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It had been an eventful few months.

Was that why Joan found herself in the Nexus, now, avoiding her life? Most definitely. Something had changed with her and Sherlock, ever since she had decided to move out. She didn't know what was going on, but she knew that, logically, she could not build her life around him. Still she wasn't feeling up to letting her life power forward and, even though she still did not entirely trust this hotel, she at least had to act as if she did, and she hoped her life didn't go racing forward while she was there in The Smoking Room, playing crossword puzzles at an empty table.

And, really, she supposed a broken heart was the least of her worries, but she had that, too.

Attempting to distance herself from her life, to gain some clarity, apparently wasn't helping her out, because she just ended up sitting around at the hotel wondering what she could do with herself. She had a bottle of beer on the table with her, barely touched. She had fancied herself to be self-medicating, but hadn't even, really, been in the mood for that. Her eyes ticked over the page. Had crosswords somehow gotten easier in the last year?

Ignoring the little voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like Sherlock and Mycroft combined, she filled out 7. getting better, eight words, with recovery. She looked at it, feeling suspicious. Typical.

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"I've always been crap at crosswords. I make my fiance do the Times Sunday for me while I supervise."

MacKenzie realizes this entire exchange has been somewhat unsolicited but she'd only been coming to the bar to get something to bring back to the room to share with Will and seeing someone all alone, well. Nobody should ever have to drink alone.

"I'm guessing you do your own cryptographic dirty work?"

She might have been a bit startled at the sudden remark, but Joan recovered quickly, offering the woman who had so suddenly appeared a faint smile. "I don't really do them often," she confessed. "I just couldn't stand the thought of playing sudoku." She wasn't used to idleness, and she had wanted to find something that would keep her somewhat preoccupied. It wasn't really working.

"But I guess I don't really have anyone to do them for me," she admitted, with a laugh that was only a little awkward sounding. "I'm bad at delegating tasks, anyway."

"Delegation is for the birds," MacKenzie agrees. "At least...that's how I operate other than crosswords. I know if I do it myself, it's been done correctly."

Letting go had always been difficult for her and it was something she could certainly empathize with. She settled in the chair across from the woman and flashed her a smile. "I'm MacKenzie. Sorry, I just saw you were alone and I didn't know if you wanted company or not. It occurs to me that people other than me probably value quiet time."

"Joan," Joan replied, offering her hand for a handshake. "It's okay. I've had more than enough quiet time, lately." It felt strange, how distant Sherlock had become from her. It worried her greatly, from more than one viewpoint.

"It's a pleasure. And yes, I'm always happiest when I'm in the middle of something loud and noisy and probably stressful. It makes me entirely well-suited to work for a 24 hour news network. There's always something exciting going on," MacKenzie says, laughing softly.

"Though my father would tell me I only like it because I'm nosy. He may have a point."

"I'd imagine that's a pretty exciting job," Joan said, thoughtfully. Something like that had never interested her - and probably never would, not in a million years - but she could imagine it would be thrilling for a particular type of person. And stress wasn't always such a bad thing. Joan had known more than her fair share of it, in her own career.

"Quite. I live for it," MacKenzie says, beaming a little. "What do you do? That's such an awkward question. There's no real good way to ask someone what they do for a living without sounding like you're on the world's most awkward blind date."

"I consult for the New York Police Department," Joan replied, easily enough - by now the moniker to her was quite natural, if a little rocky as of late. "And I wouldn't say that's an awkward blind date question. If you'd asked me how much money I made - that would be different."

"Oh no. Money is no object so long as I can keep myself in shoes," MacKenzie says. "I have a serious Louboutin fetish that is my main source of income dump. It's really embarrassing at the end of the day but I can imagine nobody can fault a woman for liking nice shoes."

Joan blinked when the subject suddenly changed to shoes, but at least that was a subject she was familiar with. "I don't think anyone could," she agreed. Her change in career had meant she was suddenly much more free in her footwear - and most other things she wore - in her day to day. She had to admit a certain joy in being able to wear her nice things all day, rather than waiting until the end of the work day to change.

