Stranded, a doctor who fanfic

Summary: If we can't always rescue ourselves, perhaps we can still find ways of helping ourselves
Disclaimer: All characters herein belong to the BBC, along with the original concept and anything else that seems familiar. I have borrowed them for this story and am making no profit from this.
Author's Note: I decided to play with a cliché and let it run

Stranded

Consciousness returned, not with the languor of a lazy morning after a restful night, but suddenly, with a jolt that was pure shock. Sarah Jane Smith started upright, heart pounding, and stared, uncomprehending, at a place she did not remember.

The scene before her was almost absurdly serene: inky waves of deepest blue and green gently lapping at an unspoiled shore, clear sky above with birds softly calling beneath a baking sun – it was beautiful and it was wrong. This was not where she had been when…when what?

She did not know where she was and she did not know how she had come here.

Throat tightening, stomach churning, she turned her head this way and that and saw only more sea and more sand, and birds and trees and rocks and nothing that was familiar.

Wait, no. That wasn't true. There was one thing that was familiar.

Behind her and to the right was some kind of pack, incongruous with the otherwise empty beach, and beyond that was Harry Sullivan, sprawled bonelessly on the pearly sand.

Her feet seemed too far to attempt. Sarah pushed onto her knees and scrambled toward him on limbs that seemed to belong to someone else, caught at his shoulder and shook it hard. "Harry! Harry!"

He came to with a gasp, bleary eyes slowly focusing on her face. "Sarah."

Would he remember any more than her? Sarah sat back and watched anxiously as he pushed up to his elbows to take in their surroundings, brow furrowing as confusion set in, and then rolled sideways to clamber laboriously to his knees, the back of his curly brown head powdered white with sand. Her hand rose automatically to her own thick dark hair, which was long and had a slight wave and therefore tangled at the slightest provocation, and was now, yes, all knotted up with sand; she wondered how long they'd been lying out here exposed to the elements, knew she'd have a devil of a job getting that lot out when all this was over.

If only they knew what 'all this' was, they might stand an actual chance of getting it all over.

Blue eyes turned toward her, bright with worry. "What happened?" Harry wanted to know. Well, one of them had to be the first to say it.

"You ask that as if you think I might know." She fought back the wave of rising panic, nailed it down flat because it couldn't help.

Harry's forehead creased. Glancing around again, he looked as befogged and befuddled as Sarah felt. "The Doctor isn't here."

"No – no, but he was, wasn't he? He was with us. We were with him." Her brain felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool, making it impossible to think. She took a breath, told herself to calm down and be sensible, take one step at a time. "What's the last thing you remember?"

He frowned, raised a hand and stared at it, fingers curling as if around the stem of a glass. "I remember drinking," he slowly offered, and as he said it a memory was triggered: a sparkling crystal glass filled with an emerald-green liquid, exotic and fruity and delicious. Intoxicating. They'd been having fun, and that was unusual enough in itself.

"The reception!" exclaimed Sarah. "We were at a reception – remember, Harry? On that planet…what was it called?"

Harry's nose was long and slightly crooked, an old break that was probably sport-related, knowing him; it crinkled when he thought hard, as he did now. "Something to do with clowns, wasn't it?" he suggested at last, the clue again triggering Sarah's own recollection.

"Harlequin," she remembered now. It was a colony, a human colony, many thousands of years after the time they'd travelled from, with the Doctor in his TARDIS. "We were in that city, at the music hall. They were holding a reception…"

So they'd been at that reception, sampling fancy food and exotic wines – enjoying the high life, for once in their travels. But then what? How had they got from there to here? It was a blank.

"They drugged us." Harry's tone was flat and definite.

Was that was this was, this confusion and fogginess, the leaden sensation in every limb and the vile taste in her mouth? Harry was a doctor, familiar with the usage and effects of drugs, so she was prepared to take his word for it. "But why?"

He shook his head and shrugged, a silent admission of ignorance, and began a slow, clumsy ascent to his feet. Sarah attempted to join him but her legs were uncooperative; she wobbled badly enough that Harry caught at her arm to steady her and promptly overbalanced himself, sending them both crashing back to the sand.

"Well, that didn't work," said Sarah, once she'd got her breath back. "Let's try again."

By dint of hanging onto one another for balance, they made it upright this time. Gazing around at the deserted beach and empty sea from this new vertical vantage point, Sarah kept hold of Harry's arm while the dizziness subsided, and then hung onto it still, needing that contact somehow, this one familiar, reassuring thing.

"If the Doctor isn't here," she said, in an attempt to reason this through rationally, "Then what does that mean? Someone brought us here, deliberately. Why would they do that?"

