Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

School Reunion

Chapter 13 - The Mechanist

Sitting in the console room of the TARDIS, I was half-tempted to rip off my limiter and run.

There were a few holes in this plan of course. First was that we were currently in the Vortex and while I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out I could survive it – when your metaphysical makeup contained everything from 'negative energy ghost monster' and 'ammonia-based kaiju' on to 'abstract personification of the concept of harmony' and 'draconic spawn of a time god' there were maybe three environments in any given universe that posed a hard 'no' to your existence –, I didn't much feel like making the gamble.

The second was that tempting a Time Lord into giving chase was probably tantamount to suicide, particularly this model of the Doctor.

The First and Second would have probably left me alone, being too young and relatively new to the wider universe to risk antagonizing a bigger fish content to leave them alone. The Third wouldn't have had a choice in the matter, not with his broken TARDIS.

The Fourth would have made a face, but not much else if I'd failed to make good on my obvious threat. Five… well, he'd end up debating himself for so long that I could leave without him immediately noticing, if someone else didn't capture him first.

Six wasn't territory I was willing to touch. Neither was War, though for entirely different reasons.

Seven… now Seven could have presented a similar screaming threat like Ten, possessing the same focus and drive when sufficiently pushed, except there would have been a lot less question about where I stood. I was an unknown who wouldn't be controlled and knew too much about him, so obviously I'd been an enemy and – if he ever learned about Zeke – an 'evil' counterpart of some description.

Eight, while fairly sharp like all the other Doctors, would have probably forgotten all about me by the next crisis that crossed his doorstep, though if that would be on account of amnesia or having more pressing concerns was entirely up in the air. Nine would give me a warning, possibly two, and then probably done the same thing as Ten but – another piece of supposition – with a significantly more open mind. Possibly handcuffs as well.

Eleven… well, that was territory I wasn't willing to touch. He was softer and harder in different ways, somewhere between the territories of Two, Seven, and Eight while managing his own thing. Fun, but not someone who you trusted unconditionally unless you had a fairly good idea that he liked you.

But those were all hypotheticals. What I had was the Tenth Doctor, Last of the Time Lords, the Oncoming Storm, and – with the right pressure in the wrong places – self-proclaimed Time Lord Victorious. A man who could and would drop me into a black hole with all the effort it took a normal person to drive to the supermarket and had no issue dividing his universe into shades of black and white applied to people and entire species with a thick brush, repainting them as he saw fit.

…maybe that was a bit unfair, but I wasn't overly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was older than him, sure, but that didn't mean I was perfect.

I'd seen too many who'd held a fraction of my power fall into that trap of thinking they couldn't be scratched and could do no wrong… or that no one else could be better with the power they'd been given. I learned from their mistakes, but that still didn't keep me from making my own, even when I walked into them with my eyes wide open.

My mistake this time was probably not running when I had the chance, back on that London rooftop. Would the Doctor have followed? Would the same conflict have arisen at another time and place? It wasn't worth thinking about, since that timeline was long since closed to me, but something told me it wouldn't have worked.

I opened my eyes. I was still in the console room, still the epicenter of the latest awkward silence, and still caught in the Doctor's proverbial crosshairs. It was unpleasantly similar to the gauging look I'd gotten from one of his less friendly lookalikes.

…with my mind automatically going to that comparison every time I interacted with him, it was no real mystery as to why I couldn't relax around the Time Lord for long.

"Well," the Doctor said, breaking the silence with a quick drum of his fingers against the rim of the console. "While this wonderful period of absolute nothing has been fun, I've got a robot dog to reassemble and three assistants to speed up the process. C'mon."

Mickey perked up immediately. "K-9?"

Such a kid. It was easy to forget how young people were sometimes.

"What, you know another one?" the Doctor called over his shoulder as he motioned for all of us to follow. "Anyway, robot dog requites robot room which requires you walk this way."

"Can't, your legs are too long."

"Ha," the Doctor said humorlessly as we started walking.

The TARDIS had shifted her hallway pattern again, along with the location of my room. There was a faintly apologetic tinkle at the back of my mind, halfway between the tinkling of fairy-speech and the feeling of dust motes hanging in a beam of morning sunlight.

So the Doctor had deeper plans than an ordinary 'talk'. Hah. Nothing I hadn't expected.

Would he wait until after I helped him with K-9 or stuff me somewhere before? If he wanted anyone who knew what they were doing with the robot – ah. There was the trap.