"Sorry. You'll learn I'm a little...haphazard. My fiance says I'm like an angry little hummingbird or something and I flit from one thing to the next. But, yes, shoes. I am quite the fan of shoes. That's the one thing the hotel is missing," MacKenzie points out.

"The shopping opportunities are woefully slim."

"I agree," Joan said, with a nod. "I've gone through a few of the doors to see what they have, and some are okay for shopping, though. But I wandered through a door with zombies last time, so I'm not really keen on exploring lately."

"No zombies for me. I did end up in the downhill competition in the Olympics," MacKenzie says.

"Thank God I speak Russian or otherwise it might be very, very awkward."

Joan chuckled. "I imagine it would," she said, even though her biggest question was: Olympics? What? "How did you place?"

"Oh, I didn't medal by any stretch but I wasn't last," MacKenzie says, exceedingly proud of that particular achievement. It was something to say she'd competed and gotten in the middle third of the crowd.

"About fifteenth, I think? Which isn't bad at all."

"Hey there," Luther said, feeling a stirring of pleasant surprise upon happening upon Joan once more. He hadn't seen her since his initial arrival at the Nexus, and he'd started to worry after her safety since that was ultimately what Luther found himself doing. She was looking sharp, just as he remembered, and he smiled at her in remembrance of the first, put-together face he'd stumbled upon in the Nexus. Her beating the hell out of a zombie with a baton was an action that had only grown more impressive to him over time and contemplation.

"It's good to see you," he continued. "Mind if I have a seat?"

When Joan looked up at the shadow cast over her table, for a minute she was confused, if only because her mind had been elsewhere. Then her memory kicked in. "John, hi," she said, with warmth that could not be faked. "How are you?"

He, along with many others, had completely slipped her mind while she had been away, but only because larger concerns had dominated her thoughts. Still, she definitely couldn't forget the man who had basically carried her away from a zombie hoard. "Of course, of course," she said, at his question of joining her. It would be nice, maybe, to talk to someone who knew her but so dimly - no expectations, but a guarantee of some friendliness.

"Good," Luther said as he moved to take the seat he'd invited himself into, folding his body down until he could slouch in comfort and cross his legs ankle over knee. He could tell by looking at her, and by her initial distraction and apparent surprise in being spoken to, that she was distracted by something. That he knew literally almost nothing about her other than her name and the fact that she came from New York gave him no real launching pad for guessing what her problem might be, so he didn't attempt it. Joan seemed like the sort of lady who valued her privacy, and Luther could certainly respect that.

"How have you been, Joan?" He asked, then made a nod toward her crossword puzzle. "That thing treating you alright?"

"It's treating me about the same as all crossword puzzles will treat people," Joan replied, with a hint of a smile on her face. "They aren't exactly welcoming, right?"

He looked fine; then again, it was hard to imagine that such a hulking man could ever be overly affected by the little things in life. "Gone through many more doors?" She asked, in a friendly tease.

"Right bastards," Luther agreed with the barest trace of a smile. "But they serve alright for when you got somethin' on your mind, I suppose. I always start them, but wind up forgetting about them for weeks at a time."

Luther had the sort of mind that always sought something to riddle through, though as of recently he'd been tasked with things far more taxing than crosswords. It seemed to him that Joan had the right idea of it, and he thought he'd try to hunt one up for hismelf before too long.

"Ha," he laughed mirthlessly, "no. That last time kinda put the fear into me and don't tell anybody, but I've been a coward ever since. What about you? Do you feel like heading through another door sometime? I might be able to get my nerve up if you and that baton of yours went along."

"I've never seen crosswords as pursuits by themselves," Joan agreed. "I've never really understood people who go at them like that. But maybe I just don't get it." Joan, it turned out, preferred more complex puzzles to work her mind through, rather than the task of combing through her mind for words that fit into a set number of boxes.

