Title: All that makes you far away Fandom: Sarah Jane Adventures Setting: 'Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?' Spoilers up to that episode. Summary: I do know what it's like to be a bit in love with your chums. Pairing: Sarah Jane/Maria Rating: All ages Notes: Thanks to Derry for Britpicking and to Chibi Squirt for pre-reading. It took Maria longer than it probably ought to realize just when and where she was. It didn't help that it was nearly impossible for her to look at Sarah Jane and call her by her name. She hadn't known Sarah Jane so very long, but there was something about her that made her important, and not entirely because she saved the world like Maria made tea. She was lovely, that was all there was to it. Strong and brave, and she treated Maria -- She treated Maria like someone else who could and would save the world. Who knew where she'd been, and with whom, and of all those people she was working with Maria. Sometimes it made Maria feel brilliant, and sometimes it made her scared. Sarah Jane had trusted her with the whatever it was in that box, and that had brought Maria to this time. To this place, too, with Sarah Jane again, with Andrea the impossible. Maria was very nearly entirely comfortable with the idea that Sarah Jane was the key to everything, and that she needed to save the world. She knew everything, or near enough, but she still needed Maria's help, and that was all right, too. She almost certainly didn't need Maria to kiss her in the sunshine, in 1964, in front of Andrea, who stared at them and then ran for the end of the pier. Maria watched Sarah Jane go pink, then pale, and wanted to take it back or do it again, a lot more times, but Sarah Jane was running after Andrea. Worse, there was the dwarf-thing coming back, and there wasn't half a second to say anything at all. Being nowhere at all with Sarah Jane, who hugged her as if Maria had never kissed her even once, was better. She wanted to ask if Sarah Jane remembered, or if the timeline was so very twisted in knots that it had been an entirely different Sarah Jane, or what. It was hard, though, with Sarah Jane right there, the only warm, real thing anywhere. If Sarah Jane remembered and didn't like it, or didn't remember and didn't like it, Maria wouldn't have anyone to talk to or rely on. Maria didn't have to bite her lip about it for more than half a second. Somewhere out in real life, the world was about to end, and either Sarah Jane or Andrea was about to fall off the end of a pier. There wasn't much of anything she could do about it, but someone had to do something. If she wasn't scared and trying to work out what might happen, she might've laughed at herself. The third , fourth, or perhaps it was the fifth time Sarah Jane hugged her and told her to just wait, Maria's knees went a bit weak. It was more than just the fear of being alone and nowhere, and it made her shiver. The fog of whatever filled the spaces where there wasn't anything clung to her skin even worse when Sarah Jane left. It was a horrible bustle getting back and having Andrea kind of save the world, and there was Luke, and Clyde, and Dad. Maria wanted to talk to Sarah Jane about the nowhere and the timeline, about Andrea and that kiss that might never have happened, but Dad needed an explanation or five, and there just wasn't any time. She could remember it better when the world wasn't about to end, and she wanted to try it again. Of course it would be different, but Sarah Jane was still Sarah Jane, and she could make the worst possible things wonderful. If she started with something as wonderful as that kiss had been, even hurried and mistaken, who knew what would happen? All the warm thoughts went away when Dad said they'd be selling the house -- tomorrow! -- and that she couldn't have any more adventures with Sarah Jane. It was like he'd put her in a little box and he was trying to close the lid and carry her off. Even the mist place would be better than that. She couldn't just disappear without saying goodbye, and before she could even think about how many stairs it was up to the attic, she was there, and Sarah Jane was hugging her again. If Luke hadn't been there, she'd have -- She didn't know. It was hard enough not to cry without doing anything really daring. Later -- when she could take a deep breath without her eyes itching -- she laughed at how worried she'd been. Sarah Jane made it all better, the way she always