I'd already established a certain level of skill and though the Doctor hadn't really had a chance to really watch me at work, he still probably had an idea of what I was capable of. So, if I deliberately underperformed, he would notice and call me out on it. If I did everything as I did before, he'd be able to see that my skill was way beyond what any human of my presumed origin was capable of and call me out on that.

Morton's Fork in action, people.

So I might as well make the best goddamn robot dog I can under the circumstances.

As the Doctor finally brought our little parade to a stop in front of a rather non-descript door, I mentally prepared myself for the inevitable mess on the other side.

Despite that, I still was not ready for it.

The Doctor's robot room reminded me of the third bedroom I'd ever remembered having in my first life.

The first had been a single snapshot of a normal – if slightly impoverished – kid's room in one of those trailer park-ish homes assembled in halves brought in by semi-truck delivery. White walls and a little white bed with a toy box at the end and a little TV for watching holiday novelty tapes, everything all neat and orderly.

The second had started out pretty much the same, except perched on the second story of a house that was only two-thirds livable and one-third active health hazard. There was no TV and no toy box there, only a closet with a weird smell and a door with no handle. The various biological stains on the walls and carpet would come later.

The third bedroom, only eight feet down the hall from the second in the same barely-fit-for-human-inhabitation house, had been – in short and in accurate reflection of my mental state at the time – a fucking mess.

Scale the ten years I'd taken to fuck up that eight-by-twelve cube of misery by about a hundred and then convert the contents from drawings, old homework, third generation hand-me downs, and clearance rack teenage bric-a-brac into seas of crap of the electronic, mechanical, and roughly robotical persuasions – added in with the odd broken down appliance, of course – and removed of any markers of a specific era, you'd roughly have what we walked into. Fuck, I'd swear I saw a washer/dryer set under one of the smaller piles, wires bursting out of one of the doors like spilled intestines.

"It's a bit messier than I remember it being," the Doctor said mildly as he stepped over long braid of wire that snaked around at least two major piles of trash. "But there shouldn't be anything dangerous."

"We're supposed to find one robot dog kit in this?" Mickey asked, voicing my own thought with two less expletives and a lot less yelling than I would have used.

At least I kept my fucking warehouse most of the way organized, though automated systems certainly served to make the task that much less of a bitch. This was… this was the trash of the titans.

"Well, no," the Doctor replied. "There should be three or four. Easier to buy in bulk and then make extra boxes with whatever upgrades I come up with later."

That was almost reasonable, but any points I could have awarded for that thought process were a drop in the ocean of 'what the fuck is wrong with you' this disaster of a storage room had dumped on me like some twisted cousin of the ice bucket challenge.

Calm down, I told myself as we moved into the clutter from hell, stepping carefully over debris as I did so. Relax. Treat it like a treasure hunt. A weird game of Dig Dug through a junk yard… that's inside of someone's fucking house, oh my god.

"Doctor," Rose said with a strain I was feeling at a cellular level. "When was the last time you were in this room?"

The Doctor opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again after an uncomfortably long moment. "Uh… a couple centuries?" he supplied uncertainly before adding, "Maybe… more?"

Okay, fuck faking normal, I was taking off my limiter just so I could grab Zeke by his imaginary lapels and scream at him for being complicit in – or at the very least complacent to –this bullshit.

Before I could do that, I tripped over something that definitely wasn't metal or plastic and took a dive through a pile of tubing and onto yet another thing that wasn't metal or plastic, but a fairly close approximation to a flesh-and-bone body.

"Delaine! You alright?"

The 'body' wasn't moving or possessed of a pulse, but it was clearly not a corpse. Too stiff and unyielding at the joints while still relatively supple in the flesh. Also, no smell. Not even the little biologic smells humans took for granted. Taking that into equation with the presence of knit scarf and tweed...

Hello, evidence of the Android Invasion.

"Tripped on his scarf," I said as I pulled myself and the android duplicate free of the plastic. Its arm was held out stiffly to the side, almost as if it was resting on the shoulder of an invisible friend. "Handsome fellow, isn't he?"

The Fourth Doctor's android grinned.

The actual Doctor made a bitch face.

Rose on the other hand, just looked curious. "Is that a…"

"Robot," the Doctor said. "Well, android."

"What's the difference?"

Hairsplitting, aesthetic design, and the occasional definition that says that golems and Frankenstein's monster technically qualify as the latter while definitely not being the former.

