Brief Hours and Weeks

[preserved_ginger]

Title: Brief Hours and Weeks
Author: lived_in_hope
Character(s), in order of appearance: Martha (references made to Ten, Donna, Rose and Tom Milligan)
Pairing(s): Ten/Rose, Martha/Ten, Martha/Tom
Rating: PG
Beta(s): karenor and rachelbeann have both seen various parts of this and have helped immensely. Thanks guys! :D
Summary: How Martha learned to understand.
Disclaimer: Not Mine.
Spoilers: Brief mention of 4X04/4X05 (The Sontaran two-parter)
A/N: The title and the quote at the beginning of the fic are both from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

When she was still travelling with him, she hadn’t understood about Rose.

She’d been able to see easily enough that he had lost someone – and recently, too. Canary Wharf? He’d said he’d been there, after all; Adeola died there that day so maybe he’d lost whoever it was then. Martha’d become something of an unwilling expert in seeing the melancholy that marked people who had lost somebody they loved in that unholy mess, and the Doctor had it in spades.

How could she have understood? The Doctor had been what she’d later come to realise was his usual enigmatic self, doling out information on what seemed to be a ‘need-to-know’ basis, and apparently although she was travelling with him she didn’t need to know. And beyond that, she was too close to the situation. Too desperate for him, wanting him to see her for herself. She tried to ignore it, didn’t want to spend her time wilting in some other woman’s shadow – for that was patently what was happening, and she knew it.

But then it wasn’t really just about her, even then.

He'd mentioned her, in passing, while the two of them were sharing a room in Shakespearean London; even through her hissy fit (and she knew she had behaved badly, but she couldn't exactly take it back) she could tell that every single word of the few he’d said had cost him dearly.

He had, under duress, told her about how his planet was long gone – when she forced it out of him when they were in New New York. But she had had the feeling that there was something else he wasn't telling her.

Something about her. About Rose.

Whoever Rose was, wherever she’d gone, he was quite clearly in love with her. So clearly, in fact, that she often found herself wondering why Rose had left him. There was quite a lot that Martha would have done to be loved as much as the Doctor loved Rose. And every time she tried to get him to talk about it, tried to coax information out of him (how could he live like that, holding on so tightly to something that so obviously hurt him?), he withdrew into himself further. He’d paste a smile on his face that rarely met his eyes, continue through life at a breakneck, almost suicidal, pace – and expect her to keep up. To an extent, she managed; but still she ached for him to notice her properly.

It never happened. By the time she was at the end of the universe overhearing him talking to Jack about how he’d lost her, she’d known it was a lost cause and had determined to leave him. Her one real regret about doing that had been that he had been left on his own; she hadn’t been at all sure he could cope with that. He needed someone, but not her – and anyway, she’d needed the distance from him at that stage, to preserve her own sanity.

When she turned her back on the TARDIS and her pilot, she still didn’t understand how losing Rose had affected him.

But for a long time after she left, she refused to let herself think about him, and even though she had a way of contacting him she wouldn’t let herself use it. Every time she found herself wavering, she asked herself whether she really wanted to go back to a situation where she had to watch the man she wanted so badly fretting and grieving over someone else. That usually cured her of the wish to see him. At least, temporarily.

When she did finally call him, she had no sooner clapped eyes on him again than she noticed straight away that he was different. Still very much the same man that she had known, but so much, well, lighter in himself. For that, she figured, he had the red-headed woman he travelled with to thank. Somehow, though, she never felt the same jealousy of the living, breathing Donna that she had of the ghost of Rose – a woman she'd never see but who had had so much influence on her life it felt to Martha almost as if she knew her.

She caught herself wondering whether Donna knows about Rose, and then realised that since the Doctor was so unlike the man she knew it was almost impossible to believe that Donna didn’t know. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that; the jealousy about Rose had gone pretty deep before she had made herself cop on.

And although her relationship with the Doctor was healthier for the distance she’d forced herself to put between herself and him, she still hadn't been able to understand about Rose, although by that stage she had wanted to understand. It was not until after the Sontaran problem was dealt with and she was saying good-bye to the Doctor and Donna, when the TARDIS had trapped her inside – and she hadn’t known if she’d ever see Tom again – that she’d begun to really understand.

And once she’d had even that small amount of experience in what it felt like to be separated from the person you loved for an indeterminate amount of time, Martha had found that she could – finally – begin to empathise with the Doctor about Rose, and she’d begun to realise both just how much pain he must have been in when she first met him, and also how that pain had led him to act as he had done.

And with that new understanding – the knowledge that however much she once had wanted it, he had never really been hers at all – she was able, at last, to truly let him go.