==== ==== EPISODE 2 ==== ====

{In which Sarah learns about the Doctor's new life and Harry investigates a case of missing people.}

"Doctor…!", whispered Sarah. She did not dare to shout through the entire room for him just yet, at least not while there were other people around. Still, she had to bite her lower lip or else her continuously growing smile would have threatened to split in her head in two.

She had not been mistaken. The man standing in front of the chalkboard and currently fiddling with an overhead projector was, purely visually anyway, the latest incarnation of her best friend. A little taller than the average British man, slim, apparently at the age of something around forty. Not particularly handsome, in contrast to Harry for example, but equipped with very distinctive features, such as his mob of curly brown hair, the intrusive, expectant stare, or the toothy grin which he always showed when he laughed. The only thing Sarah was missing on him was his uncommon style of dress. Instead of the coat and waistcoat combination, he wore just an average white shirt tucked into a pair of light brown trousers. Especially for him, who loved his multi-coloured scarf enough to get a little upset whenever it was considered to be impossible by someone, it was strange to see him without as much as a plain neckerchief for once.

After the last student had finally left Sarah's field of view, she stepped out of the corner of the room and ran up to the man she had believed lost for a month. "Doctor!", she called out, but then stopped a mere yard or so away, eagerly awaiting his reaction in the moment he would spot her face.

"Hello?"
He stopped the process of tidying up his work place as he heard her call, and looked up, but appeared to be quite perplexed to be met with the overwhelmingly glad expression of the young woman. Although their eyes met, his were bare of any recognition or the joy this reunion might have sparked. The moment of puzzlement just continued as he seemingly waited for her to say or do something.

Sarah for her part did not mind that his reaction was not as grand as she had expected it to be. The relief and gladness of finding him well were so strong that, without another word of explanation or greeting, she took a breath and threw her arms around the confused-looking man.

The sudden embrace remained unanswered. Instead, his posture stiffened a little as though he was too surprised to figure out how to react to the gesture. Which, by itself was not that surprising since he had never been much into hugging, anyway – and Sarah cared fairly little about his opinion right now. He was warm and he smelled like tea, sugary sweets and the dust of many old books – which meant that he was alive; That he was real. Not another one of her hopeful imaginations which had always disappeared around the next corner. That was all that mattered in this moment.
"I thought you were dead!", she exclaimed with a great sigh of relief. Finally, the heavy burden of worries she had carried and so hard tried to forget about, was breaking away.

"I was...? Was I? I feel very much alive, though. Whoever told you otherwise must have been lying." The bafflement was still in his voice, but Sarah knew him as a bit scatter-brained, so that was all right. The next thing he said, however, turned out a lot more confused than usual, even for him.
"...Are you one of my students?"

The journalist immediately stepped back from him to meet his eye, feeling a little alienated from him all of a sudden and he just looked at her, expectant of an answer or an explanation.
"No. No, I'm not.", Sarah quickly replied. "Don't you recognize me?"
Maybe he was just joking, she thought to herself. He liked a good prank, right? But then again, he usually gave his intentions away long before the punch line, with a smirk or an exited gaze... No, this perplexed expression on his face was genuine. Sarah felt a light stinging in her heart. After three years of travelling together, he had to recognize her!

But the Doctor just frowned at her. "Yes, I do… Just, uhm… give me a moment!" He cocked his head, rubbed his chin and tried again. "Have we met at Birmingham, maybe?"

Sarah shook her head and stared at him with her mouth open, shocked that he failed to name her.
"No, Doctor. It's me! Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane Smith!"

"Ah!" His eyes widened suddenly, a grin finally returned to his face and he opened his hands as if he wanted to applaud her. "Sarah Jane Smith! Of course!" Happy to see his memory spark, Sarah nodded and smiled back at him, but things were just getting more confusing:
"Why, look at you; You've grown into a fair young lady!", he exclaimed.

"S-Sorry..?", stammered Sarah, suddenly ripped from what she had believed to be the context of their conversation.

"What has it been? Ten years? No, it must have been more. Nineteen years? Twenty! Oh, so long ago!" He was still beaming a happy smile at her, but kept on rambling before the young woman had figured out the right question to interrupt him with. "I remember how your neighbours always used to give me strange looks. They thought that I must have had no friends to be looking after you. But we had the fun of our lives, didn't we?"

