Note: due to formatting issues, please pretend that the underlines are actually strikethroughs. What's in the brackets is basically Martha's POV from a slightly different perspective, and the emphasized ones are thoughts that she's conflicted about.

Martha honestly, legitimately tried, at the therapy sessions, but. But she couldn't. They were vetted by UNIT [and she couldn't quite shake off that niggle of paranoia that whispered in her ear], and while they were good at their job, it was also very obviously their job, not their passion [like the way Martha had hoped to become a doctor for], and for someone who had spent the better part of a year evading people who were of the 'just doing their job' mentality, it wasn't—well. It wasn't.

During their sessions, Martha knew that they weren't really interested in the people she'd known, and while the pragmatic part of her understood why [it's never going to happen anymore, those people won't exist, so why bother, they're only human], she still can't quite reconcile that with her sudden panic about forgetting anyone during the Year, for all that she was advised that it was the 'healthiest thing to do'. Most of the things discussed in her sessions were more pertinent in a report than they were for counseling, but Martha just couldn't quite close the past year like a chapter in a book, and she refused to forget anyone she'd met. Between the dispassionate air of the one in charge of her situation, and what she remembered of her psych classes, she just— couldn't.

The attitude at home didn't help.

Because her family refused to talk about it, whenever therapy or the like came up. They didn't want to talk about the Year, and focused on the here and now with an obsession that was not unlike a man trying to find an oasis in a desert. Francine refused to schedule any sessions with any of the UNIT-provided psychiatrists, Clive apparently preferred late-night introspective silences while staring into his cup of tea, and Tish didn't seem like the sessions did her any good, either. Martha had her suspicions, but she hoped it was just paranoia on her part. But as time went on, she couldn't ignore the signs.

—

Maybe UNIT had thought distance was a reasonable idea, but all she could think about was how alone she felt [and the way it was a deja vu to 1914 nonoNO]—she sucked in a breath between her teeth. Straightened her shoulders. And focused on the page detailing who the witness could and couldn't talk to about the events in the aforementioned incident report. [She had an idea of what UNIT thought about her family, and if her suspicions were right, then they'd essentially been delegated to a casefile, and that thought both rankled and—no.]

Martha was the one in charge of taking care of the paperwork, in her family. 'And,' she thought with a dry not-quite-a-laugh-nor-a-sob, 'the only one stable enough to do it.'

Everyone had thought it prudent to live together for a while. And that's how Martha had noticed.

Because the Jones family was not doing as well as it seemed.

[In another life, Martha would have returned to her flat and checked up on them via phone calls, and UNIT would have remained a more solid presence. Their recovery would have been agonizingly slow, and they would never quite return to normal. Leo would have been slightly estranged, and he would not have completely believed their story until he'd seen Martha's scars. Even then, he would never quite realize the magnitude of what had happened, and would drift apart as the years went on.]

Martha was the one the family turned to the most, after the first time her father screamed at 1:24 A.M., and she'd had to convince him that no, what he'd seen in the yard wasn't a Toclofane that escaped, but a grey balloon that the seven-year-old down the street had lost after his birthday party on a windy day.[ Martha was used to putting up an unfazed façade, and internalizing everything, now. She'd had no alternative. She didn't know when the last time she'd cried was and a part of her was scared because of it. But she simply couldn't stop.]

And so, in the following weeks, Martha lived with her family, and got acutely acquainted with how deep some unseen scars ran. [She had talked to UNIT, and managed to get them to arrange for her to take a brief break from school, citing a family emergency. She still didn't trust them, but they had undeniable resources. And she still had paperwork to finish.]

It was with a medical student's perspective that Martha noticed the way her mother only really got out of bed for a shower and food [depression, most likely], or that her father had increasingly severe agoraphobia [refused to go out the house, sometimes afraid to look out the window].

However, it was with a survivor's perspective that she noticed the way that Tish took to carrying a bottle and a knife around [not a bad combination, per se, but she herself used it to sterilize wounds, not for drinking], and that Leo still didn't quite believe them [the look in his eyes was very similar to that one ravager gang that would have delivered her to the nearest Searcher station, if she hadn't managed to parkour out of that particular sector], even despite having seen some of Martha's scars, whenever he stopped by. [He hadn't been with them then, and he was too busy with his own wife and daughter to be able to help them out more now. They didn't blame him, but it did make things awkward between them.]