Harry scrubbed a hand through his curls and a shower of sand was dislodged, sprinkling the back of his neck. He shivered at the tickle of it and brushed it off, wiggling his shoulder blades as the sand trickled under his collar and down his spine. "Perhaps they wanted us out of the way."

"Out of the way of what?" Sarah's memory remained stubbornly blank on this point. "What could they possibly want with us? And where's the Doctor?"

"In trouble, at a guess." Harry's worried expression was not reassuring.

"And it seemed such a nice place," she plaintively recalled. What had happened to them remained a blank, but the planet itself was coming back to her now, fuzzy but definite memories of the rolling parkland in which the TARDIS had landed and the broad, tree-lined avenues beyond, lush with fragrant blossom, a city of pristine streets and elegant buildings – not so much as a lolly stick out of place, as Harry had pointed out with approval.

Everyone had seemed friendly, too, as far as she recalled, which made it all the harder to understand. What were they not remembering? What clues had they missed?

Well, for all the many things they didn't – couldn't – know, there was one thing she was certain of. "If the Doctor's in some kind of trouble, if we were taken to get at him somehow, then we have to do something about it. We have to get back there, Harry, we have to help him."

"We'll have a job, Sarah," Harry protested. "We don't even know where we are."

He had a point, but she wasn't about to be swayed now.

"Then we'd better find out." She began to look around again – hoping for what, she couldn't even say, some kind of clue perhaps – and her eye fell once more on that strange pack she'd noticed earlier and then forgotten. "What's that?"

It was a tarpaulin, it transpired, folded around a kind of survival kit. There were a couple of thin mats and blankets, a hatchet and knife, a flagon of fresh water, a bag of foil-wrapped bars that looked to be emergency food rations of some kind, what appeared to be some sort of futuristic fire lighter, and an assortment of fishing gear.

"Well," said Harry, sitting back on his haunches to survey these supplies with a quizzical eye. "They don't intend us to die, then."

"Not yet, at least." Sarah did not feel inclined to give their abductors the benefit of any doubt, felt beyond restless at the mere possibility of the long haul these supplies implied. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. We won't be here long enough to need any of that," she said, as if saying it could make it true. "We just have to find our way to the nearest town, get our bearings…"

She tried not to notice the look on Harry's face as he replied, "I don't think it's quite as simple as that, old thing."

"Harry, I'm not old and I'm not a thing, and I am not going to just sit here waiting to be retrieved!" She marched off down the beach with her chin held high and her eyes firmly fixed on the sharply curving shoreline ahead of her, and refused to acknowledge the implication of it, because by hook or by crook she was going to find a town of some kind and she was going to find a way back to the Doctor, and that was all there was to it.

Harry caught up quickly enough, the flagon of water in his hand, but had enough sense to keep quiet as they navigated sand and rocks and scrubby dunes, always curving to the right, following the line of the shore, huffing and puffing in the heat of the day, until at last they rounded a cove and saw their abandoned pack of supplies, a few feet above the uneven line of scattered debris that formed the high tide mark. They'd come full circle and Sarah could no longer deny the truth, even to herself.

They were on an island.

dwdwdwdw

The island wasn't very big, so exploring it in greater depth didn't take long.

There were no conveniently abandoned boats concealed anywhere, no communications devices, no means of escape.

There was a stream of fresh water, flowing out into a deep lagoon at the far side of the island, which meant they could refill their flagon of water when it ran out – which, in this heat, didn't take long. They traced the stream up the beach and back to its source: a bubbling spring deep among the thicket of trees that clustered over a rocky incline at the centre of the island, blocking the view from one side to the other. Here at the highest point on this god-forsaken little spur of land the all-pervading smell of brine and fish was joined by another, sweeter scent. Sarah looked up into the twisted branches of the trees above her head and saw thick clusters of fruit.

At least they wouldn't get scurvy, she glumly reflected, a churning sensation bubbling up in the pit of her stomach at the thought of being trapped here indefinitely. There had to be a way off, there had to be a way back.

Harry, on the other hand, seemed far more concerned with the practicalities of survival than thoughts of escape. He organised their scant supplies into a makeshift shelter with unexpected efficiency and then, after sampling the fruit, which was delicious, and the ration bars, which weren't, wandered off bearing the fishing tackle they'd been left with the air of a man who had at least some idea what he was doing.

He had that in common with the Doctor, Sarah decided: a peculiarly male single-mindedness that said I am going to worry about this and not that, and that's that. It was the first point of similarity between the two she'd ever noticed, they were chalk and cheese in almost every other regard.