As for doors, even if she'd had time she probably wouldn't have ventured through any. The Nexus for her at the moment was a breather from her life, and entering exciting new worlds wasn't exactly going to put her at ease. At the moment, anyway. "Haven't been through any lately," she said, with a shake of her head. "But maybe another one in the future, when I want to get away. Well. Get away further, I suppose. This is already pretty far from where I should be."

At the mention of the baton, her lips quirked up in a smile. "Maybe you should get one of your own," she suggested. "They're pretty useful."

Luther made his living on figuring out the workings of other people's minds, though perhaps it said something about himself that he really only shone in such an area when he'd put his mind to the task of deciphering an act or a personality that was particularly twisted. When it came to people that were his friends and acquaintances, he was given to spontaneous moments of insight, but was generally at a loss for many social cues. It was obvious to him that Joan was distracted by something larger than a crossword, but he didn't have the slightest idea as to where to start, nor did he think she would welcome his attempts. He could not help but be idly curious, as he was with all puzzles he couldn't immediately figure out, but he turned his mind pointedly away from it.

"I hear ya," he said with a nod. "Things pretty hectic back in New York? I get a headache every time I think of what's going on back in London. Probably best I don't know. That baton idea of yours, though. I could get behind that. Think they sell 'em in the hotel shop?"

"Hectic," Joan repeated, and she figured that, really, was the best word for it. "Yeah, I'd call it that. This is pretty good place for downtime, though."

Even though she used the Nexus as a bit of a cheat to catch up on sleep, she knew she still needed to get her own place. And Sherlock was not taking that choice very well. She wished she could make him understand; but for all that he told her he did his best to accommodate her and see things her way, he couldn't move beyond his own needs, and his own glorified idea of himself and his purpose in life. Life balance was not something Sherlock did well.

She laughed. "You can borrow mine; I have others," she said, with a little smile. "Do detectives in London not carry that sort of thing around?"

"It is that," Luther agreed, thinking that his months in the Nexus had included more free time than he'd ever had at any one part in his entire life. It left him feeling both unbalanced and cautious, perhaps unable to truly to truly enjoy the freedom when he did not know how things were turning out back home in his absence. Things had been left in a mess, and while it felt nice to be away from the mess on one level, it gifted him with too much guilt to really enjoy it.

"Ah, I dunno," he said with a laugh, the action echoing hers and feeling all the more natural for it. "I'm not a proper detective, I don't guess. Or at least, that's what they're telling me all the time."

In and out and there and back again, it seemed. Martha wondered just how many times she'd end up turning around to be here, in the hotel, mid-thought. It was rather Doctor-ish, really, like that--always a surprise.

Which was probably why, in discombobulation and seeking a focal point, she started talking to the only other person in the room, a woman sitting doing a crossword puzzle and frowning at it, without introducing her own self. Rather Doctor-ish, really, too.

"I've never really understood American crosswords," she blurted, lips quirking a little. "You get used to the cryptic sort and they seem too obvious."

Joan glanced up in some surprise at the sudden appearance of another woman, and her lack of greeting. She blinked. She wasn't offended or upset, of course; she simply wasn't expecting company. "I hadn't really noticed," She said, with a bit of a laugh. "Are you... just assuming I'm American or were you just making a remark?"

"Oh god, I'm sorry," said Martha, feeling her face heat, and she quirked a sheepish smile (better to ask forgiveness than permission, right). "It was assumption. Seems like about three-quarters of the people I meet here are."

A correct assumption, judging by accent, unless the woman was Canadian--a mistake Martha had made once and had resolved not to do again after being rather politely told off. "And I'm terribly sorry to interrupt you. Just a bit disorientated; I tend to end up back here when I least expect it, including, it seems, mid-conversation and blurty."

In the face of apology, Joan could never help but soften, especially in the first offence - if an offence it was, even. "No, it's completely okay," she said, with a genuine smile. She definitely knew what it was like to be disoriented in this place. "I was just wondering if maybe I had the American look, if there was one. Or you had intense eyesight and could see my crossword in detail."

