

Of course, when they were out of the room, he immediately snatched his hand out of hers. "I assure you, I can follow you without assistance." His thumb brushed across his fingertips in an unconscious display of tension, and with his other hand, he gestured to her to lead on. He was curious enough to see this through to whatever end it might have.

He snatched his hand back, and Martha pulled her own away more slowly, keeping her fingers raised to show that she meant no harm with all of the pulling. Holding people's hands had become more than a little bit of a force of habit, especially when there might have been something bad happening at the end of all of this. Being told someone was from a novel would be a difficult thing thing to hear under the best of circumstance, never mind having been abducted with everything that went along with that.

"My apologies," she said quickly, "I wasn't thinking. Please, let's find some place quiet alright? You deserve to know why I reacted like that. I was just really surprised by everything, obviously. Should we find somewhere that has a fair amount of alcohol? I know I would want some if I'd had a strange woman who looked like she was a little bit mad." Or more than a little bit, when it all came down to it.

He certainly wasn't going to object to a stiff drink, even if he had been warned off it by the medical staff here. Closer inspection of him by Martha would show he looked rather paler than any book might have described, and dark circles under his eyes betrayed how little he'd been sleeping. The hint of bandages could be seen on his neck if his collar and hair both shifted in just the right way. Even so...

One drink wouldn't hurt. And admittedly, he was curious about her reaction. Nevermind that this was a very good excuse to extricate himself from the "party".

"Very well," he agreed at last, and though he didn't offer his hand to her again, he did extend it to suggest she ought to lead on, and he would follow.

Martha's eyes moved eagerly over him, the slight edge of disbelief still evident, making them alight as she watched him. He was real. Real and pale almost as death, but he wasn't dead. The bandages on his neck left one of her questions answered; he had only been hurt that badly in his neck once during the course of the books, and that was after he had died. His timeline was restored, whoever had borrowed them had done it after he'd been important there.

She didn't reach for his hand again as the two of them moved through the corridors, but her palm itched with the effort of not doing it. It was second nature to her now, and she did it with everyone back home. In fact, Martha was teased at UNIT for doing it, although gently. People there knew it meant that she cared.

Just like she cared about him and wanted put the book news in as gentle of a way as possible.

Finding a small bar lounge looking area, Martha grabbed a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, setting them down on the table before she asked, "Are you supposed to be drinking with that neck wound, Mr. Snape?"

Although there had been a part of him that was reserved enough to stay standing and tense in the "party", belying his injuries by not once relaxing, he didn't hesitate to take a seat once they were well away from prying eyes. It wasn't that he trusted her any more or less than the others, but there were far fewer people here, and less damage would be done.

For some reason, he doubted that she would go spreading any rumors about his weakened state.

Then again, she was questioning his ability to drink, and with a flat tone to accompany a flatter look, he answered, "Doubtful, but that has hardly stopped me before."

Martha Jones was used to flat looks and flat tones, because she'd been a doctor for a fair amount of time now, given everything. More than that, the Doctor had his dark moods that she'd needed to tiptoe around. Part of leaving him had been learning how to moderate the tiptoeing with the need to take care of everyone. He was receiving the benefit of both now, in the way that Martha poured the two of them both rather small drinks (by anyone's standards) and handed one to him. (She kept the bottle on her side, despite knowing that he could summon it if he truly needed to. And knowing the story, she suspected that he'd probably need to be able to do it.)

"I'm a doctor," she explained, with a little jut of her chin towards the small amount in the glasses. "And I would make a terrible sentinel if I allowed you to become injured again because I had the idea for liquor." Keeping silent about the need for it at the moment, Martha braced herself for a bit of of a battle over the whiskey first.

"I doubt my injuries could be repeated here, much less by a bottle of alcohol," he replied with a dry sort of humor - and as he spoke, he did something rather strange, at least as far as things went for Severus: his eyes strayed away from hers as he took a small drink of the similarly small dose of whiskey.

