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[ladyoftime]

i.

“Homework, Luke?” He was dallying over a bowl of cornflakes and a text on Mayan civilizations. Sarah Jane sat across from him at the table with a cuppa. “You didn’t finish it last night?”

“I fell asleep.” He glanced up from the underlined portions of his book. “I saw the TARDIS in the back yard. Is the Doctor here?”

“I haven’t seen her. Are you sure it was the TARDIS you saw-“

The Doctor stumbled in, carrying a forty-pound creature that appeared to be a cross between a bird and a miniature rhinoceros. “Did you know you have Meckays nesting in your trees?” she remarked to no one in particular. Luke rescued his papers and cereal bowl from the table as she set her burden down.

“Doctor, what is this?” Sarah Jane held her tea way away from the table. This was really getting distressingly close to a normal occurrence. “Is it dead? We have to eat on this table, you know.”

“Dead? No. Just sleeping.” The Doctor eyed the creature, then began rummaging through the cupboards. “Sugar! Just the thing.” She waved the sugar bowl under what passed for a set of nostrils. “Hello in there!”

“Is it dangerous?” Luke asked.

“Harmless as a goldfish. But they have an amazing homing instinct.” Her eye caught on his homework. “I should take you to a Mayan civilisation sometime. Be a lot more interesting than reading about it. Here we go!” She gently rapped on the animal’s skull. “Take me to your leader!” The Meckaw beat its wings slowly, and the Doctor grabbed hold of one. They both disappeared in a puff of displaced air.

Sarah Jane surveyed the strewn contents of her kitchen table, and Luke made a move to straighten things a bit. “No, leave it. The Doctor can clean her own mess.”


ii.

“Did she just put a scarf around your neck?” Clyde demanded the minute Luke stepped out of earshot of the Doctor, who had insisted on bringing Luke to school. And in the TARDIS.

Luke glanced down to confirm that what was hanging around his neck was, in fact, a scarf. “Yeah. She said it was going to be cold.”

“What, is she crazy? It’s supposed to be hot and sunny all day. It’s just like you’ve got two mums,” Clyde said pityingly. “Sarah Jane and the Doctor.”

(The area experienced a sudden unexplained temperature shift during the day, and dropped to a few degrees above freezing. Luke, of course, was kept completely warm by the thermal regulator knitted into his scarf.)


iii.

The Doctor smiled an over-enthusiastic and completely fake smile at the drab, slightly overweight man in a stained shirt. “Mr. Balcombe?”

“Sarah Jane Smith or a legal guardian?” he asked. He barely looked up.

“No, no, I’m the Doctor. Sarah Jane’s a bit busy,” investigating a haunted house that stank of alien involvement; the Doctor hadn’t the slightest idea why Sarah Jane had been so insistent that she come to the parent-teacher conference, “and asked me to come instead.”

“What is your name, and what is your relation to Luke Smith?”

“Dr. Susan Foreman. I’m his-“ the Doctor scrambled for an answer that would leave no questions regarding her right to stand in, “-mum.”

Maybe he was paying a little too much attention, but he accepted it and that was the main thing.


iv.

Sarah Jane poked her head into Luke’s bedroom on her way upstairs. The Doctor and Luke sat on the floor in the middle of the room, he scribbling notes and equations and she correcting and explaining this and that. Though Luke was tidy by nature, the Doctor’s involvement had caused the spread of papers to cover half his bedroom floor. “You’ve got the wrong equation here,” she was pointing out. “You can’t assume normal gravity like this.”

Sarah Jane leaned against the doorway as she watched the two. “What are you studying?”

Luke stood and showed her the papers eagerly. “Quantum physics.”

“He’ll have it in no time,” the Doctor said from the floor, sounding just a bit proud.

Sarah Jane smiled and turned back to the hallway. “Have fun, you two.”


v.

“We came back to the school after hours to have a look about the place, Rose and Mickey and me. We split up, and who do you think I found doing a little investigating of her own? Sarah Jane Smith."

She paused her narrative. Luke wasn’t having any of it. “And what happened then?”

“That’s enough for now,” Sarah Jane interrupted. “Bedtime, Luke.” It was a toss-up whose face fell farther, Luke’s or the Doctor’s, but she had made it abundantly clear when the Doctor started her story she would have to end it precisely on time, or not until the next day.

“Good night, Mum.” Luke kissed Sarah Jane on the cheek, and the same for the Doctor. “Mums.”

The Doctor gave a startled smile. “Do you know, I think I could get used to this.”

Comments

ooc

[his-sarah-jane.livejournal.com]

Awww, Doctor.

These are ADORABLE! I love the whole Luke has two mums thing so much.

:D!