"I wish I did, but I was taught a stab-in-the-dark guesses and wild assumptions from minimal evidence framework when it comes to my detective skills," Martha said, cocking her head a little and subconsciously scrubbing her hands on her trousers. "To be honest, it took some getting used to, coming from hard science, but now I can't shake the habit."

She offered a real, if sheepish yet, smile of her own. "I'm Martha," she said. "Martha Jones, from London. And I'm sorry to have barged in on your crossword--it wasn't really of my own volition."

"I can't say we have the same framework, but I get that," Joan said, grinning. "Who taught it to you? They have a lot to answer for."

She waved her hand at one of the empty chairs at the table. "Joan Watson," she said. "New York, so it's not a bad shot in the dark. Would you like to sit down?"

"Oh, he has a lot to answer for indeed," said Martha, her smile turning to a very wry and very dry smirk. "But that's a really long story, to be honest. Potentially an unbelievable one."

She ordered a round of beers, and gratefully took the seat across from Joan. "Been to New York a couple of times," she said, conversationally. "Though, uh, not recently."

"I don't know," Joan responded. "Being in this hotel kind of makes me more liable to believe more things than usual. At least when they take place here."

"I've only been to London once," she added, when Martha sat down. "But I enjoyed it. What little time I spent not doing work, anyway."

"I guess that's a valid point," Martha conceded with a faint laugh. "Enough weird shite happens here to make it seem reasonable." She slid one of the beers that arrived from a bored-looking waitstaffer over to Joan, along with a paper beer mat to catch the condensation.

"You know, when you live somewhere like London, or New York, it feels like you don't ever see any of the nifty bits. It's just head down, on with work. Even when people think it's this amazing place, and it is, you need to just carry on with your day. Probably doesn't help when travel becomes work, either."

She'd seen and experienced a lot with the Doctor. But get in-depth into a culture? Not as often as she would have liked.

When Martha slid her a new beer, this one cold with a fine mist of condensation over her, she gladly took it in favour of the one she already had at her elbow, untouched and at room temperature. She nodded when the server took it away. "Thanks," she said, raising her bottle to clink it with Martha's.

"I guess it used to be like that with me," she said, after a moment, and shrugged. "But I had a career change a couple of years back. "I see a lot more of New York now, and I have to look at everything more closely then I wasn't able to before. I consult for the NYPD," she added, since she assumed a question about what she did was not far behind from that statement.

Martha saluted Joan with her own bottle of beer slightly in reply. "No worries," she said, and took a sip before considering what she was going to say next.

"You consult?" she inquired, finally. "Crime scene investigation?" It was the only thing she could really think of from what she'd been told, though around here stuff could be far weirder than that.

"Yes," Joan answered. "Well, not really crime scenes, though I visit a fair number. I help with difficult cases, or sometimes cases that have gone cold that detectives don't have the time to pursue on their own. I do some private investigation on the side, as well, for other people. The NYPD usually has a lot of stuff handled on their own. What do you do? You mentioned travel?"

"That sounds like it's really interesting--" Martha paused, wrinkling up her nose. "And I sound like I'm just being polite, but it truly sounds brilliant. Lots of problem solving, lots of puzzles, and helping people, justice. Almost wish the Met got into that line of work but they have nasty security clearances."

She paused, sipped her beer, then admitted, "I used to travel, but I don't anymore. I guess it was because shit got too real, as people used to say? These days I'm a doctor in an A&E ward, though I do a bit of consulting myself for the, uh, government. Not often, though."

"I didn't think I would be into it," Joan had to admit. "It was... something that just crept up on me, I guess. But I love it. And I like being able to help people."

Perhaps that was a vanity, the need to do good work for others; yet it was a cornerstone to her entire career, as every time she made the switch that theme still remained. And that was why when Martha mentioned being a doctor, Joan had to laugh at the coincidence, though she covered her mouth quickly, in case she offended.

"I used to be a doctor," she said. "What on earth would the government consult you for, though?" Unless, of course, it had something to do with Martha's mention of travel. If she was a doctor 'these days', that suggested at other times she had been something else.

