This was written a while ago, inspired by someone on an lj comm mentioning that Lis Sladen turned 60 in 2008. It is pure canonish fluff with a dash of humour (I think) and bears no relation whatsoever to my Lost Ones universe. All feedback welcome!
It was a drowsy afternoon, and waiting hush of spring seemed to permeate all the way up to the attic at 13 Bannerman Road. The occupants of the attic were being unwontedly quiet; Sarah Jane Smith, the owner of the house, was sitting at her computer, working away at an article. On the big red leather sofa across the room four teenagers sat, their dark heads bent over something or other.
Sarah Jane sighed and pushed her thick rimmed glasses back into place. The black font on the screen was starting to dance a little, and she decided to take a break. After stretching to ease a couple of kinks, she crossed the floor to look over the back of the teenagers' heads. For a moment she stood and gloated over them as they murmured and chatted together over one of the books they'd pulled from her shelves.
They were hers, even though only Luke, sitting at the left, was her son. Next to him was Clyde, Luke's best mate. Then there was Rani, tall and slim with the makings of an extremely good journalist one day. Sarah Jane had never enjoyed having people tag along with her for 'work experience', but Rani was different.
Last but not least was Maria, whose arrival in Bannerman Road two years ago had changed Sarah Jane's life forever. Maria and her father had only just returned from living in Washington for a year, and Sarah Jane was still adjusting to having her 'daughter' back with them. At least, she thought gratefully, there'd been no issues between Rani and Maria when the two girls had met for the first time. They'd clicked instantly. Which was just as well. There was little time for arguments and squabbles when one was trying to save the world.
Sarah Jane exchanged a quick smile with Maria, affectionately ruffled Luke's hair (much to his annoyance) and then returned to her computer, feeling energised once more. She managed to type another paragraph and was halfway through the concluding sentence when her peace was shattered.
"No way!"
It was Clyde - and she'd just deleted her paragraph in her shock. "Clyde! Stop yelling. I've got deadlines, even if you haven't!"
The four children (she couldn't help thinking of them as children, still) turned to look at her, grins plastered across all four faces. "What?" she asked warily.
"We've been looking at your book, Mum -"
"-the one you wrote about UNIT," Clyde added. "And the photographs are like, something else!"
"What? What are you talking about?"
"I see what Luke means about the Seventies," Maria said solemnly. "Please tell me you'll never wear those overall things again."
"Over - oh my god. Let me see that!" Sarah Jane snatched the book from Clyde's hands, and gave the smirking boy a hard look as she did so. Sure enough, there she was, in all her red-and-white Andy Pandy glory. Reluctantly she began to laugh. "I'd forgotten that was in there. That photograph was sent to the publisher by mistake and I always hated it; why do you think the book was shoved out of the way?"
Rani leaned her face on her arm and looked up. "I thought that was strange. What did you mean to send?"
Sarah Jane smiled nostalgically. "This." She turned back to her computer and pulled up another photograph, only it was coloured with a distinctive rose cast. The teenagers clustered around her. "There's me, and dear old Harry, and the Brig -"
"Sir Alistair Thingummy-Bob?" Clyde asked. "The guy who helped us with the Bane?"
"The Brigadier, yes," Sarah Jane returned with a teasing rap on Clyde's shoulder.
"Who's the other guy, the one at the back?" Maria asked, leaning over Sarah Jane's chair to point out a tall man with curly hair, a megawatt smile that showed all his teeth, and a ridiculously long, striped scarf.
"That's the Doctor, as he was then." Sarah Jane's eyes lingered on the photograph. "That was his fourth regeneration. Different, isn't he?" she said to Luke, who was peering closely.
"He looks much cooler now," her son said decidedly, prompting a clap on the back from Clyde and some eye-rolling from the girls.
"I thought you said Time Lords live for a long time?" That was Rani. "But didn't you say that the Doctor is on his tenth regeneration now, and if he was in his fourth only thirty years ago -"
Clyde yelped. "Don't be silly. Can't possibly be thirty years ago." He glanced nervously at Sarah Jane. "Er, can it?"
"More like thirty five, I'm afraid," Sarah Jane told him, her mouth twitching."And it's been a lot longer than that for the Doctor, Rani." Much, much longer in so many ways...
"But - but that'd mean that you're like, really old."
"Clyde!" hissed the girls, with Maria throwing in a thump for good measure. Even Luke was glaring at his best friend.
"Hmm. I'm fifty nine this year, if you must know."
Clyde's eyes almost popped out of his skull. The girls looked impressed, Sarah Jane was glad to see. Only Luke didn't respond, but to her son she was simply 'Mum' and everything else was irrelevant.
Clyde began to snicker. "Seriously? You're not havin' me on?"
"Nope."
"But if you're fifty nine this year, that means that - oh man! You turn sixty next year!" He whooped.
"I'm glad to see you can count," Sarah Jane said, a little sourly.
Clyde stopped whooping. "No, you don't get it." He looked at his friends. "See, if she's sixty next year, well, she'll be up for a bus pass an' all, won't she?" He turned back to Sarah Jane and threw a casual arm across her shoulders and she felt a pang as she realised that Clyde, her son's goodhearted joker friend, was now clearly taller than she was. All the same, that didn't stop her from trying to glare up at him.
He grinned at her and squeezed her shoulders. "Yeah. Our Sarah Jane, the coolest O.A.P. on the planet."
"Yeah!" the other three echoed, the faint disapproval at Clyde's doings melting away. Luke came to hug her also, and she blinked away the sudden film over her eyes.
Suddenly, Maria grinned, and her whole face seemed to twinkle and glow. "I know what I'll get you, too," she said.
"Yes?" Sarah Jane couldn't help wondering what was coming.
"I'll get one of those sticky things people put in their cars, you know the ones, with the slogans?"
"'Sarah Jane Smith -'" Rani started.
"'Sixty and Still Saving the World!'" Luke added, his face alight at the idea. Sarah Jane had a feeling that would indeed be presented with this next year. Luke still had a painfully literal mind and could rarely be dissuaded from a plan that really appealed.
"Or, 'Sixty and Still Providing the Universe's Best Intergalactic Welfare Service'," Clyde put in.
"I'd hardly call it a welfare service. S'not as if we give them Housing Benefit or Income Support!" Rani protested.
Maria laughed. "No, it's more like Battersea for aliens, but that doesn't scan, does it?"
Sarah Jane gave it up and pulled all four towards her, as well as she could. "You're all mad, the lot of you!"
Maria - still the shortest of them, shorter even than Sarah Jane herself - put her head on Sarah Jane's shoulder. "But you love us anyway, even Clyde. And we love you. We're like the Musketeers, aren't we, one for all and all for one. As long as you're fighting the nasties in the universe, we'll be here."
"Even when you're ninety odd and using a sonic walking stick instead of a lipstick," Clyde added, and then had the good sense to scarper before the planet's Coolest Almost-O.A.P. could give him a well deserved clip about the ear.