Fic: Without a Hitch
Apr. 26th, 2008 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelvisTitle: Without a Hitch
Characters/Pairing(s): Nine/Sarah Jane
Rating: PG
Word count: ~2,700
Spoilers: None
Summary: Nine wakes up in Vegas married to one of his former companions. (Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jade_starlight as part of the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
churchontime ficathon.)
Beta:platypus
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Author's Notes: Why do things the easy way when I can make myself have to slot a story into canon for two different shows? For Nine, this takes place in that brief interlude when he leaves at the end of "Rose"; for Sarah Jane, it's after "School Reunion" but before "Invasion of the Bane."
::xposted tochurchontime and dwfiction, and archived at Teaspoon
The Doctor wakes on Sunday with his head pounding like a kettle drum and a naked woman partially draped across his bare chest. His right arm is unusually sore, almost to the point of numbness, and when he tries to move it, he discovers his wrist is handcuffed to a bedpost.
This is not how his days usually begin.
He cracks open his eyes slowly, painfully. Even the dim stream of sunlight leaking in between the striped green curtains is enough to aggravate his hangover. The woman is starting to stir now too; her hair, mostly dark brown with the occasional streak of grey, shifts slightly and tickles his chin.
He hopes he remembers his partner's name before she awakens. Always embarrassing, not knowing that, but considering his muzzy head and the off-kilter sensation of waking in an unfamiliar bed, in what seems to be a hotel and not his ship, it wouldn't be at all surprising if he ends up referring to the woman as "sweetheart" for however long it takes to get her into her clothes and out the door.
Except then she lifts her head, blinks at him, and smiles a dreamy smile he's seen many times before, and it's Sarah Jane Smith.
"Good morning," she says, her voice husky from sleep.
"Think it's afternoon, not morning," he answers, his senses emerging from the hangover long enough to parse when he is, if not where.
Sarah Jane chuckles. "I suppose we did have a long day yesterday. And," she says, wincing and moving her hand to her forehead, "a long night as well."
The motion of Sarah Jane's hand produces a gold flash he might have missed were it not for the fact that bright light is so irritating at the moment, and he covers her hand with his to block it out. He feels the plain band of a metal ring on her third finger.
The cool metal wakens a dozing synapse that wakens a less dozy synapse that wakens a recollection of holding hands with Sarah Jane as they stood in a room painted with a fake starscape and spiral galaxies, while a man wearing a silver lamé uniform presided over some kind of ceremony.
The pounding in his head intensifies into a full percussion section complete with woodblocks, gongs, and a marimba, and the Doctor wiggles the fingers of his left hand against each other. There's a matching metal band on one of them.
"Sarah Jane," he says, choosing his words carefully, "by any chance, did we get married last night?"
Sarah Jane's fingers stroke his chest in a way that's both pleasurable and a little troubling, because their presence is the answer to his question.
"Among other things," Sarah Jane replies, and that dreamy smile of hers takes on a wicked tilt.
This is definitely not how his days usually begin.
"And the handcuffs ...?" he tries.
"Your idea," says Sarah Jane. "Given how often you've been arrested, I assumed you'd developed a fetish."
"Ah."
"In case you're wondering, I could develop a fetish for them, too." That smile and voice of hers really are seductive, he realises, which perhaps begins to explain why she's lying in bed with him.
"Setting aside whatever my subconscious may or may not enjoy, not that I'm going to discuss this further anyway, do you think you could unlock the cuffs? My arm's all pins and needles."
"I would, but while you were showing off last night, telling me about some Venusian escape artist you studied with, you swallowed the key without attaching a thread to it."
Sarah Jane finishes her sentence by running a finger lightly along his throat, and the Doctor breathes in sharply. That little stroke should not be setting him off, but his skin tingles everywhere Sarah Jane is touching him, not to mention places she isn't touching him yet, places he tries to convince himself are at full tingly awareness simply because he needs to pee.
