(no subject)
Title: Brand New Worlds
Pairing: Harry Sullivan/Sarah Jane Smith
Rating: PG-13.
Disclaimer: Hours spent agonizing over a sentence does not make them mine, but a girl can dream.
Summary: Harry has to wonder sometimes if he's just one more destination on Sarah Jane's list.
Notes: Crossposted to sarahjane_fic and harry_sarah and my first piece for this pairing.
i. Air France; en route to London
Harry had never intended this to happen. No, no, strike that. He’d simply never expected it to happen. Sarah had always been the Doctor’s, in his mind, never for him to touch in more ways than the courteous gentleman, but when they began to travel together - Sarah for her journalism and Harry to ostensibly protect her, though she insisted she didn’t need protecting - he began to see more to her and realized that she was never the Doctor’s.
She was her own Sarah Jane Smith.
That distinction included a wide array of decisions she made and as Harry also discovered, that included the people she chose to be with and the men she chose to be with. He had known that there might be something more between them on the flight back to London when, whilst asleep, she leaned in against Harry’s shoulder and rested her cheek to his Naval jacket as she had a dozen times before (the epaulettes were quite good headrests). In the dozen times before, though, she had never wrapped her arms around his the way she was doing this particular time.
He smiled to himself as he gently jostled her awake, his own curiosity driving him to ask questions. It was very much unlike him, but perhaps all his time around her had produced some osmosis. He wondered if that worked both ways or if it was just Sarah’s tendency to affect all those around her.
“Sarah,” he whispered quietly.
“What is it, Harry?” Sarah replied, her voice thick with sleep as she kept her hold on him. “I’m sleeping.”
“Yes. Yes, I can see that.” He was still whispering, trying not to rouse her out of the true depths of sleep. He was smiling proudly and inanely happy for some reason he couldn’t quite name. “When we get back to London, how would you like to come around for a nightcap at my home?” he suggested.
“You woke me for that!” she said, shocked and angry. “Harry!”
“Well, old girl, I’m terribly sorry…”
“You know the answer’s yes,” she finished her sentence sleepily and gave him a light smack on the bicep. “Now let me sleep.”
Perhaps he should begin to make a case for the unexpected not always being quite so terrible. Yes. Yes, Harry Sullivan could be persuaded to such a thing.
ii. Australia
“Harry.”
He had convinced her to go to the beach with him where they could set up an umbrella and think of nothing but sea and sand and the sun shining down on them, causing spectrums of colours in the refracted light of pale sunglasses. It had been a lovely day from the start, from the moment Sarah Jane tied her hair up and removed the t-shirt over her bathing suit to get some sun on her shoulders. She even entertained his nervous stammering while he took off his shirt to reveal the pale chest she knew to be under his clothes.
He had gone on about the medical procedures on submarines while she had tightened the knot of her bikini and he lathered sunscreen on her shoulders so that they wouldn’t freckle (even if Harry always did say he liked freckles).
But that had been earlier in the day. Now was a far different story.
“Hold on a moment!”
It was on the beach that an older man had collapsed right in front of them, from seeming complications. Harry had rushed forward while Sarah did her very best to assist, but the problem was that Sarah Jane had seen something coming out of the ocean and…
“Harry!” she shouted, trying to get his attention.
“Sarah, I’m trying to stabilize this man!”
“Harry!” she bellowed now, trying to get his attention by the shout, but also by giving his shoulder something of a shove. “Look at the ocean.”
Because there in the beautiful and crystal-clear idyllic waves of the Australian Gold Coast were several Zygons, emerging from the water and wholly covered in seaweed. The sound that Harry made was a cross between a yelp and a gulp, and by the sounds of it, Sarah was already trying to get something resembling a stretcher for the patient or something resembling a gun for the Zygons.
“Oh, well,” Harry remarked, protectively pushing Sarah Jane behind him as they staggered up the beach and the emergency services with the stretchers ran down to load up the patient. “I say, Sarah, do you have a weapon of any kind?”
When she was sure that the ambulance had the man all secured, she grabbed Harry’s hand and yanked it along as they tore up sand and ran as fast as they could. Not far along, there was a hut and Sarah pushed him into it, ducking in after to try and hide in the darkness. His breaths were heavy and deep and Sarah’s were ragged to match as she kept her hands on Harry’s chest, unable to move in the tight spot that they had found themselves in. She looked up in the dimmed light, right into his eyes and Harry pressed a finger to her mouth, which she ignored by pursing her lips.