"Androids are made to look organic, at least from the outside," the Time Lord said, coming forward to peer up at the form of his former self. "This one was made to look like me."

Mickey and Rose both did a minor double take. "Uh…"

"Sarah Jane's model. Well, the second one. First one she had was a bit more…" His hand twisted around in the air as he searched for the appropriate word to sum up his Third self. "Dandyish."

"Alright, I get that," Mickey replied. "What I don't get is why you have an android of yourself."

"Weelll… long story short, someone decided to build an android of me for some nefarious purpose or another and after that plot fell through, I decided to keep him. Sarah would probably recognize him. I used to dress him up and pose him artfully to take weird photos and annoy people, but eventually I got bored with it and threw him in here. It's been… five or six centuries? Maybe more?"

Wax Tom Baker lives… or, rather, doesn't. I started poking at the android's face, moving the expression around into different ridiculous positions. "I can see the appeal. Does this thing do tongue?"

"What?"

"I mean can you pose the tongue?"

"…Why?"

Ignoring the Doctor's question, I opened the android's mouth – no different than manipulating a human's jaw, really, though the resistance of the material gave away its age and disuse – and pulled out the tongue. "Feels like a dehydrated slug," I noted as I closed the jaw into a smile around it. Have to fix that, and replace the skin with something a little less – stop it, it's not my android to tinker with. At least it was in good condition considering however many centuries it had been back here. I pushed around a few other features before finally deciding that the image in front of me was perfect.

"There we go."

The Fourth Doctor's distinctive face was now locked into a goofy – if mildly threatening by its design alone – grin, tongue stuck out between his teeth and eyes boggling out of their sockets. All he needed now were some jelly babies and a jauntily positioned Indiana Jones hat.

Mickey immediately lost his shit and I allowed myself a small giggle. It was funny and the way the actual Doctor looked fit to swallow his own tongue was funny too.

It almost made one forget the threat of being trapped in the event horizon of a black hole for all of eternity.

"Hey," Rose called from not too far away. "I found something."

There were a lot of 'somethings' in this room. There were a lot of those 'somethings' that would be better classified as 'nothings'. There were also some that could be classified as 'wow'.

"It's a robot cat," she said, holding the limp-legged mechanoid out for everyone to see.

What Rose Tyler had found was one of the 'wows'.

While the Doctor's android duplicate had the superficial appearance of a living being and K-9's main concession to the theme established by his name was his head, end, and collar, this robot had found a middle ground of being unmistakably catlike in design while being most definitely not an organic being.

Underneath the dust and scruff marks, it was a pearly white, each plate of its body smoothly worked into the rest like clockwork. Its head, while shaped very much like a cat, did not have a cat's usual eyes. Instead, the space that would have been taken up by the eyes, forehead, and brain on a flesh-and-blood cat was a clear dome covering a motley selection of dead diodes and silent sensors.

While it clearly hadn't been discarded as long ago as the Fourth Doctor's android double, it was also clear that the electric cat wasn't in here due to catastrophic structural damage.

You know what? I'm going to steal that cat. I don't even care if it's the Doctor's, this level of neglect will not stand. This –

"Ah, I see you've found Splinx. Used to travel with her… well, it didn't last long, seeing as she didn't have much of a personality."

– this Splinx will be repaired, improved, and polished to a high shine and equipped with a mini-taser to remind certain assholes that basic maintenance is not optional.

"You can put it down, Delaine."

I stopped petting the robot cat for only a second. "No?"

"Yes," the Doctor ordered.

I very slowly and very carefully placed Splinx on the android Four's lap, arranging its – her? – legs underneath her in classic catloaf-style. Once I'd rearranged the android's hands over the cat, I turned back around and gave the Doctor a look that muttered, 'Are you happy now?'

The Doctor didn't respond, instead going back to searching for K-9.

Alright then, I thought as I quietly slipped off my limiter. Business-business time.

Even with my powers providing a guide to pinpoint where the boxes were, it still took a half-hour to get one out of the sea of trash and then ten minutes to move it back to the console room. Despite his seeming disregard for order, the Doctor had conceded that the chances of losing an important part in the mess he called a robot room were too high to really think about dealing with at this time.

'Zeke, would it be going out of line for me to strangle your future self?' I asked as I helped Mickey drag the box to the console room.

