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She’d hesitated for so many reasons, and they all fall away as easily as the years between this moment and the last.
“Oh,” Sarah Jane says shakily, her fingers curling around the edge of the TARDIS door. “Oh, it’s—”
“Gorgeous,” the Doctor murmurs, soft as the smile on his glowing face. “Go on, then.”
It’s not been long since she’s set foot on another world. Years, yes, but not decades. It’s not common, exactly, but the Doctor, this Doctor, has settled into something like a life here on Earth. She’s come to know this TARDIS well, different but dear as her own.
They’ve traveled together—how could they not? There had been Florana, finally, when she turned seventy-five; just her and her closest family, sun-drunk beneath the purple sky and floating in a pink salt sea. Then there had been a distant world that sang of Donna Noble, the TARDIS full to bursting as Donna herself held up her handful of ashes and released them to become something else. A few other trips that hadn’t gone exactly as planned, but had gone exactly the way they needed to.
They’re all old, now, Sarah and the Doctor and the TARDIS alike, and they move through the universe a little more gently. She trusts that.
Three days ago, on her eightieth birthday, the Doctor had asked her again about the Skies of Always. He'd been eager and antsy in a way she knows well but sees rarely these days, and it had been easy, this time, to say yes.
She steps out into them now, reaching behind her for the warm hand that’s waiting.
The skies swallow her like they did before, a bright, brilliant boil of clouds and color that reflects endlessly off the shimmering, simmering sea. Wind sings around them, a song that comes back to her in the same moment she realizes she'd forgotten it in the first place.
It’s been more than fifty years, but it all comes back: the glassy black rock they stand on and how it, too, mirrors the dancing skies so brightly that she finds herself unsteady all over again. Silence so complete that she knows without asking that they’re alone, entirely, the only breathing beings for lightyears.
She doesn’t let go of the Doctor’s hand.
They breathe the ocean air and stare up at the impossible skies, surging and sparkling with colors that can’t exist anywhere but here. Very far away, great black waves billow so high that she can’t tell what’s real and what’s reflected, where the swells end and the skies begin. She could stand here for lifetimes, she knows, and never stop wondering.
A very light rain begins to fall, each drop incandescent. Sarah’s dressed warmly but she gets cold more easily these days, and she’s barely had time to shiver before the Doctor is behind her, draping his coat across her shoulders and kissing her temple in a way that's as familiar as it was once strange. She pulls it tight around her, and she smiles without breaking her rapt gaze.
“I’ll be back,” he whispers, something strange in his voice that she'll remember later. “Forgot something! Wait here, just a tick. Right here.”
Sarah Jane hums in agreement. She doesn’t mind waiting for him anymore.
She lifts her face to the skies and tastes salt; she closes her eyes, and lets it glaze her cheeks. She feels so small, standing here alone. She feels immortal.
And then—
“Sarah?”
For a crystal moment, she’s sure that even the skies go still.
“Oh,” she breathes for the second time, the coat slipping from her nerveless fingers as she raises a trembling hand to her mouth. She turns, and takes him in. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Yes,” the Doctor says, staring at her with those wide, unblinking eyes.
Eyes she hasn’t seen in nearly sixty years.
She staggers where she stands, and he surges into motion.
“How are you here?” he demands, moving towards her urgently. “Sarah, you can’t—” He grips her shoulders, as stunned as she’s ever seen him, and she doesn’t know what to say.
He’s right, of course, she’s quite certain of that if nothing else. If he’s here, then she’s here. She’d gone exploring, she remembers dimly, made her way onto an outcrop of rock she’d nearly killed herself on, not that she’d told the Doctor that.
But she can’t be far, which means that Sarah can’t be here, she—
“You’re old,” the Doctor says blankly. “When did you get old?”
For several long seconds, disbelief stretches between them until Sarah finally breaks into incredulous laughter.
“You—I’m still younger than you,” she retorts, her entire body still pulsing with shock. She opens her mouth again, sure that something will come out, and then closes it.
“That’s hardly a feat,” the Doctor says absently, looking her up and down with a critical eye and then leaning in to examine her face in a way that reminds her of her yearly physical. “You’re what, a hundred and seven? A hundred and eight?” In one swift movement he grabs one of her hands, bending down so that his nose brushes her own thin skin as he inspects it. “For a human in your century, that’s bordering on ancient, unless—”
She snatches her hand free and smacks him with it. He sputters indignantly, straightening to meet her glare.
“I’m eighty, thank you,” she snaps, “and if you could please do both of us a favor and just for once in your life shut up—”
His mouth snaps shut as she reaches for him beneath a sky that might as well not exist.
