The Running Man
Old Friends and New Faces
Her heart leapt long before her brain had time to categorize the sound. But there was no way that she could possibly be right. Sarah Jane had convinced herself long ago that she'd never hear that sound again.
Her pounding heart indicated otherwise, though, so she ran out into the rain-slicked street at one o'clock in the morning. Sure enough, there it stood as if it had been there all along. She grinned and ran up to the door, paying no mind to the rain that soaked her pajamas or the cool, rough pavement beneath her bare feet. The only thing that mattered was that he had come back.
The door opened, and instantly, with a twist of her gut, Sarah Jane knew that something was very, very wrong. The inside of the TARDIS was smoking, and there was no way the man in the tarnished Victorian-era coat could be her Doctor. His eyes were haunted and empty, nothing like the childish wonderment she knew.
Those cold eyes locked on hers and the man who surely wasn't the Doctor tried to form words, but he couldn't. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head and his knees gave out. Sarah Jane darted forward and caught him just in time.
"Come on, now, get up," she said.
He didn't answer her. Sarah Jane eased him out of the doorway. Thankfully, the TARDIS seemed to realize that closing the door was not an option with the man in her arms, so the door swung shut on its own. She began the long trek to her house dragging him with her. Doctor or not, Sarah Jane was not the kind of person to leave a clearly injured man lying in her front lawn. Her feet protested, the ground digging into her skin, but she kept going. Finally, she reached the front door and hauled her load through it. There was no chance of her getting him up the steps, so she settled him on the couch in her living room instead.
"What am I going to do with you?" she asked his sleeping form.
Briefly, she considered taking him to a hospital and letting professionals deal with him, but it would be fairly obvious he was an alien if they discovered his other heart. No, he'd have to stay.
She knelt beside him and checked him over for damage. The regeneration (if this was the Doctor, which part of her still doubted) had taken care of the injuries that had ripped up his jacket. His hands, though, were riddled with horrible burns which she guessed were caused the by the control panel overheating. Sarah Jane got to her feet and retrieved her bath robe from her bedroom. She wrapped him in a sort of fluffy pink cocoon and then collapsed in the armchair across from him.
"What happened to you, Doctor?"
~o0o~
A scream tore Sarah Jane from her sleep. She jerked upright, hands clenched into fists, ready for a fight. A price of running with the Doctor. The man cried out again, but it wasn't pain. He was dreaming. Sarah Jane sprang up and took his hand.
"No!" he bellowed, lashing out with his foot.
The pretty sea-glass blue lamp sitting on her bookshelf took the brunt of his fear and flew across the room. Clear shards decorated the floor in a random mosaic.
"Shh, shh," she soothed.
He stopped thrashing at the sound of her voice and his shouts subsided. Tears seeped out from under his eyelids. Sarah Jane was suddenly seized by icy fear. In all the years she had known him, the Doctor had always been perfectly composed, even jovial when faced with a deadly situation. What had happened to this Doctor, that a simple nightmare would reduce him to this?
"No!"
"It's all right. It's all right."
His eyes shot open, electric blue and terrified, but clearly not seeing her.
"Help them."
"I will," she said, knowing full well that whoever he wanted helped was long gone.
His eyes shut again and he sank back into the sofa. Sarah Jane stayed by his side for another hour, but he didn't move or say another word.
She stumbled back to her armchair and fell back asleep.
~o0o~
The Doctor awoke with a start, eyes flying open. Almost of its own accord, his fist clenched. He tried to get up, but found that his feet were ensnared in…a fluffy bath robe?
He frowned, and tried to think back. Everything was always fuzzy after a regeneration. Regeneration! He'd regenerated, but why? Fire seared in his memory and he flinched as if it still burned his skin. Fire…why fire?
It was like someone had punched him in the gut when he realized why. Get a grip, he chided himself. You're the Doctor, get a grip.
He looked about the room, anything to distract himself. It was pretty standard as far as living rooms went, but a picture hanging on the wall caught his eye.
He knew that scarf.
Knowing it would help him figure out where (and, more importantly, when) he was, the Doctor disentangled himself from the bath robe and got to his feet. He crept across the room to the picture frame, careful not to disturb the woman sleeping peacefully in the armchair across from him. When had the picture been taken? He recognized, with a start, one of his former regenerations with a silly grin on his face, still wrapped up in that ridiculous scarf. Beside him, laughing at the cameraman (no doubt it had been Harry to take the picture) was Sarah Jane. He glanced back and forth from the owner of the house to the picture, trying to reconcile his mental image of the girl who'd snuck on to his TARDIS looking for a scoop with the tired woman sitting on the armchair.