did. Somebody who could stop meteors and the Bane wasn't going to get slowed down by a dad, even a really good dad. It still wasn't a good time to say, "I really fancy you, Sarah Jane." Maria was quite sure that never would be the best possible time for that, and that it would be easier to just kiss her again, sometime when she wasn't looking. The trouble was that Sarah Jane had become a lot more aware since 1964 and there weren't a lot of ways to sneak things by her anymore. They were going to be neighbors always, and that ought to have made things easier, but it didn't. If things went wrong, if maybe Sarah Jane didn't like her and it made things change, that would be terrible. Worse than terrible, because what if she got angry and said Maria could never talk to her again? She'd lose everything, all the stars and the magic, because of one little kiss. Worrying didn't stop her wanting it. Sometimes she wanted it so badly that sometimes she got distracted from normal stuff like the industrial revolution, or not so normal stuff like what Luke kept going on about. She didn't really understand him even when she was paying attention, though, so she didn't feel too badly about ignoring him for a little while. It was the part where there was an alien talking to Sarah Jane, all oozy bits and purple looked-like-but-wasn't-fur, and Maria caught herself staring at Sarah Jane instead of the alien. Then she knew she was really and truly in trouble. The alien didn't want to take over the planet, for once. This one just wanted a nice souvenir, and it seemed to think orange marmalade was everything it ever wanted to take home to the -- mate and offspring. Or wife and kids. Or whatever purple blobby things wanted. It sang a pretty thank-you song before it left. "It had good manners, anyway," Maria said while she waved it good-bye with Sarah Jane. "I'd have said you weren't paying it any attention," Sarah Jane said, and when she looked at Maria, she wasn't smiling as much as she normally might. "Are you all right?" She realized then that she ought to have come up with a good answer, but she hadn't got one ready. "I suppose, sure." "You called it a 'he,' twice. You don't normally make that sort of mistake." Maria bit her lip and looked away from Sarah Jane's face. "I don't know what's wrong. I should get on and rest up, then." "Maria." Sarah Jane touched her shoulder and she tried not to shiver or go even a tiny bit weak in the knees. It wasn't anything at all, and surely it wasn't what she was thinking about when she called the purple thing 'he' by mistake. "Just one thing," Sarah Jane said. "Anything," Maria said, and smiled. Maybe it was a little weak, but she was trying. Sarah Jane wasn't smiling at all. Her attic was well-enough lit that Maria could see her frown perfectly clearly. Every line looked like it had hurt to earn, once. "It's not about -- what happened, back when Andrea made all that trouble and you came back in time, is it?" "When --" Maria stared at her and remembered to close her mouth after a few moments. "Sarah Jane -- I'm so sorry." She was all ready to run home when Sarah Jane squeezed her shoulder. "Whatever for? I was a bit in love with Andrea, back then. If we'd grown up in this decade, with the freedoms people have now, who knows what might have come of --" She shook her head. "No, not of that. But of any number of things." Maria realized she'd stopped breathing some time ago and took a deep breath before she started hyperventilating. It was just one more thing Sarah Jane had taught her about how to deal with stress. "Then you're not angry?" "Not in the least." Sarah Jane patted her shoulder and let her go. "I do know what it's like to be a bit in love with your chums." It was certainly several steps above "I never want to speak to you again," but it wasn't nearly as good as it could possibly have been. Maria had to look away before she stopped smiling and made Sarah Jane worry again. "I should get home," she said. "Good night, then. I don't know of anything else likely to happen tonight, but I'll ring if anything does." Maria bit her lip. "Good night." She left the garden, telling herself not to be so thick. Of course Sarah Jane didn't think of her like that. How could she, when she'd been so many places and seen so many things? Plain old Maria Jackson from over the road wasn't anything to compare with that. Plain young Maria Jackson, even worse. She scrubbed her eyes with her hands, yelled, "I'm