She wondered again where the Doctor was, what he was doing, if he was safe. What was happening to him, while she and Harry were stuck here, unable to get back to him? How could they help him when they couldn't even help themselves?

She had rarely in her life felt so useless.

The sun beat down mercilessly. Sarah had long since removed her jacket, as had Harry, and her fair, unprotected skin prickled uncomfortably in the unaccustomed heat. She retreated into the shelter of the trees and started to gather some firewood, because it was the only useful thing she could think to do, and then found a shady spot at the edge of their makeshift camp to attempt to arrange it like the campfires she'd seen in pictures and films…but her efforts were a dismal failure, a skill she'd never dreamt, growing up, that she might someday need.

She longed for an enemy to oppose, something practical she could do, but there was nothing.

"Here you are, Sarah: dinner." Sounding both cheerful and proud, Harry's voice alerted her to his return no more than a second before a pair of fish landed in the sand in front of her.

She stared at them, scales shimmering in the sun like oil on water, their flat, dead eyes staring back at her.

"What do you expect me to do with those?" Her voice was sharp, anger welling up inside her. Why wasn't he taking this seriously?

"Well, I caught them." Harry knelt down alongside her and began to rearrange the wood she'd gathered into a proper campfire.

Man hunt, woman cook? It was the final straw. "This isn't the dark ages, Harry."

"What?" He looked up, surprised.

It felt good to let it out, pent-up fear and frustration bubbling over in a sudden burst of fury. "Big macho huntsman bringing home the meat while the good little woman tends the hearth? This isn't a game, Harry, it isn't a holiday in the sun, and I'm not your wife!"

Harry blinked at her in confusion as she pushed to her feet and stormed away, fuming about men and chauvinism and the domestic stereotypes of femininity she'd railed against all her life. She made it all the way to the other side of the island before guilt set in, because she'd overreacted to a bit of silly teasing and she knew it and it wasn't even Harry she was angry with, not really. He was just the only available target.

The tide was on the turn. Sarah sat on the sand hugging her knees to her chest and watched the waves ebb and flow, let the anger leach away.

It was done. They were trapped. There was no immediately obvious way to escape. Surviving the experience was all they could do, at least until a better plan presented itself. She might wish she were better equipped for it, but getting angry wasn't going to help.

Her arms and nose were prickling again; she'd caught the sun, she knew, and would feel it in the morning. As she retreated back into the shade of the trees, the enticing scent of freshly cooked fish began to waft along on the breeze and her stomach rumbled. Time to bite the bullet and go back.

"I was joking, Sarah," Harry said as soon as she came near, his tone cautious, eyeing her warily as if expecting another explosion.

"I know." They'd always teased each other, since the day they first met. She was the one who'd started it, amused by his stuffy manners and cautious ways, and had quickly found that a whimsical sense of humour lurked beneath that starchy surface, that he could give every bit as good as he got. It had been the pattern of their relationship ever since, because Harry's old-fashioned values tended to clash with Sarah's passionate feminism and banter was how they knocked one another's sharp edges off, the bedrock their friendship was founded on, thrown together as they were out here in the big wide universe. She'd hate for a silly misunderstanding to spoil that, especially since, just at the moment, each of them was quite literally all the other had.

But Harry wouldn't hold it against her, she already knew. He was the most good-natured person she'd ever met, it was both one of his most endearing and one of his most irritating traits.

"So is this Navy training: how to survive in the wild?" She sat cross-legged alongside him on the sand and peered appreciatively at the half-cooked fish, skewered on spits of wood that were propped over the fire on forked sticks jutting out of the sand.

Harry was quiet for a moment, busying himself by turning the carefully balanced spits. "When I was a boy," he said at last, eyes on the fish. "After my mother died, my father was away with his ship quite a bit, so I spent rather a lot of school holidays with my grandparents."

"Okay," Sarah said, assuming this was leading somewhere and intrigued, despite the long-windedness, because it was so rare for Harry to talk about his home life and family.

"Well, my grandmother wasn't all that well," he went on. "She liked us out from under her feet, so my grandfather would take me camping – down along the coast or up on the moors, a different spot each time." His voice became soft, nostalgic. "He knew every bird by its call, every tree by the shape of its branches, even in winter – tried very hard to teach me."

Raised mainly by boarding school and grandparents…so much about Harry suddenly made sense. "Sounds like the kind of thing a growing boy would love," said Sarah, resting her chin on a palm and her elbow on a knee.

Harry poked at the fish. "Well, this part seems to have stuck."

Sarah smiled. At least one of them knew what they were doing.

"Aunt Lavinia used to tell me I'd have to make my fortune and keep a good cook or I'd starve. She's a fine one to talk!" She drew in a long, approving sniff. "If this tastes as good as it smells, remind me to say a big thank you to your grandfather."

