A/N: This is the second sequel to Burnt Toast. What have I done? I am getting all weird, writing sequels! So, Burnt Toast, Bus Stations, and Unrequited Love was a Seven/SJS story. In that Sarah Jane and Seven embark on a life together and he ends up getting called Duncan. The first sequel was Collecting the Set. That concludes close in time to when this one begins. This starts with an out of sorts Sarah Jane after Eleven has gone walkabout.
I have reached a whole new understanding for Six now that this is written...
Sarah had sat down rather hard at the sight of her garden that morning. The TARDIS was back. But it was the wrong TARDIS. She wasn't quite sure how she could tell. Some ding marks must have been missing, or perhaps the paint was not quite right.
She let out a sigh to steady herself. To push out what she reasoned must have been disappointment.
She had let herself hope that her Doctor - her latest, the Boy Wonder of Doctors - had come back.
Not that she resented his leaving. Really, he was as twitchy as a gerbil, that one. The longer he had tried to stay in one place with her, the more he had seemed like a very frustrated gerbil running on a wheel that was two sizes too small.
So, she had let him go. And she had declined his efforts to get her to come along. He was new to that body... the majority of that brain seemed new as well. He didn't need to be dragging her along like an anchor to the past.
Besides, he'd be back. Just a quick spin. A drive in the park, so to speak.
And then he'd be here. She had told herself that only just last night. She's been telling herself that for a month full of nights.
The Doctor was back, she told herself from her spot in the kitchen. Well, in a manner of speaking he was. Because it wasn't him striding out that TARDIS door. Or even any iteration that she recognized. Oh, she recognized the regrettable attire. She had shrieked over that the day years ago when she had mucked about with Duncan in the old clothes closet.
Suddenly, that outfit was circling the TARDIS. And God help her, she was sure this Time Lord was blaming the remains of her day lilies for lodging themselves under his precious damn ship. Now, she thought, as she exhaled sharply and added steel to her spine, he is marching over here to pull my slider door off its track.
"You," he said too loudly for the hour or the space, "are Sarah Jane."
"I'm glad I am not completely unrecognizable, Doctor." She tried to smile. At the same time, she tried hard not to look at anything other than his eyes. Lovely eyes, truly. But they were in such close proximity to that suit. The suit that had cats on the lapels and...
"Might you ask me to sit down?" he queried, brusquely. "Are you quite recovered from the shock of seeing me?"
Don't mention the clown suit, she thought as she motioned to a chair next to hers at the kitchen table. And don't hit him just because he's a haughty bastard. Please, don't mention the suit. Or the spats. God help me, spats! Ignore the over bearing expression. Just... try to get along.
"He's gone then?" the Doctor asked as he took possession of the chair.
"Obviously."
"Which one was this latest then?" he asked with painful sarcasm. "No, don't tell me," he said raising a hand to forestall her.
Sarah Jane had had enough suddenly. This childish prat in front of her was worse than three petulant teenagers. This was her day off. The kids were all off at the skate park. She would not parent today, she had decided.
"God, it's not just the suit!" she said breaking her vow to remain silent on that issue. "It's the whole attitude."
"I have no idea why you are angry with ME!" he told her, testily.
She drummed non-believing finger tips on the table. "Fine. Let's start at the beginning. Did you receive some sort of message that prompted you to come visit?"
"I dare say, we ALL got that message. Intrusive and rather supercilious stunt if you ask me. I know I had a head ache for weeks."
She fixed him with her most deadly stare, and he did not even have the decency to blink. Instead, he raised his eyebrows in some sort of impatient taunt.
She assessed him then. The ruddy face, the temper, the attack on fashion. And before she could help herself, she had barked out a short laugh.
"What," he barked back.
"Ridiculous that I didn't see it before," Sarah said sounding so much calmer suddenly.
"What?" he demanded with sweaty suspicion.
"You. This whole regeneration... it's some kind of ... Time Lord menopause."
"Ah," he shrieked dramatically. "The effrontery. You have no idea what I've been..." he began.
"Oh," she fumed. "I have every idea. I lived with you. A lot of you," she said with a hand wag that indicated a frightening sort of multitude. "Though the accumulated egos would not match this current one. And even you know THAT is saying quite a lot..."
"I didn't come back just so you could fight with me!"
"NO? Are you sure? I rather think you did. Because it is all you've tried to do."
"I could just go," he threatened.
"Yes, you could. But you haven't. So, you are here for something, aren't you?"
"Your message...He wanted you to know... he loved you." His voice was clipped and ugly.
She had heard these words before, but never like this. He was throwing the message at her in challenge.
She shook her head at him, still not believing the venom in his voice.
"And he was sorry. Very sorry," he told her a little more gently. They were silent then. He was waiting, gauging her reaction.
She stood up and walked for the far side of the kitchen, needing distance from this Time Lord.