It had been a not-uncommon problem for him; in part, it was due to the injuries he had sustained just before finding himself transported here. However, the swiss cheese of his memory also played a role in it. When discussing past events, he often found himself straying from the conversation, analyzing bits of his memory that seemed to have faded to dull copies of themselves or disappeared entirely, trying to remember what had once been there.

It was a problem that would fade with time, when his injuries healed somewhat and he wasn't dealing with the double whammy, but the mind did odd things when one was ill.

Quickly, he recovered himself and his gaze snapped back to her. He lowered his drink. "You had something to tell me."

Watching his eyes move from hers, Martha wondered where he'd gone in the middle of the conversation. Somehow, that didn't seem like him from everything she'd read, but one needed to wonder just how much of that was actual personality from him, and how much was being viewed through the mirror of Harry Potter's eleven-year-old dislike. Martha didn't press while he was gone, instead taking the opportunity to take a sip of the whiskey. Like everything else here, it was of excellent quality, and she wondered just how much the Governors were paying to try and keep them happy in this luxury prison. Well, or protective area, depending on how generous one was feeling during that moment.

But Severus Snape broke through her own thoughts with the reminder of why they were here, and she focused on him, not shrinking from the darkness of his eyes. While she was tempted to move into the familiar path of storyteller mode, Martha stopped herself. Doing it wouldn't be fair to him, considering this was his life and how people knew about it! She wouldn't want all the secrets about her known (everyone knowing she loved the Doctor when he couldn't have cared less would have quite possibly embarassed her to death.)

Taking a very matter of fact but sympathetic tone, Martha began to speak. She sounded as if she regretted this, even as she kept her eyes upon his own. If he had not jerked his hand away before, Martha would have placed her own upon his in the way she did when she needed to give bad news. "You know we're all pulled from different universes, yeah?" Without giving him the chance to answer the question, Martha continued, because she didn't want to get into a possible discussion about what the multiverses meant. "Well, in my universe, there's a series of very popular books." A beat, "and movies too, based on the books. The books are the story of Harry Potter's years at school, starting when he was eleven, and ending when he defeated Voldemort." She left out the epilogue, no one needed to hear about that!

"I know who you are because you're a major character in the books."

All things considered, it wouldn't have been entirely out of line for Severus to throw a fit right then and there. It wasn't beyond him, and this news would have made anyone begin to seriously examine everything they knew about their world - and their choices. That didn't happen, however.

Her prodigious statement was met with an emotionless stare for a long moment, before, slowly, he raised an eyebrow at her. It wasn't that he didn't believe her, of course; no, he was still debating that one. She had known him, but she could have asked someone. She could have found the information the Governors had on him.

But sometimes, when there were hoofbeats, one had to consider zebras after all. Universes aside...Was it possible that there was a series of books based on the life of Harry Potter? Certainly. They might even be textbooks in his own world. So, who was to say there wasn't a fictional series sold to Muggles? And who was to say he wasn't in them? All right. Accepting that the books existed, what then did that mean for him if he was a 'major character'?

Was he a villain in these books, he wondered?

At long last, he settled for asking, "Should I be concerned?"

"Concerned?" The word was mirrored back to him, and she just blinked for a second, wondering how he'd thought the books had gone. After all, if he had realized that they'd gotten to the end of the time at school, then he had to know... No. Her eyes moved to the bandages on his neck that the collar of his shirt half-hid and Martha realized something very important. The Governors had pulled him from the moment before he'd died, so perhaps he didn't realize what it was that he'd done. Still, even if he hadn't told Harry to take the memories, the intent had to have been there, hadn't it?

"No," she responded after a second, and she shook her head, a decision evident. "You don't need to be concerned. In the end, you were an anti-hero of sorts, fighting on the side of good even if you weren't exactly the nicest bloke about. You saved Harry; if it wasn't for you, then he would have lost and the wizarding world would have fallen to Voldemort and chaos. No, people shouldn't be coming after you for what you'd done under the guise of being a double agent."

Whatever else, Martha Jones could talk, couldn't she? When she wanted to, when she needed to, she found her voice quite easily now, and this was one of those times. She had told him the story without telling the story which was quite a feat for her. More than that, she was making him a promise, with the jutting out of her chin. "And if someone has a problem with it, then I'll tell them to sod off, because I remember the story."