Harry looked a little wistful, busied himself turning the fish again. "Oh, he's long gone now."

She should have expected that. "A toast to his memory, then – the finest spring water." She lofted the flagon and was rewarded by a smile, the first since her outburst.

"I found us some plates," Harry said, a hint of mischief about him now. "Just behind you."

"Plates?" Surprised, Sarah turned and looked and couldn't imagine what he was talking about…and then saw a pile of large, thick leaves and burst out laughing. "Oh, nothing but the best for us!"

dwdwdwdw

Fresh fish cooked over a campfire and eaten off a leaf, washed down with sips of spring water, with sweet, juicy fruit for dessert: it could have been a lot worse.

At least there was no washing up.

The prospect of nothing but fish and fruit and water for the foreseeable future, though – Sarah still couldn't accept that.

Sated, she sat back and watched the waves lapping at the shore, the ocean lit up a blazing golden-red as the sun sank low in the sky, and tried again to remember more details about that reception. What could have gone wrong? How had they ended up here – and why?

And how long might they be left out here to rot? The Doctor would try to find them, of course he would…but what if he couldn't?

What if he was in no fit state even to try?

They had to find a way back.

There were a few other islands dotted around and some of them looked tantalisingly close in the fiery glow of sunset. Sarah squinted at them with an appraising eye and wished she'd learned how to swim.

"How far do you suppose that is?"

"To the nearest?" Harry considered it for a moment, head cocked to one side. "Three, maybe four miles, I'd say."

"As far as that?" Sarah heard dismay in her own voice and wondered at it. Had she really hoped she might make it there somehow, that doing so would help in any way?

"It's deceptive."

She sighed. "I'll take your word for it, sailor."

"Planning to swim for it, were you, old – Sarah." Harry caught himself just in time and Sarah let the slip pass this time.

"Hardly. I never learnt to swim," she admitted, wondering if it would make a difference if she had. Then, before he could verbalise his visible surprise at the notion of anyone not being able to swim, she added, "Could you do it?" suddenly wondering if it were actually possible, for a swimmer.

He shot her a funny look, as if wondering just how fit do you think I am? "I don't think we should split up, Sarah."

"No, but could you?" she wanted to know, if only for academic interest. "If I weren't here, if it was just you – would it be possible?"

"Four miles in unfamiliar waters?" He shook his head. "It'd be a jolly big risk and for what? At least we know there's food and fresh water here."

Sarah sighed, disheartened. "I suppose."

"The Doctor will find us." Harry's voice was steady and soothing, but since that was the voice he always tended to use when he was worried, it wasn't as reassuring as he probably intended.

"But what if he can't?" It was a fear that kept gnawing away at her. "What if he needs us to find him?"

Harry had no answer for her, shook his head and shrugged and fell silent. Sarah couldn't stop thinking about it, turning the problem over and over in her mind. There had to be a way.

"Perhaps we could build a raft," she began to suggest, but Harry was no longer listening.

"I don't like the look of that sky," he said, pushing upright.

Neither did Sarah, now she came to look at it again: thunderous clouds rolling in out of nowhere, heavy and swollen and angry, transforming the blazing glow of the evening sky to murky greys and stormy black.

"We'd better take cover," she agreed, scrambling to her feet as the first splodges of rain began to fall.

dwdwdwdw

Sarah had never known a storm like it – from clear skies and glorious sunset to howling wind and torrential rain in about 30 seconds flat.

The impromptu shelter Harry had erected from their meagre supplies had no hope of withstanding it. They wrapped themselves around those meagre supplies in a vain attempt to stop them blowing away, held the wildly flapping tarpaulin down over their heads as best they could and hung onto one another for grim death, for what felt like hours and probably was before the onslaught began to die down at last and exhaustion won out.

She half-awoke once during the night, just enough to be aware of dark and cold, damp ground beneath her and clammy tarpaulin above, sticks and stones digging into soft flesh, and Harry's arms draped around her, warm breath on the back of her neck. Shuffling around to get more comfortable, she felt him shift and stir, and stilled so as not to wake him, let her head drop back against his chest; it was the best pillow she was going to get, in the circumstances.

Her breathing slowed to match his as she drifted off once more.

dwdwdwdw

Full consciousness returned slowly this time, an awareness of place and time that unfurled gradually yet inexorably: still on the island, the morning bright enough and warm enough and still enough that the storm of last night seemed almost like a bad dream.

Sarah fervently wished it had been a bad dream, all of it, but no such luck.

