He looked hard at her, his brow furrowed. "I don't understand," he said. "I thought you'd be happy. I was dying, now I'm not. How is that not a good thing?"

"I loved you, I trusted you completely, I gave you everything that I was, and in return you betrayed me. You lied to me, you made a mockery of my love for you and our married life. I would have never thought you capable of being so cruel."

"Sarah, I'm sorry you got hurt. I didn't lie to you," he said gently, "You see, I had to do a little … creative navigation to get the TARDIS this close to my timeline, and something in the ceiling - I'm guessing it was the harmonic stabilizer - exploded before the transformation process was complete. That's why I had that gash on my head. It was from something falling on me." He started to reach out to her, but stopped himself. "You see, the Chameleon Arch stores all of my memories and knowledge in the watch, and when it does the transformation my mind is basically a clean slate. The explosion happened before I could get any memories back. So I didn't lie to you, I really didn't know I was the Doctor. I didn't know anything." He took her gently by the shoulders. "I would never lie to you, and I would never hurt you. I'm sorry you got hurt anyway."

"What would you want to become a human for anyway," she asked him.

He looked at her as though the answer was obvious. "Welllll, to be with you, of course."

"We've been together before and you never felt it was necessary, why come back to me as a human?"

"Because I'm not supposed to be here. I've crossed my own timeline to be with you, and there are all sorts of temporal implications of that. Think about all that temporal gravity we've been detecting around Luke. Can you imagine what it must measure around me? There's a reason trouble always finds me; the last thing I wanted to do is attract every alien invasion in the universe to 1977 Earth. I thought if I could come back to you as a human, at least long enough to work things out with you, I could work out the temporal gravity problem in other ways afterwards. But that's why I didn't have any other temporal anomalies, like the sonic, or the bigger-on-the-inside pockets you told me you were looking for that first day," he smiled.

She stopped crying. When she looked at him again, her were eyes red and puffy and still not warming to him or what he was saying. "Then am I John Tinker's widow now?"

His brow furrowed. "Um … I'm not sure. I mean, I am the Doctor, but I'm also John. I still have all of John's memories, and I still have all of John's feelings. I love you as the Doctor, but I still love you the way John loved you. And I love our children, and I love our life, and heaven help me I even love fixing toasters if it means that I get to be with you. I'm not going to say things won't be a little different, but I can promise you that as long as I'm alive, John won't ever die."

"You'll forgive me I hope because, you see, I find this quite painful and confusing. You say you have all of John's memories, but you're the Doctor now. So that means you're a Time Lord again. Does that also mean that my life with John is over and there's nothing left of him but the memories?"

"No, Sarah, I promise you. I am a Time Lord, that's true. But that's all that's different. I still feel about you exactly the same way I did before I got on that plane to Reykjavik. It's just that now I'm not … well … dying."

Sarah drew closer to him and pick up his hand and looked at it. "That's still the wedding ring I placed on John's finger, but what happens now, Doctor?" She dropped his hand and moved back slightly. "I don't even know what I should call you."

"What do you want to call me?"

"It's seems to me it's not so much what I want to call you, but who you really are. Even if you never meant to keep it a secret, the fact remains that I thought," she stopped herself. "No, I was married to John Tinker. We had three beautiful children together and a wonderful life. We were as happy as two people can be. The suddenly after being married for just over twenty years I find that John has been you all along." She took a deep breath. "Are we even legally married?"

"Of course we are." He took her hands. "Sarah Jane, I'm still John. I'm still your husband." He just wanted to take her in his arms and make her understand how much he still loved her.

She held back her tears as she began to tremble. "You're the Doctor too. So I suppose that means that you're going to go back to the TARDIS now and leave."

He shook his head. "No. I couldn't if I wanted to, and I knew that when I came."

"I still don't understand, why can't you leave? Didn't you say this timeline was wrong for you? I should think you'd have to leave."

He took a deep breath and nodded. "The TARDIS isn't like Jack's vortex manipulator. He can go anywhere because there's no error checking, but the TARDIS, she's a sensitive machine, and she won't go somewhere that's going to cause a conflict. But I found a tiny, tiny crack, a single moment where I could squeeze the TARDIS in by doing what's called a 'deadfall'. Basically it's like pushing the TARDIS off a temporal cliff. She can't stop it because she's not actually flying, she's just sort of falling into that spot. But the only way to do that is to essentially shut her down, put her into a kind of a coma until the conflicts are resolved. Your timeline and mine, they're intertwined until future you meets past me in 2008. After that, things should clear up and she'll wake up. But I knew when I came that whether you said 'yes' or not, I was going to be here at least until 2008, even if it meant sitting in a dark TARDIS with a lantern for 31 years."

She hoped she knew what he was trying to say to her, but unless she could get him to completely open up to her they way he did when he was John, she knew they wouldn't be able to work things out. It was one of the things she loved about John; the Doctor would never tell her exactly what he was thinking. He mostly assumed she should know everything he did without being told about his feelings. If he truly loved her, they needed to be able to take the time to try and work it out. "So, you were just coming back for a visit, or was it to see if I might want to travel with you again? Is that what you were hoping I'd say yes to?"

He shook his head. "I was coming back to ask you to marry me. That's why I had the -" he panicked for a moment, patting non-existent pockets, then remembering he was only wearing a hospital gown and a blanket. "Don't you remember the engagement ring I had with me?"