multiversallogs | There's a place called home I can almost see.

Who: Martha Snape-Jones and Jack Harkness.
What: Seeing an old friend for the first time in a long time.
Where: The train station near the inn.
When: Following this.
Warnings: None.

Jack. Funny how if she could have picked someone from her world to show up here, it definitely would be him. No, not the Doctor with all the background and drama that could come with him (especially now) and not her family (she wouldn't want them here with no way of getting home) but Captain Jack Harkness. He was someone whom she didn't need to worry too much about adjusting, and she knew that of all the people in her life, he would probably handle it the best.

Martha had never really gotten over her habit of walking far too quickly than she should for her legs; there were good things about walking with people who averaged a foot taller than she did. However, there's a more certain note to her step, and the coat that's she's wearing is long and billowy, her own version of a (substitute) hero jacket. (Someday, she'd get back to her actual jacket. Someday.)

Someday was quickly becoming a worrying concept. Normally, Martha was fairly good at being hopeful and knowing that they couldn't stay here forever. But following the holidays and the fact that it was another Christmas away from her family, and away from her life, some of the cheerfulness was fraying. This was different from the Barge; there she could chose, but here there was nothing but being stuck. However, as soon as Martha saw him, her lips spread into a brilliant grin and she tore off running towards him.

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The ability to land, tumble, or be thrown bodily into new situations and to look never out of place (and thus vulnerable) wasn't one that Jack had been taught, though it was once he'd been refining through nearly constant use since the days he wouldn't get up after getting blown into messy bits. Playing the bumbling tourist could be a useful disguise if you weren't one in fact, but Captain Jack instead walked to the station with the broad-shouldered, long-legged confidence of someone who knew what he was doing here.

It helped to whittle things down. Strange lands with no immediate escape, not even to just live until interstellar transit happened? Yeah, kinda intimidating. But: Jack knew he was going to meet Martha, and Martha was brilliant and one of the few people he felt truly was his equal in the domains of saving-the-day and getting-things-done, so the rest of the issues at hand seemed as minor, peripheral problems.

Besides, he looked ugly when he panicked, and all he had to bring to the problem-solving table was good-looks and charm, so it was incredibly easy to buckle down anything bad and instead let the anticipation of seeing Martha Jones once again.

Once sighted, he rather shattered his blasé disguise by laughing joyfully and running, coat billowing, to collide with Martha and sweep her up in a hug, pulling her clear off the ground and twirling around with her twice.

"Oh, Martha, it is so good to see you," he breathed into her hair.

Hugs like this were the best hugs and Martha felt some of the tension slide off her shoulders and down out of her toes when he spun her about in the air like that. Brilliant really, how he felt like home when she hugged him back tightly, and closed her eyes for a just a moment, savoring it. It had been ages since the last time she'd hugged him, and even then that hug had been brittle and filed with worry and disappointment. This hug was jubilant, and filled with laughter.

"It's so brilliant to see you, Jack. You've no idea how much I've missed you." But it was written in her voice, and in the way her arms were so tight around him. "I'd gotten worried that I wouldn't see anyone from home again." Words that she'd not spoken aloud before, and words that she would avoid speaking aloud again. Martha was attempting to cover her concern and her fears about this place, and sometimes it worked better than others.

Jack clung back just as tightly to Martha, ostensibly to offer comfort, but drawing for himselfjust as much if not more. The past few years were a heavy, ugly weight that clenched tightly around his mind, and the simple pleasure of one of his oldest friends alive in his arms was unparalleled.

He didn't even know if Martha was alive, back in his subjective linear time. It was one of a million hideous thoughts he lived with daily, and one Jack pushed from his mind and kept from his face with the ease of long practice.

"If only every lovely, wonderful girl in the world was as happy to see me," he said with the fondest of chuckles. Jack held her for a moment more, before pulling back only to hold her gently at arm's length. He presses his forehead to hers, smiling sadly. "If I knew you'd been taken, I wouldn't have hesitated to tear the world down to find you."

And he was damn well going to do as such once he got home.

"I'm pretty sure that most lovely wonderful girls are happy to see you, Jack. At least the straight ones, and more than a few gay men." She was teasing with a sparkle in her eyes, and blimey did it feel fantastic to do it.

The comment about being taken made her sigh though, and she closed her eyes for a moment. When she'd first arrived here, Martha had been entirely certain that the Doctor would notice the fact that she was missing and that he'd come with the TARDIS and find her. The certainty had been tempered when she'd remembered the Barge, and then as time had gone on it'd become even less around. After all, she'd been out of time aboard the Barge; how would he notice her being gone?

Still, it felt brilliant to hear. "Thanks Jack." She paused and then tightened her arms around him again. "I mean it."

Jack just hummed deep in his chest and rested his head atop Martha's, and continued to hold her for long enough they likely became a spectacle... in the middle of the street in some patchwork, impossible dimension, so yeah, one can imagine all the fucks he gave about hypothetical people staring. It felt good to be there for someone, even if he couldn't solve all their problems -- even if a lot of their problems were also his own.

Though it was more than a bit hypocritical, he couldn't help but feel a little angry at the Doctor on behalf of all the companions strung out across time and space, abandoned one way or another. He squeezed Martha tighter for one last moment, and pulled back to sling an arm over her shoulder.

"Shall we head back to your place," he said, giving a massively exaggerated leer, aiming to keep the mood light. "I'm dying to hear about this husband of yours."

Leers earned her laughter, because Jack was Jack and he was a flirt in nearly every circumstance that there could be. Martha pulled back and then tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, steering them towards the train station and the Snape-Jones cottage. It felt comfortable and familiar to walk with him like this, as though they were in Cardiff rather than in a city that was run on magic.

"You better be careful," Martha teased, "he hears you talking like that he's likely to put a hole in your middle. My husband's a bit of the jealous sort." She chuckled after saying it, because talking about her husband and her marriage was a conversation that was miles happier.

"He's brilliant though," her voice lost her teasing, but it was definitely happier. "He's not what people expect for me, after Tom, but he's fantastic and wonderful and I wouldn't change him for the world."

It brought a certain kind of peace to Jack, walking hand-in-arm with Martha. He straightened his posture just ever-so, evening his strides to the measured pace of a proper officer escorting a lovely woman along some promenade. The time after things really changed for him; the time before they got difficult. Simpler times.

Jack grinned, giving the hand in his keeping am amiable pat. "He sounds delightful, both from what you've said and the messages we had, while I was in the, uh, arrival room."

"Anyone lucky enough to draw your love would of course be jealous," he continues. "I promise not to ruffle his feathers too much."

Granted, love and threats of homicide meant different things to Jack, but he honestly sounded like he approved of Martha's husband. Probably the fact he passed muster alive of a previous iteration of himself helped things along.

Martha wondered what Severus had said to Jack when he was in the room, but she suspected that it was something along the lines of 'hands to yourself or I will hex them off' which was rather in character for her husband. Jack would know not to go too far, she had faith in him. Of course, she hadn't expected the grepping that had occurred at their wedding, but the matter was a moot point.

All and all, she was glad that he approved of Severus, or seemed to at least. The last thing she wanted was for someone else to have the same reaction of 'really? you married him?' around her. After hearing it so often over the last couple of months it was the sort of thing that instantly put her on the defensive.

"My mum likes him," she explained quickly, as if that would somehow make stave off the idea that her and Snape were a bad pairing. "And you know how she can be." Slapping the Doctor and all of that.

There's a place called home I can almost see.

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