She was alone, she realised as she began to sit up and look around, sunburned skin screaming angrily the moment she attempted to move and her joints protesting all the way, stiff from a night on the ground. Harry's jacket and a blanket had been draped over her, both slightly damp, the tarpaulin was airing over a scrubby bush nearby, and there were fallen sticks and branches and leaves everywhere as a reminder of that ferocious wind, a neat pile of firewood already gathered nearby and the campfire rebuilt ready to light.

Harry was nowhere to be seen.

The island wasn't very big, so he couldn't have gone far, and it was him who'd gathered the firewood and tidied up the campsite, obviously, but still she felt her stomach lurch in sudden, irrational panic and scrambled hastily to her feet to shout for him. The fear was illogical and she knew it, but if they could be drugged and abandoned in the first place, for no apparent reason, surely Harry could be taken again just as easily – they were at the mercy of their unknown captor's whim after all, and stranded together had been bad enough, but if she were left alone here she'd go mad, she knew she would, if she didn't starve first, and…

And there he was, strolling back through the trees with the water flagon in one hand and her jacket in the other, dripping wet.

"There you are." Panic over, Sarah relaxed.

"Morning, Sarah," he said, as amiable and laid-back as if they hadn't just spent the night marooned on an island huddled together against the elements. "I found this in a rock pool at the edge of that lagoon; it'd blown clear across the island." He bent to lay the jacket out to dry in the sun and then squinted at her, lifting a hand to shade his eyes. "Is something the matter?"

Was something the matter? "You mean apart from being stranded?"

Conceding the point, he offered her the flagon for a drink – she only wished it held tea or coffee rather than water – and ruefully said, "We've lost both of our mats, I'm afraid, and one of the blankets. I suppose they might turn up in a tree, or something. Everything else seems to be present and correct, though. We were lucky."

Lucky. They were stranded on a blisteringly hot tropical island that was apparently prone to violent storms, on a planet at the far side of the galaxy, thousands of years after their own time, with only the scantest of provisions to see them through, no idea who had left them here or why, and no way of escape. Sarah felt grimy and sore and decidedly unlucky. "I'm not sure that's the word I'd use," she retorted.

And so a second day on the island began. Sarah took herself off to the stream to freshen up as best she could, commandeering a comb from Harry's jacket pocket to at least attempt to tame her tangled hair and his tie to winch it back off her face; she'd always hated tying her hair back, but needs must, it was the only practical solution here with the wind and salt and spray.

She returned to the campsite to find Harry frowning worriedly at the fire lighter and her heart sank, because what could have gone wrong now? "What is it?"

"Blasted thing seems to have got wet."

Although mild enough, as curses went, it was the strongest language she'd ever heard him use, habitual gentleman that he was, and she understood why as she realised what he meant. "It won't light? But it has to, we need that."

"Yes, exactly!" Harry had seemed so calm throughout this whole ordeal, sensible and practical and focused, but he was rattled now. If they couldn't light a fire…well, they might not freeze, although it had been chilly enough overnight, but they wouldn't be able to cook, and if they couldn't cook they couldn't eat – those ration bars were both revolting and limited in number, they wouldn't last long, and you couldn't live on fruit indefinitely.

"But there are other ways of making fire, aren't there?" There had to be.

He raised his eyebrows. "Rub two sticks together, you mean?"

"Something like that." Sarah mentally cursed her own lack of woodcraft, because she was certain she'd heard of the technique, but was suddenly unsure. "Unless it's just an old wives' tale…"

Harry wrinkled his nose. "I tried it once or twice when I was a boy," he offered, lending her sudden hope.

"And?"

"And nothing," he ruefully admitted. "Never quite had the patience to keep going long enough to make it work, I'm afraid. Not when there was a matchbook to hand."

Sarah sighed. "Defeatist. I don't suppose you happen to have a matchbook to hand now, do you?" He didn't, of course he didn't, and neither did she: neither of them smoked. "Well, now's your chance to try again, then."

Harry promptly returned his attention to the lighter. "I suppose this might be all right when it dries out…" he rather hopefully suggested, setting it out in the sun alongside her jacket.

"Well if not," said Sarah, "You'll get to experiment with those sticks again and show me how it's done, because I've had enough."

"Had enough of what?"

"All of it. Everything." Now she'd started, the words just came tumbling out. "They think they've beaten us, don't they? They've got us trapped and we don't even know who they are and there's nothing we can do. We don't know where we are. We don't know where the Doctor is. We can't escape. And I've had enough of it. So…well, whoever they are may or may not ever come back for us. The Doctor may or may not come for us. There's nothing we can do either way. So we'll just have to do what we can and that's make the best of things here, and we are not going to be defeated by a bit of rain, I won't have it! So if rubbing two sticks together until they burn is what it takes, then that's what we'll do!"

