Title: Getting Out
Author: kerianne
Characters: Martha POV; mentions of one-sided Martha/Doctor, Simm!Master/Lucy, and Doctor/Rose
Wordcount: 557
Rating/Warning: PG. Spoilers through Last of the Time Lords.
Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing them.
Summary: Martha understands, far too well.
Author's Notes: Just a short Martha character piece exploring some interesting parallels I noticed in the finale. This is my first attempt at writing for this fandom, and it probably won't be my last, seeing as the Saxons have taken up residence in my brain and won't let me rest until I've written at least one fic that's properly about them.
Before she leaves, she tells him a story, something about a friend's hopeless crush that lingered a little too long. She is careful; she keeps her tone light and confident, as if it really is so simple, just an intelligent woman deciding she's tired of wasting time on a man who clearly isn't interested.
And it's almost true, of course; she does want him to know how much it hurt her, his careless indifference, the way he forced her to live with the restless ghost of a woman who was universes away. She knows he won't feel guilty-- he's seen and done so much that one human girl's romantic woes will hardly register-- but if she can force him to look at her, to really see her as something other than a warm body imperfectly filling the space Rose left, it will be enough.
There is another story, though-- one she will never tell him.
What she doesn't say is that her decision to leave was made the moment she saw Lucy Saxon raise her gun to shoot the Master.
The others assumed that Lucy had lost her mind, that after a year of watching her husband methodically destroy the Earth she had finally shattered like the fragile porcelain doll she resembled. But Martha knew. She, better than anyone in the universe, could understand exactly what was going on behind the other woman's blank eyes, what drove the hand that never once trembled.
She saw it all in that instant-- the exhilaration of the early days, the nameless thrill of staring into his eyes and seeing the inconceivable endlessness of the universe, the inevitable slide into chaos and darkness and pain. The manipulation, the casual cruelty, the other women and the violence, the eventual realization that the beautiful, brilliant, inhuman madman who played at being her husband felt nothing that could be called affection for her-- and through it all, impossibly, so much love. Desperate, frustrated, twisted love, grown out of control into something dark and terrible that cried for blood.
Martha wanted to pity her-- a shame, that one, just fell for the wrong Time Lord-- and found, as the Doctor wept and cradled the man who had slaughtered the people of her world as if he were a beloved brother, that she could not.
She could delude herself all the way to the end of the universe that they were different, that the Doctor was good, that she was stronger than Lucy and would never lose herself in an obsession that consumed everything it touched. But she already loves him more than she should, and every time he ignores her, every time he turns her down, every time he looks at her and disappointment flickers in his eyes for an instant as if he'd expected to see someone else, that love flares with defiant intensity. She knows it is changing her, has already changed her, and she's not at all sure anymore that loving the Doctor won't burn away all that makes her human. Perhaps Rose, perfect, incomparable Rose, would have had the strength to handle it-- but she isn't Rose. He's never let her forget that.
So she says "This is me getting out," and smiles, and hopes that one day when she closes her eyes she won't see herself pulling the trigger.