![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Age/Appearance: Martha is twenty-six years old and petite, with dark skin and hair. Her hair is close-cropped - still growing out from being shaved off - and she's abnormally thin. She was already thinner than she had been after a year of walking the Earth - from travel, stress, and simply a worldwide shortage of food - and then she was imprisoned, eventually choosing to go on a hunger strike. She bears a number of scars on her back, the result of an attack that occurred during the Year.
AU History: Martha was the one who ultimately picked up the gun in "Last of the Time Lords", and she was the one who shot the Master (twice, once in each heart). The Doctor urged the other Time Lord to regenerate, but he refused - and, perhaps, it was too late. Either way, her choice caused the Doctor to simply ignore her after that moment. No words of reproach, not even asking why - just nothing. Jack comforted her briefly, but he left her, too, when the Doctor left. There was no choice to leave in this universe, no "getting out"; the Doctor left Martha behind, clearly rejecting her as unfit to travel with him any longer. (Of course, there were probably a number of other factors involved in the Doctor's decision, but in Martha's mind, he was denouncing her actions.)
Martha was more hurt by this than she would let on, even though she hadn't been planning on going with him anyway - she'd made that decision during her time away from him - but she hadn't expected their parting to be like this. There was nothing she could do about it, though, and she certainly felt no need to apologize for what she'd done, so she simply went on with her life, the best she could. Her family needed her, after all, and her exams were coming up. Everything seemed entirely normal, or as normal as it could be, for a few months. She took her exams and graduated, receiving her license to practice medicine.
Shortly thereafter, someone contacted her with a mysterious job offer to work for an organization dedicated to protecting the earth from alien invasions. Martha went to the interview - and it was then that UNIT chose to spring their trap. They had waited until it was clear that the Doctor had deserted her, possibly because they feared the Doctor and what he could do, and possibly because there were still those who remembered the old days and the times when the Doctor had worked with them in power in the organization. Whatever the case, Martha was arbitrarily imprisoned for killing the Prime Minister - imprisoned without a trial, because UNIT was outside the law, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. There was, after all, video footage of her committing her crime - and who would have listened to her reasoning for doing it? Besides, they made veiled threats about her family - how they could all be arrested as part of a terrorist cell if Martha's case came to light, and Martha suspected that they could very well do whatever they liked. They told her that her parents would be informed that she was volunteering to work for a nonprofit organization in Africa, and, eventually, she would be declared dead - killed by guerrillas, perhaps.
As they interrogated her, Martha discovered that they were much more interested in the Doctor than anything else. After all, they didn't know anything about the entire situation, much less anything about the Doctor. Even though the Doctor had abandoned her, Martha knew that telling them about him couldn't possibly lead to anything good, and she couldn't betray him like that. Maybe she didn't love him anymore, but she still felt a fierce - if slightly misplaced - loyalty to him. (Though his decision had hurt, she didn't blame him, not entirely.)
So Martha held her tongue. She tried innocuous responses and lies at first, but they kept asking, and she slipped into silence. Apart from the interrogation sessions, she spent her days in solitary confinement in a small cell. In the beginning, she tried to keep exercising as best she could, walking around her cell to keep her muscles stretched - but as the months passed, she stopped even that. She even stopped eating for several weeks, out of sheer desperation; she felt like it was the only thing in her life that she could control. Even when she started eating again - swayed by the threat of force-feeding - she didn't eat much, because she didn't need much.
Eventually, Jack discovered what had happened to Martha and came to rescue her after she'd been imprisoned for several months. While Martha never learned precisely what led to his discovery or all the details of her release, Jack did tell her a few things: she was legally dead, with a grave, and would have to live under an assumed name, and she wasn't allowed to see her family (he'd told Francine she was alive, but the rest of them had no idea). Jack took her to Cardiff, because she couldn't stay in London, and she began recuperating there.
Once Martha was well enough, she took a job at Torchwood, though she couldn't help but feel a little like the extraneous member of the team. She got along well with her other coworkers, particularly Ianto and Gwen, who she'd met at different points during her convalescence, but Owen was downright hostile towards her, possibly in defense of his position as the team's medic. Martha was understandably a little hurt by this, but refrained from making an effort to change his mind; she still felt too withdrawn and set apart from the others.