She ran out of words at last and cast a sheepish glance sideways at Harry, who was smiling. "Oh, I agree," he said. Of course he did, he'd been focused on practicalities and making the best of their situation from the start.

"Right then," said Sarah, setting her resolve. "Well, you can start by showing me how to catch a fish, because I didn't have a granddad to take me camping and you never know, I might be on my own next time. I might need to know."

Harry let out a wry chuckle. "Already planning a next time, are you, old thing?"

dwdwdwdw

Sarah had never harboured any illusions whatsoever about being an outdoorsy sort of person. She wasn't. She'd always known that. Fishing, hunting, sport of any kind – they were all things other people did. She was a city girl and proud of it.

So Harry's complicated explanation of fish and tides and times meant very little to her, but the upshot of it was that the technique he'd used yesterday – with a rod, off the rocks – was to be abandoned in favour of a more direct approach because a large shoal of fish had drifted right up close to the beach with the incoming tide, a shifting dark shadow in the water that she hadn't even noticed until it was pointed out to her. Catching themselves a spot of breakfast would, she was assured, be simple: all they had to do, in theory, was wade into the water with the net and Bob's your uncle, they'd have fish.

So much else had gone wrong, it came almost as a surprise to find that it really was that simple. Shoes off, trousers rolled up, and Sarah was transported back to the summer holidays of her childhood, paddling in the sea at Brighton or Bournemouth, the shifting sand tickling her toes. She'd grown wary of water since then, and here especially was acutely aware of her own limitation – she couldn't swim and that made her vulnerable – but Harry was at her side, there'd be no need to venture out too deep, and in the heat of the morning the gentle blue-green waves were deliciously cool and inviting.

She waded in up to her knees, not caring if her clothes got wet, and laughed in delight at the feel of the fish darting all around her, bumping into her legs and nuzzling at them curiously. They were ridiculously easy to catch. She danced in triumph when she netted her first, splashing herself and Harry from top to toe, and then splashed him again, vigorously, when he scooped up a fish with his bare hands and tossed it toward her, just to see her reaction.

The second time he tried it she managed to catch the fish in her net and danced again. How was it possible they could have so much fun, hopelessly marooned as they were?

It was respite and release and they'd badly needed it.

They were both dripping wet by the time they waded back to land, and there Harry had the advantage over Sarah since he could just strip his shirt off and wring it out. Hers clung to her, revealingly – but not half as revealing as if she removed it. She could see Harry trying very hard not to look, but couldn't quite bring herself to care if he did. The sun was hot, she'd dry soon enough…and she was looking at him.

He had on a vest underneath, tight-fitting, accentuating a surprisingly muscular build that was usually well hidden beneath the smart shirts and jackets he liked to wear. Also usually kept hidden were his military dog tags, worn on a chain around his neck. Sarah had never seen them before and leaned in close to take a look at the bald inscription:

A POS
C680182P
SULLIVAN, HA

"You're a very nosy person, Sarah. Has anyone ever told you that?" he said without rancour, letting her look.

"Frequently," she smartly replied. "I'm a journalist. It's my job."

"Gives you a good excuse, more like," he retorted.

He had her bang to rights there and she couldn't deny it, so she asked instead what the A stood for. He wouldn't say, which meant it was something absurd like Albert or Archibald, and trying to guess kept her nicely distracted all the way back to camp, allowed her not to think about what they'd do if they couldn't light the fire.

"You know, the Japanese eat fish raw," she recalled, stomach churning at the thought of it, as Harry busied himself about the campfire, making sure it was all shipshape for lighting…or for attempting to light.

"Let's hope we don't have to try it, eh. All right, here goes."

He set the lighter to the kindling and tried pulling the switch. Nothing. He gave it a shake and tried again. Still nothing. Sarah took it off him and tried herself. Nothing.

"Looks like we're going to have to try rubbing those sticks together after all," she said in dismay.

Harry frowned and shook the lighter again and then tried the switch a fourth time.

The flame lit at last. The kindling caught. The fire started.

They threw their arms around one another in celebration and the hug lingered, the moment unexpectedly charged with unanticipated possibilities. She felt almost as if she'd never really seen him before, she'd always been looking elsewhere, but she was looking at him now, acutely aware of the maleness of him, muscles and musk and good-heartedness, steady as a rock. It was just the two of them now, maybe forever…

Her stomach rumbled loudly and just like that the spell was broken. Harry pulled back, smiling fondly. "Time for breakfast, I think."

dwdwdwdw

"I spy with my little eye something beginning with S."

"Sand."

"No."

"Sea."