“Sarah, behind you,” Harry whispered, trying to manoeuvre their bodies so they could twist and turn and he could open a box.
“Fireworks,” she said, peering into the box. A quick look around the rest of the room proved that it was some sort of pyrotechnic point on the beach, which made sense considering the displays they offered on a nightly basis. Her eyes lit up as she began to help Harry mine the boxes for useful ingredients, grasping matches from the very top shelf (achieved only on the very tippytoes of her feet).
She handed the matches to Harry and opened the door just a sliver to see what was going on. It looked like a scene from a Godzilla flick (or possibly Jaws), the way that tourists and beachgoers ran around screaming.
“Almost ready,” Harry whispered, attaching several of the fireworks and stringing them together. “Did you see the ship?”
“In the water,” she agreed hurriedly.
“You’ve better aim than I do, old girl,” Harry admitted, handing her the hastily strapped together contraption. “I’ll light it and you shoot it off?”
It wasn’t as though they could simply let the Zygons run free and terrorize anyone, especially not after the mess in Scotland. So Sarah nodded eagerly, adrenaline coursing through her system as she took Harry’s little invention and gave him a bright grin. “Not bad, Harry. Just be glad we have something to fight away, else I might push it up your bottom for calling me that nickname, yet.”
“It’s an…” Harry sighed, sounding frustrated. “It’s only an endearment.”
“Choose a different one.”
That was all she said before she made her way out of the small shack and put her good aim and Harry’s talent at impromptu assembly to work and let a fireworks show really begin, getting the ship and some of the stray Zygons in the process.
When her eyes had slowly accustomed themselves to the brightness on the beach, she turned to look at Harry and offered him a shaky laugh, the adrenaline slowly dying down. She found she couldn’t exactly stop looking at him and even as she brushed chemicals off of her hands, she was looking at him.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking. All we were missing was dinner and that might have been something of a date,” she joked and it was utterly worth it for the laugh she got out of him.
iii. France
Sometimes, it was like travelling with an accountant. At least, that was what Sarah said to him. No matter where they were, he would always be looking at his wallet fold and keeping an eye on the bills, as though money were what controlled them. “Harry, you need to loosen up,” Sarah Jane had advised him tersely outside of the Eiffel Tower when he had refused to eat at a restaurant charging too many francs just to sit in the shadow of a landmark. “You’ll never learn to live!”
“I’m living perfectly fine,” he assured her. “Come along then, old girl. We’ll find a nice café nearby.”
That may have been the crushing blow to the conversation (he didn’t mean to say ‘old girl’ anymore, it simply tumbled off his lips) because off Sarah Jane was storming in the direction of the hotel, muttering curses under her breath that were most assuredly about Harry, he was one-hundred-percent sure.
He held himself back from following and raining down the usual apologies, knowing they would do absolutely no good. She might not even have gone back to the hotel. Knowing Sarah, she had probably found some hint of alien conspiracy in the time it took her to get back to the lobby and was now off investigating it and putting herself in peril.
He stopped by a little flower cart and found the most unique flower it had to offer, paying the francs before he wandered back to the hotel.
He knocked politely at the door, even if they both had keys. It wasn’t very intelligent to provoke Sarah once she got in one of these moods and he knew he had to tread carefully, lest he step on an eggshell that was actually made of glass.
“Oh, come in already,” she huffed from behind the door. “And I don’t want another apology flower, so stick it in the nearest planter before you come in.”
Harry made sure that he was through smiling in wry bemusement at her seeming ‘plight’ before he entered the room and went about the work of a very regretful man who had done something terribly wrong. And he went in flowerless.
“Well?” she asked, head on a pillow as she peered up at him from the bed in a half-upside down position. “Are you going to say it?”
“Say what?” Harry asked, knowing this script off by heart by now. It wasn’t just Paris that they enacted this scene, after all. They’d played this one in Australia and in Moscow, in the heart of London to the thick of Brazil. “Oh, yes, I’m terribly sorry,” he finished, and she even was kind enough to not grin away at him like she’d been expecting it. “Come along, then. We’ve got reservations at the nearest restaurant under the Eiffel Tower.”
“Do we?”
