A strange creature

The Doctor was halfway through rambling about something incoherent, fiddling with the TARDIS's mechanisms, when a siren sounded; he jumped, bumping his head on the underside of the console.

"Doctor?" Martha said.

The TARDIS making odd sounds was hardly anything new, though the Doctor reacting with anything more than an idle shrug and a 'probably nothing' was unusual.

She took a step back as he started running around the console, glancing at the screen and fiddling with switches.

"No, no... It can't..." the Doctor murmured. "Not now!"

"What is it?" Martha said.

"Old alarm," the Doctor said. "Set it up... a while ago now, during the War. Detects the presence of something very specific and very nasty."

"What something?" Martha said, slightly impatiently.

"A memeovore," the Doctor said. "It was... It's a immeasurably dangerous creature the Time Lords used as a weapon in the war. I thought they'd all been excised from this universe, but just in case I set up that alarm in case I ever got near one."

"What does it do?" Martha said. "Why's it so dangerous?"

"It's a predator," the Doctor said.

"Of what?"

"Everything," the Doctor said. "It eats meanings. Basic concepts. The first time one got loose, a nearby planet had its alphabet start shrinking letter by letter. In the war... There was a galaxy where the Daleks lost the concept of killing. They just couldn't do it, even by accident, they didn't know how. It was lost to them, eaten."

"That... doesn't sound so bad," Martha said.

"Doesn't it?" the Doctor met her eyes. "You should hear about the supercluster that lost the concept of breathing. You could go there, show them how to do it, but nothing would work."

"Oh," Martha faltered. "That's... How do we stop it?"

"We hope," the Doctor said.

The TARDIS landed worryingly close to Earth. Martha's home could be seen, a twinkle in the sky; they were in the Solar System, if not quite on the world. The Doctor stepped out the TARDIS, clad in an orange spacesuit; Martha followed. It was the asteroid belt; the rock beneath them was large, though Martha couldn't help but feel like she was a breath away from drifting off into space.

The Doctor ran ahead of her. He carried what seemed more like a large fishbowl.

"We're lucky," the Doctor had said. "Readings say the memeovore was removed. This is... it's like a stray hair. A fragment. Still dangerous, but an exclusion vessel like this can hold it. Ready?"

Then, there had been the familiar twinkle in his eyes. That alone had made Martha feel like things were going to be alright; he always withdrew whenever he was reminded of the Time War, but the moment she got a glimpse of the Doctor she always thought of as the real one...

And really, was there any more Doctor a thing to do than prance about on a rock that barely had the gravity to hold him down, waving a fishbowl around?

She didn't know what he was looking for, but evidently he found it. The neck of the fishbowl started to glow, and he hugged it close to his chest as he ran back at the TARDIS.

Maybe there'd been no need for her to get into this grimy spacesuit after all. She backed into the TARDIS a moment before the Doctor followed.

"Just got to throw this little thing out through a hole in the universe," the Doctor said. "Then back to business as usual. Pick your favourite lever and we'll see where it takes us."

Then he hurried to the controls. The fishbowl rattled disturbingly from where he'd put it on the floor but, no matter how hard she tried, Martha couldn't see anything inside it. It was... almost actively nothing, not a void, not anything so cliche, but rather emptiness that seemed just as tangible as if it were filled to the brim.

Shaking off those thoughts, Martha returned to her room. She really hated this spacesuits.

What she needed was a shower. Wash off whatever muck had been in that suit; she gratefully peeled it off, then stripped off the rest of her clothes, lying them out on the bed in her room. Nude she walked out to the en suite that had materialised by her room about a month back, consulted the notes she'd made on the wall to translate the ever-fluctuating alien measure of heat to celsius, then got in.

It was good to feel clean. She soaped up her body, ran her fingers through her hair; the chance for a good soak was rather lacking when most days were spent running from aliens or robots. She was always one to take advantage of a lull.

Especially after wearing one of those suits. She didn't even want to think about how many people must have put it on before her.

She was almost done when there was a clatter from outside. Martha frowned, turning off the water.

A definite clatter. Tentatively she stepped out of the shower, approaching the exit to her room; rather than anything so prosaic as a towel, she was dried by a weird forcefield over the TARDIS doorway that dismissed any water molecules on her skin. It had taken her a while to get used to it.

Then Martha yelped as the Doctor rushed into her room, waving the fishbowl. She jumped back into the bathroom, cheeks burning.

God, couldn't he have waited until she'd gotten dressed?!

"It got loose!" the Doctor said, waving around the bowl. "Almost... got it! Ok, hole's just outside, see you in a minute!"

Hugging the fishbowl to his chest again, now filled with nothing once more, he moved out of the room.

She really needed to... Martha paused.

The Doctor stuck his head around her door again; Martha yelped, crossing one arm over her chest and the other over her pussy in an effort to try and preserve some modesty.

"Oh, and it might've eaten a few surface level thoughts," the Doctor said. "No time to do anything major. Probably nothing."

And then he was gone. Martha stared after him.

Great, so that... thing, on top of leading the Doctor into running into her room right after she'd had a shower, might've just eaten a concept out of her head. That was just peachy.

Now back to... Huh, that was strange. Martha was sure she'd been about to do something, but for the life of her she couldn't remember what.

She glanced around her room, hoping that would spark a memory. All it did was make her frown; what were those... things on her bed?

She approached, picking up the top couple. A scrap of fabric, a band with an almost hourglass-shaped strip of fabric hanging low from it. And the other was much larger, two long denim tubes, each maybe the size of one of her legs, joined at the top.

Weird. There was all kinds of inexplicable stuff that popped up in the TARDIS: shrugging she threw those, and the other two, into her bin. Whatever they were, they were useless to her.

Then Martha turned, nervously regarding the door out to the rest of the TARDIS. Intellectually she knew she must have gone out there before, but something still made her falter. The idea of being seen naked again was embarrassing, to say the least.

Then again, it wasn't like there was any possible solution to that, right? How was she ever to not be naked?

She shrugged off those weird thoughts. Still, she crossed her arms awkwardly, cheeks hot as she headed out for the control room, naked as ever.