She talked about him as though he was a character in a book - and the more she talked, the more perplexity showed in his expression. What an odd sensation, to have a literary analysis repeated to him about himself. For a long moment, he simply stood there with his mostly-empty glass of whiskey, the holes in his neck and his memory more apparent to him now than usual, and stared.

Anti-hero?

More important than that, however: you saved Harry. Those words sank in and once more his gaze drifted off very slightly to the left. She knew not only the events of that evening - the injury, the memories - but what happened after he had been abducted. She knew Potter had somehow, somehow fumbled his way to success. And if her phrasing was anything to go by (in the end, were, weren't, had done, all past-tense), she also knew that Severus wouldn't have survived that night if the Governors hadn't intervened. Something to think about.

"I gave him something that night," he replied cautiously. It was an invitation for her to reveal just how much she actually knew about the few precious seconds before he'd been snatched away by the Governors - but also a can of worms he was rather unnerved to open. Was it possible she knew about the memories he'd given over to Potter?

Once upon a time, Martha Jones had met Shakespeare, and she'd had the Doctor there (and the rather large crush she'd developed upon the alien) to keep her from acting like a complete moron. Here, she just had herself and her love of the Harry Potter series; acting like a moron seemed to be winning out even with her attempting to well... not be one. No, instead Martha was trying to distance herself and her gushing as much as possible.

Maybe she was doing too good of a job of it.

Accepting the invitation, Martha nodded quickly and solemnly. "You gave him your memories," the words came softly, and her fingers flexed to touch him once again, because each word brought her closer to the inevitable that she'd already given away with a use of tenses that she'd not even thought of, given the wibbly wobbly timey wimey nature of traveling in the TARDIS.

While she had been trying to keep some of the emotion from her voice, Martha couldn't help the low tones and sympathy that filled it when she mentioned what it was that had been contained in the flowing silver that had come from every pore in an effort to save Harry fulfill his promise. "It was your memories of Lily that got him to trust you, and then memories of Dumbledore actually telling you what Harry would need to do that would end up..." Winning seemed like a harsh thing to say, given how Severus Snape had laid down his life for Harry, so she settled for, "defeating Voldemort."

Severus might have been satisfied - if not wholly comfortable - with the short answer. He hadn't expected her to start listing off the contents of those memories, and when she did, his eyes widened slightly in shock and not a little bit of horror. It hadn't been part of the plan for him to simply pour out the contents of his mind for Potter, but he'd known he was moments from dying. What was necessary had always trumped what he wanted.

To have those memories recited back to him by a stranger - evidence of hundreds, thousands, millions of strangers who could similarly recite back those memories - was harrowing, an unintentional violation of the privacy he held so sacred. She knew about -

Things he himself didn't know about. That was the worst part. If he had been home, he could reclaim those memories, but just as removing memories during Potter's Occlumency lessons had ensured they wouldn't be viewed in the event of an accident, letting loose his memories so close to death and abduction had been like cutting off a hand. They were in the possession of Lily's son - or, if he had missed capturing any of them - gone entirely, with only fragments remaining behind. Memories of memories, places where they once existed. Emotions remained from past experiences, but without explanation for why.

Martha Jones knew all those things he couldn't remember.

He felt dizzy.

He sank down into one of the seats, his glass held delicately in both hands.

Seeing how pale he looked, Martha was concerned that there was something wrong other than simply the obvious. Guilt for letting him have the whiskey slipped into her thoughts and Martha moved closer to him on the sofa where he'd settled, one hand readying to slip below his wrist and take his pulse in order to make certain she didn't need to call for this place's version of an ambulance. This was a lot for anyone, never mind someone who had lost the memories Martha knew.

If she had know that he'd not remembered, that when he'd taken out those memories he'd lost them for good, Martha Jones would have kept her mouth shut. Alas, she'd been taken from a time before there was even the mention of a Pottermore, and when the Doctor had given her the seventh book, he'd neglected to tell her about it's existence, or indeed, that there would be an eighth story that would come out several years later. All Martha had to go on was the words she'd cherished and how she'd cried when she'd read them.