Sarah returned to him a confused smile, because yes, they used to have a lot of fun, but not twenty years ago. At that time, she would have been six years old only. Although he once had claimed to have travelled into her childhood to save her younger self from a time paradox, she remembered nothing of it, and believed even less the story he was telling her now.

"And all the incredible stories we used to make up! I was a doctor before I even graduated! Say, do you remember what we used to call the pepper pot monsters?", he suddenly asked.

Still without a clue to what he kept going on about, she took a wild guess.
"...You mean the Daleks?"

"Yes, those exactly! Oh, they were so very nasty, always killing people..." The Doctor elaborated on his greatest enemy and for a moment he looked as serious as he should be when talking about them. But Sarah had gotten her hopes up too early. A smile soon returned to his face and he pointed at her, claiming that: "Thankfully, our stories always ended well. I mean, I was a fictional hero; of course they had to end well or I could not have sent you off to bed."

"But you really are a hero! And you still are!", Sarah tried to argue with him and stifled her desire to grab the much taller man by his shirt's collar and shake him until he remembered. His adventures were not just a bedtime stories, they were real, and quite recent, too! But how did it happen that all of it had become this twisted in his memory? Being an amnesiac was one thing, but this was something entirely different.

The Doctor shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged, flattered. "To you I still am, maybe.", he replied. "But to everyone else I'm just an ordinary man."As he looked at her, he kept his head tilted to one side and showed her a sorry shimmer in his eyes. "It's my fault, really, that you would think of me as greater than I really am: I used to be so egocentric in my storytelling! Looking back at it, you should have gotten the starring role at least once."

His companion squinted her eyes at him, confused and worried. Was he just accusing her of having a wrong picture of him, when it was really the other way around? "Then what about the stories? Were all they all made-up, too? Top to bottom?"

"Yes, of course they were." He hesitated a short moment and blinked at the young woman in surprise. If he really thought that his version was the true one, he probably found it strange that a well-educated, grown woman had never questioned the authenticity of stories about time travel and aliens. "They were just that; Stories. If I had been any good at writing, I might have able been to make something of them, but frankly, I was more interested in solar systems, nebulas and the like. Don't you remember? I didn't always have the time to play with you, sometimes I had to study.", he continued.

Sarah nodded, although she didn't believe a word, and swallowed bitter. The picture he was painting of his past appeared to become quite detailed. But there were so many questions yet to be asked – in fact, she had to question his entire life. After a few seconds of thinking, Sarah decided to ask another one, but only when she uttered the words she felt just how painful they were to her memory of him. "Would it be wrong then if I still called you the Doctor?"

"Well..." The tall man took in a breath of air as if he spontaneously meant to say something, but then his expression eased again, he smiled, and eventually went for a more detailed answer. "You can keep calling me the Doctor if it pleases you. After all, I have a doctorate now. But, as you know, my actual name's still Anthony Smith – or Tony, for short."

As he shrugged again, Sarah was slightly relieved to still be able to call him by the title she had gotten so very used to. On the other hand, he had only assured her now that he really believed to be someone else and that was something she would not get used to any time soon. She did not intend to, either, because he was the one who was wrong out of the two of them – except that only she and UNIT knew about it. In fact, in a bureaucratic sense, he did not even exist on this planet! By logical conclusion, he should not have been able to become a professor without the right academic papers to prove his career. Amberton should have never employed him!

"So, uhm… you're a professor for planetary science now?", Sarah decided to poke around the topic.

"Yes, I dare say so.", he proudly replied, "The university has been a bit at a pinch when the Centauri space telescope project was about to be cancelled due to the vanishing of the professor before me, a Professor Doctor Robert Oliver – a total quack of a doctor he must've been if you ask me. Anyway, I just so happened to apply at the right moment and they were more than happy to employ me."

"Aha..." Sarah could barely keep herself from giving away that all of this was not quite what she wanted to hear from him. Yet she could understand just how he had gotten the position. More than once on their travels the Doctor and his meddling had only found acceptance because he helped those in dire need of assistance. And it must have been just the same with the university this time. If they really needed him, they would take him even if they knew he was a fake.

The Doctor noticed how she was drifting off into thought and attempted to recapture her attention by bombarding her with questions she neither had excepted nor wanted to answer.
"What about you? How's your aunt doing? What brought you here?"

"Lavinia's fine and I…well.", Sarah stammered, uncertain of how she could satisfy his curiosity. On a whim, she decided to lie to him. "I just entered university. Been doing a bit of journalism before and some travelling." The words came out with a smile, but in reality, it was just all an act. She figured, retrospectively, that it would only damage her credibility if she kept insisting that he was a time traveller as long as he did not believe in it.