"You needn't of come, really, if that was the only thing. But I appreciate the effort you've made," she said trying for some civility. She refused to believe that there could be a Doctor she did not feel some affinity for. "If you want to stay a bit, you are welcome. Let me get you something to drink or..." her words were bland and automatic. She had not really yet dispelled the shock over the way he had delivered his message.
"No, really. I'm fine." But he didn't move to leave which surprised her a tad. "No. I'd best make sure you are truly all right. I'll discharge my duty."
It was pretense, she realized now. She could see that much. So, what was it that would make him stay?
She stared at him a long time and refused to rush her thoughts. With a patience a younger Sarah Jane never would have known, she took in all of him. The expression. The restless fingers on her table top. The stiff posture that wanted to let go. And she knew then. Because in one form or another this was the man she had built her life around. The man she had married.
"You aren't angry about delivering the message," she told him with realization in her voice. "It's something about the message that makes you angry."
"It has little to do with me. I'm only here to deliver it."
"What an odd thing to say." She paused to consider him then before she continued. "Trust me on this, Doctor. There are things I know more about than you do. And I often think that YOU are one of those things."
"Impossible," he huffed. But he did look a tad worried.
She laughed then and walked over to pat his arm. She could not help the words that tumbled out next. "I know that you are working yourself into a long celibacy with that attitude, my friend."
He seemed taken aback by her words at first. "An idol assertion," he concluded, finally.
"No, an apt prediction based not just on what I see, but on what I have been told." She turned then and walked for the stove. She busied herself with warming a kettle, cementing the knowledge for him that she suspected he was in no hurry to leave.
It was long minutes before she turned to face him again. The tea cups balanced in one hand and the pot held in the other. "Even if you go now, you'll be back," she told him as she set her things down. "I know THAT much. Either as you, because you can't really be done with me until your curiosity is settled... or you'll be back as someone else."
"What is it you think I'm so... curious about then?" he asked as he poured his tea.
"I think, you want to know why he would fall in love with me," she told him in a kinder voice.
He set his cup down then and turned away. Telegraphing his unease for her. And more.
"You know there's something between us. Oh, not on your part right now, obviously," she explained to the Time Lord who was avoiding her eyes. "But before. And after. You know, that as unlikely or as inconvenient as it all seems, that we are tied together."
"Tied together?" he scoffed with a dramatic wave of his hand. "Humans simply want to believe in something enduring. But the reality is that planets come and go. Stars perish. Matter disperses, coalesces, forms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal."
"God, that sounded like a well-practiced speech," she accused with a knowing smile.
The Doctor wilted a bit at being found out. He coughed then before he continued. "Well, hardly a crime to state the truth twice."
He smiled a touch then, suddenly feeling pleased. There was a warmth to this... the sense of familiarity he felt now in being caught out by Sarah Jane.
"Stay a bit?" she offered. "We could start again? Finish your tea, and I'll make another pot. I'll find you something sweet?"
...
They moved to the living room then, and she curled up in the corner of her couch as was her habit. He faced off with her from the far end. They spoke for two hours with all too many statements starting with 'Do you remember?" Or 'What about when...'
"Forget the dinosaurs and the giant robots. Do you remember some of the better times we've had?" he asked softly.
"Remember? Oh, I remember things we haven't done. Well, that you haven't done. Amazing things," she said with an eyebrow waggle.
"I remember you dressed as someone's squire... A rather fetching squire. But bossy. And fool hearty. Mostly... fetching," he said with a sly grin.
"You might of said so at the time."
"You would have slapped me. All that feminist jingo-jango you were spouting day and night. A man never knew what to say to you to come out in one piece. And a confused, though proper, Time Lord never, ever knew how to act with you."
"Not true."
"Not completely true, no," he admitted.
"You've said and done just the right thing. Time and again."
"Only because it was you." He was nearly dripping praise in whispers now.
"Stop," she protested.
His eyes shone, as he told her, "It seems I've met my match. My match in many ways. Ways delightful and ways disarming. There is no other like you, Sarah Jane."
"Oh, you are a dangerous one," she pronounced, putting her cup down for punctuation. "You start by wanting to make me hate you. I half believe you would do that just so I would feel compelled to want to like you..."
"Perverse logic that."
"Yes, and completely like you. So, stop interrupting! And then when I think I might just be able to like you... barely," she teased. "You say something, so... so utterly lovely. That I just want to... Almost want to..." she stopped herself then and leaned back away from him.
"Is this all... good?" he asked with a confidant twitch of his lips as he closed the distance between them. His face was lit up now with good-natured gloating.
"I hardly know," Sarah Jane said with a shake of her head. "I had thought it was going to be a challenge to get the requisite kiss..."
"Requisite kiss!" he said, sounding horribly intrigued.
"...and now I wonder how I am going to keep from asking you to spend the night..."
"Woman! Thy name is temptress."
"In the guest room, Doctor."
