Pulled from the Water

Author's note: Throught the fic are a few things marked with a symbol like this: [x]. I've included a few comments at the end of the fanfic on each of these subjects. Most of them are simply my thoughts on the matter.

Enjoy!

Martha Jones was drowning.

It had been six months since the Master had been defeated and the Doctor had left her life, and things had gone from bad to worse. She'd struggled to stay afloat, throwing herself into her job and caring for her family, and later into work with Torchwood and time with her fiancée. It had worked, for a while. Even so, there was still that feeling of déjà vu. There were still the nightmares of what had happened the day before, yet had never happened. The Year That Never Was, the year Martha was still technically in, haunted her. It weighed her down worse than any anchor could.

Then, of course, things got worse. After all, that's what they always did.

Her trip with the Doctor after the Sontaran affair, short and unexpected as it was, brought many memories back to life. Many were wonderful, but more were traumatizing, linked to the year she missed even though she had rarely saw his face then. She rarely got a good night's sleep for fear of the nightmares. Her job at UNIT was one she enjoyed, but not one she could focus on thanks to her endless flashbacks and paranoia. Her family was struggling too, and though she did her best, she always felt as though she'd failed them by dragging them into the fight against the Master. Anything she tried to do to help them felt useless.

Finally, she was cut loose from the last rope which held her fast. Soon after the Doctor visited, she ended things with Tom, realizing she loved the man he'd been during the Year, not the one he was now. It had been a hard separation, but Martha knew it had to happen. It wouldn't be fair to him to love him as the survivor of the Year; he didn't remember who he'd been then, and she couldn't change him to be that man. [1]

Needless to say, Martha was no longer even treading water anymore. One afternoon, she returned to her apartment after a long day of work held together by a single thread. She was exhausted, and the day had been stressful. Besides, this day marked the anniversary (or was it the same day? Martha didn't know) of the time she saw Japan blown to smithereens, all the people murdered. Seeing Hanuko, a Japanese-born coworker of hers, at work had nearly undone her fragile composure.

Martha Jones was a strong woman, a woman who had walked the earth and ended up saving it through words alone. However, even the strongest things had a breaking point.

She slammed the door hard behind her, a reaction many would see as frustrated or angry, but was really just a desperation to keep the rest of the world out. She wanted out; it was getting harder every day to juggle everything. She was sinking below the surface, and quickly.

Would it be easier to just let the current drag her under? She was not the sort to contemplate suicide readily, but it could be the escape she desperately needed. It might be the only thing which ended all the nightmares, the troubles, the regrets. Martha let out a long sigh, slumping against the wall next to her door. She was so terribly tired, tired of the memories, tired of fighting.

"Martha?" called a voice from her bedroom. She nearly jumped out of her skin; she'd thought she was alone. After all, she lived by herself. Straightening herself, she wondered for a moment if she'd imagined the voice. It sounded vaguely familiar, as if spoken out of a dream or one of her memories.

"You there?" the voice called again. No, she definitely hadn't imagined it. Even so, it sounded familiar, though she couldn't quite figure out why. She was simply too tired and overwhelmed to place it.

"Who's there?" she called, advancing slowly on the door to her room. "What do you want?"

"I'm not here to hurt you," came the reply. "Just come on in."

She crept to the door anyway, ready to run or strike at any moment. And then she saw who was sitting on the bed.

He still looked like a model straight from the forties, minus the coat (which Martha could see was hung up on the hook next to her bathroom door) and the shoes (which she hadn't noticed when she'd entered her home, but that she'd realize later were on her shoe rack). The brown hair was neatly but carelessly combed, and the usually playful blue eyes held a very serious look.

"Jack," Martha greeted him uncertainly. "What are you doing here? Don't you have work?" Jack had never dropped in on her like this before. She'd seen him once in a while when she'd worked with Torchwood, but not at all outside of either of their jobs. After she'd started up with UNIT without much contact from him, she'd assumed she'd never see him again. Though she hardly knew him, the thought saddened her for some reason. He'd struck her as a kind individual, if more than a little odd. Then again, who had she met at the Doctor's side who wasn't?

"Nice to see you too, Martha," Jack greeted her, getting up from the bed. "I figured I could take some time off; it was a quiet day. Quite unlike UNIT's day, if Tosh's reports are true from her monitoring station. To answer the other question, I figured you might need some company."

"Why?" Martha asked him.

"Why? You just broke up with Tom," he replied. "I figured you'd need to see someone like me right about now," he added with a wink.

"Oh, Jack," sighed Martha, a smile coming onto her face at the innuendo. She'd been flirted with by everyone from Renaissance playwrights to spaceship mechanics since getting aboard the TARDIS; why wouldn't a not-completely-human, anachronistically-dressed head of a shadowy alien-fighting organization join in? She couldn't even help the smile; the idea of it all was just so ridiculous. [2]

"And also, today was the day you saw Japan destroyed and millions of innocent people murdered needlessly," Jack finished, seeing the smile slide off her face as quickly as it had come.

"How'd you know?" she asked, voice betraying only the slightest tremor.

"The Master told me. He tended to tell me things like that: Japan being destroyed, the resistance movement in the U.S being crushed in a bloody massacre, my entire Torchwood team finally freezing to death in the Himalayas after they'd been trapped up there. The exact kind of news to make my day," Jack's voice was devoid of emotion. Even so, Martha saw a glimmer of pain and sadness in his eyes.