"The sonic's in my jacket." He pauses a moment. "Don't suppose you know where my jacket is? Or anything else I was wearing?"
His companion slithers off the bed – nice motion, that slithering shimmy of hers, a highly effective reminder of several reasons why he likes human females – and pads over to a pile of clothing on the floor. She bends down to look inside the jacket, and the pale white curve of her buttocks ... oh, yes, time to get out of the bed before he considers a reprise of typical newlywed activities.
The sonic warbles at the handcuffs, and finally he's free to slither off the bed himself, wrapping a sheet around his waist and grabbing his jeans off the floor on his way to the loo.
When he emerges, Sarah Jane is back in the bed, gently massaging her temples. "Any chance you packed a hangover cure in that jacket as well?" she asks.
He rummages through the pockets, discarding a suction cup and several Legos before locating two thin patches. He tosses one to Sarah Jane and applies the other to the back of his neck, sighing with relief as the painkiller takes effect.
"So," he says.
Sarah Jane cocks an eyebrow at him.
"Not going to make this easy for me, are you?" he continues.
Sarah Jane pats the empty side of the bed. "Come sit down and maybe I'll tell you what happened last night."
"Think I'll stay right here, thanks, unless you care to put on some clothes yourself."
"Have it your way ... my dear husband. Or should I call you 'Mr. Smith'? Either way, I'm keeping my last name; 'Mrs. The Doctor' sounds completely ridiculous."
"Sarah ..."
"Oh, all right, spoilsport." She sits up in the bed, her knees to her chest, the duvet covering that distracting nudity of hers. "You really don't remember anything?"
The Doctor squints at the ceiling and wipes his face with his hand. "I might remember part of a wedding ceremony performed by some bloke wearing shiny antennae on his head."
"Reverend Jimmy. You asked him for a traditional Denebian handfasting and said something like 'spare no expense, we'll need all twelve wrestlers and the Full Blessing of Kavinka the Nine-Breasted Virgin.'"
"We got 'love, honour and obey,' didn't we?"
"'Love, honour and cherish,' actually. You know better than to ask me to obey."
"What's this world coming to when you can't even get the blessings of the Nine-Breasted Virgin at a wedding?" The Doctor gives up on his pretence of annoyance with Sarah Jane and drops onto the bed beside her, telling himself it's only because he's still too woozy to stand up for long, a plausible if unconvincing excuse. "Earth can be such a backwards little place."
She kicks him lightly. "No insulting your bride's home planet. I should have put that in the wedding vows."
"Too late now," he says. "Ah, wonderful things, these patches; kill the headache and I can finally start to hear myself think again. Oh. Ow. I need to learn to think more quietly." He closes his eyes briefly, concentrating. "We met ... we met in some silly bar meant to look like a bordello? Bartenders in tuxedos, and waitresses wearing frilly red knickers?"
"You don't remember running around Las Vegas with one of your oldest and dearest friends, much less how we ended up getting married, but you remember the frilly knickers. That's a fine set of priorities."
"Perhaps if you'd been wearing frilly red knickers yesterday, I'd have remembered." The hangover patch must definitely be working if he's feeling up to a bit of a flirt, but since they obviously went several kilometres past flirting last night, this one crack can't hurt. Probably.
Sarah Jane's voice is suddenly hushed. "You were drinking quite a lot," she says. "You said something about being better off alone."
The Doctor stares at the wall opposite the bed, noting the plaited reed texture on the wallpaper, the mass-produced watercolour of a felluca drifting down the Nile, the faux-Egyptian trim on the armoire. He fiddles with the finely woven cotton duvet cover and wonders if he'll be able to guess the thread count before Sarah Jane expects him to respond.
She continues. "Naturally, I ignored you."
"Naturally."
"You never did tell me what was bothering you," she says, and leans over to touch his shoulder. "I expect you meant –"
"Don't really feel like talking about it now, either."
"All right. Maybe later." Sarah Jane slumps back against the headboard, her brow squinched up in that puzzled look he knows so well.