Personality: Once a brilliant young woman living life to the fullest, Martha has settled down into a more sober and responsible role. Though her appetite was whetted by her travels with the Doctor, she knows that remaining on Earth is more important – but she still looks at the stars from time to time and wonders what else is out there, what she hasn’t seen yet – and she’s filled with a sort of wistful regret for what could have been. But if there’s one word to describe Martha, it’s dedicated – dedicated to her family, to her job, to protecting the Earth from alien threats. She can be impossibly stubborn sometimes (all right, most of the time), and refuses to be viewed as inferior or second-best to anybody. She has an independent streak a mile wide, which sometimes causes problems when working with others – like, for example, the Doctor. If she thinks that something is stupid, she’s not afraid to voice an opinion about it – and if you want her to do something that she thinks is stupid, she simply won’t. Martha wants to know the reasons for things – she won’t just follow orders blindly. If you want her respect, you have to earn it.
Though she’s the middle child of her family, she acts like the oldest – she shepherded her family through her parents’ divorce, then kept on acting as the peacemaker between her parents (and her siblings) for several years. Now she’s the healer, the one keeping them all together. It’s a role that comes as naturally to her as breathing – though what she really wants is someone who she isn’t afraid to admit her weakness to, someone who doesn’t rely on her for everything. She wants to be able to let her guard down, and she can’t do that around her family.
Martha is primarily driven by her need to protect others, as evidenced by her choice to become a doctor. In her first appearance in Doctor Who, she considered it her duty to help save a hospital full of people stranded on the moon (and, in the alternate universe put forth in “Turn Left”, she winds up dead after giving a fellow intern her oxygen mask). Throughout the series, her protective instincts continue to be roused – she keeps the Doctor safe while he’s human, then provides for him while they’re trapped in the 1960s. She walks the Earth by herself for a year to save the Doctor, Jack, her family, and the rest of the human race. She would give anything to keep the people she cares about safe – and, in fact, she tends to be overprotective, a definite byproduct of the brief time she spent trying to glue her family back together after the Master's reign. She’s seen the aftermath, and she refuses to let it happen again. This drives her to darker, more rage-filled impulses than she’s willing to admit to – because when she says she’ll do anything, she really does mean anything, up to and including killing.
This is, in fact, what led her to kill the Master in the first place - not necessarily vengeance, but a simple need to stop him from harming anyone further. It was a split-second decision, but one she believed had to be done. Even after everything that's happened to her as a result of it, she still would make the same choice if she had to - she would have done it even if it had led to her own death. Though the Doctor's abandonment of her hurt - and still does hurt - she doesn't blame him for it. Well, she does a little bit, but not to the point of hating him. She still respects him and, though she doesn't want to admit it to herself, still likes him. It was a betrayal, but a necessary one; from her point of view, she was putting down a rabid dog, but she understands the Doctor's pain at losing the only other Time Lord in the universe.
Martha is still very much troubled by the events of the year that never was. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder – she rarely sleeps (because she spent a year being hyperalert at all times), and when she does, she has nightmares. These nightmares generally take the form of her perception filter failing and Toclafane descending on her and killing her, but have also featured her family members’ heads inside the metal spheres, among other things. She still dreams of the firebombing of Japan, which she watched from a boat as she left, and of all those who died for her during the Year. She's not necessarily haunted by their (metaphorical) ghosts, but it weighs heavily on her mind.
Her imprisonment has left her even more broken; rather than tell her interrogators about the Doctor, she stopped speaking entirely, and she was eventually driven into a hunger strike. Given the opportunity to recover, she would embrace it gladly, though it would be a long recovery process. Martha's the sort of person who won't allow herself to be held back; she doesn't want to wallow in her pain and suffering, but, rather, she wants to regain some semblance of a normal life. Other people might notice something "off" about her - she's more subdued than she was before her imprisonment; quieter and more serious, and there's a certain look about her - she looks older than she ought to, like she's been through a great deal (which she has, obviously). However, she does her best to hide behind a facade of functionality - and, as she's used to pushing through and doing what needs to be done no matter what, tends to succeed. She most definitely suffers from PTSD; though logic tells her she needs to seek treatment for her problems, whether or not she does is another thing entirely. (After all, there's every likelihood that she'd be misdiagnosed while trying to tell someone what she's been through, a perfectly valid reason to keep her past a secret.)
