imagine going to a haunted house with your friend, she gets so freaked out she runs ahead and you trip and fall and can’t catch up to her.
ghost sees you, stalking toward you with a knife and you suddenly can’t breath, tears streaming down your cheeks as you choke on a sob and beg for him to stop.
you’re hyperventilating, trying to crawl away but backed into the corner of the hallway, and you’re absolutely shaking from fear. it’s hard to catch your breath, feeling like your chest is collapsing in on itself, fat tears still falling and dripping from your jaw.
ghost puts the knife away, holds out his hands in a placating manner but you’re still too scared, still begging him to stay away.
he uses a radio to call for someone, and you watch as a gentleman — no costume, no fake blood or weapons — comes to you. ghosts turns the other way to keep others away as the man crouches in front of you, blue eyes deep with worry, a frown pulling on his lips.
“you’re alright, sweetheart,” he says in this raspy drawl. “can you walk for me?”
all you can do is whimper and shake your head, unable to stop glancing over his shoulder, wondering if ghost is going to come back, if someone else — someone worse — will appear in his stead.
“i gotcha,” he says, carefully scooping you up in his arms, making sure to not jostle your ankle too much as he takes you through a door, the atmosphere not as suffocating.
he gently places you on a chair, still worried, checking you over for anything he might’ve missed. he looks so soft, his distinct facial hair trimmed and kept, eyes gentle.
“‘’m john,” he says, and you find it within yourself to give him your name back.
he politely ignores the crack in your voice.
“you okay?” he asks as he places a hand on your knee, rubbing his thumb gently over and over.
“m-my friend,” you begin, voice thick and tears pooling at the corners of your eyes, catching on another hiccup. “she really wanted to go to this but none of our other friends wanted to and she looked so sad and i hate scary stuff, but i went with her anyway and then i tripped and she ran off and never came back for me,” you babble through increasingly thickening tears, reaching out for his shoulders and curling your fingers into his shirt, for comfort, to ground you.
he cups your cheek, thumb wiping away your tears, holding back his tongue on how your friend left you.
“let’s get you out of here, hm?”
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thing about rose, for me, is that she wasn't there first -- this in a "she was first in nu!who in the sense that this was the first person to travel with nine, and the first person since the timewar, and the last person that nine was with, to the point that ten was born out of that experience/modelled on her."
and in that framing, I am a big fan of her haunting of the narrative, because it start outs with her placing herself inside the doctor's ribcage and rebooting their ability to want to feel things, but unfortunately rose is still a human, like every human the doctor travelled with before, it's just that the doctor forgot how to steel themself against that inevitability because of the circumstances around meeting rose
this is The thing that I find tragic about martha, because I think she could have been that person, if she'd been the first person post-timewar to travel with the doctor, but because she's coming in during bleeding-heart times, she's got to deal with triage instead. and yes, there are wonders, and yes, there are good times, but for a lot of it, it's shrapnel, and I think if it hadn't been, she would have had a very different attitude towards *waves hands* space and time travel and aliens and the universe (one where she wouldn't be the person trusted with something like the osterhagen key)
and donna had a sense of that Space the doctor was in post-rose (she canonically stopped the doctor from dying in runaway bride) and stepped away from it, and didn't get back to the doctor until some of that hole-in-chest had been bandaged up, which martha did a great job of, but didn't get to really benefit from, and I think that's the sad thing about martha jones, is that she absolutely got a taste of the beauty and the splendor, but never without all the violence and heave weight that was put onto her
which, again, she seems to have been very aware of, considering she joined UNIT and Torchwood. her eyes were barely ever rose tinted (no pun here) during her whole journey in the story. martha really is in my opinion the most tragic companion (that I've met so far, I know Adric straight up dies, but maybe he had some fun times before that?), because yes, donna loses her memories and rose is in a parallel universe, but that's more tragic for the doctor -- they've both built lives
in donna's case there's probably a lot of imperfection in that life, but clearly a lot of joy as well, with her and her husband and her kid and her mum, and I'm sure she'd have preferred to be the donna who saw the universe and was splendid, but martha never gets to forget, and has to continue her life one step out of sync of everything she could have been
which, maybe her life is pretty flipping fantastic, but we really don't know, which is the biggest thing I side-eye about the first nu!who era. that whole weird ending with the sontaran and mickey is like... anti-character work, it answers nothing and it makes very little sense
all I know about her at the end is that she more than anyone saw the doctor's life and became a soldier (still a doctor as well, but...) because that was the work she saw needed doing, and she's the kind of person who does what needs doing. but is she... okay? youknow?
but going back to the original point, is that framing martha through the lens of rose is all well and good in the sense that rose is the reason the doctor is at that emotional point when he meets martha -- although donna absolutely had a very big hand in that as well -- but once we've established that, martha's arc is martha's arc, and it's dull to me to frame it as the "rebound" arc or even particularly about alloromanticism (including -- and this is why i get why people do it in fandom -- some shit said by rtd, which is just less interesting than what I get out of it, so shhhh)
she's got so much going on, and her relationship with the doctor changes the trajectory of her life, and it's in many ways a more interesting and far less straightforward trajectory of bad-to-better that many companions get -- it's a wonderfully complicated narrative that (and again, I get that some of this comes from within deliberate framings of the text, even though I think it's more than open enough to do more with, death of the author and all that -- but certainly not all of this is text either, some of it is ignoring what is actually there) is done a disservice by not going through the real messed up fascinating extraordinary shit that's going on during her era + arc in s4
but also... is she ok? I want to know. it's one of my top three burning questions, since we're getting a bit of best-ofs of the noughties DW era, some of your crimes can be righted by a simple bit of martha mr davies
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