"That's the best thing, really," Martha agreed, and it was a statement from the heart, for her. That had been the core of what she and the Doctor had done, something she'd always known would be there in their travels; was the core of her work in A&E, definitive and inescapable.

"Then you know how it is, being constantly on your feet--what sort of speciality...were...you...?" she asked, before she entirely processed Joan's question, and managed to keep herself from a rather unprofessional and overly guarded um, uh, medical, uh, things response by sheer force of will. This place was out of time, after all, and she'd never been particularly fond of Eyes Only type information anyway.

Probably why neither UNIT nor Torchwood had actually hired her.

"I have, er, a unique skillset," she said, looking a little sheepish. "My travelling, well, if I tell you, will you swear you don't think I'm mad?" Because she liked Joan, from what she could tell in this meeting, and she really did want her to believe her.

Edited 2014-07-12 21:12 (UTC)

"I was a surgeon," Joan replied, easily enough. It was not a role she was comfortable to play anymore; even despite all of her years of hard work, in pushing herself to become the top of her field, she shied away from anyone ever even trying to call her 'Doctor'. Happily, those instances were few and far between now.

Joan had worked with a lot of people whose hold on reality was rather thin. Her own father, sometimes, never recognized her, even when she took aims to find him, to help him with his medications. In all of those times Joan had never wanted anyone to think she didn't believe them, or for them to think she was simply pretending. She did her best to understand that their world was as real as theirs.

But with the hotel? With everything she had seen? It wouldn't take a lot of understanding and being in Martha's shoes this time. This time, it was probably all, entirely legitimate, and Joan knew better than to doubt anything here, save for perhaps the safety of the doors. "Honestly, I probably won't think you are," she said. "You know, I can't promise until I hear it - but I'm pretty confident I'm a bigger believer now than I was six months ago."

Martha simply nodded at Joan's first statement. If the other woman didn't want to elaborate right now, then that was good enough--a past life, after all. (To be honest, she'd sort of been rubbish at her surgical rotation, so she was impressed by those who were good at it.)

But as for her own story...

"This sort of place does tend to enable, uh, an expansion of one's beliefs," she agreed, and maybe she was stalling a little, just for the moment. "I didn't really believe much in demons and angels and vampires, for a start--my world's a little more scientifically bound, I guess." A big sip of beer, a hard swallow.

"My travelling was time travel. Well, time and space, actually, the space part's pretty relevant. I saw a bit of the universe and its whens and wheres, and then..." She shrugged a little, nonchalance she didn't really feel and knew that Joan would see through. "I had to stop, before it became all I was. Sometimes I wonder if even that wasn't too late."

Yes; it was in her to immediately react to Martha's statement, not with pure disbelief, but more along the lines of a teenage girl shouting 'no way!' at something she could not imagine to be real, but must be, and it was amazing. But luckily Joan had a bit more composure than that, and she blinked at Martha, vaguely stunned; then she started to smile.

"You're telling me that you basically lived the majority of every cool science fiction book ever written?" she asked. Well; she hoped that was the case, because Joan couldn't imagine Martha telling her what she had done and only going around seeing a large amount of dead planets, or anything boring like that. "That's amazing."

It was difficult to believe, yes. But Joan figured that most of what she saw at the hotel was true, and Martha had no reason to trick her, which meant that, logically, she just met a time traveler. Because she could not comfort Martha, technically - they had just met - about the concerns she raised at the end of her statement, Joan instead tried to lighten the bomb dropped just a bit. "Did you do that thing, where you go back and meet your favourite person from history?" she asked. "You know. That question everyone gets asked at every party in their life when the conversation goes to a standstill."

"Sort of. Well, I mean, we met Shakespeare, among other people...so if you were ever wondering about the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, that'd be..." Martha gestured to herself, though she looked suitably modest and sheepish about it. "But a lot of it was, to be perfectly honest with you, a lot like those science fiction novels. Amazing and beautiful but also terrible and so very--pardon my language--fucked up. And the guy I was travelling with was also fucked up, pretty much. To anticipate your question as to why I stopped."

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