This is a non-profit work of fan-fiction based upon the television series Doctor Who. All related characters, places, and events, belong to the BBC, and Russell T. Davies, used without permission. This story, with all original content, belongs to the author, © 2008.

Edge of Doom
by Orianna2000

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
— Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Chapter One –The Advertisement

He'd almost missed it.

The timelines had been fluctuating for days, hinting at something monumental to come. The Doctor hated when that happened; it always put him on edge. The texture of the potential timeline suggested something big, something life-altering . . . and yet, triggered by something so small that it might easily be overlooked.

This sort of thing didn't happen often, but the Doctor had long ago learned to pay attention when it did. He'd felt something similar on the day he'd first met Rose, as well as during the weeks preceding the battle of Canary Wharf. Both events had had the potential to swing either direction, and both had dramatically changed his life. But life-altering didn't always mean for the better.

If he'd only known what to look for, he could have actively chosen his fate, but the timelines offered no clue, only a lingering sense of doom.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

He'd almost missed it.

In fact, he would have completely missed it if it hadn't been for the fact that Sinead had ticked off the sovereign ruler of Genk by refusing to become his tenth concubine, and their subsequent need to find some place to hide.

"Where's the TARDIS?" she'd shouted as she ran several paces behind the Doctor on the rough cobblestone road.

"Here! It should be here!" But, of course, it hadn't been. He'd glanced around in frustration, running his hands through his hair as his companion caught her breath. "I know we left it right here. See the orange triangles on the wall? I remember those."

Sinead shook her head. "I distinctly recall that it was green squares."

"Green. . . ?" The Doctor frowned, pivoting to look at the various symbols. "Orange? Ah, green is the spectrum opposite of orange—I must've transposed the two colours."

"Green is the opposite of orange? On what planet, Doctor?" she asked incredulously.

He blinked at her. "Mine. The real question is, did I also mix up the shapes? Green squares or green triangles . . . think! Which is it?"

"So we're lost?"

"No! No, no, no. Of course not. Being lost assumes that we've no idea where we are," he said with an air of authority. "And we know that we're exactly . . . where the TARDIS is not. See? Not lost. Just in the wrong place. C'mon."

A royal guard marched around the corner, spear in hand. The dull sunlight shimmered across his red silk tunic. His eyes scanned the path, searching . . . finding. He gave a shout, the Doctor grabbed Sinead's arm, and all three ran.

The inhabitants of this world did not go out of their way to help the Doctor and his companion, but neither did they cause trouble. By ducking and weaving, the two of them were able to lose the chasing guard, at least momentarily. As they paused to rest in an alleyway decorated with purple circles, the Doctor shrugged out of his overcoat. He tossed it over Sinead's shoulders. "Pull that up over your hair. You're much too conspicuous!"

With a rueful smile, she obeyed. The evidence of her Celtic ancestry had been what had attracted the Emperor's advances in the first place. Pale skin and red hair always stood out in a crowd—exactly what they did not want right now.

"All right, that'll do," he said, even though a woman with a coat over her head looked nearly as conspicuous as one with flaming red hair. "Let's try to make it past that next intersection. If these symbols are aligned by colour order, then the TARDIS should be another two sections north of here. C'mon."

They entered the street again and tried to look unobtrusive. Several people gave them odd looks, but no one sounded an alarm. A flash of red up ahead signalled the presence of another royal guard, though. They wouldn't stay hidden for long. They ran.

"Here," Sinead shouted, yanking on the Doctor's hand.

He followed willingly through the open doorway. A museum? "History of Human Communications. Isn't that brilliant? Oh, right. Tickets."

The psychic paper got them past the ticket counter and into an anteroom filled with a dozen other people. A woman at the end of the room smiled the generic sort of smile of tour guides across the universe.

"Welcome! This exhibit is sponsored by Psyberwolf Communications—technology of the future at your fingertips. Our tour today will feature the history of written, verbal, and psychic communication from the beginning of the human race. Please refrain from touching the artefacts or taking images. This way, please."

The Doctor straightened his tie and obediently got into line. Odd that the name of the company had "wolf" in it . . . not "bad wolf", but close enough that it gave him a bit of a chill down his spine.