"That's great.", he said and nodded. "You must've had an exciting life so far!"

"You probably wouldn't believe it." The reply had only been spoken in her head, because she could not bring herself to say it in fear that he might keep asking about it, forcing her to re-invent their adventures, too…

Their conversation was interrupted when suddenly, someone was clearing their throat loudly. The two friends turned towards the door and there stood a grey-haired professor, ready with his documents under one arm and a few students following him.

"Right." The Doctor hurried up and walked past Sarah into the direction of the exit.
"You absolutely must tell me more about it sometime. But it looks like I have to get to my office now.", he concluded in regard to Sarah's so-called exciting life. At first it seemed as if he was just going to leave, but then he stopped to turn back towards his friend again. "Would like to accompany me?"

And that question was so much like him: The way he cocked his head, smiled and simply expected her to catch up with him. Sarah nodded excitedly and did just that. More even, if he would let her, she would continue to follow him around again. "Say, Doctor, you don't happen to have an assistant yet, do you…? Do you think it would be possible for me to apply?"

"Oh, that's a fantastic idea! No, I don't have an assistant yet, but I would love to work with you.", he replied with great delight. "Let me talk to the dean for you, I'm sure I can make it possible."

During her first day at the university she just followed the Doctor around with, theoretically speaking, very little permission to do so since she was not actually part of the student body.
It was all right, though, because he introduced her everywhere he went that day – from another course to the dining hall and to his office – as his assistant, almost as if it had always been supposed to be that way. And that was an amazing feeling for Sarah, because it proved to her that she had been right about him all along: Beneath these twisted memories he was still the Doctor she knew and despite of what he had made up their relationship to be, he still treated her the same.
Whenever Sarah saw a chance to ask him further about his past, she did so. In fact, she asked him more about it than she had ever wanted to know before, while his memory had still been intact. Eventually, she found out that he believed their families had originally bonded over the same family name – despite not actually being related – during the time both of them had lived in a place called Foxgrove. When he began his studies, long after the death of Sarah's parents, he had moved to South Croydon, where he then met her aunt and, according to him, looked after her younger self on a few occasions. This relationship to her family eventually ceased completely after he had moved once more, this time to London, to participate in a research project he failed to give her details on.
Although Sarah poked around some more in the hope to find a dead end in his memories somewhere, she only ended up hearing more things she did not really want to know. It was all fake, and she could only sigh to herself, wishing that he would be able to see it, too. Whoever had written that new life for him had done so exceedingly well. She might not have been surprised if his very own meticulous brain had made up at least the half of it. Almost any little thing she had ever mentioned to him about her family he had recalled in his story with great precision.

At the end of the day, they parted ways again. Yet it was unlike the last time, or any time before that. He left for home, to return to work the next day, like anyone else did who was caught in the treadmill of ordinary life. But Sarah had been reluctant to accept a fact as simple as this one. His home on Earth was the TARDIS – to her knowledge, anyway – yet he knew of no police box anywhere near his flat in Liverpool. A place he had absolutely no interest to show to her, as he said, because he had moved in only recently and it was not even properly furnished yet. The best she could do to stick around a little while longer was to give him a lift home, but despite her expectations she found nothing out of the ordinary in the entire neighbourhood while she had gazed out of her car's window.

Since Sarah had been left with a feeling that he truly believed in the daily routine and seemed fine otherwise, she eventually decided to let him go. Still reluctantly maybe, and with a little bit of scepticism, but she let him. He had promised her he would be back in the office by half past seven in the morning. The Time Lord she had known would have never agreed to any set appointment unless it was of the utmost importance, and so she remained still a little worried about the discrepancies between his old and new self. In total, however, she was more glad to find him in an otherwise good state of health than she was concerned, and so when she arrived back at Lavinia's place, Sarah had regained some inner peace.

On this evening, she spent hours talking to the Brigadier on the phone about her latest discovery. With the help of UNIT's authority as the higher-valued institution, they managed to quickly arrange a deal with the university so that their management would help them with the cover-up of Sarah's next mission; To keep a close eye on the Doctor. The Brigadier had compared it to a witness protection program in his explanation to the head of university, and thanks to his persuasive talk, the former journalist was able to gain access to a university place and the assistant's position despite the lack of requirements.