"No."

"Sun."

"No."

"I give up." Harry sounded even more bored than Sarah was.

"Shoes," she told him. They hadn't put them back on, had left them in a heap at the edge of the campsite. "Your turn."

"I haven't seen any fishing boats," he remarked apropos of nothing, instead of continuing the game. "Not even one – if they were about, we might try to signal them."

Sarah looked out across the clear expanse of ocean, dotted with islands, birds wheeling overhead, here and there a sudden ripple as a fish broke the surface, but nothing even remotely resembling a boat of any kind. "No such luck."

It was so quiet, so still, if someone had told her the two of them were the only people left in the world, she might have believed them, because it certainly felt that way. It was even hotter today than yesterday and, with the sun at its zenith, they were restricted to the shade of the trees to avoid sunstroke, the unrelenting heat sapping their energy enough that even talking seemed an effort.

Oh for a fan of some kind. An iced drink, preferably alcoholic. Ice cream. The items that hadn't been in the survival kit left for them were legion. Sunhats would also be useful, Sarah mused, something wide-brimmed and shady…and now that she was thinking about it, she had an idea.

"Wait here," she told Harry, scrambling to her feet, and darted deeper into the tree cover, where the ground was thick with fallen leaves. She sifted through the assorted varieties in search of a particular type, gathering the longest fronds available and testing them for suppleness and flexibility – fresh was better than dry, she decided, and thanks to that storm there were plenty to choose from. She was almost sure her idea would work…if she could only remember the technique. It had been well over a decade and she'd barely given half her attention at the time.

She sat down alongside the bubbling spring with a pile of leaves on her knee and began to experiment. How did it go again…?

Two or three discarded prototypes later, she was confident she had it at last, almost finished now…

"There you are, Sarah." Harry had come looking for her. "I wondered where you'd got to. What've you got there?"

"Ta-da!" She held up her completed work: a woven sunhat – a little wonky, perhaps, but serviceable.

"I say, that's remarkable!" He took it from her for a closer look and tried it on.

Sarah chuckled. "Suits you, sir!"

Harry grinned, adjusted the hat to a jaunty angle, and sat down alongside her. "Wherever did you learn to do this?"

"Okay, don't laugh." Selecting fronds to start on a second hat, she tried to remember what had worked for the first. This bit here and that bit there, like so… "We did a bit of weaving when I was in Guides."

"You were a Girl Guide, eh?"

She smacked him for laughing. "Not for very long. My friend Susie was joining and it sounded like fun – a chance to do all kinds of things we girls didn't normally get to do. But then we got there and it turned out Miss Crane's horizons didn't extend much further than knitting and sewing – useful domestic skills, she called it, nothing adventurous at all. She had very definite ideas about what was suitable for girls and they didn't match mine so I left. But one thing I did learn there was weaving – I had no idea I remembered how to do it!"

"Stroke of luck for us," Harry approved.

"Stroke is exactly what we want to avoid," she reminded him, weaving away. This second hat would be better than the first, she already knew – less clumsy, more practised. "You know, I never dreamt I might someday thank the old Crane for an actual useful skill."

"You see, Sarah. Domesticity isn't so bad after all," Harry said in his driest, most pompous tone, only the twinkle in his eye to show that he was teasing, trying to get a rise out of her. She freed a hand from her work to smack his arm again.

"Watch it, mister, or I'll have that hat back."

"I'm serious," he insisted, deadpan. "Besides, sewing isn't just for girls, you know. My mother taught me."

"You're kidding."

"Buttons and socks," he solemnly said, still, she was sure, no more than half-serious. "Jolly useful these days – we bachelors must make shift for ourselves, you know."

"Worst nightmare for a growing boy, I'd have thought." Sarah well remembered her own bitter resentment of all domestic lessons growing up.

"Oh, I don't know. She tried hard to make it fun. We'd tell each other stories…" A wistful note came into his voice now. "I suppose she was already ill."

And just like that the joking was over. "I wish I had memories like that," Sarah longingly admitted. "I was just a baby when my parents died – never knew either of them."

Harry looked sympathetic. "You had your aunt."

"I did," she said. "And she's wonderful. I owe her so much…but it isn't the same."

"No. No it isn't the same," he quietly agreed, and she remembered what he'd said about school holidays and grandparents.

"How old were you when your mother died?"

"Nine – just. No birthday party that year."

She tried to imagine it and couldn't. Her own loss had been so different.

"Oh, listen to us. A fine pair we are, getting all maudlin. Look, I've finished." She held up the second hat for inspection.

Harry smiled. "Well done, Sarah."

