Disclaimer: I have absolutely no claim to the ownership of Doctor Who and I make absolutely no money out of using BBC's characters.

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother.

Always wandering off. This might be London, but that doesn't mean it's safe.

He was worried. Worried for them, and worried that they might choose to leave him here. He could see it underneath the irritation; he had been him, after all.

Susan…

The Tenth Doctor threw his mental barriers up. So, they, whoever they were, had taken Ian and Barbara, after he had left Susan behind but before they had found Vicki.

Rose and Ian and Barbara. Why?

xxx

Sarah materialised a split second before someone rounded the corner and ran into her.

"Oof." Sarah clutched at the small girl.

"I'm sorry!" The girl exclaimed, her voice muffled by Sarah's body.

"It's alright," Sarah recovered herself and released the girl.

"I'm sorry, Mummy always says…" The girl trailed off, staring up into Sarah's face. "Mummy?"

"Lauren!" The voice that called was all too familiar to Sarah.

Sarah didn't touch the dial, which was beeping softly to itself. But she vanished a split second before Sarah came around the corner.

She noticed the blonde woman before anything else. The blonde woman was engaged in reading and didn't seem to notice her arrival. Sarah entertained the idea that she might be able to hide and stage a more orthodox arrival, which was quickly dismissed.

xxx

"What are you doing here?" The woman spoke without looking up.

"The Doctor sent me." Sarah had no idea why she was telling her this; why she trusted her.

At this, the woman looked up. Her face should have been pretty, it must have been when she smiled, but something had left shadows in her eyes. It was a look Sarah recognised; it was the one she saw every time she looked into the mirror.

"He took you home. You shouldn't be here."

Sarah agreed. She didn't know where she should be, although home with Luke and Maria sounded a good idea, but she knew that she shouldn't be there, facing this woman who had the same look about her as the Doctor's other companions but suddenly looked a lot more like the Doctor.

"Are you ready yet?" Sarah asked. "Leela-"

The blow stung.

"Romana!"

"No," Romana said. "You are not that Sarah. Who are you?"

Her breath ghosted across Sarah's cheek as she fought against conflicting memories.

Aberdeen…

Gallifrey…

Harry Sullivan drove her back to Croydon…

She was lucky to survive with her memory intact…

Nat, Josh…

Leela, Romana…

She adopted the archetype and called him Luke…

She served the President: President Romana with her alien bodyguards Sarah and Leela…

The Fourteenth Doctor…

"Sarah Jane Smith."

"Who am I?" The strange blonde woman looked into Sarah's eyes and found a stranger.

Sarah shook her head wordlessly.

"Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith." It was a dismissal.

Sarah twisted the dial and then she was gone, leaving only a lingering trace of temporal pollution.

Somewhere, someone was singing.

xxx

Her friend screamed as the teenage girl was thrown into the air by the car. The car of a different design to the few others; the car which had just appeared out of thin air.

Barbara stared.

The girl hit the ground and the spell was broken.

The crowd let her through.

"Do you know her? Is she your sister? Where did that car come from? I reckon it was foreign." The noise of the crowd washed over her as she fell to her knees beside her younger self.

There was a glimmer of recognition in the girl's eyes before they closed.

xxx

"It's not very nice seeing yourself killed, is it?" Barbara murmured to herself.

The brick wall was cold and shadowed; the summer sunshine hadn't reached it. The cold soaking through her cardigan was simply a sensation that proved to her that, as far she was concerned, she was still alive. She still existed. For now, at any rate. When the universe caught up with events, however…

An image of Ian's bloody body sprawled awkwardly across a trolley came to the forefront of her mind. She shook her head to dismiss the memory. This was a different thing entirely.

She'd given her mother's address to the ambulance men and run. She couldn't meet her. No doubt the police would want statements, but there were plenty of witnesses willing to say that a foreign car seemed to appear out of thin air and hit the girl before disappearing again. She doubted they would be interested in a woman claiming to be a temporal anomaly who said that she'd been killed by a car from the nineties which had slipped back in time to the fifties. She hoped that the driver had got home.