going to bed, Dad," as soon as she got in the door, and managed to get to the bathroom without him catching her crying. * Nothing whatsoever had prepared Sarah Jane for the sound of the TARDIS, let alone for its appearance in her living room. She was ready to greet the Doctor as soon as it had fully materialized, but she wasn't at all expecting a thirty-something woman with a riot of dark curls to run out the door and into her arms. "Sarah Jane! It's so good to see you! You have to stop the Reili invasion right now!" "Maria?" "Yes, there's no time to explain, just --" Maria waved her hands. "Tell Mr Smith to scan -- what was it, I've forgot again." The Doctor gave Sarah Jane a little wave. "Frequency 564 potato 7." Sarah Jane laughed nervously. "Potato?" The Doctor nodded as if he'd never been more serious in his lives. "564 potato 7. Within the next three minutes, give or take a week." "A week?" Maria spluttered and glared at him. "Why the rush, then?" "Is it Tuesday?" the Doctor asked Sarah Jane. "Sunday." The Doctor's eyebrows went up. "Let's just hope we're not too late. And I want to see this Mr Smith of yours." Sarah Jane ran for the attic so quickly she nearly forgot to blush properly; he was never meant to know about that name. "564 --" "Potato 7," Maria said, from the landing right behind her. "And if we're in time, everything will be fine." Sarah Jane knew better than to ask, "And if we're not?" so she didn't. "Mr Smith, I need you!" The fanfare, the fog, and there was her computer. "How can I help you, Sarah Jane?" "Brilliant!" the Doctor said. "Mr Smith, huh? Mr John Smith?" "Not now," Maria said, and what at 14 seemed petulant was quite commanding at 25 or 30 or however old she was now. "I need you to scan frequency 564 --" Sarah Jane took a deep breath. "Potato 7," Maria finished for her, reliable as ever, for all she wasn't the Maria Sarah Jane knew. "Scanning," Mr Smith said. The Doctor ran his fingers over one of the consoles. "Aren't you gorgeous," he said, grinning so hard it had to hurt. "And what's an alien supercomputer like you doing in an attic like this?" "Stop it," Maria said sharply. "He's working." The Doctor's eyes widened nearly as much as Sarah Jane's at this tone. "Right, sorry." "There is a transmission on frequency 564 potato 7," Mr Smith said. "It is in a dialect from the southernmost continent of Reili 4, and it says, being translated, 'Give us all your chocolate and no one will get hurt.'" "Oh, no," the Doctor said. "We can't be having with that. They want to denude Belgium of its finest wealth." Sarah Jane frowned. "I've never been to their planet, but if all they want is chocolate, why are they invading?" Maria shook her head. "They're lying. They landed and they took over everything, everywhere, and it took years for any humans to put forth a useful resistance." "Perhaps," Sarah Jane said, "but perhaps no one heard them in time, and they really would have left." She frowned. "If we can meet them on some sort of neutral ground with enough chocolate to pacify them -- and the means of its production, too -- they may go home quietly." "They took over the planet," Maria said, her voice rising. "It was years before we could even think of eating anything but nutritionally enhanced gruel, and you want to fight them off with a handful of Dairy Milks?" "And a cacao tree or six," the Doctor said, and hugged Sarah Jane. "As long as they can make it themselves, they've no call to make demands on you. It was probably what they really wanted." He pulled out his sonic screwdriver, and Sarah Jane had to blink at him. He wa the same young, thin man she met at the school the Krillitane wanted to take over, but it seemed odd that after so many changes, he would have just the same technology as ever. "I think you've got a good answer, Sarah Jane." He winked at Maria. "Grab a shovel and let's get to the jungle." The doorbell rang in a pattern that meant Maria -- the real one, or the present-day one, whichever was the appropriate term -- was home from school, and that meant Luke was probably with her. The Maria who arrived with the Doctor went pale. "I'm at your door, aren't I." "Don't come in!" the Doctor said, as if she was the one who was about to cause a paradox. "You shouldn't see yourself or touch yourself or anything." Sarah Jane ran down the stairs as fast as she could go. Maria was waiting. "Luke and Clyde went for chips, but I wasn't hungry," she said, and greeted