'Well, considering that I'm not personally connected to that experience and more than a little of what he's been up to is highly aggravating to my sensibilities, I wouldn't be personally offended,' my personal copy of the Doctor mused. 'But the fact that I – that is to say, the Doctor's continued existence is needed for most of this universe not to spontaneously catch flame at any given second, I'd advise against it, no matter how appealing the idea may strike you.'

'…you had a separate robot room didn't you.'

'Oh yes. A bit smaller, more of a workshop, and much more organized. The TARDIS will probably let you find it… if one of my successors didn't space it in an emergency. Or out of spite. Or, possibly, entirely on accident.'

I had the sudden feeling that if the Doctor ever tried to kill me, he might manage the feat through dumb luck alone. Fuck if that wasn't the main reason he was still alive.

The TARDIS interrupted my internal conversation with a golden buzz of annoyance.

Fine. Luck and the love of the most beautiful and wonderful time machine to ever fly through the Vortex.

'That's better,' the TARDIS seemed to say before her honey-gold presence returned to the walls around us.

'It's nice being around her again,' Zeke noted as we finally reached the console room with this stupid ugly box. 'I almost forgot what it was like…'

'To be a proper Time Lord?'

I could feel Zeke's smile at the back of my mind. Not his fully pleased one, but a bittersweet twist of the mouth. 'Oh, I've never been an ordinary Time Lord, much less a 'proper' one. But she does make me feel like myself again. Even though I'm not.'

'Don't talk like that. You're you. Maybe a bit more than what you once were, but never anything less.'

Any more of pep talk that I might have thrown out was disturbed by the feeling of getting yanked back to reality. Suddenly, everything was too bright, too loud, and too close all while every sense felt like it was being transmitted through a ringing haze.

"-aine? Delaine? Delaine!"

Actually, this mild sensory overload bit was very annoying now that it was being applied to a voice I hated on reflex. "What?"

Kilgrave – no, the Doctor stopped shaking me. Kilgrave had never had worn a look of worry on his face like that, not for another living creature. Another small but important difference was the spiky brown hair, both in styling and shade. "Thought I'd lost you for a minute."

Lost me? It wasn't like I'd done anything more than zone out from any outsider's perspective. Hell, I hadn't even fallen over or anything. "Just had myself a little moment. Also; stop touching me."

His fingers stopped digging into my shoulders immediately, though the barely concealed look of confusion that followed the action was… odd. Had that been an involuntary reflex? Or had my 'patron' put some kind of subconscious programming into yet another person they wanted me to stick around?

Either way, the moment passed. "Anyway," the Doctor said. "I was asking you if you were ready to start work on K-9 Mrk. IV."

He turned, showing the scattering of parts and blueprints on the floor. The blueprints, I wouldn't need more than a second's glance. The rest…

'Oh yes,' Zeke murmured, flexing a pair of imaginary hands as we prepared to sync up. 'I think we have this well in hand.'

The Doctor could have handled K-9 on his own, true. But this… this was a way to test the depths of his companions, particularly the one who'd already established that there was more to her than initially assumed.

"Alright," Mickey said as he pulled out the instruction manual. "Aw, this can't be more complicated than assembling Legos!"

"Clearly you've never encountered the Lego Millennium Falcon kit," Delaine replied as she loosened her wrist strap and set to sorting the various parts of K-9 into piles. "Over five thousand pieces of pure torture, all waiting to be stepped on."

There was a minute shift in her voice, a faintly familiar buzz around the R's and a distinctly un-American emphasis on the L's and the P's. If he had to pin an exact location on it, he would say that it was Scottish, possibly Highlands, though it wasn't a complete enough shift to make that an absolute identification.

The motions she was going through were familiar as well, though thankfully they were not those of the incarnation he preferred to forget. In fact, he could probably say that if not for the presence of Mickey looking over the directions and naming the odd part, Delaine would be preforming a script perfect recreation of his Seventh's assembly process.

'It's not like that's particularly odd, sorting things by what goes where before one gets started,' his Seventh said, folding a pair of imaginary arms. Now there was a proper example of a Highland Scottish accent, without any trace of American English running through it like a half-broken horse. 'I don't understand why you'd remark on that, of all things. Unlike some others I could think of.'

'I have a system!' his Sixth protested in absence of any direct accusation while his Eighth stifled a cough, which was an odd trick for someone who didn't currently possess a corporeal body.

