Wilfred Mott led the Doctor, Rose, and Tony back to the minibus full of the very talkative friends he had used to seek out the Doctor.
Minnie, the flirtatious and outrageous woman in red, gushed sweetness the moment she saw Tony.
"So who is this young man then, eh?" she said fondly when he took a seat opposite her. Rose and the Doctor sat in the seats behind him.
"Tony, ma'am. Nice to meet you." He extended his hand and she took it, looking impressed at his manners. "That's my sister," he nodded to Rose. "And I guess he's my brother-in-law. I live with them."
"You're married?" Minnie asked the Doctor, scandalized.
He exchanged a look with Rose, who leaned against him rather possessively so he could put his arm around her shoulders. "Yes, this is my wife, Rose."
Rose smiled pleasantly at the woman, shooting a small surprised look up at the Doctor. It was the first time the Doctor had called her his wife and she was immensely pleased to hear him say the words.
"Now Tony, how are you enjoying school this year?" Minnie asked in a decidedly grandmotherly voice.
"I'm homeschooled," he told the woman. "We travel a lot, so I get to learn all over the place." Rose was impressed with his ability to spin a believable story so quickly. Her mind drifted a bit as Tony and the woman made small talk and the Doctor chatted with Wilfred. She let her eyes wander over the familiar London sights the minibus drove past.
In truth, Tony's education had fallen a bit by the wayside since they had arrived on Gallifrey. Rose felt a pang of regret at the fact. Tony had worked through all of the academic material she had brought for him, and he was well past what he would need to know for his A-levels, so she had given him some of the texts she had packed from her uni days.
Even though she'd pursued a degree in physics, she'd had to take courses in all of the pure sciences and many maths courses. While Rose was bright and found that as she stretched the once disused muscle of her mind on a more regular basis she was able to make sense of fairly complex concepts, but she did not have the innate and instant grasp of every subject the way Tony did. Rose had forced herself through pure and discrete maths by sheer force of will, and she was still intimidated by organic chemistry. Tony, however, seemed almost bored with the ease with which he'd picked them up.
After a while, Wilf asked the driver to stop. He left the bus, the three travellers in tow, and ushered them into a small café.
"Why this café and not one of the other fifteen we passed, Wilfred?"
"I just like this one," he said, holding the door open.
Before long, they sat around a low table in the trendy-coloured, squashy leather chairs Tony had pulled them to. Rose sipped a latte; she'd not had proper one for a desperately long time and had missed the milky beverage.
"Now, just who are you?" the Doctor asked, looking at Wilf seriously, lips pursed.
The older man looked confused. "I'm Wilfred Mott."
"No, Wilf, who are you that you could find me? People have waited hundreds of years to find me, but you managed it in a few hours." His voice was troubled.
"Just lucky, I suppose," Wilfred said simply.
The Doctor took a sip of his tea then let out a long breath. He turned to Tony. "Think you might like to pop over to the bookshop next door? For say, oh, ten minutes?"
Tony took the hint easily enough. "Sure. Can I have ten quid?" he asked with a grin. "Might find something I want."
The Doctor, who rarely carried cash of any sort, actually did have ten pounds somewhere in one of his pockets this day. He reached deeply into his jacket pocket, far more deeply than his arm should be able to reach and, after a moment, extracted the note and handed it to Tony. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," he cautioned.
"Oh yeah, like that rules out much," Tony said as he walked away, shoving the money in his pocket.
"Be good!" Rose called to the retreating back of the boy.
He raised his hand in acknowledgement as he left the café and turned left towards the bookshop.
"I don't know why I keep meeting you, Wilfred," he began. Changing his mind, he got to the meat of the matter. "Everything keeps pointing to you, and there's one message I hear every time. That I'm going to die."
"No," Rose said softly, reaching over and taking his hand. "No you're not."
"I thought you could change. When I saw you before, you said your people could change, like, your whole body."