Even Sarah Jane couldn’t make that sound natural. Harry should have really worried that she had him utterly in the palm of his hand, but when she let him pick a dress for her - green, the one that accentuated the golden-brown in her hair - and kissed him on the cheek in thanks, he forgot that he was so utterly wrapped around one woman’s little pinkie.
iv. Harry’s Flat
When we get back to London, how would you like to come around for a nightcap at my home?, he had once said to her and she had agreed as though it was second nature for her to accept such a thing. This time when they got back from a long-delayed flight from Egypt, he extended the same offer to her in fewer words.
“My place?” had been all he’d offered as she fell asleep on his shoulder in the taxi.
“Mm.”
He took that for a yes. He half-carried her when they arrived back at his flat and had to extemporaneously juggle while he dug out his key and ignored the way her lips were pressed to the crook of his neck, breath causing the funniest of feelings down in his stomach. “We’re there?” she mumbled sleepily.
“We’re here,” Harry confirmed, wrapping his arms around her narrow waist as he tugged them both inside in a ragdollesque dance, though she seemed to be making an effort of waking herself up. His hand tightened on her waist, grasping fabric and his thumb brushed against the incomparable warmth of her skin and his pointer finger snuck under the fabric of her shirt and touched her hip and the door closed, separating them from the world and the world from them.
She was waking up now and staring up at him with eyes that had seen the world, the universe, and him - inside and out.
“Harry,” she said around a yawn and a smile, peering up at him from his arms.
“Yes, Sarah?”
“Kiss me.”
It wasn’t a question, he was sure of that. There was no hesitance to her words and Harry wondered if this was simply one more of Sarah’s items in her notebook. She had explored the universe and now they were back exploring the Earth.
He couldn’t help but wonder if she wanted to explore new territory with him as well and check it off as she lay in bed at night. Was he just an attraction to be visited, to see the layout of the interior and marvel at the exterior before taking a picture to snap in some scrapbook down the line.
He still kissed her, though.
And for just one moment, Harry let himself pretend that there wouldn’t be something else to see in the morning, something new to discover, some new find to probe.
One moment turned to two, turned to three, spanned past four, five, and six.
And as they arrived in his bedroom, Harry stopped counting and closed the door and kept reality out on the doorstep, just for the night.
THE END
Pairing: Harry Sullivan/Sarah Jane Smith
Rating: PG-13.
Disclaimer: Hours spent agonizing over a sentence does not make them mine, but a girl can dream.
Summary: Harry has to wonder sometimes if he's just one more destination on Sarah Jane's list.
Notes: Crossposted to sarahjane_fic and harry_sarah and my first piece for this pairing.
i. Air France; en route to London
Harry had never intended this to happen. No, no, strike that. He’d simply never expected it to happen. Sarah had always been the Doctor’s, in his mind, never for him to touch in more ways than the courteous gentleman, but when they began to travel together - Sarah for her journalism and Harry to ostensibly protect her, though she insisted she didn’t need protecting - he began to see more to her and realized that she was never the Doctor’s.
She was her own Sarah Jane Smith.
That distinction included a wide array of decisions she made and as Harry also discovered, that included the people she chose to be with and the men she chose to be with. He had known that there might be something more between them on the flight back to London when, whilst asleep, she leaned in against Harry’s shoulder and rested her cheek to his Naval jacket as she had a dozen times before (the epaulettes were quite good headrests). In the dozen times before, though, she had never wrapped her arms around his the way she was doing this particular time.
He smiled to himself as he gently jostled her awake, his own curiosity driving him to ask questions. It was very much unlike him, but perhaps all his time around her had produced some osmosis. He wondered if that worked both ways or if it was just Sarah’s tendency to affect all those around her.
“Sarah,” he whispered quietly.
“What is it, Harry?” Sarah replied, her voice thick with sleep as she kept her hold on him. “I’m sleeping.”
“Yes. Yes, I can see that.” He was still whispering, trying not to rouse her out of the true depths of sleep. He was smiling proudly and inanely happy for some reason he couldn’t quite name. “When we get back to London, how would you like to come around for a nightcap at my home?” he suggested.
“You woke me for that!” she said, shocked and angry. “Harry!”
“Well, old girl, I’m terribly sorry…”
“You know the answer’s yes,” she finished her sentence sleepily and gave him a light smack on the bicep. “Now let me sleep.”