The Doctor did appreciate the chance to see her at work though. He'd missed it earlier, having had most of his attention fixed on Sarah Jane at the time, but now that attention was fixed on Delaine and, oh, there was a lot to see. She was clever with her hands, much better with robotics than Rose… or most of his companions really. Mickey wasn't so bad himself, but there was a big difference between fiddling with the wheely-bits and connecting a robot's sensory inputs correctly.

No human from this time period should have been capable of the last without instruction and Delaine was barely looking at the sheet provided.

So that meant that either Delaine was far enough ahead of the curve – not impossible, though incredibly improbable – for such work to be relatively simple, she wasn't from this time period, or she was never human to begin with.

'The last can be tested, you know,' his First pointed out. 'The TARDIS has medical scanners and it's just as simple to separate twenty-first century humans from fifty-first century humans as it is aliens. From there, we can eliminate the theories that don't work.'

There were three of those as well.

The first was that Delaine was some sort of spy, sent by the Time Agency or some other party that knew who and what he was. The second was that she was some old enemy under a new face. The Master was his best guess at the moment, though why his old friend-slash-enemy would flirt with his Sixth self was an entirely different can of worms.

'Probably would do it just to get a rise out of us,' his Fifth muttered. 'Rassilon knows what else the Master would be willing to sink to get a reaction.'

'Ah –'

'You know what I meant, Four.'

The third and, in the Doctor's mind, least probably theory was that the girl had the bad luck to be a local era time sensitive, in which case everything he was thinking of doing to get answers would serve no purpose than to shatter whatever trust the Doctor had managed to build with her.

'So what are you willing to consider an acceptable cost for the confirmation of your suspicions, Doctor?' the warrior asked, the question setting the current incarnation's teeth on edge.

He shouldn't have let him out of the box.

Delaine sat back from the now-mostly assembled robot dog. "The memory backup, Doctor?"

"I'll handle that bit, after I check over your work," the Doctor replied sitting down with the sonic screwdriver to do just that. While making sure she didn't add any 'extra features' to K-9's hardware, he added in an internal aside. An unlikely event, considering how closely he'd been watching her, but for once he would err on the side of caution.

'Is that a first for us? It's difficult to recall.'

Delaine seemed to hear his thought all the same, giving a small nod as she leaned back against the railing, fastened her leather bracelet again, and began idling with the fastener.

'A nervous tic or something else?' his Seventh wondered. 'Check the scanners while you're doing the medical scan. If that thing's giving off any interference, the TARDIS will know.'

Yet another check on the list of things to do within the next twenty four hours or so. Thankfully, it was a very short list, made all the shorter by the quick assembly of K-9. On the other hand, the most important point on the list – getting some answers from Delaine – could be tricky. Especially now that they were back to the tense atmosphere that they had started this exercise with.

'Very nice work on the energy transferal array,' his Fourth noted. 'Improves power efficiency by almost… twice over.'

Definitely not current era then, unless that joke about her being a UNIT scientist in disguise had held more truth than he realized. 'Have we found any problems in the programming?'

'Well, there's a bit of odd activity in the memory core, but that's all from the back-up and it all reads as benign,' his Third said, his mental presence rubbing the back of his neck. 'Could be a natural techno-organic A.I. evolution or the remnants of some deleted files.'

'What's missing?' the Doctor asked before squinting at the read-out. '…tennis?' What? Well, at least it wasn't anything worth worrying about.

He closed up K-9's casing. "You two did well," the Doctor told Mickey and Delaine. A little too well, actually, seeing as everything was just as he would have done it and maybe – if he cared to admit it – a little better than what he would have done in some places.

And all without him lifting a finger to assist.

The Doctor would probably leave out that bit when he presented the robot dog to Sarah Jane, but otherwise everything was letter-perfect. All they needed now was a little collar to slip on and, what do you know, he had one right here in his pocket!

On the other hand, Delaine hadn't sabotaged the dog or her efforts in repairing it in an attempt to stay under the radar. Would that be a point for or against her?

He'd worry about that later, he decided as he started punching coordinates into the TARDIS console. For now, he had a dog to return to his mistress.

It was a nice park that Sarah had picked for their meeting place. Very green and very well-maintained, but it still had that distinctive London air; mildly polluted and heavy with the promise of rain – or at least a thick, choking fog – at some point in the unforeseeable future.

For now, however, it was clear and sunny so the Doctor was simply enjoying the wait, kicking the heels of his trainers against the stonework beneath the rail he was sitting on. The latest version of K-9 was hidden behind the TARDIS, all ready to wake up and follow Sarah Jane home the moment the Doctor took off again.