He retreated to his sofa and waited for her to wake up.
~o0o~
The Doctor didn't have to wait long. She woke only two minutes after he did.
"It's 1980," she said by way of greeting.
She could tell this Doctor didn't have much use for hellos or other pleasantries.
"So it's been four years for you."
She nodded tersely. Had it really been that long? Not a day went by that she didn't think about the stars.
"And you?"
"Twenty-five."
She gave a low whistle. "Regeneration?"
"Nine."
"Someone's not been careful enough," she said, shaking her head.
An awkward silence descended over the pair. Sarah Jane ticked off the seconds in her head. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three…
"You're twenty-nine?"he asked.
She'd had enough of beating around the bush. No matter how painful it might be for him, she needed to know what had happened.
"Doctor, what happened to you?"
His gaze slowly slid from hers to his hands, convulsing violently in his lap.
"Same old same old."
She narrowed her eyes. "Doctor—"
"You don't need to mother me, Sarah Jane. I'm nine-hundred years—"
"Then stop coming to me!" she shouted, leaping to her feet, feeling all the resentment and annoyance that usually vanished when he arrived. "You're ruining my life, Doctor! Stay in it or stay out of it. Every time you come here it's for a reason, you need my help. I'm tired of giving it, Doctor. The moment I begin to forget, you waltz back in my life like it's been five minutes rather than five years so I can't move on because there's always a chance you'll come back. It's not fair."
She took a deep breath and calmed herself much faster than she would have before.
"You need to get those burns treated," she said stiffly, ignoring his protest that the regeneration would take care of it.
She left the living room as quickly as she could and entered the kitchen. She needed a moment to think without him present. Mechanically, she filled a bowl with icy water and retrieved some gauze from a first aid kit she had stowed under the sink. (She could never be too careful—running with the Doctor seemed to make her more susceptible to alien attacks.) Careful not to spill the water, she reentered the living room and sat down next to him on the couch.
"Soak your hands," she ordered.
He followed orders and dunked them under the water. The burns looked a little less threatening beneath the surface.
"Gallifrey is gone."
Nothing could have prepared her for that. She stopped unwinding the bandages she held and stared at him. How could anything ever be truly gone for a Time Lord? As he always said, everything had its time. If Gallifrey had met its, he wouldn't be one to argue.
"What?"
"Time lock," he said. "It's like it never existed—like they never existed. Every advancement, every achievement, every good deed, just gone!"
She pulled his hands out of the bowl and toweled them off the best she could, wincing sympathetically all the way.
"Who did it?" she asked once she realized that he would never open up on his own. "Cybermen? Daleks?"
Sarah Jane wrapped his hands finger by finger in the gauze. It was a long moment before he lifted his head and looked her in the eyes. All the breath in her lungs exited with a woosh.
"Doctor?" she asked softly, finishing the bandaging with practiced fingers.
"I had no choice."
Time seemed to freeze. She stared at him in abject horror. He had…but, no, he'd never do that, no matter how bad things got, because he didn't like violence, the Doctor.
"You shouldn't help me," he said, pushing her hand away, nearly sending the bowl of water to the floor. "It's too—"
"Dangerous? When have I ever cared?" she asked, taking his hand.
He closed his eyes, as if remembering dozens of people that had said the same thing.
"You should."
Her eyes stung at the thought of an entire culture wiped from existence. Even when Earth had burned, their legacy had lived on in the human's descendants. The only place Gallifrey existed was in memory, and even that would diminish with time.
"What happened?"
His voice cracked as he began. The war, from what she could gather, had been bloody. The Doctor, her Doctor, the man who hated having to use weapons, had fought. His voice slowed as he described the end, pulling the trigger. She realized, with another wrench of her gut, that he had expected to die with his people.
"The TARDIS was launched away," he said. "I tried to get her to go back, but she wouldn't listen."
"She was protecting you."
"The control panel was burning," he said, waggling his bandaged fingers to make his point. "Next thing I know, I'm here."
"You regenerated."
"I'd noticed," he replied drily. "I didn't think I was bleeding that badly."
He picked at the tattered jacket he still wore. In the light, Sarah Jane could see that the edges of the rips were crimson stained as well as black from soot.
He got to his feet. Sarah Jane leapt up alongside him and grabbed him tightly by the wrist.