Sarah regarded her efforts with great satisfaction. "Hats off to the old Crane for teaching me how!"

dwdwdwdw

"I hope the Doctor's all right." Sarah had been trying not to think about this all day, but the worry wouldn't go away. She picked at fishy remains on her leaf plate, already bored of this repetitive diet, the anxiety she'd been trying so hard to repress bubbling toward the surface once more as a second day on the island neared its end. "It's been so long. He'd have come by now if he was coming, surely."

Harry immediately put his cheery voice on. "Oh, you know him, Sarah. He's probably got himself all tied up with something."

She snorted. "Literally, knowing him – for all we know, he could be out there on another of these islands, as trapped as we are."

"No, he'd have found a way off by now." Harry poked disconsolately at the campfire, his façade of hearty good cheer dropping away. "You'd have done far better to stick with him than me, I'm afraid."

"I don't recall having any say in the matter." She leaned over and brushed a kiss to his cheek, he looked so woebegone. "No, if I had to be stranded, I'm glad you were here. I just wish the Doctor was here too. At least then we'd know he's all right."

"I'm sure he is," Harry insisted, although his eyes gave the lie to the certainty expressed. They couldn't know, either way, that was the trouble. They might never know. "We just have to wait."

"I can't imagine the universe without him," Sarah murmured, and then, hesitantly, added, "You know if anything's happened to him, we really are stuck. Even if we get off this island, we'll still be trapped, no way home."

Harry had no answer for her there. She looked around at their peaceful, isolated surroundings: the pearly white sand and waving trees, golden sun sinking low in the sky as another day neared its end, birds wheeling overhead.

"Of all the places I could have ended up," she said. "I'd never have expected this."

"Expect the unexpected," Harry sagely remarked. "That's what the Brigadier told me when I was invited to join UNIT."

"Invited?" Train of thought derailed, Sarah squinted sideways at him. She hadn't ever put any thought into how UNIT might conduct its recruitment, but if she had, she probably wouldn't have expected personal invitation to be involved. "How did that happen?"

"Got myself involved in a UNIT job," he said, leaning back on an elbow. "Up at Faslane, when I was stationed there – that was when I first met the chaps, you know. There was an opening – I suppose I must have fitted the bill."

"So you were stationed at Faslane, and now UNIT – you know, Harry, for a sailor, you don't seem to have spent much time at sea."

"I served on the Ark Royal!" he indignantly retorted and she laughed, pleased to have got a rise out of him. Then his face changed. "I say, is that a boat?"

He was on his feet at once and Sarah wasn't far behind, hand shading her eyes to stare eagerly out to sea.

There was a boat, distant but moving closer all the time – and it was heading straight for their island. They ran down the beach to the waterline and jumped up and down, waving their arms and shouting and hugging one another in excitement.

At last a figure could be made out, a man, standing at the prow of the boat waving back.

"Ahoy there," he shouted, and the boat was near enough now to make out more detail: heavy overcoat and absurdly long scarf, floppy felt hat clutched tight in a waving hand, shaggy curls blown every which way by the breeze, and gleaming teeth as he grinned his delight to see them, safe and sound.

It was the Doctor.

dwdwdwdw

"Well, it was all a bit of a mix-up, really," said the Doctor, when they were aboard and speeding away, their island retreating into the distance. "Harmonics, you see. And it's an election year, of course."

"No, not of course," Sarah grumbled impatiently. He never explained anything properly. "Doctor, what are you talking about?"

"Yes, Doctor. What happened?" Harry added.

The Doctor scratched his head, looking embarrassed. "Sensory simulators," he said. "They use harmonics relayed through a synapse encoder for emotional manipulation and mental conditioning. Well, I had no idea, of course, when I was talking to Professor Stoller at the reception, our discussion was purely academic, I thought…and I may have given the impression I could be of some assistance in boosting the amplification relay to reach a wider audience."

"But what's that got to do with us?" Sarah wanted to know.

"It's an election year," he repeated. "And Stoller was up for high office."

"He wanted you to help him hypnotise the electorate into voting for him, you mean," said Harry, frowning with the concentration involved in translating Doctor-speak into plain English.

"Exactly!" the Doctor confirmed. "You two were his leverage, stashed away where he thought I'd never find you. Still, all's well that ends well, the transmitters are being broken up, the professor is in jail, and I must say, you two are looking rather well for the experience. Time to go, wouldn't you say?"

So they'd missed the whole thing. There were so many unanswered questions still, but somehow they no longer seemed important. Sarah looked at Harry, who smiled and shrugged and nodded, and then turned back to the Doctor. "Yes," she said, and thought of the TARDIS, with its gleaming console room and endless corridors. Where might they end up next? "It's time to go."