Beside him, Sinead adjusted the coat over her shoulders and ran her fingers through her hair. He did the same, and hoped they wouldn't get thrown out for looking disreputable. Running for one's life got the blood pumping, but it also tended to leave one a bit rumpled.

"Back on old Earth, long before civilisation began, people had no verbal communication skills," said the tour guide. Everyone followed her into a room with curved walls made of imitation stone. She gestured to the painted cave walls. "As cave-dwellers slowly gave their primitive sounds meaning, they likewise gave significance to their primitive sketches, and used them to record their history. Accordingly, a man could illustrate events on the cave walls using charcoal or dyes made from crushed fruits."

The next room showed a toga-clad man writing on a stone tablet with a carved reed.

"Cuneiform was the first example of a written script," the guide said, gesturing to the wall, upon which someone had carved row after row of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal slashes.

The Doctor slipped on his glasses to examine the cuneiform writing, but after a moment he snorted. "Someone's idea of a joke! Literally. It's a dirty joke, originating in Sumeria."

"Let me guess. You're the one who told the joke to the Sumerian king, yeah?" Sinead smirked.

"Do you really think I'd stoop so low?" He paused and then winked at her. "Actually, Rose is the one who told the joke to the king. She must've heard it from Jack, because Mickey would've thought that was physically impossible."

Sinead frowned. "Rose? Mickey? Old companions of yours?"

The Doctor looked at her, startled. "But I've told you about them. Must have! Hundreds of times. Rose . . . you know, Rose. My Rose? Mickey the idiot. No?"

"You've mentioned Captain Jack once or twice, but not the others."

"But that's impossible," he murmured, feeling a sharp pang of guilt. He'd promised he wouldn't forget about Rose, that he wouldn't sweep her memory under the rug, and yet here he had a companion who'd been with him more than a year, but had no idea who Rose Tyler was.

With a sigh, he hurried to put his glasses away and catch up with the group.

They strolled past robotic men writing on parchment, then paper. Quills evolved into fountain pens and then typewriters. The next room featured the printing press. The walls contained shelves of antique books, with several open on display in protective glass cases. The Doctor leaned over one, squinting to read the tiny text. After a moment he made an astonished face. "Oh. Oh, oh, oh! But, this is brilliant! A Gutenberg Bible! Genuine, and in exquisite condition. The rarest book that exists in this time period! I'd like to know how they got their hands on it."

Beside it, presented with equal reverence, lay a menu from a restaurant.

Minutes later, they passed by an exhibit of early lawmakers hard at work. The Doctor chortled at an animatronic Benjamin Franklin dressed in clothing from the wrong century.

"I knew old Ben," he murmured to Sinead, "and d'you know, I think he'd rather like wearing jeans and trainers! He certainly seemed impressed by Jack's blue jeans."

"They're only a couple centuries off," she whispered back. "Could be worse."

"What, you mean like Neil Armstrong wearing scuba gear instead of a spacesuit?" He pointed to the next exhibit, which showed astronauts using radios to communicate with the planet below. Sure enough, the lead figure stepping out of the space craft wore a skin-tight wetsuit, complete with heavy oxygen tanks strapped to his back, bright yellow flippers on his feet, and matching goggles on his face. The Doctor and Sinead couldn't hold back their snickering.

"Well, least it's got oxygen," she pointed out. "And it does sort of look like a bio-suit."

"About a century too soon for that, and besides, it isn't a bio-suit, it's a wetsuit." The Doctor shook his head. "As soon as this tour's over, we need to have nice chat with whoever's in charge here."

"Actually, we'll need to make a run for the TARDIS when we're done here," she reminded him.

He made a face. "Bother. I'd forgotten about that. Having entirely too much fun here."

As the tour guide droned on, they passed a glass case holding an Edwardian brass and wood telephone, a classic radio from the 1930s, a set of walkie-talkies from the 1980s, and an array of wafer-thin mobile phones.