"Don't go running off."
~o0o~
"I'm just getting a new jacket," he said, easing her off of him.
"I'm warning you, Doctor," she said, her voice warbling embarrassingly. "If you leave, you can bet that sonic screwdriver of yours that the next time you land on my porch needing help, you won't be getting any."
He nodded and headed for the door. What had happened to the Sarah Jane he knew? An annoying voice in the back of his mind whispered that maybe he should do exactly what she suggested. Stay with her or stay away from her.
"How are you?" he asked the TARDIS, touching the blue door.
She answered with a dull affirmative. She was all right, there was no external damage. Well, that made two of them. The Doctor knew that he'd never get used to the big, gaping emptiness that filled his head. There had been times that he'd resented the Time Lord's presence in the back of his mind. Now he craved it. The only thing that kept him grounded was the brush of the TARDIS so that he knew he was not completely alone.
He pushed open the door. It took a couple of blinks to convince his brain that it was the TARDIS and he hadn't stepped into the wrong time travelling police box. The control room was completely remodeled.
"I suppose it's up to you," he said grudgingly, making his way to the exceptionally large wardrobe.
Upon seeing the bright clothes lining the wall, he groaned. Where was he going to find clothing for the last of the Time Lords in a place like that?
~o0o~
Despite the Doctor's word that he wouldn't leave, Sarah Jane still listened intently for the sound of a vanishing TARDIS. She hadn't been kidding about not helping again. She resented the Doctor as much as she loved him. He couldn't keep doing this.
She did up the guest room for him while she waited. The flowered wallpaper probably wasn't his type, but there wasn't much she could do about that. She dumped the fake flowers out of their vase and into the closet. The bed sheets were clean, if a bit dusty, but she didn't think he'd mind.
"What are you doing?" she chided herself.
He'd just lost everything. He didn't care about dust or flowers. What the Doctor needed was a safe place to rest, complete the regeneration and pull himself together. Part of her couldn't help but fuss over him, though she knew it was the last thing he wanted.
The door opened and closed again. Sarah Jane couldn't hold back the grin that crept up her face. He hadn't left!
"Sarah Jane?" he called, a note of panic in his voice.
Stupid! He probably thought she'd been abducted or something. She should have told him what she was doing.
"I'm right upstairs," she said.
The stairs creaked as he made his way up. Most people would have been annoyed by the loud floorboards, but Sarah Jane thought they added character to the house.
For the first time, she really examined his new face. He had a rather large nose, and a pair of ears to match, but as with all his other incarnations, there was something about him that made you want to trust him. She couldn't get over his eyes. Electric blue, like she'd observed the night before, but empty, not brimming with life. The Doctor's eyes had always been a constant for her. No matter what color, shape or size they were, they retained a sort of old wisdom but youthful wonderment at the same time.
She took in the new clothing as well. There was a darkly colored jumper, possibly green (she couldn't tell in this lighting) underneath a worn leather jacket that fit as if he'd worn it for years. His fists were plunged deep in the pockets, and she had a feeling they'd be like that a lot of the time. He wore dark jeans and sensible dark shoes. Everything about the ensemble screamed 'Don't touch me.'
He gave her a look, as if daring her to say something. She offered a weak smile instead.
"I fixed the guest room up," she said.
~o0o~
Well, it certainly wasn't his type, but it would do. The wallpaper was at least a decade out of date (no doubt placed there before Sarah Jane had bought the house) and the mismatch of furniture wasn't going to be winning her any awards, but it was a place to stay that wasn't the TARDIS. After the horrific events of the past twenty-four hours, the idea of staying in the ship where it had happened made him sick.
"Get some more sleep."
"Doctor's orders?" he asked, trying to diffuse some of the tension.
She cracked a small smile. "Doctor's orders."
He wanted to thank her, but he couldn't find the words and she was gone before he had the chance. Sarah Jane—his Sarah Jane—really was something else.
This story takes place in 1980, as stated in the chapter. For Sarah Jane, it's been four years since The Hand of Fear and her leaving the TARDIS. The Doctor is fresh off the Time War, and if you're looking at human time from however many years since he met Ian and Barbara, it's about 2005 for the Doctor.
In 1983 (three years after the events of this story) Sarah Jane will run into the Doctor again during the story The Five Doctors. Knowing the fate of Gallifrey, it's a little difficult for her to keep quiet, but she does, because its destruction is a fixed point that the Doctor would go crazy trying to change. So, she keeps the secret throughout that episode.
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