MARTHA after the year that never was
She's spent a year traveling a desperate world, a year to consider the man she thinks she loves. She is no longer blinded to him. What she sees is a man who is broken from loss and pain, grief and guilt, but will never allow himself to forget.
She watches as he clutches at the man who murdered so many people. In her head she knows why he is upset, but she finds it difficult to sympathize as the Doctor clutches at a murderer, wailing. She feels sick and turns away to vomit on the floor. She's not sure she can forgive him this.
Her family needs her to stay with them. She has seen more, understands more, than all of them. They will get through this as a family (and they will be a family again and not the shattered facsimile she ran away from).
She wants to stay with them. No, that's not true. She wants to stay with the Doctor, but she needs to stay with her family. For them and for herself (pick up the pieces of her heart and build it anew.)
She hates herself a little, when she realizes she's not so certain she would have stayed if he had loved her back. But she knows he won't move on from his perfect Rose. She can't quite help the bitterness, because Martha was there for him, Martha didn't leave him, but he never noticed and it's definitely burning a hole through that place where her compassion should be. (But there's a little bit of her that keeps remembering that Rose didn't so much leave as become trapped. That this girl was powerful enough to bestow immortality on Jack and save the universe in the process. She deserves someone who loves her for her own merits and doesn't hold her to the impossible standards of a goddess.) She wonders if he was ever as wonderful as she imagined, this man who doesn't appreciate her. She's followed the yellow brick road, and is not so sure it's worth it, now she's here.
So she tells him that she's good and leaves him. It's bittersweet, but she deserves to be appreciated. She'll pick up the pieces of her life and move on.
Maybe she can find Tom Milligan again?