Martha, meanwhile, found that she hid her particular issues alarmingly well; even though she woke tangled up in clammy sheets, a scream strangled behind her lips, and tended to rise with the sun and still slept lightly enough to wake up and comfort whoever it was that was nursing a mug of chamomile at midnight, she still noticed the furtive-but-jealous glances, and could easily imagine the accusatory 'why aren't you like us?' hidden in them.

Then again, no one really noticed that she carried a messenger bag that was now as much of a constant for her as the Doctor's screwdriver had been for him. [She felt restless without it; not naked, but uneasy, as if she was walking backwards in one of the most crowded streets in London.] It served as a pillow, and she only ever really removed it when she took one of her icy five-minute showers. [And tried not to think of how much of a target she was while doing so, especially when washing her hair.]

No one noticed the battered journals she scribbled in whenever she had the time or inclination to do so, hidden beneath the piles of paperwork UNIT had left her family to fill out, either. Because Martha recalled what the Doctor had done in when they were in 1914 [and firmly tried to repress everything else, because that was a bad time to be anything other than white or male, thank you oh so very much Doctor], bought a leather-bound journal, and started to write. The pages slowly but steadily fill with the stories she's terrified of forgetting [but no one would care if she did because it never happened]. Some bad sketches of the wastelands she'd seen, and faces also cropped up every so often. [And amidst it all, every day, the bone-deep urge to just walk out the door and never return, never look back, because she'd been walking for so long and she was so tired but a part of her still didn't want to stop.]

Martha didn't mention it to anyone. A very large part of her wanted to, but then remembered that UNIT would probably take it, and no one who read it would really care about the way John had been so polite with everyone, had acted like the epitome of what it meant to be British with a stiff upper lip [and still somehow able to procure tea even in the middle of Afghanistan, something she still hadn't figured out]. No one would care about Marianna, who'd helped her persuade one of the scavenger groups in Nicaragua to spread the story of the Doctor as much as possible, and then collapsed a building with a few well-placed pipe bombs to cover their theft of a boat, or huge but gruffly warm Andrei, who'd taught her the best ways to make herself a weapon when none were available, for all that she hadn't wanted to learn at first. [Then Martha'd seen the moaning and whimpering shell of a person that one of the Toclofane left behind, too far gone to be able to survive without being rushed to surgery, and the only humane option left had her retching and shivering miles later. She still saw it in her nightmares.] The journals were for the people she didn't want to forget, because the reports she had to fill out took care of the rest.

—

Martha was poring over yet another stack of paperwork [at least it wasn't in triplicate this time] when her phone rang. She couldn't quite help but frown; everyone who had her number was either in the same house as her, or aware that she had a family emergency. She braced herself, and hit the green icon. "Hello? Who is this?"

"Hello! This is Captain Jack Harkness speaking. Would I happen to be speaking to a certain Martha Jones?" The familiar voice asked, and Martha's shoulders relaxed.

(In another life, UNIT's presence would have made Jack just a bit more hesitant to call, and between that, and the rocky relationship that Torchwood had with UNIT at times, Martha wouldn't have started to open up enough for him to realize what wasn't being said. At least, not in time.)

"Why, hello, Jack. How've you been?"

And so started their habit of calling each other. Martha hadn't really heard of Torchwood until, well, the mess with her cousin at Canary Wharf [Adeola had named her as the next-of-kin in her will(!) because her own parents were dead, and apparently she'd been the other responsible one in the family] when she'd had to help make funerary arrangements, and then there was that fiasco with the Year, and…[No.]

But Martha had noticed that there was friction between Torchwood and UNIT. It was mainly subtle, but she still got the gist between the sheer professionalism that Jack treated anyone from UNIT who hadn't been on the Valiant, or the entire subsections dedicated to other organizations in the paperwork. So she took care and discretion in calling Jack. [The Hub also had a very secure line, which helped immensely, even if UNIT wasn't monitoring them to that extent.]And that's where things started to come apart.

(In another life, Martha's trust in UNIT, along with the weeks without contact, would have put her at a bit of an impasse regarding Jack.)

AN: being crossposted to AO3 and tumblr. If you want to reach me, I'm mynormalisnotyournormal, and for anything related to this 'verse, check my 'blurred lines' tag.