Title: Here at the end of the world, we learn how to dance
Author: Kate's Master, aka Emma
Summery: A few of the moments, thoughts and feelings that Journey's End didn't quite get round to.
Disclaimer: I am not actually a 19 year old vet student. I'm in fact a nationally owned corporation, all by my self. Doctor Who, is, therefore, mine. Insert appropriate sarcasm here.

Authors Notes: I guess this technically goes beyond Journey's End now, since it takes place after the end of the episode. But it's very tightly woven in with what happened, specifically one line, when the Doctor asks Sarah Jane about Luke, and she replies "It's a long story". I like to think that he gets to hear it.

Sorry it's taken me so long to get this up. Uni and exams and life in general are pulling me away from my writing far more than I'd like. But I shall persevere!

He stood in front of the old Victorian house and regarded it thoughtfully. From the outside, it looked like nothing special – garden slightly overgrown, an old, evidently much used and abused car in the driveway, the higgledy-piggledy roof. Nestled between the semi-detached estate houses that surrounded it, however, it stood out proudly. Different. Special.

He smiled slightly, and walked up to the front door.

Before he had even raised his hand to knock, however, it was wrenched open, and a teenage boy dressed in jeans and t-shirt stumbled to a sudden halt, discovering his path blocked. Another boy skidded to a stop, and, finally, a dark haired girl barrelled into the back of him, let out an exasperated cry, and peered round to see what had caused the collision.

"Hello!" the Doctor said brightly, recovering first.

"Hello." the second boy replied calmly, while the girl and the first boy continued to stare curiously.

Footsteps on the stairs behind the three teens announced the arrival of a fourth person, and, a moment later, a far more familiar face appeared. Sarah Jane stared at him, shock apparent on her face.

"Doctor?"

"You said it was a long story." he said by way of a greeting, over the heads of the three figures in the doorway. "I've got time. If you're not too busy, that is. I can go away."

She smiled at him, the same smile from years back, when he had first taken her with him, and, for a moment, it was as if no time at all had passed.

"Come in. I'll make us some tea."

Two minutes later, and he was settled in a chair in Sarah Jane's kitchen, looking around curiously, and being regarded equally curiously by the three teens, who had apparently abandoned whatever their original destination had been in favour of this new arrival.

"Are you really the Doctor?" blurted out the girl finally, after several moments silence.

"Doctor, meet Maria Jackson, my neighbour, and Clyde Langer." intercepted Sarah, indicating to the girl and the boy who had first opened the door. "Maria, Clyde, the Doctor. And…well, I suppose you've sort of met. This is Luke, my son."

Luke held out a hand, surprisingly formal for a fourteen year old, and the Doctor shook it gravely.

"Have you got your Tardis with you?" asked the other boy, Clyde, enthusiastically, boggling at the Doctor as if he were about to grow a second head.

"The Tardis? Yes! Yes, of course. I left it by a park."

"In which city?" asked Sarah dryly, carrying over a tray of mugs. The girl – Maria? – leapt to her feet and rooted round in one of the cupboards, reappearing with a tin of biscuits, but the Doctor found his attention kept returning to the boy Sarah Jane called her son.

"You're wrong." he said, suddenly, and the other three around the table immediately looked defensive. "Sorry. That was rude. I'm very rude this time, Sarah. Rose was always telling me off about it. And Do…and Donna."

He could see the question on Sarah's lips, but he couldn't face it, not yet, and so he leapt to his feet, approaching Luke.

"It's like…time doesn't fit around you." he mused aloud, reaching for his screwdriver while the other two teenagers watched him slightly warily, and Luke just looked up impassively.

"You've got the body of a fourteen year old. All hormones and gawkyness – god, it's an awful age – but your mind…"

He switched on the screwdriver and held it in front of the boy's eyes.

"What are you doing?" the girl began sharply, half standing up, but Sarah Jane waved her back down and looked on, ever trusting.

"Show him your stomach, Luke." she said instead, and Luke obediently pulled up his t-shirt.

"No belly button! Oh, this is just great! You should be human – even my screwdriver says you're human, and you can't fool my screwdriver, but at the same time…"

"Perhaps you'd like to hear the story now, Doctor?" interrupted Sarah with a smile. "It really began about a year ago…"

"And Maria's dad sent Mr Smith a virus he borrowed from NASA, totally wiped his hard drive, and there we go. Good as new." concluded Sarah some time later. The tea was cold, and the biscuits were all gone, and, between the four people sitting around him, the Doctor had been bought up-to-date with the past year of his old friend's life.

He looked across at her now, smiling proudly.

"Sarah Jane Smith. Look at you! I was right. You don't need me at all. And you three!" he turned to the teenagers. "Just…fantastic. All of you!"

"Would you like to meet Mr Smith?" asked Sarah Jane while the teenagers smiled at each other, proud and slightly smug, and then they were off, thundering upstairs even as the Doctor began to nod his head.

They passed another hour poking round the attic, unearthing treasures and telling the stories behind them. Mr Smith was poked, prodded, questioned, and, at last, almost reluctantly, admired.

Eventually, however, even the wonders of Sarah Jane's attic began to run out, and they sat round once more, the Doctor this time bringing up adventures from years before, when a young journalist had first stowed away in his ship.

Maria, eyes alight with a fire he had seen on so many faces before, lent back on her elbows and sighed at the ceiling.

"I wish I could see it." she sighed, tugging warily at a loose strand of hair. "Don't suppose you're allowed to tell us when humans first start really exploring other planets?"

Sarah Jane laughed, and Luke launched into an explanation of exactly why it was currently not possible to delve so far into space with a living crew. The Doctor, however, looked thoughtful.

"Who says you can't?" he asked slowly.

Sarah Jane looked at him hard. "Doctor…" she began warningly, as the three teens sat up a little straighter.