He rubs a hand – the hand with a wedding ring, which somehow he hasn't yet removed – familiarly on her knee and tries not to consider how much further Sarah Jane might let his fingers wander. "I'm sorry. It's complicated. Very, very complicated. Could take days – years – decades to untangle all the complications. You'd be thoroughly bored by the time I finished, and anyway, it's hardly the proper sort of topic for a honeymoon."
"And what is the proper sort of topic?"
He waves his other hand in the air. "You, me, what must have been the bathtub full of liquor we drained last night. How badly behaved cousin Albert was with the maid of honour, and whether this will finally be the year for Aunt Betty, now that she's caught the bouquet."
"Don't laugh." Sarah Jane frowns at him. "Up until I met you again last month, I was Aunt Betty."
"We met last month? I don't make a habit of drunken evenings in Las Vegas. I'm sure I'd have remembered meeting you."
"That's because you haven't met me yet. We figured this out last night. You became very cross after I said the you I met was surprised to see me. Said the more I told you, the more you were going to have to forget later."
"Well, I am. It's tedious work, making myself forget things. I have to scrub out all the little peaks and valleys in the brain, and brain as smart as mine, it's got a lot of peaks and tonnes of valleys." He runs a hand over his head. Can't quite feel the valleys, but there's a peak or two still sore from whatever he'd been drinking.
"Sarah Jane," he says, sighing, "what am I going to do with you?"
"Oh, I believe we did that already." That smile of hers is going to kill him – the way her eyes crinkle at the edges and sparkle the tiniest bit, the way she looks like she knows exactly how far she can push him. Mostly because she does, and one little push is likely to send him tumbling.
"Not what I mean, and you know it." The Doctor slides down on the bed, props himself up on an elbow, and gazes up at Sarah Jane. Nope, still gorgeous and tempting from this angle, too. He amends his statement: "Okay, maybe I meant it a little." Pinches his fingers close together. "More than a little, even."
Sarah Jane relaxes her knees and lies down beside him. "If it helps, I don't think a marriage licence written on psychic paper is valid in the state of Nevada."
"Well, there's a load off. Because a traditional Denebian divorce requires twenty-four wrestlers, and if they can't get us Kavinka the Nine-Breasted Virgin, the Spotted Ferret of Wedded Dissolution is probably right out."
"Always the jokester," she says, and the Doctor closes his eyes as Sarah Jane runs her thumb over his cheek.
"Taking life seriously is highly overrated," he replies, dragging a finger back and forth along Sarah Jane's arm. He feels her skin prickle into gooseflesh, hears her breath catch with every stroke he makes.
She stares directly at him and slides her thumb leisurely over his lips until he kisses it. "Last night – today – it wasn't completely imaginary, was it?" she asks.
"No, of course not," he says, and pulls her into his arms, hooking one leg over hers.
"Good," she says. "One of us ought to remember this, or it might as well never have happened. Mind you, no one except the Sun would believe me even if I told them I married a thousand-year-old alien, and they'd just want to know whether you were any good in bed."
"First off, I'm only nine hundred –"
"Liar."
"– and second, I am bloody fantastic in bed, in case you hadn't noticed, but I seem to recall now that you did, at least twice."
Sarah Jane's hand slips from his face down to his side. Slowly, she rakes her fingernails along his back and says, "You might need to remind me. I'm getting so forgetful in my old age ..."
* * *
Afterwards, Sarah Jane walks the Doctor back to the TARDIS, which is tucked away behind a giant potted palm near the casino floor. He touches the door, feels the ship hum a welcome.
It will be so quiet in there once he walks through those doors, nothing but him and the clicks and whirs of the TARDIS controls, and he hesitates, turning back to Sarah Jane. "You sure you don't want to come? One more spin 'round the universe?"
"You asked me that last time, too," she says, "and I'm afraid the answer is still 'no.' But you'll find someone to keep you company. You always do."