"However," the guide continued, "these forms of communication lasted only until the advent of something called the Internet, at which point people could use their personal computers to download information from anywhere in the world. By means of the Internet, people could also communicate with anyone on the planet, and so these more primitive methods fell into immediate disuse."

The Doctor could hardly keep a straight face. Sinead nudged him. "Don't you dare say a word. If you cause a commotion, they'll toss us out on the street and we'll be arrested. M'not gonna become a concubine just so you can correct a few mistakes!"

"A few. . . ? These people wouldn't know proper history if I took them back in the TARDIS and showed them!" But he folded his arms and followed the group without protest.

For a few minutes the Doctor tuned out the tour guide's words and let his mind wander. It certainly seemed odd that he would find so many reminders of his time with Rose, here in a museum on a world they'd never been to. Before he'd regenerated, he and Rose and Jack had spent time in the late 18th century with Benjamin Franklin . . . and he'd never forget how lovely Rose had looked in that wide-skirted calico gown. With Mickey tagging along, they'd witnessed the first moon landing. And they'd visited ancient Sumeria just a few weeks before he'd lost Rose.

So many memories of Rose in one place. . . it couldn't be a coincidence. Not with the alarming tug of diverging timelines casting a shadow over everything. He would have to keep a sharp eye out if he wanted to prevent a catastrophe.

"Once people began abandoning old Earth," the guide said, "interstellar communication became vital. They developed the star-wave for visual communications, though a slight lag in timing could not be overcome. Within planetary systems, the old-fashioned newspaper made a comeback. People could send and receive non-urgent news, fiction, and even personal advertisements, without wasting vital energy."

The Doctor slipped on his glasses to examine the newspapers displayed. A few were old enough that they did not belong in this section of the museum. The Ayrshire Post, for example, certainly did not come from any colony world! But the later ones did. Many had clever three-dimensional engravings or embedded sound bites.

"New New York mayoral election ends with a landslide victory for Edwin Brovlocc Alpha-di'Shiin," he read aloud. "Ha! I remember that. He only won because the opposing candidates all came down with the Martian influenza."

"Doctor," Sinead called.

"Just a minute." He crouched to see one of the lower papers. "Invasion by Ice Warriors. Three million citizens of Gamma Epsilon killed. We tried to stop that, me and Rose."

"Doctor!"

As he straightened, he noticed that the tour group had gone ahead, leaving them alone at this end of the room. He turned with a frown to find Sinead standing in front of a newspaper tacked behind a sheet of glass. "What is it?"

"Didn't you say you knew someone named Rose?" Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

"Yes, so I did. It's a bit of a long story, though. I'll tell you all about her once we're back at the TARDIS." He waved his hand vaguely at the retreating tour group. "They're gonna leave without us."

"You really should see this. Personal advertisements, from Earth."
"Oh? I noticed that some of these papers are older than they're supposed to be. Probably quite valuable." He walked over and stood beside her. The prescient feeling increased to a tingle at the back of his neck. He scratched the spot and glanced about the room. The tour group had disappeared; they were alone with the exhibits. No invading aliens, or monsters, nothing dangerous at all. Just a lot of ancient newspapers. Still, he kept on guard, and only gave Sinead half his attention.

"Personals. From London," she clarified, grinning.

He looked at her with a blank face. "As I said: yes, so?"

"A personal ad, in a thousand-year-old London newspaper. . . ." She paused, and her smile turned teasing. ". . . For you."

He stared at her. Then blinked. "What?"

"Look! See for yourself." Barely able to contain her mirth, she gestured to the ancient English paper. "Just above the crossword."

She was only winding him up, but the Doctor felt a weight on his chest, hampering every breath. What could be so perilous about a newspaper advertisement? Gathering his courage, he ran a finger down the column, careful not to touch the security glass. "Ah, here we go."

To the Doctor—
Nothing's impossible!
Waiting for you,
Harbour Drive, Cardiff Bay
—Forever, Rose

The Doctor's glasses clattered to the floor.

(To Be Continued. . . .)

Author's Notes: A lot of people helped me to make this story cohesive; I must say thank you to Dame Ruth, Humansrsuperior, Little Zink, Aligoestonz, and the writers at A Teaspooner's Workshop.