The travel device continued its persistent beeping. She slapped at it.

"I know something's wrong!"

Her surroundings blurred.

Temporally unstable. The phrase just brushed past her mind before the universe seemed to implode inside her head.

xxx

Ian was hiding from himself. And Barbara. And Alice and Katherine and Michael and David and Jackie. And every other person in Coal Hill School.

He cursed himself for not noticing until it was too late. And the Fourteenth Doctor, who apparently made devices with faulty clasps. And the Doctor they knew, for kidnapping them in the first place.

However, nothing was going to change the fact that it was break time; the staff room was full; he was squashed into a cupboard as cramped as a Dalek's casing and his travel device was lying on the floor out there, in full view of everyone. It could so easily be stepped on. There might be a rare lull in the conversations and someone might hear the insistent beeping of the device. That someone could so easily pick it up and end up anywhere.

Quite apart from changing history, which the Doctor still maintained was impossible, he would be stranded. He would have laughed at the thought if he wasn't trying to keep quiet. Stranded at home; in the very place they'd spent over a year trying to get back to. He didn't fancy the idea of trying to live a life with only the clothes on his back and a small bit of decimal currency, though. A life without-

"It's never going to be alright. She's never coming back to us."

Ian toppled from the cupboard as his mind flooded with thoughts and memories alien to him.

He applied for the job at Reigate, got an interview, and won the job. He was happy in his work-

And never went near Coal Hill School, he thought, stretching out for the device. Never knew Barbara Wright, never wondered about Susan Foreman, and never went along to the junkyard. He didn't really envy himself that existence.

He died in his own arms, her name on his lips.

He caught sight of his own shocked face just as his outstretched hand found the device. Someone dropped a newspaper. The date seemed to burn itself on his retinas as he fell through time and space.

3rd March 1964. Why were they still there?

xxx

Rose waved goodbye at the school gates to her parents- no

Rose waved goodbye at the school gates to her children- no

Rose dumped another portion of chips on another plate for yet another visitor- no

Rose staggered through the corridors of the hospital, barely aware of her surroundings, as what her life could have been was played out in her mind again and again. There were infinite possibilities; it wouldn't stop. It wouldn't ever stop.

As she welcomed the silence of unconsciousness, it occurred to her that at least the Fourteenth Doctor had sent her to the right place to collapse in.

xxx

She was seven years old and listening to the radio with Aunt Lavinia, waiting for her parents to come home. There was a knock on the door and then they were back.

Sarah fought away the memory of the fantasy. She'd been through it so many times before. She'd been convinced that she would soon wake up and find herself back there and that, this time, the knock on the door would be heralding her parents' safe return, rather than being the harbinger of doom.

Three old companions; the Doctor was so proud of them…

"No." Sarah concentrated on her history; who she was.

Sometimes willpower isn't enough.

They first met on an item about the proposed abolishment of the 11+ plus exam…

xxx

It was so loud.

Something hit her with massive force, throwing her up into the air as if she was no heavier than a rag doll.

The army lorry suddenly loomed out of the fog and Susan screamed…

Barbara staggered backwards, suddenly missing the support of the brick wall.

Ptolemy laughed and kissed her and suddenly her forgotten past mattered much less…

Universes collided and timelines collapsed into each other. She fell to the floor and screamed as her mind was torn apart.

The Doctor stood over her and sighed sadly.

"The strong fall first," he muttered. "Always the strong."

xxx

Trapped, unable to help them, the Fourteenth Doctor watched the dance of the data output. The displays had cleared for a while, but then reverted to indecipherable gobbledegook. One by one the displays died as the devices overloaded.

"Enough!" he cried eventually, slamming his hand down on the button and closing the link off. What had happened to them? He had pulled them from their timelines; he had been responsible for them, and he had let them down. Like so many others.

"Yes," the voice that spoke behind him was cold and controlled, "I quite agree."