"No," he responds, shaking his head. "Really is best that I stay on my own for a while. Besides, the last person I asked, this girl Rose, she turned me down. Said she needed to take care of her boyfriend."
"Did you say 'Rose'? Rose Tyler?"
"Yeah, think that was it. Don't tell me she's got something to do with my future; that's just one more thing I'll have to forget later."
Sarah Jane starts to laugh. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you need to go back and get her." She rummages in her handbag, extracts a pink highlighter, and writes ROSE in glowing block capitals on the back of the Doctor's hand. "Here, this way you'll have a reminder after you wipe your memory. Or, you could keep your memories and just tell Rose your wife said you needed a younger woman."
"Sarah Jane Smith, were you always this meddlesome?"
"Oh, yes. But you need us meddlesome humans, Doctor. We keep you honest."
"You do more than that," he says, and leans down to kiss Sarah Jane, a brief caress that can't possibly convey all his regret.
She looks up at him, that puzzled expression of hers returning. "Before you go ... I have to ask. Why this, now?" She gestures between the two of them. "When we travelled together, I never had the impression that you wanted ... that you were interested in me that way."
"Sarah Jane," he says quietly, "I am interested in many things, and in many people, but the most interesting thing to me, the best part of it all, is having a friend I can share the universe with. That's more important to me than anything. But it means that sometimes I don't say everything I should to my friends."
"Okay, then," she replies, "now's your chance. Anything you want to say to me?"
He grins, and is delighted to see her match his expression with her own. "Yes. Yes, there is. Sarah Jane Smith, you were the best fake Las Vegas wife I ever had, and I'd marry you all over again."
"Next time," she says, "I absolutely insist on the nine-breasted virgin."
* * *
Inside the TARDIS, he sets the coordinates for London, twenty seconds after he left Rose and Mickey in the alleyway. He sits cross-legged on the grating, breathes deeply, and centres himself in preparation for wiping his memory.
But before he begins, he takes a pen and writes "Kavinka" on his other hand. Just in case.
Characters/Pairing(s): Nine/Sarah Jane
Rating: PG
Word count: ~2,700
Spoilers: None
Summary: Nine wakes up in Vegas married to one of his former companions. (Written for
jade_starlight as part of the churchontime ficathon.)Beta:
platypusDisclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Author's Notes: Why do things the easy way when I can make myself have to slot a story into canon for two different shows? For Nine, this takes place in that brief interlude when he leaves at the end of "Rose"; for Sarah Jane, it's after "School Reunion" but before "Invasion of the Bane."
::xposted to
churchontime and dwfiction, and archived at TeaspoonThe Doctor wakes on Sunday with his head pounding like a kettle drum and a naked woman partially draped across his bare chest. His right arm is unusually sore, almost to the point of numbness, and when he tries to move it, he discovers his wrist is handcuffed to a bedpost.
This is not how his days usually begin.
He cracks open his eyes slowly, painfully. Even the dim stream of sunlight leaking in between the striped green curtains is enough to aggravate his hangover. The woman is starting to stir now too; her hair, mostly dark brown with the occasional streak of grey, shifts slightly and tickles his chin.
He hopes he remembers his partner's name before she awakens. Always embarrassing, not knowing that, but considering his muzzy head and the off-kilter sensation of waking in an unfamiliar bed, in what seems to be a hotel and not his ship, it wouldn't be at all surprising if he ends up referring to the woman as "sweetheart" for however long it takes to get her into her clothes and out the door.
Except then she lifts her head, blinks at him, and smiles a dreamy smile he's seen many times before, and it's Sarah Jane Smith.
"Good morning," she says, her voice husky from sleep.
"Think it's afternoon, not morning," he answers, his senses emerging from the hangover long enough to parse when he is, if not where.
Sarah Jane chuckles. "I suppose we did have a long day yesterday. And," she says, wincing and moving her hand to her forehead, "a long night as well."
