Author's Note

I do not own The Sarah Jane Adventures.

I've always felt there's a sad lack of Maria in Washington fics (probably because the fandom is so small), so I made one myself!

Maria noticed the first one on the bus.

It was Tuesday and she was on the way to school, surrounded by rowdy school kids. America was nothing like she imagined. Maybe she had expected something like what they showed on TV, but this wasn't anything like that.

So far she had been here five months, made no friends, been laughed at for her accent, pushed in muddy puddles and knocked over in the school yard.

When one listed things like that, maybe America was exactly what she should have expected.

They even lived on a street that backed up to open land.

It was definitely nothing like England.

The bus was stopped by a barricade.

There were armed soldiers everywhere.

Stone of them were wearing what Maria recognised as UNIT uniform.

The other kids gathered around the windows, staring out. One of the soldiers knocked on the driver's window and leant inside. "Gas leak."

Maria was new to America, but she had never heard of a gas leak requiring dozens of soldiers.

Maria saw the second one come down.

It was Thursday, two weeks after the incident with the soldiers on the bus. Maria was sat in the living room doing her math homework. Perhaps living opposite Sarah Jane Smith had made her more aware of her surroundings, because she barely saw the steak of light from the corner of her eye before she started turning her head.

It was dusk, and dark enough that someone who didn't know what they were looking at might have just dismissed it, but Maria knew at once and stared shouting for her dad. He rushed through. "Maria! What's going on?"

She pointed outside, but the object had already fallen beneath their line of sight. "Did you see it?"

"See what?"

"The space ship!"

"Maria, this is Washington, not Ealing!"

"I'm not kidding dad, that was a space ship! We need to go out and see, there might be someone hurt!"

"Maria, that is not our job."

"Then whose is it?" Maria grabbed her jacket. "I'm going, even if you won't."

Her dad sighed. "Fine. Just let me find the car keys."

She was right. It had been a space ship. 'Had' was the key word there. It was now in a dozen pieces, scattered across the landscape. It was fairly clear there would be no survivors.

"Wow," whispered Maria. Her dad wrapped his arm around her waist.

"Come on. Let's get home."

They didn't talk about it later, and maybe they should have done but they didn't.

The third time the alien came to her.

The fact that it happened to look like a small Earth kitten seemed moot.

It also happened to be neon green.

And have small antenna on top of its head.

It appeared in the garden, snuffling around the bins.

Maria managed to shoo it inside before (too many of) the neighbours saw and rang Sarah Jane. According to Mr Smith it was a female peozeiral leopard from the planet Casinakon.

"What's... one of them doing in Washington?" Maria asked.

"It could have arrived on a crashed space ship. Plenty of things do."

"Well, what am I meant to do with it?"

"You could send it here, Mr Smith could teleport it up to a passing freighter."

"Sarah Jane, I don't think I can express post an alien cat."

"Probably not."

So the alien cat stayed. She was surprisingly good company, and her dad became more comfortable with keeping it when he saw how much Maria liked having it around and the improvement in her mood. Maria called her Apple. She could walk through walls and jumped on her lap every time she sat down. Someone had loved her, once.

The fourth time her dad came home from work and told her their CCTV cameras had caught what looked like another ship coming down.

"Its there anything happening that would cause so much activity?" Maria asked Sarah Jane. "I mean, that's the fourth time."

"It could only be the second. You don't know anything was going on with those soldiers Maria, and Apple could have come from the first ship you saw come down. Not everything is aliens."

Maria sighed. "I guess so."

The fifth time Maria met the alien.

Or the alien met her.