She poured more tea to enforce a break in their conversation and to banish the past. "What about you. Now?" she asked. "How is it?"
She watched as he obviously thought about his answer. This fellow was proud, she knew. But he was also the Doctor. And somewhere in him was the knowledge that she was one of the few people he could talk to without having to really explain.
"It's knowing I have to leave. Not here... But..."
"Sometimes you can feel that a regeneration is not far off," she supplied.
He nodded. "The time is almost gone. I don't want to go. But I feel it. I'll have to. Because there are whispers of things to come. And they are not for me."
"I'm sorry," she told him with obvious feeling. She laid a quick hand to his face then.
"And so I wanted to know... I needed to understand things."
'Things,' he had said. But she suspected he might mean something quite specific. He might mean them. The relationship. That love.
She could see it now. "When you came here. All that bitterness. You resented him."
He held her eyes then and made his admission unshirkingly. "Childish of me, I admit."
"And you wanted to know what we were all about?" Sarah Jane asked gently. "What was so important that Duncan would make that fuss. How he could be so ... desperate seeming. Desperate enough to ask his other selves to bend time just so I could hear that he still loved me?"
He got up roughly then and began to pace. The emotion was too much. With his back to her now, he stood in front of that book case – a picture of his future self.. "And... I wanted to hear..." he began. "To understand how you really felt about me. Him. Us...It seems a foreign thing to me," he admitted.
"To love? Or to be loved?" she asked sadly.
But he dodged her question. "I wanted to know why it wasn't... me," he continued quickly as if he had not heard her. "Why some things are not for me. Am I made so wrong? So, ill fitting?"
She stood up and walked for him then. Turned him with faint touches to his shoulders. She brushed the hair at his temple. "You are always different," she told him. "Yet always the same somehow. And you are never made wrong. You just needed this. The visit. The answers, hmm?"
But, suddenly, all this tore at Sarah Jane. This Doctor had so much to look forward to. But for her, the best years of her life - and the love of her life- were behind her.
Pain had brought him here. His and maybe, somehow, hers. But as he stood there, he let go of it all. She saw it fall away from him.
She wanted to let go of all her hurt as well. She looped her arms around him and put her tears into his shirt front. "I've missed you," she told him. He surprised her and folded his arms around her tightly.
She looked up then and took her requisite kiss. And he gave her another. Tentative and sweet like the galaxy's best first kisses.
"You just needed me to tell you the most important thing," Sarah said. "That I love you."
"Well, I understand that you will. You will love me," he said like a man unaccustomed with forming those words. "In the future. Although it started in the past. Just not..."
"You feel out of synch," she said in a way that stopped his words. "God, so do I. It's that lost sort of feeling when you know there is something better, but you can't get there from here. That's it, isn't it?" She sighed then before she told him, "I've been widowed 10 years now, Doctor. Ten. A pittance to you, but so much time."
"I don't begrudge you what you had, Sarah Jane. That's not why I came. I just... It's petty, I know. Ridiculous," he spat with self contempt. "But I wanted to understand why it wasn't ...me."
"You are standing here wondering, why if something was so wondrous, it couldn't come sooner. And time has left me asking why it had to pass so quickly."
"We are the same," he agreed with a sad nod. "Betrayed and feeling cheated. I hadn't seen that before." And he let her wrap her arms around him and bury her head in his chest again. "At least... it happened for you. At least you loved him once."
She smiled. Shook her head. She knew then why he was there. Because there were things only she could say to him. There were things he need to hear if there was going to be a sense of peace in him. "You. I love you. It's not a him or them." She put a hand to his face and let her thumb trace the smile that was starting there. "You're adorable when you smile. Did you know that?"
"I had no idea." He was beginning to grin now.
/ / */ / / / / / *
"This is the most particularly odd flavor of monogamy," she announced to the quiet dark of her room.
"Indeed. I hardly know what to make of it myself."
"That good?" she teased.
"Not that together we are not speech worthy. I am just incapable of speech at the moment," he told her.
"Oh, that is one for the record books."
He sighed and rolled over to kiss her shoulder. And when he found his voice, it seemed to come from inside her head.
"I believe it now, you know," he said.
"I thought you couldn't talk..."
"Oh, I can always talk..." and the smile came through in the words.
"Figures."
"I should have told you when it happened. When I saw it all," he whispered then, as if the thought was fragile.
"When what happened?"
"When I fell in love with you. It was shortly after the third biscuit. Before the second pot of tea," he mused sleepily.
"Oh, my love. I can't count the number of times I've fallen in love with you."
"Odd thing..." he said sounding thoughtful.
"Yes."
"But nice. Even better than cats."
Six's 'well practiced' sounding dialogue is from The Trial of a Time Lord.
My thanks to Sel for all manner of help here and elsewhere. And to PrimSong, J and P and all my helper bunnies who have been so encouraging while I slogged through the muck...