From Where He Stands

[preserved_ginger]

Title: From Where He Stands
Rating: PG-13
Setting: 3X13 (Last of the Time Lords)
Character(s): Ten. Martha (off-camera). Rose (off-camera).
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose
Beta(s): requialexa
Disclaimer: Not mine (dammit)
Spoilers: General Season Three
A/N: The title is from an amended line in Where I Stand by Máire Brennan.
Summary: Martha says he's ruined her for anyone else.

The one thing his working relationship with Martha didn't have that it really ought to have done – and he'd seen it all unfolding, with no ideas of how to stop it – was a bit of realism. She wanted him right from the first moment, had made it blatantly clear — and, he’d hoped, he’d made it just as clear: he didn't want her. For once, though, the cliché – it's not you, it's me – really had held: it'd not been any lacking on her part, but his own painfully human predicament.

He knew that taking on another (female) companion so soon after losing Rose had probably been a disaster waiting to happen — again, saw it playing out but could do nothing to stop it. He’d been desperate for a smile, someone who would listen to him — and truly, most terribly, he’d needed someone to look after him and to keep him alive. He'd lost interest in doing any of it himself; could think of little except her. And if taking on another companion had been such a bad idea, how much more disastrous had it been for him to choose someone that reminded him, every time he looked at her, of the agony that had been Canary Wharf?

But at the time, he'd been desperate for company. Any company. The darkness had almost subsumed him by then, and he figured that so long as he hadn't been on his own there had still been a reason to fight against it.

She tells him as she leaves that she thinks he's completely ruined her for anyone else – Chaos only knows why she thought that; he'd certainly not consciously encouraged her – but he can't find it in himself to care.

And even as the darkness threatens him yet again – in the wake of losing the Master, someone he'd not loved (as he had Rose) but whom he had needed just as much as he needed her – he cannot bring himself to care about her infatuation. Not the way she wants him to, at any rate, and certainly nowhere near enough to stop her leaving.