"Severus," Martha began, and then she instantly corrected herself to go with the more formal, "Mr. Snape," because perhaps she was personal enough already, "are you alright? Can I take your pulse, please?" Her fingers hovered over his pale skin and the glass, not quite touching them, just enough to give the illusion of warmth.

He withdrew from her a little, moving his hand under the pretense of bringing it to his forehead. It had only been momentary, a slight tilting of the room that was now right again. He was fine, he told himself - but she was probably right about the alcohol. If he wasn't going to allow her to play doctor with his pulse, he could certainly make a small concession and let her have the glass back.

Drinking would only exacerbate what this conversation was doing to him.

He shook his head slowly, clearing it and at the same time rejecting her offer. "I'm fine." He wasn't. He knew he wasn't; his injuries hadn't even remotely healed, and who knew what long-term effects would come from Nagini's venom? Arthur Weasley had been less seriously injured by her, and he had been laid up for weeks.

"You have accomplished quite a feat," he commented after a beat had passed. As he continued, he handed over his glass, surrendering his right to drink for the remainder of the evening. "For once, I have absolutely no idea what to say."

The glass wasn't his pulse, but she took it from him anyway, drawing back in order to set it on the table top before her attention was returned to him once more. He was using the same 'I'm fine' that Martha herself tended to use and she wondered if it rang as untrue for people who did the same thing as it was doing for Martha right now. All of her instincts were currently going on high speed, and she wanted to do nothing more than to rush him to be checked, but she also knew that he wouldn't appreciate her doing it.

Understanding what it meant for him to be silent, Martha herself remained so for a moment, her eyes on him and a look of concern etched on her face. She shouldn't have told him; she should have waited and let someone else do it, a doctor perhaps once they'd cleared him medically to have such a huge shock to his system. If someone told Martha about the year that wasn't, and how it had been entertainment, she would have had the same sort of mortified reaction that he did.

"I'm sorry," the words came quickly, and she pressed her hands together in order not to touch him. "I shouldn't have told you, not like that. It wasn't fair of me."

"I can't imagine there is a good way to tell someone the information you did," he replied dryly. Now that the glass was gone, he found he wished he hadn't parted with it. There was still enough whiskey in that cup to dull some of the edges -

No, that wouldn't be wise right now. Perhaps later, when she wasn't around to regard him with such concern.

He spread his hands, indicating with gesture the pause in his speech was matched by one in thought while he tried to sort out how best to continue. She was a complete stranger - but that sort of thing went right out the window when a complete stranger was both a doctor and knew your entire life's story, didn't it? And when that person looked so worried on your behalf?

No. Again, no. He couldn't tell her that he was missing large fragments of himself. It was humiliating on its own, but to have her know things about him that he didn't? To have her in a position to hold those things over him, to blackmail him? He didn't know her, and he certainly didn't trust her. He needed to escape this conversation with minimal threat. "I'm sure you would agree I should rest."

Martha watched him the entire time he was silent, the compassion and concern on her face only growing the longer the silence between them spread out. He was right of course, there was no good way to tell someone that people (especially her) knew about his past, and the wounds that were causing him such an issue at the present. A part of her, the doctor part, wanted to see his chart, to learn how he was being treated. Martha remembered the length of time that Arthur Weasley had suffered, and she was hoping (for his sake) that the period of being sick wasn't going to be as lengthy.

At the suggestion of rest, Martha nodded, her face forming into the countenance of her doctor self. The concern was still present of course, but it was more professional than personal. Martha, the woman who had just torn his life into bits and felt terrible about it was pressed aside for Dr. Jones and at least some professional distance. "Of course, Mr. Snape," she agreed calmly, and she rose to stand up.

To stand up and to offer a suggestion she didn't expect him to take but one she needed to make anyway, if only for her sake. "Do you want me to walk back with you, Mr. Snape." There was a question of just in case the small amount of liquor and the large amount of emotional upheaval had interferred with the healing process.

meet-and-greet | January 2016

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