Fic reading order:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
(A series of fics that are an AU of this AU - where Nine is the one who rescues Martha, not Jack - can be found here. They start after Part Two in the above list.)
AU History: Martha was the one who ultimately picked up the gun in "Last of the Time Lords", and she was the one who shot the Master (twice, once in each heart). The Doctor urged the other Time Lord to regenerate, but he refused - and, perhaps, it was too late. Either way, her choice caused the Doctor to simply ignore her after that moment. No words of reproach, not even asking why - just nothing. Jack comforted her briefly, but he left her, too, when the Doctor left. There was no choice to leave in this universe, no "getting out"; the Doctor left Martha behind, clearly rejecting her as unfit to travel with him any longer. (Of course, there were probably a number of other factors involved in the Doctor's decision, but in Martha's mind, he was denouncing her actions.)
Martha was more hurt by this than she would let on, even though she hadn't been planning on going with him anyway - she'd made that decision during her time away from him - but she hadn't expected their parting to be like this. There was nothing she could do about it, though, and she certainly felt no need to apologize for what she'd done, so she simply went on with her life, the best she could. Her family needed her, after all, and her exams were coming up. Everything seemed entirely normal, or as normal as it could be, for a few months. She took her exams and graduated, receiving her license to practice medicine.
Shortly thereafter, someone contacted her with a mysterious job offer to work for an organization dedicated to protecting the earth from alien invasions. Martha went to the interview - and it was then that UNIT chose to spring their trap. They had waited until it was clear that the Doctor had deserted her, possibly because they feared the Doctor and what he could do, and possibly because there were still those who remembered the old days and the times when the Doctor had worked with them in power in the organization. Whatever the case, Martha was arbitrarily imprisoned for killing the Prime Minister - imprisoned without a trial, because UNIT was outside the law, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. There was, after all, video footage of her committing her crime - and who would have listened to her reasoning for doing it? Besides, they made veiled threats about her family - how they could all be arrested as part of a terrorist cell if Martha's case came to light, and Martha suspected that they could very well do whatever they liked. They told her that her parents would be informed that she was volunteering to work for a nonprofit organization in Africa, and, eventually, she would be declared dead - killed by guerrillas, perhaps.
As they interrogated her, Martha discovered that they were much more interested in the Doctor than anything else. After all, they didn't know anything about the entire situation, much less anything about the Doctor. Even though the Doctor had abandoned her, Martha knew that telling them about him couldn't possibly lead to anything good, and she couldn't betray him like that. Maybe she didn't love him anymore, but she still felt a fierce - if slightly misplaced - loyalty to him. (Though his decision had hurt, she didn't blame him, not entirely.)
So Martha held her tongue. She tried innocuous responses and lies at first, but they kept asking, and she slipped into silence. Apart from the interrogation sessions, she spent her days in solitary confinement in a small cell. In the beginning, she tried to keep exercising as best she could, walking around her cell to keep her muscles stretched - but as the months passed, she stopped even that. She even stopped eating for several weeks, out of sheer desperation; she felt like it was the only thing in her life that she could control. Even when she started eating again - swayed by the threat of force-feeding - she didn't eat much, because she didn't need much.
Eventually, Jack discovered what had happened to Martha and came to rescue her after she'd been imprisoned for several months. While Martha never learned precisely what led to his discovery or all the details of her release, Jack did tell her a few things: she was legally dead, with a grave, and would have to live under an assumed name, and she wasn't allowed to see her family (he'd told Francine she was alive, but the rest of them had no idea). Jack took her to Cardiff, because she couldn't stay in London, and she began recuperating there.
Once Martha was well enough, she took a job at Torchwood, though she couldn't help but feel a little like the extraneous member of the team. She got along well with her other coworkers, particularly Ianto and Gwen, who she'd met at different points during her convalescence, but Owen was downright hostile towards her, possibly in defense of his position as the team's medic. Martha was understandably a little hurt by this, but refrained from making an effort to change his mind; she still felt too withdrawn and set apart from the others.