'I do enjoy being around her again, you know,' his Fourth whispered conspiratorially. 'One forgets for a time what a face means, but when you see them again…'

Yes, the Doctor remembered that sweeping, fluttering feeling that had come over him when Sarah Jane Smith of all people walk into that teacher's lounge. Like his hearts had suddenly become feather-light and his tongue had suddenly been cut loose from his control. That his voice had squeaked up to pitches he hadn't known this model's could reach until then was just the most obvious side effect.

'Never had that problem myself,' his Sixth noted.

'Because instead of getting higher, your voice simply settles for getting louder,' his Fifth snipped quietly.

'Why you –'

His past selves all shut up as the Doctor turned to catch Sarah Jane's arrival. Under the leaf-diffused sunlight, she was even more beautiful than she'd been in the school. It was too bad that behind that beauty, he could also see time wearing her down. Slowly and inexorably.

"Hello, Doctor," Sarah Jane said around a smile. "Thought better of leaving K-9 on my front step with a voice message again?"

"Well, I thought you deserved a proper goodbye from me this time," he replied, bouncing up onto his feet and nodding towards the TARDIS, the bluest thing in the park that wasn't the sky. "Cup of tea?"

The Doctor opened the door for her, waiting until she was inside to follow. There was the look, oh so subtle compared to the confusion that was usually written all over the faces of first-time observers, but the wonder was still there even though none of this was strictly new to her.

Good.

"You've redecorated," Sarah Jane noted after a good look around.

The Doctor smiled. "Do you like it?"

A pause. "Ah, it's lovely," his old companion said carefully. "But… I think I prefer it as it was. Yes."

'I think that means I win, Doctor,' his Fourth said.

'Ah, it wasn't even a contest,' he replied silently.

Rose stepped out from behind the console, flashing a wide smile even as Mickey played the part of less certain shadow. "Well I love it."

Delaine, the Doctor noted, was still sitting on the floor with her back against the railing. A small smile was sent Sarah Jane's way, but there was no interjection.

"Anyway," he said, drawing everyone's attention back to him. "We're about to be off and I was just wondering… if you could come with us?"

It was a vain hope that he knew would be refused and yet, as Sarah Jane gathered herself and smiled, the Doctor felt the 'no' break his hearts a little. "I just can't do this anymore," she explained. "Besides, I've got a much bigger adventure ahead of me. Time I stopped waiting for you and found a life of my own."

"Can I come?"

Everyone except Delaine turned to look at Mickey.

"Not with you, Miss Smith, no offense," the boy corrected before looking over at the Doctor. "But with you. Cause I'm not the tin dog. I want to see the stars and all that."

The Doctor made a point of ignoring the absolutely disgusted look on Rose's face and the way she unsubtly mouthed 'no' at him.

Sarah Jane seemed to take a very different view of her fellow Smith. "Oh come on, Doctor. Sarah Jane Smith, Mickey Smith. You need a Smith on board, keep you honest."

Maybe it was the nostalgia talking, but he supposed that was as a good a logic as anything. "Alright," he told Mickey. "I'll give you a try. Could always do with a laugh."

"Rose, is that okay with you?" Mickey asked the blonde.

"No, great," Rose replied with all the enthusiasm present at the average funeral. "Why not?"

Sarah Jane shook her head at the antics of his companions. "Well, it seems I should be going then," she said before taking the younger girl into a hug. As they pulled apart from each other, the last exchange of their conversation reached the Doctor's ears. "Find me, if you need to one day. Find me."

His old companion then turned around and walked towards the door, leaving the Doctor to open it for her.

"You know," she said as they stepped back out onto the gravel outside. "It's daft, but I never ever thanked you for that time. And, like I said, I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"Something to tell the grandkids at least," the Doctor said.

"Someone else's grandkids, I suppose."

Right. Right. "I didn't think to ask if there had ever been anyone else," he murmured.

Sarah Jane smiled. "Ah, there was one guy that I travelled with for a while. He was a real tough act to follow." She stepped up on her toes to whisper in his ear. "Goodbye, Doctor."

"Oh, it's not goodbye –"

"Do say it," she said. "Please, this time say it."

"Goodbye," the Doctor said softly before clasping his arms around her in a tight embrace and spinning them around, his coat flaring out around him. "My Sarah Jane!"