For a long and impossible moment, all that comes out of him are harsh breaths. The wind, the fine mist, the sea and the skies and the reasons why…they vanish like the years, a wave settling back into still water and leaving just this. Just him, hot breath against her neck, the tickle of damp curls and the warmth of his coat collar against her nose; his hands, heavy and uncertain at her back until they’re not anymore, until they’re clutching her more tightly than she thinks he ever has.
“You idiot,” she gasps wetly into his shoulder as they shudder, “you—all this time—”
“Sarah,” he murmurs into her skin, low and rough and aching. “Sarah.”
She’d thought she remembered.
She wipes her eyes when they break apart, reaching to smooth his jacket over his shoulders and tangling her fingers in his scarf. “You still wear this,” she says disbelievingly, shaking her head even as she hears it; he was wearing it on this beach with her some fifty odd years ago, and he’s still wet with the same rain.
“Yes, well,” the Doctor says, but whatever hot reply was on his tongue cools into grim silence. His gaze is fixed over her shoulder instead of at her, and already his dear, familiar features are worn with a grief that she’s never seen on this face.
I walk in eternity, he’d told her mournfully, a very long time ago. She’d laughed at him. She knows better now.
God, he’s young.
Sarah wraps her hands tighter in his scarf, holding him that much closer.
“I know I shouldn’t be here,” she says quietly. “I didn’t...I’m afraid this is the work of someone much more reckless.” She tilts her head to where the TARDIS of her timeline waits.
He nods, resignation in his eyes. “Hard to imagine,” he says, voice velvet and valiantly cheerful. “Why, just the other week I had to rescue you from a terrarium on Varos, which for some reason you thought would make an excellent hiding spot—
Sarah chuckles, letting go of the scarf just long enough to brush white, windswept hair out of her face. “I’d nearly forgotten about that,” she muses, making a face. “Varos…the slugs, right?”
“Capitalist slugs,” the Doctor corrects her, squeezing her arms tentatively. He's clumsy with affection, this Doctor, and she rests one hand over his and squeezes back. “Slimy capitalist slugs.”
She laughs until tears burn behind her eyes. “Yes, I remember that part. Oh, I was furious!”
“You still are,” he says fondly, just before he turns sober. “Well. Maybe not after this.” He gestures down the beach, to where the other Sarah must be waiting.
Above them, a whirl of radiant color expands and contracts like clay on a wheel. Bright, nebulous light bursts through, painting the shore with gold and glitter for just a moment before the clouds close up again and cast them once more in brilliant shadow.
“I never could stay mad at you for long,” Sarah manages at last. “I tried, you know. For a long time, I really—” Her voice catches. She blinks helplessly at the sky, and tries for a rueful shrug. “More fool me.”
The Doctor holds her gaze this time, looking at her with sad, steady eyes like he’s seeing her for the first time, or maybe for the last.
“Sarah,” he says seriously. “It’s time for you to go, isn’t it?”
“Nearly,” she agrees, moving closer into the warmth of his coat. He stiffens, just for a moment, before he sighs a deep sigh and raises a careful hand to her back. “And boy, do you cock that up.”
He huffs out the ghost of a laugh that she feels against her temple. “Yes,” he says resignedly, “yes, I expect I will.”
She’d wondered, those early months and later years back in London, if he’d known it was the end. When he’d known. Had he meant to return; if so, why hadn’t he? Or had the call from Gallifrey been a timely excuse to be rid of her? She’d wondered, in darker moments, if there had even been a call, or if he’d just wanted to avoid the fight. She didn’t think so, but…
She wondered. She spent decades wondering.
It was only after she found him again that she considered their conversation here on this beach in a new light. I can’t give you forever, Sarah Jane, he’d told her, and she hadn’t asked for it. Not in so many words. But she was young and wild with love, with wonder, and of course she had wanted forever. She just didn’t know what that meant.
Barely two weeks later, she’d been boarding a bus in Aberdeen.
She could change things, she realizes now. Just a little. Ask for the closed door of goodbye rather than the crack of until we meet again. But then—she shivers with understanding, a shiver that ripples across the surface of nearly sixty years of memories.
She swallows hard, her forehead on his chest right between his hearts. Distantly she thinks that she could tell him to check his coordinates, at the very least, before letting her go. A small adjustment, just removing salt from the wound.
She wouldn’t, though. She would never.
But there’s so much she wants to tell him.
You’re about to get a dog, she thinks inanely, breathing in the musk and metal scent she’s mourned for so long. He’s the best dog in the universe, and he’s ours. I have a sonic now, and you'll never believe what kind. And just wait until you hear what little Katie Lethbridge-Stewart is up to these days!