"Your whole team?" she gasped. She knew them now, Tosh and Gwen and Owen and Ianto. The image of her friends freezing to death slowly, perhaps wondering why Jack had abandoned them, appeared in her mind, and wouldn't disappear no matter what she tried to do. That wasn't what she needed to imagine today.

"Yeah. That was a bad day. First day I really cried," Jack replied. "That actually happened a week after Japan. They won't know why, but I'm certainly not letting them out of my sight this week." Martha smiled at that one, only a little, sad smile, which he returned. Now he looked like a survivor of the Year, between the haggard smile and the lost look in his eyes.

"How are you holding up?" he continued. "Oh, and tell me the truth," he added quickly as she started to speak. "I'm almost two hundred years old. Goodness knows I should be able to read body language pretty well. I'll probably be able to tell."

"I'm...holding up?" Martha managed. "I mean, it's not easy. But I'm still standing, right?" Her voice trembled only slightly with the words. Jack nodded, hearing the tremor and suspecting she was far worse than she was letting on. Even so, he didn't push her. If there was anything he was good at, it was realizing when to push and when to hold back a bit.

"Figured just as much," Jack replied at last. "I'm shocked you got this far without crashing and burning. You amaze me, Martha Jones."

She gave him a watery smile on that one, a smile which barely lasted a second. She'd been holding back tears all day, sometimes having to struggle harder than others. Now, however, they finally threatened to spill over.

"Well, I'm not doing so well right now, huh?" she asked rhetorically.

"Good thing I'm here. Come on, let's sit down," Jack crossed back over to the bed, sitting down and looking expectantly at her.

"Why?" she asked, though she followed him.

"It's more comfortable to have a good cry sitting down by a friend. Trust me, I know," he explained. And then, before she could react, he threw his arms around her and pulled her close.

"Jack?" she squeaked as best she could.

"Just let it all out, Martha," he murmured into her hair. "It's okay."

Something about that completely shattered what was left of her composure. The floodgates, which had been only leaking so far, opened wide. Martha had only ever cried this hard when she was a child, or perhaps when her Hath friend had died. She finally broke down, crying for all those she'd seen die during the year, for the nightmares she still had, for her feeling of weakness regarding her family, for Tom, for the Doctor, for everything that had gone wrong.

If Jack was taken aback by just how upset she was, he didn't let on. He just kept holding her, one arm rubbing soothing circles on her back. All throughout, he continued to whisper gentle, comforting things to her. She didn't even listen to the words, just the soothing tone.

Martha gave into the tears, which strangely enough were making her feel better. At the same time, she let herself be lost in the waves of love she felt from the friend who was holding her. From what she'd known of Jack Harkness, this was no surprise. He was a person who loved deeply and loved many, and she was one of those. Perhaps it wasn't the same love he had for Ianto, which she was sure was genuine romantic feelings. Perhaps it wasn't what he felt for Gwen, an infatuation and a feeling of respect for an equal. It wasn't how he felt for the Doctor, either, which Martha knew was a sense of love which ran to his very core. It wasn't even what he had for Tosh and Owen, a sense of parental protectiveness. No, Martha was his friend, a person who'd won his eternal respect, someone he would do anything for.

And now, he was like a life preserver to her. Martha felt her spirits being restored. Now she had someone, and the troubles, while they didn't melt away, at least seemed to mute in importance.

After a minute, she'd finished crying, just rested her head on his shoulder as he stroked her hair. The memories still nagged at the edges of her consciousness, but less insistently.

"How about I make you dinner and we talk about troubles? Or not. Either way, I'm good," he started speaking after a minute. She could feel the words as much as she could hear them, resting as she was against his chest.

"Anything but sushi," she replied, voice muffled by his shirt.

"Of course not!"

The two then made their way to the kitchen, Martha relieved she had someone like Jack to pull her from the water when it got to be too much.

Author's note: Hi, folks! Since I'm making no headway with either of my multi-chaptered fics (they're both finished, but the total lack of attention they're getting means that I don't feel much like posting more chapters), I'm just going to stick to oneshots for now. I've decided to publish the three that I'm proudest of today.

Okay, so here are a few comments:

This was the first oneshot I wrote starring Martha and Jack, both of whom I simply adore. Jack is one of my two favorite companions of NuWho, and Martha is right up there. Even though I'm a huge fan of Rose, I love Martha as well (see, it's possible to like them both). I don't really ship them, but after this fic, I wrote a three-shot in which they ended up together...maybe I'll post that someday.

I tried to use a controlling metaphor of water throughout this. Please let me know how you found that.

[1]: I have two different theories as to why Martha and Tom split up. This is one of them, which I got by way of the excellent fic Hush, Says the Scone by RosalieOfGallifrey. I don't know if Martha was still wearing a ring by Journey's End, but for the purposes of this fic, they've split up soon after The Poison Sky/The Sontaran Stratagem.

[2]: Please tell me I'm not the only one who has noticed the fact that Martha gets flirted with by SO MANY PEOPLE over the course of her episodes. I mean, yes, she's gorgeous and amazing and everything else, but still...wow.

Well, that's all, folks! Enjoy and please review!