The motion of Sarah Jane's hand produces a gold flash he might have missed were it not for the fact that bright light is so irritating at the moment, and he covers her hand with his to block it out. He feels the plain band of a metal ring on her third finger.
The cool metal wakens a dozing synapse that wakens a less dozy synapse that wakens a recollection of holding hands with Sarah Jane as they stood in a room painted with a fake starscape and spiral galaxies, while a man wearing a silver lamé uniform presided over some kind of ceremony.
The pounding in his head intensifies into a full percussion section complete with woodblocks, gongs, and a marimba, and the Doctor wiggles the fingers of his left hand against each other. There's a matching metal band on one of them.
"Sarah Jane," he says, choosing his words carefully, "by any chance, did we get married last night?"
Sarah Jane's fingers stroke his chest in a way that's both pleasurable and a little troubling, because their presence is the answer to his question.
"Among other things," Sarah Jane replies, and that dreamy smile of hers takes on a wicked tilt.
This is definitely not how his days usually begin.
"And the handcuffs ...?" he tries.
"Your idea," says Sarah Jane. "Given how often you've been arrested, I assumed you'd developed a fetish."
"Ah."
"In case you're wondering, I could develop a fetish for them, too." That smile and voice of hers really are seductive, he realises, which perhaps begins to explain why she's lying in bed with him.
"Setting aside whatever my subconscious may or may not enjoy, not that I'm going to discuss this further anyway, do you think you could unlock the cuffs? My arm's all pins and needles."
"I would, but while you were showing off last night, telling me about some Venusian escape artist you studied with, you swallowed the key without attaching a thread to it."
Sarah Jane finishes her sentence by running a finger lightly along his throat, and the Doctor breathes in sharply. That little stroke should not be setting him off, but his skin tingles everywhere Sarah Jane is touching him, not to mention places she isn't touching him yet, places he tries to convince himself are at full tingly awareness simply because he needs to pee.
"The sonic's in my jacket." He pauses a moment. "Don't suppose you know where my jacket is? Or anything else I was wearing?"
His companion slithers off the bed – nice motion, that slithering shimmy of hers, a highly effective reminder of several reasons why he likes human females – and pads over to a pile of clothing on the floor. She bends down to look inside the jacket, and the pale white curve of her buttocks ... oh, yes, time to get out of the bed before he considers a reprise of typical newlywed activities.
The sonic warbles at the handcuffs, and finally he's free to slither off the bed himself, wrapping a sheet around his waist and grabbing his jeans off the floor on his way to the loo.
When he emerges, Sarah Jane is back in the bed, gently massaging her temples. "Any chance you packed a hangover cure in that jacket as well?" she asks.
He rummages through the pockets, discarding a suction cup and several Legos before locating two thin patches. He tosses one to Sarah Jane and applies the other to the back of his neck, sighing with relief as the painkiller takes effect.
"So," he says.
Sarah Jane cocks an eyebrow at him.
"Not going to make this easy for me, are you?" he continues.
Sarah Jane pats the empty side of the bed. "Come sit down and maybe I'll tell you what happened last night."
"Think I'll stay right here, thanks, unless you care to put on some clothes yourself."
"Have it your way ... my dear husband. Or should I call you 'Mr. Smith'? Either way, I'm keeping my last name; 'Mrs. The Doctor' sounds completely ridiculous."
"Sarah ..."
"Oh, all right, spoilsport." She sits up in the bed, her knees to her chest, the duvet covering that distracting nudity of hers. "You really don't remember anything?"
The Doctor squints at the ceiling and wipes his face with his hand. "I might remember part of a wedding ceremony performed by some bloke wearing shiny antennae on his head."
"Reverend Jimmy. You asked him for a traditional Denebian handfasting and said something like 'spare no expense, we'll need all twelve wrestlers and the Full Blessing of Kavinka the Nine-Breasted Virgin.'"
"We got 'love, honour and obey,' didn't we?"
