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Who: Hermione Granger, Martha Jones
What: Tea and a chat. (And Hermione not realising that this is the Snape-Jones Cottage as opposed to just the Jones Cottage).
Where: Barrackham train station, then the Snape-Jones Cottage
When: day of Hermione's arrival.
Warnings: TBA, probably none.

Hermione had realised on the train that she had no idea what she was getting into- or who, really, she was meeting. It was enough to make her pause before messaging Martha- but what choice did she have, really? There were countless strangers here, and Martha's trustworthiness had been vouched for in the strongest terms. Admittedly, Snape had been the one to tell her that- but after everything which had been revealed to her about him, she had to take his word for it.

Anyway, for someone Snape seemed to hold in such high regard (even telling her to be polite to her- if she hadn't known better, Hermione would have wondered if there was some kind of romantic entanglement or something there, but by merit of who he was the thought wasn't even properly addressed) she seemed inordinately nice. Friendly, even. Cheerful, in fact.

It was probably a little stupid and incautious, but after the day she'd had, the prospect of tea with someone cheerful certainly wasn't unwelcome.

She stood in the train station feeling awkward, dressed in a dark trouser suit and trying to look as if she knew her way around perfectly well, though she took nervous looks at signs and the frown on her face never quite left. The train journey had made her realise how big the city really was, and how many different types of people it housed, not to mention the surprising normality of the city's daily life; there were people in uniforms, people going to work, people with shopping in their arms- and stranger things, too, but she knew enough not to stare too eagerly. And now she was adrift in the middle of it all, endeavouring to seem both harmless and unharmable.

She found herself hoping- rather nervously- that Dr Jones wouldn't be late.

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"No trouble at all," Hermione said, brushing the warning aside- something else had caught her interest.

"Shakespeare? As in- Macbeth, Hamlet, Twelfth Night...?" It was possible to hear the slightly hungry fascination in her voice, a smile coming to her face despite herself. "You time-travelled, then?" She didn't sound disbelieving; considering everything she'd gotten up to in third year, it would have been hypocritical, but wizards didn't have quite that sort of time-travelling ability. "That's amazing. How? I mean, the wizarding world has limited time travel, and in theory one could go back that far, but then there would be no real way to go forwards again. Oh, what was he like?"

"Yeah. Will." Martha grinned, because meeting Shakespeare had definitely been the best part of her time with the Doctor, despite the near-death that went along with it. Dropping onto the couch next to Hermione once more, she focused her attention on the girl with a smile.

"Yes, I traveled in time. There's the bloke called the Doctor. Well, he's not really a bloke. He's a Time Lord, and he's from a planet called Gallifrey. He's got a ship called a TARDIS, and that's what he took me in." Martha paused for a minute, and her voiced moved into the tone that she typically used when it came to storytelling.

"I saved his life once, and he took me on a trip to return the favor. London, 1599, and we went to the Globe to see Love's Labour Lost."

"How did you meet him, then?" she asked eagerly, already caught up in the story. It was easy to believe, after everything she'd been through today, and more attractive to think about than the fact that she was far away from home, from her job, her friends, everything familiar- the fact that she was back in a situation of having to worry about Bellatrix Lestrange- and everything else.

She was exceedingly glad to meet Martha, really; she seemed capable of taking everything in her stride, and with good humour, too, rather than stern warnings or bewildering amounts of explanations.

"I was a student then, a junior doctor. Just going through and living my life. I was on my way to work and this nice-looking bloke just stopped in front of me, took off his tie and said 'like so.' I was surprised and thought he was a nutter really. So, I go into work, and we're doing rounds, and then laying in the bed is the very same man who'd taken his tie off."

Martha paused for a second, and half-smiled. "I called him on it, and then he acted like he'd no idea what I was talking about, and it turned out that he hadn't. But while I was listening to his chest, I discovered something really odd.

"He had two heartbeats. I moved my stethoscope because I thought I was mental or something, and then I locked eyes with him, and he just winked."

