Just a small Martha piece, set after the s3 finale, that I wrote a while ago. Enjoy!


At first it feels like she's walking on a cloud.

The voices she hears all seem faraway, like the faint echo of a world she once took for granted. She's seeing their faces; she smiles, and replies without missing a beat, but it feels somehow like she is standing on a stage, speaking the words another wrote for her, automatically. (Is she the girl who almost kissed Shakespeare, still?) She sleeps and wakes, gets up and works and she isn't unhappy, she isn't sad. What she is, exactly, is quite hard to tell.

She tries harder, and then harder still, for her family needs her—and she's never been the type to abandon a loved one, Martha Jones, nor a person in need. At the hospital, she is more careful than ever, scared of daydreaming about stars and letting her awareness slip away. But her hand remains steady and slowly, this small part of the world becomes hers all over again, as she relearns the tiny, silly, stunning wonders of being home.

She thinks of a man who will never be granted such luxuries, and it is partly for him that she looks up a certain doctor Tom Milligan—because he taught her to be fearless, but he's not there anymore to grab her hand and pull her along, and her life is now hers to design. She makes up a story, her voice smooth and sure, fusses and giggles with Tish over the most fitting outfit like it's the only thing that matters in the universe.

And for a moment, for her, it is.