"I could take you – don't look at me like that Sarah Jane, you can come too and make sure everyone survives. Just for an afternoon, mind. Nice, quiet planet."

Three heads turned to look imploringly at Sarah. She, in turn, looked from Clyde to Luke to Maria, and, finally, to the Doctor.

"Alright then." she conceded. "One trip. But Doctor, I'm warning you. I know how your nice, quiet planets tend to turn out. If anything happens to harm any one of them, then I swear there is nowhere in this universe where you will be safe from me."

Perhaps the gravity of her threat made him slightly more careful, perhaps the Tardis herself realised that today was not a day for mis-adventure. Either way, they somehow landed on a small planet apparently devoid of any life more intelligent than the small, three winged bird-type creatures that flocked to investigate the newcomers.

Sarah Jane could only smile as she watched her three charges step out onto the slightly blue sand, each burying their feet into it as if the process were a religious ritual. The beach stretched as far as they could see in either direction, while behind them great dunes rose out of the sand. The sea sparkled red, and the sky above their heads was a never-ending green.

"How is it," remarked Sarah Jane, sitting on the sand next to the Doctor while the teenagers splashed in the water, "that we never made it anywhere this quiet? Or am I tempting fate by speaking too soon?"

The Doctor grinned. "Nah. In about 30,000 years, those birds will evolve far enough to be counted as intelligent beings under the Shadow Proclamation, and even then this planet survives as one of the most peace-ridden in the universe. Terribly polite."

"It was a good choice. You can't get much more alien that red seas and green skies."

"No point going somewhere too like earth, if we have to be safe and boring."

"Sometimes, safe and boring happens to be just what the Doctor ordered."

"Not this one, I promise you."

Silence fell for a few minutes, broken only by the calls of the three-winged birds and the shrieks from those in the water.

"Doctor," began Sarah Jane, slowly, after a moment, "What happened? Where's Donna?"

"Home." said the Doctor heavily after another, less comfortable, silence. "She went home."

"Why? I mean, she was…you two were so good together. That thing, with the other you, the metacrisis…she was…well, she nearly was you."

"I know."

"Then why did she leave?"

"She didn't leave. She…I took her home. Having so much inside her head, all that knowledge…it was killing her. So I took it out. Except for it to work, to prevent it all coming back to her, I had to take her memories too. Anything to do with me, or the Tardis, or anything like that. If she ever remembers, if anything ever happens to remind her, then her brain will burn up and she'll die. That's one of the reasons I came, actually, to warn you. If you see her, out in the street, anywhere, then you can't act like you know her. Just pass her by, like you would any other person."

"But she's not any other person, is she." sighed Sarah, covering the Doctor's hand with her own and squeezing it gently. "I'm sorry, Doctor. I saw…I know how much she meant to you."

He looked across at her, the careworn face, the streaks of grey in her hair, and saw the girl he'd first met so long ago still hiding behind it all.

"You all mean that much to me, Sarah." he reminded her softly. "Every one of you. You, Harry, the Brigadier…and all the others, before and after. Jack's gone back to Torchwood, and Martha and Mickey went with him. You should pay them a visit sometime, introduce them to your marvellous computer, they'd like that."

"And Rose?"

"She had to go back to the other universe. The new me that Donna created…he needed her more than I did. And one universe would never be big enough for the two of us. He's how I was when I first met her, and she can fix that. And in return, she gets him. The metacrisis worked both ways, so he was half human, with a normal lifespan and all my memories. He can give her everything she wanted from me."

"So you're on your own again."

It was a statement, not a question.

"Yes. Well, for now. Someone will come along."

He eyed the three in the water with a half smile.

"Maybe one of them – they're definitely keen. And already partly trained."

Sarah Jane laughed. "Don't you dare."

And the sombre mood was broken, the three returning wet and triumphant from the water to engage the adults in a game of hide and seek in the dunes, interrupted by an assault on the Doctor for using his sonic screwdriver – definitely cheating, Clyde declared, until, eventually, the sun began to fall, and they returned, albeit extremely reluctantly, home.

"Come again." Sarah Jane said, standing outside the Tardis doors yet again to say her goodbyes. "Any time you feel like it. It's not good for you, rattling around in this old thing on your own for too long without seeing a friendly face."

The Doctor smiled fondly at her.

"You've turned into a mother, Sarah Jane."

She paused, considering for a moment. "Yes. Yes, I suppose I have."

They hugged, and she waited until the Tardis had fully disappeared before turning to leave, joining Luke, Maria and Clyde, waiting at the park entrance for her.

Her funny, mish-mashed little family. She hugged them all tightly, just for a moment, though Clyde squirmed uncomfortably, and Luke managed to bang his nose on Maria's forehead. To lose them…it would be unbearable. And yet the Doctor bore it, day in, day out, continued to take on the strays and stowaways who needed him slightly more than anyone else, knowing deep down, she was sure, the pain each one of them would cause him.

Just as she knew, not so deep down, not anymore, how she would be hurt, how the three teenagers she loved so dearly would grow up in a very small number of years, leave to find their own lives, their own futures. Futures that would involve aliens and dangers and whole lot more running. Futures that could well take them away from her for good.

"Come on," she said, keeping her arms around her young charges and swallowing her thoughts, because what good did they do anyway, really? "Let's go home."

And, in the back of her mind, the unsaid plea. Please. In the end, let's always, always go home.

Far far longer than the previous chapter, I know. Originally it stopped much sooner, but then my mind got carried away, and I couldn't leave it unfinished. I'm desperate for Luke and the Doctor to meet onscreen, to see the reactions of each to the other. When the opportunity to have a go at it myself reared its head, I couldn't resist.

Reviews are love.

One more to go. Whenever it may come!