"That's a bit cavalier," she said, a slight smile on her face, although her eyebrows were raised- she believed Martha, but the story was certainly a little bizarre. "So hold on, the man who took his tie off, was he-" She stopped, something clicking in her mind. "Oh. Yes. Time-travelling alien. You met him before he met you, or...something like that. Right?"

"Yep. We definitely met out of time. It's weird in that way. Probably why the two of us never could really get properly into step." Martha smiled, because the old pain didn't hurt any longer. Thank goodness for that, really.

"But he definitely had two heart beats, but I couldn't ask him about it because he'd think I was mental. Or worse, Dr. Stoker would have thought I was. The last thing I wanted to do was get sectioned. So I put it out of my mind and made plans to have lunch with my sister Tish." There was a little bit of a wistful smile at the mention of her sister; she hadn't seen her in a very long time and would likely not see her for a very long time more.

"It was raining on Royal Hope, but where she was, it was bone dry. A mate then told me to look at the sky and when I did, I saw that it was raining up. The suddenly it was black as night."

What Hermione lacked in social intuition she could certainly make up for in intellect, and she took very little time in deciding that Martha had something of a past with the man she'd traveled with. Her eyes flickered to the wedding ring again- it was a wedding ring, wasn't it, not just a ring that happened to be on her wedding finger?

Quite aside from her (rather nosy) musings on Martha's love life, she was genuinely interested in the story, her mind racing through possible explanations before she reminded herself that Martha wasn't from her world. Trying to deduce what had happened would be impossible for her.

A disquieting thought, for someone so used to knowing all the answers.

"Go on," she said, sounding curious but uncertain.

The uncertainty in Hermione's voice made her quickly offer a smile. "I swear I'm not mad, really. It all sounds like I should be sectioned some place or writing for the tell, but I'm not mental."

A pause, and then Martha slipped into the storyteller tone. "Well, when we looked out side, we saw that it wasn't noon and we definitely weren't in the middle of London anymore. Instead, when we looked out the window, we could see something very familiar indeed." Martha paused for a moment and then grinned, her voice dropping a bit low. "We could see the Earth from where we were, and the surface of the moon stretched out before us."

If Martha closed her eyes, it was something she would be able to picture with all of the vividness such a sight was due. Standing in Earth light wasn't something that most people had seen, and Martha had done it twice.

"Everyone was panicking. My mate freaked out, but I had figured out something very important. There was something keeping the air and heat in otherwise we already would have been dead. Then the Doctor showed up, dressed as I had seen him, and he told me that I was brilliant, and asked my name."

"It's not that, I promise," Hermione assured her quickly, settling down to listen again. It wasn't; it was simply a worrying feeling of being adrift in the unknown.

She had a lot of research to do, evidently. Even now, she was marking off things in her mind, keeping track for later.

"Was that sort of thing- normal for him?" she asked helplessly, finding herself sympathising somewhat- she knew what it was like to be the relatively normal sidekick, constantly dragged into bizarre situations (and admittedly, sometimes rather enjoying them, but that was another matter entirely).

Chuckling, Martha nodded. "It was his standard operating procedure really. In the time I traveled with him, we only ever ended up not in the middle of something twice, and that was because I insisted on it." The time after 1915, and the 1969, when he felt that he owed her. There probably would have been another one following the year, but she'd decided to step away before then.

"Well, the two of us stepped out onto the balcony, and as we were standing out there and looking, then all of a sudden ships landed. Real alien space ships just appearing out of no where. As we watched, the Doctor explained to me what they were."

She paused here, and gestured to her head, forming a box with her hands. "They were space rhinos, called the Judoon and they were intergalactic police thugs."

Blink. "Space rhinos." Frown. "Intergalactic policing space rhinos."

Her eyebrows quirked up; okay, she was still suspending her disbelief. "Doesn't sound boring, at least. It's against...intergalactic law to transport a hospital to the moon, then?"

Yes, Martha knew that frown, and it made her grin. She couldn't help it, because Hermione reminded her of one of the other times that she had told this story, to a listener who had a very similar reaction.

"Actually, it's against intergalactic law to hunt people on Earth. See, we're a class three planet, and we're not civilized enough to interact with. They think of us a bit like plankton, really. But they were hunting a plasmavore who had killed a princess."

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