Personality: Once a brilliant young woman living life to the fullest, Martha has settled down into a more sober and responsible role. Though her appetite was whetted by her travels with the Doctor, she knows that remaining on Earth is more important – but she still looks at the stars from time to time and wonders what else is out there, what she hasn’t seen yet – and she’s filled with a sort of wistful regret for what could have been. But if there’s one word to describe Martha, it’s dedicated – dedicated to her family, to her job, to protecting the Earth from alien threats. She can be impossibly stubborn sometimes (all right, most of the time), and refuses to be viewed as inferior or second-best to anybody. She has an independent streak a mile wide, which sometimes causes problems when working with others – like, for example, the Doctor. If she thinks that something is stupid, she’s not afraid to voice an opinion about it – and if you want her to do something that she thinks is stupid, she simply won’t. Martha wants to know the reasons for things – she won’t just follow orders blindly. If you want her respect, you have to earn it.
Though she’s the middle child of her family, she acts like the oldest – she shepherded her family through her parents’ divorce, then kept on acting as the peacemaker between her parents (and her siblings) for several years. Now she’s the healer, the one keeping them all together. It’s a role that comes as naturally to her as breathing – though what she really wants is someone who she isn’t afraid to admit her weakness to, someone who doesn’t rely on her for everything. She wants to be able to let her guard down, and she can’t do that around her family.
Martha is primarily driven by her need to protect others, as evidenced by her choice to become a doctor. In her first appearance in Doctor Who, she considered it her duty to help save a hospital full of people stranded on the moon (and, in the alternate universe put forth in “Turn Left”, she winds up dead after giving a fellow intern her oxygen mask). Throughout the series, her protective instincts continue to be roused – she keeps the Doctor safe while he’s human, then provides for him while they’re trapped in the 1960s. She walks the Earth by herself for a year to save the Doctor, Jack, her family, and the rest of the human race. She would give anything to keep the people she cares about safe – and, in fact, she tends to be overprotective, a definite byproduct of the brief time she spent trying to glue her family back together after the Master's reign. She’s seen the aftermath, and she refuses to let it happen again. This drives her to darker, more rage-filled impulses than she’s willing to admit to – because when she says she’ll do anything, she really does mean anything, up to and including killing.
This is, in fact, what led her to kill the Master in the first place - not necessarily vengeance, but a simple need to stop him from harming anyone further. It was a split-second decision, but one she believed had to be done. Even after everything that's happened to her as a result of it, she still would make the same choice if she had to - she would have done it even if it had led to her own death. Though the Doctor's abandonment of her hurt - and still does hurt - she doesn't blame him for it. Well, she does a little bit, but not to the point of hating him. She still respects him and, though she doesn't want to admit it to herself, still likes him. It was a betrayal, but a necessary one; from her point of view, she was putting down a rabid dog, but she understands the Doctor's pain at losing the only other Time Lord in the universe.
Martha is still very much troubled by the events of the year that never was. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder – she rarely sleeps (because she spent a year being hyperalert at all times), and when she does, she has nightmares. These nightmares generally take the form of her perception filter failing and Toclafane descending on her and killing her, but have also featured her family members’ heads inside the metal spheres, among other things. She still dreams of the firebombing of Japan, which she watched from a boat as she left, and of all those who died for her during the Year. She's not necessarily haunted by their (metaphorical) ghosts, but it weighs heavily on her mind.
Her imprisonment has left her even more broken; rather than tell her interrogators about the Doctor, she stopped speaking entirely, and she was eventually driven into a hunger strike. Given the opportunity to recover, she would embrace it gladly, though it would be a long recovery process. Martha's the sort of person who won't allow herself to be held back; she doesn't want to wallow in her pain and suffering, but, rather, she wants to regain some semblance of a normal life. Other people might notice something "off" about her - she's more subdued than she was before her imprisonment; quieter and more serious, and there's a certain look about her - she looks older than she ought to, like she's been through a great deal (which she has, obviously). However, she does her best to hide behind a facade of functionality - and, as she's used to pushing through and doing what needs to be done no matter what, tends to succeed. She most definitely suffers from PTSD; though logic tells her she needs to seek treatment for her problems, whether or not she does is another thing entirely. (After all, there's every likelihood that she'd be misdiagnosed while trying to tell someone what she's been through, a perfectly valid reason to keep her past a secret.)
Fic reading order:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
(A series of fics that are an AU of this AU - where Nine is the one who rescues Martha, not Jack - can be found here. They start after Part Two in the above list.)
