Work Text:
Of course she misses it, the promise of all time and space, though as it turned out, that promise was just as suspect as she thought it might be. Martha Jones is a lot of things - faithful family woman, medical doctor, defender of the Earth - but a fool she is not.
But she misses ... The freedom of it, travelling anywhere, anywhen.
When she meets up with Mickey for the second time, it's the eve of an alien invasion and the Doctor's nowhere in sight. Like the old soldiers they are, they greet each other with relative ease, eyeing each other with genial candor. (Waking up one morning sandwiched between an enormous and friendly not-quite American from the future tends open things up in that way.)
"You reckon he'll show?" Mickey squints into the grey skies above them.
But there's no flash of blue out there, only the soggy promise of rain.
"I think we'll have to handle it by ourselves," says Martha.
And they did, after they've seen the last of the would-be world-conquerors, getting some drinks seems like a very natural thing to do.
+
She leaves U.N.I.T. shortly after the moving Earth fiasco. She doesn't like to be manipulated like that, for whatever reason. She tries to get into private practice, but after fighting aliens for almost half a decade, lecturing on cholesterol levels have little to no appeal.
She looks for something else.
+
The other half of Smith & Jones (freelance alien hunters) says one day, half-jokingly, "D'you think it was because he was so old?"
Martha blinks, eyes dazed from too many lab reports, not enough sleep. "What?"
"The way the Doctor, you know, was so ... Funny about us."
A pause. "Are you saying the Doctor was racist?"
"Lots of older people are."
She shouldn't laugh, because it's not funny, not at all.
She blames her elevated stress-levels for the laughter, and for the odd rush of tears that follows.
+
Life on Earth is like this now: time goes in one direction (ever forward) and that's the direction we all must face.
Martha understands that better than most.
She's looking forward to tomorrow, because that's where she lives.