Sarah/Various
It's 4 in the morning here and I swear this makes sense in my head now, if it's gobbledegook please feel free to tell me. Otherwise enjoy :)
Title: Copper Sweets
Rating: PG (Good lord I've written something clean!)
Pairing: Various (although if you've read my stuff before I'm sure you can guess one of them :)
Length: 825
When she was young sweets felt like gold.
The rationing ended on sweets two years after Sarah Jane was born - just in time for her to enjoy them her Aunt Lavinia used to say when she remembered to bring little Sarah treats to cheer her up. She’d had nightmares about harlequins three nights running, red and blue features blurring together in one horrifying creature and Lavinia decided she needed cheering. Years went by in a blur that Sarah Jane will forever remember as an endless summer of yellow sun and dried yellow grass eating flying saucers with Andrea.
When they’re twelve years old they share their first kiss. It’s blazed on her memory as tasting of sherbet and sunshine. Afterwards she and Andrea had giggled incessantly and ate their last liquorish stick like Lady and the Tramp. The sweet is red and that is the day Sarah Jane decides it’s her favourite colour. She tries to dot the colour through her drab brown school uniform but she never carries it off with the same flair as Andrea who’s hair colour was brilliant enough to elevate her above the drab.
The 60s had not ended on a high note, after Andrea died there had been years of young men and she’s stuck with a particularly insipid one at a party on New Years Eve 1969. Copper-haired and sweet looking, he talked incessantly about how the moon landing was a conspiracy. Ten years later Sarah Jane wants to send him proof to the contrary but resists the impulse. He kisses her at midnight and she lets him. The room is dark and musty, she think if she’s not careful she’ll end up in rooms like this forever receiving sloppy kisses from uninspiring people in dingy, grey smoke-filled corners and by the following year she is at University, far away from home and seeking people that inspire her to live.
The Doctor feels like Prince Charming, awakening her from a stupor with a much promised, never delivered kiss and now the flying saucers are real and though there is no sunshine there is inspiration and Sarah Jane Smith becomes the sort of person her Aunt always wanted her to be. She’s bright and strong and opinionated and has a tendency to attract more than her fair share of Doctors and though she won’t let herself think about him too much she allows herself to think of Harry and, though it’s silly, she never throws away the piece of rubbish jewelry he once bought her, even if it did leave a copper mark on her middle finger. She never told him but she thought the mark was more beautiful than the ring.
Years roll by. There’s the occasional man and even a women once but not one that makes anything better and slowly but surely she becomes the madwoman across the street driving around in her little car and occasionally known to have little explosions come out of her roof.
Her son is wonderful and she truly loves his friends but somehow she still gets the feeling sometimes that this just isn’t the life she’s supposed to have had. This world is all blue suits, blue boxes, blue sonic, blue light and try as she might Sarah Jane still wants red.
Over forty years after the first one there’s another woman with russet hair, almost the same shade as Andrea’s and though there’s no sugar and no sunshine Sarah Jane still kisses her. There’s no sweetness either and if she giggled she’s quite sure she’ll get a slap, but Rani and Clyde have charged upstairs, Luke trailing slightly behind them, and she’s alone with Mrs Wormwood. The woman just saved her life and she kisses her with force, telling herself that it’s gratitude and knowing it’s not. Mrs Wormwood grabs the back of her head and responds passionately and she has all the fire and briefly Sarah Jane imagines letting another redhead dominate her but knocks the idea on the head swiftly. Mrs Wormwood has none of the sweetness and wouldn’t even if Sarah covered her in pink sherbet.
Mrs Wormwood falls and it’s like watching Andrea fall all over again. And though she knows she shouldn’t, she almost runs to try and save this one and later hates herself just a little - when she was thirteen there was nothing she could do, now she is a fully grown woman and she could have saved her. She still has the children but she misses the hair colour.
They never leave her completely. She had the Doctor’s dog and Harry’s ring and Mrs Wormwood’s child and a life that Andrea might have lived.
But when she closed her eyes she could still feel a woollen scarf tickling her as it flies back in the wind and she can taste the jelly babies on the back of her tongue. And all the flying saucers in the world can’t save her.