Chapter Text
Martha Jones wasn't okay.
She'd walked the Earth, helped fight the madman who'd orchestrated a massacre on a global, if not galactic, scale. She'd seen ancient cities burn, newfound friends die, seen the sheer desperation as the days went on in a universe that was nothing more than a paradox. She'd had to pick her way through mass graves [if they could even be called that] to get to relative safety, and bribed and cheated and slunk her way through countries' borders towards her next destination, where she'd start all over again. And all the while, she'd had to just...carry on. With the threat of failure hanging over her head, knowing she couldn't relax, had to keep walking [even though her feet ached and her eyes burned from the smoke and-] to keep everything and everyone she loved safe.
So, no. After everything, after seeing the Master shot dead and the Paradox Machine disassembled so that all the horrors never really happened, Martha Jones was. Not. Okay.
Her family was still a wreck from a year of cohabitation with the madman; she still woke up silently at night, with a knife in her hand, and a litany of the no-longer-actually-dead on the lips. UNIT was both helpful and not helpful in this matter; they seemed to care more about completing the mission reports than the darkening shadows in her family's eyes, and she'd promised to look after them, even while ignoring once-familiar faces in both reality and her [dreams]nightmares, but...she wasn't okay. [Martha was drowning. Quietly, and slowly, with every tick of the clock, every glimpse of her sister's flinch and her brother's confused looks and every incident report she filled out, she was drowning.]
Sometimes, she called Jack to commiserate about it. About the Year, about the Doctor's ramblings and the journeys they'd had. Other times, they made a drinking game of it. ["We can laugh or cry, why not take a shot and do both?" "You're on, I cut my teeth on vodka."] Retcon came up, in one conversation- and when Martha realized what it did, that was that. [The beginning of the end.]
A long talk and several [dozen] arguments later, it was done.
(In another universe, Martha Jones might have abstained from erasing her memories of her journey, might have decided to keep both the good and the bad because she could bear the darker moments, if they meant she could remember everyone's kindness and brilliance during such dark times.)
In this life, however, Martha decided to take the Retcon with the rest of her family [because she’s just a touch more tired, and can feel it in her bones]. She had very little incentive to do otherwise, and a part of her knew that the fight to get out of bed [and to ignore the medicine cabinet because she knew which overdoses and combinations would need a stomach pump, she could lock the door and no one would know until it was over] would only worsen as the days went on.
Jack had seen the look in Martha’s eyes, and a part of him hated that they looked like his whenever she looked in the mirror [even if she didn’t know it just yet]. She had potential, had been so strong and incredibly brilliant throughout the Year, but.
But she was so, so terrifyingly close to shattering now, he could already see the cracks. [The almost-sob she’d made when talk shifted around to her family, how they weren’t recovering, and the slump in her shoulders that refused to lessen.] He didn’t want to be alone, but it’d happen one way or another, and she didn’t deserve any of this, so he gave in. Some fast [not fast, actually, he'd been very careful to be as precise as possible because this was for a dear friend, for all that it stung and burned] calculations and one last time sharing drinks for old time’s sake [ha], and it was done.
(In this universe, there were four cups of tea with Retcon, not three.)
Months later, he gave into temptation and visited her on one of her shifts in the A&E. [Well, ‘visited’ was putting it a bit strongly, but still—] and when he saw her at work, so self-confident and young it ached, he knew that he didn’t regret it [even despite the ringing silence from her seat at their usual place, and the pitying looks the other regulars gave him as he quietly sipped his glass].
He also braced himself for the fallout, because the Doctor would inevitably find out, and Jack had seen his wrath more than once before. [But he was a fixed point, an immovable object— as the Doctor had so callously mentioned, back in Utopia—so he knew that he could endure what was to come.]
But Martha had been nothing if not prepared; when she had set her mind and persuaded him to help, she’d also talked him into keeping her souvenirs from the Year. In the days immediately after the Jones family took the Retcon, Jack flipped through some of her journals.
[And understood more of her desperation. Again.]
The things she hadn’t said, even to him during their late-night phone calls, could be easily picked out at times. She hadn’t cried, but the hurried, spidery handwriting that described ravager gangs and how they’d differed from scavenger groups had been telling. As had the light pencil strokes that only implied the scope of the Fields, and the ruins of cities that had stood for centuries. One journal was neatly filled, with stories organized in chronological order. Another, far more battered book had neat handwriting on the same page as a budding doctor’s nigh-illegible scrawl, and dotted with half-sketched faces, in red ink and pencil alike. But they all told bits and pieces of Martha’s story. And Jack had grown to realize, that while the Doctor was a good man, he still made mistakes. [And this incarnation was…dicey. What on Earth had he been thinking when he’d dealt with Harriet Jones?] And he’d really dropped the ball when it came to Martha. [They all had, but at least Jack had been able to do something about it. So he did.]