Perhaps he should begin to make a case for the unexpected not always being quite so terrible. Yes. Yes, Harry Sullivan could be persuaded to such a thing.
ii. Australia
“Harry.”
He had convinced her to go to the beach with him where they could set up an umbrella and think of nothing but sea and sand and the sun shining down on them, causing spectrums of colours in the refracted light of pale sunglasses. It had been a lovely day from the start, from the moment Sarah Jane tied her hair up and removed the t-shirt over her bathing suit to get some sun on her shoulders. She even entertained his nervous stammering while he took off his shirt to reveal the pale chest she knew to be under his clothes.
He had gone on about the medical procedures on submarines while she had tightened the knot of her bikini and he lathered sunscreen on her shoulders so that they wouldn’t freckle (even if Harry always did say he liked freckles).
But that had been earlier in the day. Now was a far different story.
“Hold on a moment!”
It was on the beach that an older man had collapsed right in front of them, from seeming complications. Harry had rushed forward while Sarah did her very best to assist, but the problem was that Sarah Jane had seen something coming out of the ocean and…
“Harry!” she shouted, trying to get his attention.
“Sarah, I’m trying to stabilize this man!”
“Harry!” she bellowed now, trying to get his attention by the shout, but also by giving his shoulder something of a shove. “Look at the ocean.”
Because there in the beautiful and crystal-clear idyllic waves of the Australian Gold Coast were several Zygons, emerging from the water and wholly covered in seaweed. The sound that Harry made was a cross between a yelp and a gulp, and by the sounds of it, Sarah was already trying to get something resembling a stretcher for the patient or something resembling a gun for the Zygons.
“Oh, well,” Harry remarked, protectively pushing Sarah Jane behind him as they staggered up the beach and the emergency services with the stretchers ran down to load up the patient. “I say, Sarah, do you have a weapon of any kind?”
When she was sure that the ambulance had the man all secured, she grabbed Harry’s hand and yanked it along as they tore up sand and ran as fast as they could. Not far along, there was a hut and Sarah pushed him into it, ducking in after to try and hide in the darkness. His breaths were heavy and deep and Sarah’s were ragged to match as she kept her hands on Harry’s chest, unable to move in the tight spot that they had found themselves in. She looked up in the dimmed light, right into his eyes and Harry pressed a finger to her mouth, which she ignored by pursing her lips.
“Sarah, behind you,” Harry whispered, trying to manoeuvre their bodies so they could twist and turn and he could open a box.
“Fireworks,” she said, peering into the box. A quick look around the rest of the room proved that it was some sort of pyrotechnic point on the beach, which made sense considering the displays they offered on a nightly basis. Her eyes lit up as she began to help Harry mine the boxes for useful ingredients, grasping matches from the very top shelf (achieved only on the very tippytoes of her feet).
She handed the matches to Harry and opened the door just a sliver to see what was going on. It looked like a scene from a Godzilla flick (or possibly Jaws), the way that tourists and beachgoers ran around screaming.
“Almost ready,” Harry whispered, attaching several of the fireworks and stringing them together. “Did you see the ship?”
“In the water,” she agreed hurriedly.
“You’ve better aim than I do, old girl,” Harry admitted, handing her the hastily strapped together contraption. “I’ll light it and you shoot it off?”
It wasn’t as though they could simply let the Zygons run free and terrorize anyone, especially not after the mess in Scotland. So Sarah nodded eagerly, adrenaline coursing through her system as she took Harry’s little invention and gave him a bright grin. “Not bad, Harry. Just be glad we have something to fight away, else I might push it up your bottom for calling me that nickname, yet.”
“It’s an…” Harry sighed, sounding frustrated. “It’s only an endearment.”
“Choose a different one.”
That was all she said before she made her way out of the small shack and put her good aim and Harry’s talent at impromptu assembly to work and let a fireworks show really begin, getting the ship and some of the stray Zygons in the process.
When her eyes had slowly accustomed themselves to the brightness on the beach, she turned to look at Harry and offered him a shaky laugh, the adrenaline slowly dying down. She found she couldn’t exactly stop looking at him and even as she brushed chemicals off of her hands, she was looking at him.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking. All we were missing was dinner and that might have been something of a date,” she joked and it was utterly worth it for the laugh she got out of him.
iii. France
Sometimes, it was like travelling with an accountant. At least, that was what Sarah said to him. No matter where they were, he would always be looking at his wallet fold and keeping an eye on the bills, as though money were what controlled them. “Harry, you need to loosen up,” Sarah Jane had advised him tersely outside of the Eiffel Tower when he had refused to eat at a restaurant charging too many francs just to sit in the shadow of a landmark. “You’ll never learn to live!”
