It had taken Martha Jones all the courage she still had in her heart, and the love and support from her family, to tear herself apart from the Doctor and his TARDIS, breaking her own heart in the process.

But she was needed. Her ptsd-driven family was just about as close to a psychiatric unit as they could get, and Martha was the doctor that had to save them. Her own pain was unimportant before that of her family's. Even the Doctor's own pain was unimportant.

Because much of his pain came from having lost Rose Tyler, and now the Master, his childhood friend. His pain wasn't the slightest bit about losing Martha (or so she thought), because she was no Rose Tyler.

It took her exactly five months to get all caught up in alien warfare all over again, and sometimes she wondered if maybe she had become an addict to it. She should have given herself time to heal, time to overcome the nightmares, time to cry and mourn and fix the remains of her broken heart. But she didn't. Because she was Martha Jones and she knew what was more important than herself.

Now she cursed herself sometimes, because she couldn't give UNIT her all. Her 100%. She knew in the face of battle she would do her part, but she also knew her weaknesses.

Dear Tom Milligan was one. The poor naïve innocent doctor, "doctor", like that in no caps, had only brief memories of what the alien attacks of the few last years had been. He remembered the chaos in America caused by the sudden annihilation of their President, but he could not remember the Year That Never Was. And Martha loved him for that.

He was all open arms, cheerful heart, and desire to help others. Not very different than who she herself used to be before the Doctor (in caps) appeared in her life with his big blue box. Not that she blamed the Doctor for anything, no, she and only she was guilty of the terrible things that had happened to the world, and she knew it, and she was trying to deal with it.

Sometimes she wondered if she should look up Rose Tyler, and see if she, too, had become a regrets-filled creature like Martha had, after the Doctor. But probably not. She was Rose Tyler after all.

Even so, Martha had once looked up the Tylers in the guide. But Rose Tyler wasn't anywhere. She remembered all too late that the Doctor had told Jack Harkness that Rose was in a parallel world.

Jack Harkness, Martha thought with a genuine smile, and his Torchwood. Now those were crazy guys she loved. But her duty was with UNIT now. And Tom.

It had been weird at first, the first few nights they spent together, because she kept waking up in the middle of the night, screaming. After the second time she cried "Doctor, run!" at 3 a.m. in the morning, Tom started asking questions. And Martha told him about the Doctor, in the same way she told the people to hope and love him like she had, during The Year. He listened to her, and she never realized at which point her talk shifted, when he interrupted to ask point blank if she was in love with him.

Martha looked into his eyes, and saw herself reflected in them. She saw her unrequited love for the Doctor, and Tom's unrequited love for her, and said yes, she loved the Doctor.

But Tom did not go away like she expected, and hugged her instead, because Tom didn't care that she wasn't Rose Tyler, and he didn't care that she didn't love him (yet). She wondered for an instant if Rose Tyler had a boyfriend, wherever she was, that she did not love because she would forever love the Doctor.

She knew then, she was not Rose Tyler. She hugged Tom back.

She forgot about the Doctor one night about a month after that, when Tom was loving her, and she trembled in his arms, sighing, shifting, sweating under the sheets, and he whispered "I love you" in her ear, and she whispered "I love you too" before she had time to think of the Doctor and his TARDIS, or Rose Tyler.


Thomas Milligan proposed to Martha Jones on a summer evening, in a fancy restaurant near the Thames. She cried out the yes, and several heads turned to look at her.

That was when she started to forget she was The Girl Who Walked The Earth. That was when she started to forget she was not Rose Tyler.

That was the very first day she felt like Martha Jones, and it was okay.