"'Love, honour and cherish,' actually. You know better than to ask me to obey."
"What's this world coming to when you can't even get the blessings of the Nine-Breasted Virgin at a wedding?" The Doctor gives up on his pretence of annoyance with Sarah Jane and drops onto the bed beside her, telling himself it's only because he's still too woozy to stand up for long, a plausible if unconvincing excuse. "Earth can be such a backwards little place."
She kicks him lightly. "No insulting your bride's home planet. I should have put that in the wedding vows."
"Too late now," he says. "Ah, wonderful things, these patches; kill the headache and I can finally start to hear myself think again. Oh. Ow. I need to learn to think more quietly." He closes his eyes briefly, concentrating. "We met ... we met in some silly bar meant to look like a bordello? Bartenders in tuxedos, and waitresses wearing frilly red knickers?"
"You don't remember running around Las Vegas with one of your oldest and dearest friends, much less how we ended up getting married, but you remember the frilly knickers. That's a fine set of priorities."
"Perhaps if you'd been wearing frilly red knickers yesterday, I'd have remembered." The hangover patch must definitely be working if he's feeling up to a bit of a flirt, but since they obviously went several kilometres past flirting last night, this one crack can't hurt. Probably.
Sarah Jane's voice is suddenly hushed. "You were drinking quite a lot," she says. "You said something about being better off alone."
The Doctor stares at the wall opposite the bed, noting the plaited reed texture on the wallpaper, the mass-produced watercolour of a felluca drifting down the Nile, the faux-Egyptian trim on the armoire. He fiddles with the finely woven cotton duvet cover and wonders if he'll be able to guess the thread count before Sarah Jane expects him to respond.
She continues. "Naturally, I ignored you."
"Naturally."
"You never did tell me what was bothering you," she says, and leans over to touch his shoulder. "I expect you meant –"
"Don't really feel like talking about it now, either."
"All right. Maybe later." Sarah Jane slumps back against the headboard, her brow squinched up in that puzzled look he knows so well.
He rubs a hand – the hand with a wedding ring, which somehow he hasn't yet removed – familiarly on her knee and tries not to consider how much further Sarah Jane might let his fingers wander. "I'm sorry. It's complicated. Very, very complicated. Could take days – years – decades to untangle all the complications. You'd be thoroughly bored by the time I finished, and anyway, it's hardly the proper sort of topic for a honeymoon."
"And what is the proper sort of topic?"
He waves his other hand in the air. "You, me, what must have been the bathtub full of liquor we drained last night. How badly behaved cousin Albert was with the maid of honour, and whether this will finally be the year for Aunt Betty, now that she's caught the bouquet."
"Don't laugh." Sarah Jane frowns at him. "Up until I met you again last month, I was Aunt Betty."
"We met last month? I don't make a habit of drunken evenings in Las Vegas. I'm sure I'd have remembered meeting you."
"That's because you haven't met me yet. We figured this out last night. You became very cross after I said the you I met was surprised to see me. Said the more I told you, the more you were going to have to forget later."
"Well, I am. It's tedious work, making myself forget things. I have to scrub out all the little peaks and valleys in the brain, and brain as smart as mine, it's got a lot of peaks and tonnes of valleys." He runs a hand over his head. Can't quite feel the valleys, but there's a peak or two still sore from whatever he'd been drinking.
"Sarah Jane," he says, sighing, "what am I going to do with you?"
"Oh, I believe we did that already." That smile of hers is going to kill him – the way her eyes crinkle at the edges and sparkle the tiniest bit, the way she looks like she knows exactly how far she can push him. Mostly because she does, and one little push is likely to send him tumbling.
"Not what I mean, and you know it." The Doctor slides down on the bed, props himself up on an elbow, and gazes up at Sarah Jane. Nope, still gorgeous and tempting from this angle, too. He amends his statement: "Okay, maybe I meant it a little." Pinches his fingers close together. "More than a little, even."
