[fic] for sunday_reveries
Prompt response for this image
Word Count: 349
There were several times during her time with the Doctor that Martha Jones felt like asking him to take her home. It wasn't exactly giving up. It was realizing that she could not win, being aware of her own limits. Pulling someone out of their own deep loss and making someone love her as she loved them were both beyond her capabilities.
Can you take me home, please? I've had enough. How often the words had occurred to her. How often she felt them so important to say. She was limited. He needed something more. She needed something more.
Then he would smile at her in that way that he did, bright, full of promise, with something undefinable that was so him in it. Then he would say her name, her full name as he had a tendency to do. Martha Jones, he'd say with all of these levels of emotion and meaning wrapped up into three syllables. No one had ever made her feel so important, so empowered simply by saying her name. Then he'd wrap his arms around her and hug her with the whole of him (or at least that's what it felt like), emotion and intensity and endless care.
He did all of those things at exactly the right moment, and she found the words dying on her lips turning instead into a soft, inaudible sigh. It felt like nearly everything she wanted, everything she dreamed of while lying in bed at night. Martha couldn't give up, even if she kept on dreaming. In her dreams, she pressed her lips against his and it meant to him what it would mean to her, not a genetic transfer, but everything she wanted.
When she finally went home for good, she didn't ask him. She said goodbye and walked out. She didn't leave because what she'd just been through was too horrible and far too much for her to manage traveling by his side any longer.
It was because all she wanted at the end of that year was to have the courage and strength to let go of what she could never have.
Word Count: 349
There were several times during her time with the Doctor that Martha Jones felt like asking him to take her home. It wasn't exactly giving up. It was realizing that she could not win, being aware of her own limits. Pulling someone out of their own deep loss and making someone love her as she loved them were both beyond her capabilities.
Can you take me home, please? I've had enough. How often the words had occurred to her. How often she felt them so important to say. She was limited. He needed something more. She needed something more.
Then he would smile at her in that way that he did, bright, full of promise, with something undefinable that was so him in it. Then he would say her name, her full name as he had a tendency to do. Martha Jones, he'd say with all of these levels of emotion and meaning wrapped up into three syllables. No one had ever made her feel so important, so empowered simply by saying her name. Then he'd wrap his arms around her and hug her with the whole of him (or at least that's what it felt like), emotion and intensity and endless care.
He did all of those things at exactly the right moment, and she found the words dying on her lips turning instead into a soft, inaudible sigh. It felt like nearly everything she wanted, everything she dreamed of while lying in bed at night. Martha couldn't give up, even if she kept on dreaming. In her dreams, she pressed her lips against his and it meant to him what it would mean to her, not a genetic transfer, but everything she wanted.
When she finally went home for good, she didn't ask him. She said goodbye and walked out. She didn't leave because what she'd just been through was too horrible and far too much for her to manage traveling by his side any longer.
It was because all she wanted at the end of that year was to have the courage and strength to let go of what she could never have.