I’ve saved the world so many times. There are tears now, she can't help it. This Doctor’s never been good with them. The very first thing he’d seen with these eyes had been her crying over him. Sontarans and Silurians and Slitheen—God, so many Slitheen—I’ve fought the Trickster, and the Daleks, and the damned Mona Lisa—
The Doctor and Sarah Jane have both grown more affectionate with age, but the Doctor she’s with now was never particularly touchy. He holds her now, though, patting her back, then cradling her head like maybe she's taught him something in just these few moments. And she can’t blame him anymore, not for any of it.
She’s said goodbye to the Doctor so many times, but never to this one. Not really.
I have a son, she wants to tell him, so badly it hurts. I have a family, and they’re magnificent, all of them. There’s Luke, of course there’s Luke, and there’s Maria and Clyde and Rani and their families; but there’s also Jo, there’s Donna and Mel and Rose and Martha and so many others. There are Saturdays in a garden in Chiswick, a garden that’s always the same size and so is sometimes too small for all of them. I have a family, and it’s yours too.
She wishes he could know now all that he will, one day.
She thinks he’ll wish the same thing very soon. She thinks he probably has, for a very long time.
“All this time,” she says thickly, pulling away at last. “Years, and you—”
The Doctor raises a hand to her face, so slowly and awkwardly that her tears bubble into a laugh as she leans into his warm palm. “Careful,” he cautions, tracing a delicate line over her cheek. “This is tricky territory, Sarah. You shouldn’t be here in the first place. If one of us says something—”
“Don’t,” Sarah warns, pressing a stern finger into his chest. “Don’t even think about it. I’ve solved my share of paradoxes, Doctor, I know what happens when a fixed point is broken, but there’s nothing to fix. We’re not breaking anything." She smiles, glassy-eyed and brittle. "This has always happened, hasn't it? I’m just catching up.”
"Sarah—"
"No," she cuts him off, gaze sharpening into a fierce glare. “I mean it. You do whatever you need to in your own head, but stay out of mine.”
The Doctor smiles then, broad and beaming, brighter than the suns and the skies still dancing above them. “I suppose that it’s my turn to catch up to you, then,” he says, as pleased as she’s ever heard him. “I must say, I’m looking forward to it.”
He sweeps his thumb across the delicate skin of her eyelid, and then again down her cheek before dropping his hands to catch hers between them.
She thinks about the last time they stood here, more distance between them than she'd realized and so much more to come. She thinks about the grief her younger self will come to know very soon, and how it pales against what the Doctor will face in the centuries to come.
She thinks, mostly, about how very close they are now.
“There’s one thing,” Sarah Jane says, choosing her words carefully as she offers what little she can. “You told me that Time Lords wrote a great deal of poetry about this world, but that I couldn’t read it. It was all High Gallifreyan.”
He nods slowly.
Sarah smiles, squeezing his hands again. “Great Nature has another thing to do,” she quotes, "to you and me; so take the lively air..." She looks up at the Skies of Always—strange and beautiful and splendid, miraculous enough that the poets have filled libraries in their honor—and then back to the Doctor, who’s looking at her like he’d spend lifetimes in search of the first word, only to strike it and start over and over again.
She finishes, a reverent murmur: “And, lovely, learn by going where to go.”
The Doctor stares at her, breathing deeply through his nose, until Sarah shrugs and manages a smile that makes her feel young again. “I have a friend,” she says lightly.
His fingers twitch in her own. “A friend.”
“An Arcateenian Star Poet,” Sarah clarifies.
“Ah.” The Doctor nods, blinking hard. “Of course. Why…I mean, an Arcateenian Star Poet. Of course.” He laughs then, long and loud and utterly delighted, and in a whirl of motion she’s back in his arms, and then—
—then she’s not, and they’re looking at each other for the last time.
“Oh, Sarah,” he murmurs, that old voice worn and rich and thicker now than she’s ever heard it. “Sarah, old girl.”
Sarah laughs too, just for him. “Don’t you start.”
“My Sarah Jane.” He doesn’t look at her while he says it, but she forgives him for that.
Sarah swallows her tears down, allowing herself one last touch as she smooths his coat collar back into place and adjusts the scarf beneath it. “My Doctor,” she says, smiling. They all are, but him most of all.
He says it then, far too late and right on time, as ever. He looks at her for one last, brief moment and he gives her his goodbye, not waiting for her reply before disappearing into the shimmering darkness. She whispers it into the night anyway: until we meet again.
The Doctor returns to Sarah Jane. Two weeks later, he leaves her.
Decades pass, then centuries. Millennia stretch themselves around the long, shaky breaths that Sarah breathes, through the quiet minutes she stands alone on a black beach, small and silent beneath yet another wonder of the universe.
Clouds crest and burst into champagne rain as again—still—decades pass. Centuries. Millennia.
Finally, Sarah Jane smiles. She steps through them in seconds, and walks to where the Doctor is waiting.