Sarah Jane relaxes her knees and lies down beside him. "If it helps, I don't think a marriage licence written on psychic paper is valid in the state of Nevada."
"Well, there's a load off. Because a traditional Denebian divorce requires twenty-four wrestlers, and if they can't get us Kavinka the Nine-Breasted Virgin, the Spotted Ferret of Wedded Dissolution is probably right out."
"Always the jokester," she says, and the Doctor closes his eyes as Sarah Jane runs her thumb over his cheek.
"Taking life seriously is highly overrated," he replies, dragging a finger back and forth along Sarah Jane's arm. He feels her skin prickle into gooseflesh, hears her breath catch with every stroke he makes.
She stares directly at him and slides her thumb leisurely over his lips until he kisses it. "Last night – today – it wasn't completely imaginary, was it?" she asks.
"No, of course not," he says, and pulls her into his arms, hooking one leg over hers.
"Good," she says. "One of us ought to remember this, or it might as well never have happened. Mind you, no one except the Sun would believe me even if I told them I married a thousand-year-old alien, and they'd just want to know whether you were any good in bed."
"First off, I'm only nine hundred –"
"Liar."
"– and second, I am bloody fantastic in bed, in case you hadn't noticed, but I seem to recall now that you did, at least twice."
Sarah Jane's hand slips from his face down to his side. Slowly, she rakes her fingernails along his back and says, "You might need to remind me. I'm getting so forgetful in my old age ..."
Afterwards, Sarah Jane walks the Doctor back to the TARDIS, which is tucked away behind a giant potted palm near the casino floor. He touches the door, feels the ship hum a welcome.
It will be so quiet in there once he walks through those doors, nothing but him and the clicks and whirs of the TARDIS controls, and he hesitates, turning back to Sarah Jane. "You sure you don't want to come? One more spin 'round the universe?"
"You asked me that last time, too," she says, "and I'm afraid the answer is still 'no.' But you'll find someone to keep you company. You always do."
"No," he responds, shaking his head. "Really is best that I stay on my own for a while. Besides, the last person I asked, this girl Rose, she turned me down. Said she needed to take care of her boyfriend."
"Did you say 'Rose'? Rose Tyler?"
"Yeah, think that was it. Don't tell me she's got something to do with my future; that's just one more thing I'll have to forget later."
Sarah Jane starts to laugh. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you need to go back and get her." She rummages in her handbag, extracts a pink highlighter, and writes ROSE in glowing block capitals on the back of the Doctor's hand. "Here, this way you'll have a reminder after you wipe your memory. Or, you could keep your memories and just tell Rose your wife said you needed a younger woman."
"Sarah Jane Smith, were you always this meddlesome?"
"Oh, yes. But you need us meddlesome humans, Doctor. We keep you honest."
"You do more than that," he says, and leans down to kiss Sarah Jane, a brief caress that can't possibly convey all his regret.
She looks up at him, that puzzled expression of hers returning. "Before you go ... I have to ask. Why this, now?" She gestures between the two of them. "When we travelled together, I never had the impression that you wanted ... that you were interested in me that way."
"Sarah Jane," he says quietly, "I am interested in many things, and in many people, but the most interesting thing to me, the best part of it all, is having a friend I can share the universe with. That's more important to me than anything. But it means that sometimes I don't say everything I should to my friends."
"Okay, then," she replies, "now's your chance. Anything you want to say to me?"
He grins, and is delighted to see her match his expression with her own. "Yes. Yes, there is. Sarah Jane Smith, you were the best fake Las Vegas wife I ever had, and I'd marry you all over again."
"Next time," she says, "I absolutely insist on the nine-breasted virgin."
Inside the TARDIS, he sets the coordinates for London, twenty seconds after he left Rose and Mickey in the alleyway. He sits cross-legged on the grating, breathes deeply, and centres himself in preparation for wiping his memory.
But before he begins, he takes a pen and writes "Kavinka" on his other hand. Just in case.