“I’m living perfectly fine,” he assured her. “Come along then, old girl. We’ll find a nice café nearby.”
That may have been the crushing blow to the conversation (he didn’t mean to say ‘old girl’ anymore, it simply tumbled off his lips) because off Sarah Jane was storming in the direction of the hotel, muttering curses under her breath that were most assuredly about Harry, he was one-hundred-percent sure.
He held himself back from following and raining down the usual apologies, knowing they would do absolutely no good. She might not even have gone back to the hotel. Knowing Sarah, she had probably found some hint of alien conspiracy in the time it took her to get back to the lobby and was now off investigating it and putting herself in peril.
He stopped by a little flower cart and found the most unique flower it had to offer, paying the francs before he wandered back to the hotel.
He knocked politely at the door, even if they both had keys. It wasn’t very intelligent to provoke Sarah once she got in one of these moods and he knew he had to tread carefully, lest he step on an eggshell that was actually made of glass.
“Oh, come in already,” she huffed from behind the door. “And I don’t want another apology flower, so stick it in the nearest planter before you come in.”
Harry made sure that he was through smiling in wry bemusement at her seeming ‘plight’ before he entered the room and went about the work of a very regretful man who had done something terribly wrong. And he went in flowerless.
“Well?” she asked, head on a pillow as she peered up at him from the bed in a half-upside down position. “Are you going to say it?”
“Say what?” Harry asked, knowing this script off by heart by now. It wasn’t just Paris that they enacted this scene, after all. They’d played this one in Australia and in Moscow, in the heart of London to the thick of Brazil. “Oh, yes, I’m terribly sorry,” he finished, and she even was kind enough to not grin away at him like she’d been expecting it. “Come along, then. We’ve got reservations at the nearest restaurant under the Eiffel Tower.”
“Do we?”
Even Sarah Jane couldn’t make that sound natural. Harry should have really worried that she had him utterly in the palm of his hand, but when she let him pick a dress for her - green, the one that accentuated the golden-brown in her hair - and kissed him on the cheek in thanks, he forgot that he was so utterly wrapped around one woman’s little pinkie.
iv. Harry’s Flat
When we get back to London, how would you like to come around for a nightcap at my home?, he had once said to her and she had agreed as though it was second nature for her to accept such a thing. This time when they got back from a long-delayed flight from Egypt, he extended the same offer to her in fewer words.
“My place?” had been all he’d offered as she fell asleep on his shoulder in the taxi.
“Mm.”
He took that for a yes. He half-carried her when they arrived back at his flat and had to extemporaneously juggle while he dug out his key and ignored the way her lips were pressed to the crook of his neck, breath causing the funniest of feelings down in his stomach. “We’re there?” she mumbled sleepily.
“We’re here,” Harry confirmed, wrapping his arms around her narrow waist as he tugged them both inside in a ragdollesque dance, though she seemed to be making an effort of waking herself up. His hand tightened on her waist, grasping fabric and his thumb brushed against the incomparable warmth of her skin and his pointer finger snuck under the fabric of her shirt and touched her hip and the door closed, separating them from the world and the world from them.
She was waking up now and staring up at him with eyes that had seen the world, the universe, and him - inside and out.
“Harry,” she said around a yawn and a smile, peering up at him from his arms.
“Yes, Sarah?”
“Kiss me.”
It wasn’t a question, he was sure of that. There was no hesitance to her words and Harry wondered if this was simply one more of Sarah’s items in her notebook. She had explored the universe and now they were back exploring the Earth.
He couldn’t help but wonder if she wanted to explore new territory with him as well and check it off as she lay in bed at night. Was he just an attraction to be visited, to see the layout of the interior and marvel at the exterior before taking a picture to snap in some scrapbook down the line.
He still kissed her, though.
And for just one moment, Harry let himself pretend that there wouldn’t be something else to see in the morning, something new to discover, some new find to probe.
One moment turned to two, turned to three, spanned past four, five, and six.
And as they arrived in his bedroom, Harry stopped counting and closed the door and kept reality out on the doorstep, just for the night.
THE END