He set her down gently and began to walk back towards the TARDIS.

"Oh, one last thing," Sarah Jane said, making him pause. "Is that girl… Delaine. Is she going to be alright?"

"Ah…" There was no good way to frame the lie. "I hope so," the Doctor finally said, turning around to look at his old companion. "Why do you ask?"

Sarah Jane smiled. "Oh, when I first met her… she just reminded me of you when you were my Doctor. I thought, 'If there's anyone who could be the Doctor in this building, it's probably that strange girl in the library with the yo-yo and the rambling explanation for how she knew how my name was Sarah Jane before I had to correct her.' Turns out my investigative intuition wasn't as sharp as I thought it was."

"Oh?"

"Just something about her. I'd ask if she was another Time Lord, but you already said…"

Now there's a theory, but the factoid itself was an interesting little kernel of unexpected truth. Maybe he'd do something with that later. "No, I don't think so," he replied.

"Well, that doesn't change the fact that she's a good girl," Sarah Jane said. "Just as important to have around as a Smith, don't you think?"

The Doctor didn't answer her as he ducked back into the TARDIS and refocused his attention on the humans sitting in there. Mickey and Rose had picked up on the renewed tension between him and Delaine and were accordingly tense themselves as they waited for something to happen.

And judging by the way that Delaine had just settled into silence, sitting on the floor with her back to the railing as she studied the finer details of his shoe tops and the metal grating in front of them, the responsibility of making that 'something' happen was going to fall on the Doctor.

He set the dematerialization circuits running and hoped that Sarah Jane's assessment of Delaine's character was an accurate one.

Author's Notes

Another wholly original chapter… at least until we get to Sarah Jane, and even then it's not really all that much like the end of School Reunion beyond certain dialogue bits and the implication of a brand new K-9. I originally wrote the entire thing from the Doctor's POV, but a reviewer pointed out that this was a prime time for some insight into Delaine's thought process and I was like '…yeah, that would work better'. So this is the second version of the whole thing, brought in under the umbrella of School Reunion because it just kind of made sense to do that and with some other parts scooted over to the next chapter because they didn't quite fit in this one (thematically, not physically).

Uberch01 – *The author sees your 'baka' and raises you one Excalibur-grade 'FOOL'* Well, I didn't know if you were familiar with the finer details. A lot of people aren't neck deep into the Classic, you know.

I mentioned the Android Invasion? Yes, I did, though that was back in Chapter 7. One of the Android duplicates was of the Fourth Doctor and at the end of the story, the Doctor managed to reprogram it to help him out. After it 'died', Sarah Jane had a minor freak out over the apparently dead Doctor, and the real Doctor had a chance to confirm that 'no it was just the robot I'm still very much alive', it wasn't ever mentioned again, but I figured the Doctor probably would have just shoved it in a closet somewhere at UNIT or on the TARDIS.

And the whole 'pose artfully to freak people out' is kind of a reference to the fact that they couldn't get Tom Baker for the multi-Doctor story The Five Doctors so they just posed every Doctor they could get (along with one replacement for the one who died) with a wax sculpture of the Fourth and then they just kind of chose to get weird from there.

Seriously, Google images is a gift, just search 'wax Tom Baker', the one I'm thinking of should be in the top results.

Splinx was a robot cat belonging to the Sixth Doctor in the Doctor Who And The Mines Of Terror computer game (1986, BBC Micro, Commodore 64), pretty much serving the same purposes as K-9 but with proper legs, no weapons, shorter battery life, stealth features, and being something of a semi-autonomous carrying case (thanks to bigger on the inside technology).

In the Fourth Doctor story The Stones Of Blood, Romana asks K-9 what 'tennis' is after a conversation with the Doctor. K-9 asks if she means lawn or table tennis, and when Romana told him to 'forget it', he deleted all the files on tennis.

Okay, so it's very unclear how Sarah Jane came into possession of her first K-9 because, while there was a short story written where the Fourth Doctor personally delivered it along with a proper goodbye (the accordingly named 'Farewells' from the Doctor Who Yearbook 1993), School Reunion says that the Doctor never gave her a proper goodbye. So I decided to interpret that as the Doctor leaving K-9 on Sarah Jane's porch with a voice message but never really talking to her in person until School Reunion (though she did encounter the Fifth Doctor during the Five Doctors, they didn't really interact beyond Sarah having a 'uh, who is this' moment at the end).