A Place Called Home, by sheldrake
Story: A Place Called Home
Author: sheldrake
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 2,413
Author's summary: What's so bloody special about being human, anyway?
Characters/pairings: Martha, Jenny (from "Human Nature")
Warnings: none
Recced because: It makes Martha's experience in 1913 real. Though we only got brief glimpses in the episode itself, Martha's interactions with Jenny suggest that she entered into that world to a great extent, even though her time there was mostly bitter and she knew she wasn't staying. A Place Called Home explains why.
I'm at a loss to explain just what makes this story so effective; the best I can do is to say that it doesn't make the view through Martha's eyes pretty, but it does make it beautiful. It's just very alive. It's also one of my favorite looks inside Martha's head.
After all, Martha reasons, you don't have to be a human just to stop being a Time Lord, do you? You could choose to be one of those cat people. Or an intelligent tree. Or, you know, an octopus or something. She imagines telling the Doctor this, and she can almost see him standing in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He'd be making a face, staring into the middle distance and protesting the essentially random nature of chameleon arches. Not my fault, guv. I just go where I'm sent. Yeah, right.
She scrapes at the leaf-mould under her feet with the heels of her boots, jabbing them into the rich English soil. The boots leave marks when she moves away. 1913 should be all dried up now, dead and buried, over and done with. And yet here she is, leaving marks on the ground. Dead and gone crows flap homewards as the evening light fades, and she thinks, for no particular reason, of her mother, and her mother's mother's mother.
Author: sheldrake
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 2,413
Author's summary: What's so bloody special about being human, anyway?
Characters/pairings: Martha, Jenny (from "Human Nature")
Warnings: none
Recced because: It makes Martha's experience in 1913 real. Though we only got brief glimpses in the episode itself, Martha's interactions with Jenny suggest that she entered into that world to a great extent, even though her time there was mostly bitter and she knew she wasn't staying. A Place Called Home explains why.
I'm at a loss to explain just what makes this story so effective; the best I can do is to say that it doesn't make the view through Martha's eyes pretty, but it does make it beautiful. It's just very alive. It's also one of my favorite looks inside Martha's head.
After all, Martha reasons, you don't have to be a human just to stop being a Time Lord, do you? You could choose to be one of those cat people. Or an intelligent tree. Or, you know, an octopus or something. She imagines telling the Doctor this, and she can almost see him standing in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets. He'd be making a face, staring into the middle distance and protesting the essentially random nature of chameleon arches. Not my fault, guv. I just go where I'm sent. Yeah, right.
She scrapes at the leaf-mould under her feet with the heels of her boots, jabbing them into the rich English soil. The boots leave marks when she moves away. 1913 should be all dried up now, dead and buried, over and done with. And yet here she is, leaving marks on the ground. Dead and gone crows flap homewards as the evening light fades, and she thinks, for no particular reason, of her mother, and her mother's mother's mother.