Sarah Jane with a hug. "I was worried you were out, or busy." "I am busy," Sarah Jane said. "You can't come in." Maria frowned, looking so like her counterpart it made Sarah Jane look for further resemblance between them. "But -- I wanted to tell you about this math teacher. I think there might be something --" "Not now." Sarah Jane patted her shoulder. "There's an older version of you here, time-travelling, and apparently you're not to meet her." Maria's mouth fell open. "A version of me? Time-travelling! That's marvelous. Are you sure I mustn't --" "Yes." Sarah Jane gave her a sympathetic frown. "I only wish you could. She seems quite --" she searched for a word. "She seems like everything you'll love to be, but you can't. I'll ring you when it's safe." Maria bit her lip. "If you're sure." It would have been easiest to tell her that the Doctor is there and that he said it would be a terrible thing, but then she'd surely want to meet him, and they had to save the world first. In any case, she'd apparently meet him later. "Certain." Sarah Jane squeezed her shoulder. "Later, I promise." "Okay." Maria smiled again and waved her goodbye. The TARDIS was as different from Sarah Jane's memories of the old days as the Doctor was, with that similarity that let her know they were still the same on some ineffable level. The Doctor had a wide array of digging implements, none of which looked as though they'll be up to the challenge he described as, "Brazilian jungle, 1300, plenty of time before smallpox and guns and what-have you." "And we're going to dig up an actual tree?" Maria shook her head, half-smiling, half-frustrated. It was the sort of face her younger self gave her father when she was vexed with him. "I think you're quite mad." Sarah Jane smiled. "So you haven't been travelling with him long, then." "Not so very, no," Maria smiled back. "Does he do this sort of thing that often?" "Hold the doors!" the Doctor called, and there was no way he'd got a tree uprooted this quickly. But he had, and even though he was stuffing it into a police box, it was no more a police box than it had ever been. The tree went right in, roots and all. It was an awful mess, but there would be time for that when the world was saved, some seven hundred years on. "Do we need a breeding pair?" the Doctor asked when they'd got the tree lashed down to some invaluable part of the console or other. Maria frowned at it. "I have no idea, but it can't hurt." The problem of fitting three more trees -- for good measure, the Doctor said -- into the TARDIS was not one for standard Euclidean geometry. Sarah Jane made herself stop thinking about it as effectively as she stopped herself from thinking just what would happen to this version of Maria when they were successful. Like Andrea, she'd cease to exist. Sarah Jane told herself to keep from thinking about it entirely. Several times. She thought about biscuits instead, and what she'd make Luke for dinner when the world was safe. Maria was laughing, a low, grown-up sound, and the Doctor was dialing in what might or might not be the proper space-time coordinates. "Hang on!" Maria called, and Sarah Jane looked from the tree to her. She wasn't frightened of anything, so far as Sarah Jane could see, including the aliens who had somehow subjugated the planet because of chocolate. There was something in her smile, even after she'd lived under who knows what sorts of labor impositions and domination, that evoked the girl Sarah Jane relied on. "We're off," the Doctor said, and the TARDIS engine made its achingly familiar sound. They arrived -- the familiar attic was outside the doors -- and the trip was too short for Sarah Jane, for all they were all in terrible danger. She had Mr Smith hail the Reili ship. "Do we need to bring the trees out?" she asked the Doctor. "They're so hideous," Maria said, as the Reili appeared onscreen. To Sarah Jane's eye, it looked like a perfectly standard humanoid. The teal shade of its skin was a bit off-putting, as were the gill-like structures around its neck. But then, she hadn't lived under the Reilian domination, so she reminded herself not to judge. "Greetings," she said, and drew herself up. "We have a gift of cacao trees for you." The Reili made a string of burbling noises, and thanks to the TARDIS they came across simultaneously as English. "Do you really! Thanks ever so. Where are they?" "In my ship," the Doctor said, and jerked his thumb toward the TARDIS. "Hang on, I'll take down the anti-teleportation shields, and you can pick them up." He ran into the TARDIS. Maria's face had gone still and pale. "But you must swear never to visit this system again, first." The Reili gestured with an appendage. "Never again. What could you ever have that we want?" Its laughter was unpleasant, even to Sarah Jane's untrained ear. Maria winced visibly. The Doctor stuck his head out again. "Right, you should be able to find the coordinates now. Beam them up." Maria took Sarah Jane's hand and held it tightly. "I'm meant to disappear just as fast as they are, I suppose, but I'm glad I got to see you again first." Sarah Jane hugged her with the same warmth she'd give the Maria she knew best. "I know you'll be wonderful, whatever happens to the timestream." She expected Maria to thump her shoulder and disappear. The bit where Maria said, "I've always wanted to --" and kissed her, soft and sweet and not at all in a childish way -- Sarah Jane was still gasping when she realized her arms are entirely empty, and that the Reili had stopped transmitting. "You've got quite the partner there," the Doctor said from behind her. "And I had, until a moment ago. I lose more travelling companions that way." Sarah Jane stared at him openmouthed until she thought about how she must appear to him. At that point, she spluttered. "You make them cease to -- to have existed?" "On occasion." The Doctor went to her window. "Her younger self has gone home, but it's safe now." "Ah," Sarah Jane said, which wasn't at all what she meant to say. At this rate, he was going to go away for another handful of decades, and she might well never see him again. "Well. The world's safe again. For now." His smile was just as unreassuring as it ever was. "Yes. Well done." It'd been a long time since she was sure what she thought about him hugging her. Now she knew it was less special than Maria in her arms, for very specific instances of Maria that had entirely ceased to be and which would not recur short of a massive paradox. "I suppose you'll be off, then," Sarah Jane said. The Doctor shrugged. "Places to go. You didn't want to take a spin, did you?" She had already declined him once, and for far less cause. Over the road, there was a young woman who would someday be strong, beautiful, and brave. Who already was all of these things. One who, by her own account, had always wanted to kiss Sarah Jane, and who felt like a kind of damnation brought by angels when she did it. "Thanks, no, I've got to look after a few people," she said, and that was when she heard the door slam. The alarms weren't going off, so chances were that Luke was home. Sarah Jane glanced toward the attic door. "And there they are." She waved to the Doctor. "I'll see you, then," he said. The TARDIS only just finished dematerializing when Luke came in the door. "What was that noise?" he asked. "Just a friend." Sarah Jane smiled at him. "Did you enjoy your chips?" Luke's quick smile in return reminded her of just what shape this time and this place were. "Yes, and I don't think I've ruined my appetite, either." Sarah Jane nodded. He was entirely a growing boy, the same apparent age as Maria. The earth had never been conquered by Reili, and might never be. It was possible that the elder Maria's affection had been spurred on by that ongoing crisis. It was also possible that it wasn't, but it would be a terrible thing to ask Maria about it, even obliquely. "I'll see about dinner." She framed ten impossible ways to enquire and burned her fingers once, which pushed the ridiculous, adolescent thoughts out of her mind. There was simply no way to bring the matter up, and she wouldn't do it. Perhaps in a few years, after Maria had gone to university, or taken her own travels with the Doctor, or any number of things -- perhaps when she was not, in the general reckoning, so very young -- Perhaps by then, if the earth has not been conquered, she will have tired of Sarah Jane, or they will quarrel, or some such thing. If that has happened, it will be simple enough to pretend that there was never a version of Maria who smiled at her and kissed her. It would be more of a wrench to pretend she never wanted to kiss her back, but that, too, would be possible. Sarah Jane had certainly spent more than a decade waiting for the nearly impossible before. Another was no more likely to kill her than the last.
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