"I can still die," he said sombrely. Rose looked sideways to meet his eyes, pain in her own. "If I'm killed before regeneration, then I'm dead. Even then, even if I change, it still feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and I'm dead."
"Then we won't let that happen," Wilf said certainly.
"I'm with him," Rose agreed.
"Why do you think you're going to die, anyway?" the old soldier asked. "Did you go ahead in time and look yourself up?"
The Doctor shook his head. With an almost apologetic look at Rose, he explained. "Can't do that, jumping around in my own timeline. There's been a prophecy. That I'll die. He will knock four times, that's what it said. Knock four times and then…" His voice trailed off, leaving the remainder unsaid.
"Is that Donna?" Rose asked, looking out the window. The Doctor looked out and frowned and turned back to Wilfred, feeling rather manipulated.
"I'm sorry, but I had to try," he said, putting his hands up in his defense. "Can't you make her better? Bring back her memory?"
"Stop it," he said to Wilf.
"But you're so clever – can't you bring her memory back? Look, just go to her. Go on, just run across the street and say hello." The man's voice was very sad and pleading.
The Doctor's voice was firm as he replied. "If she ever remembers me, her mind will burn and she will die. I can't Wilf, I'm sorry." He felt the familiar sorrow well up in his chest.
"Who's that now?" Rose ask Wilf.
He turned, looked at the man who had stepped up beside Donna. "Shaun Temple, her fiancé. Getting married in the spring."
"Another wedding," the Doctor said, a bit amazed. Rose grinned at him, recalling the memory of what John had told her about meeting Donna the first time. "Hold on, she's not going to be called Noble-Temple, is she? That sounds like a tourist spot." Rose laughed softly at that.
"No," Wilf said, holding himself a bit more erect. "It's Temple-Noble."
The Doctor sighed. "Right. Is she happy, though? Is he nice?"
"Yeah, he's sweet enough," the man said a bit grudgingly. "Bit of a dreamer. And they've not got tuppence between them so all they have is this tiny little flat." His voice grew a bit distant. "And then sometimes… sometimes I see this look on her face, like she's so sad and she just can't remember why."
"She looks happy with him," Rose observed. "Big old smile like that."
"Could say the same about you, my girl," Wilf told Rose. "The pair of you, happy as you like, and I think I heard you say you're married! When did that happen?"
Rose and the Doctor exchanged a look. "There's a rather complicated answer to that," Rose said, smiling.
"Well congratulations, you two. You deserve it, after what you did saving the universe like that."
"Oh that was nothing," the Doctor said with false humility. Rose poked his upper arm and scowled at him playfully. "What?"
"We'd better be going to fetch Tony." Rose redirected the conversation.
"Yes. Unless there was something else?" the Doctor said, moving to stand from the seat.
"Yes," Wilf said, stopping them with a raised hand. His eyes were dark as he told the Doctor. "We've been having bad dreams. All of us. Dreams we can't remember, but it's all of us. There's something bad going on, Doctor. Something serious, and I needed to make sure you knew."
"Thank you, Wilfred." He stood and lifted Rose's coat off the back of her chair. He held it open for her before reaching for his own familiar, long coat.
"It was lovely to see you again, Wilf," Rose said, bending to place a friendly peck on the gruff old man's cheek. "Thank you for all your help last time. I never said."
"No trouble, my dear. Don't stay away so long next time, eh?"
"Of course not," the Doctor said, taking Rose's arm in his as they left the small, warm café.
The bookshop's entry door was just a few metres down the sidewalk from the café. As soon as the Doctor entered it, he smiled. It felt very much like his library; dark wood shelves, tables placed haphazardly, piled with books, and perfectly soft leather chairs for reading in. A man was running his hand down the spines of various books on one of the shelves, clearly reading their titles.
Tony was seated in one of the leather chairs at the higher, back section of the shop, a thin, blue, leather-bound volume in his hands.
"Macbeth," Rose read the title as they approached. "Bit deep for a ten year old."
"Oh but it's bloody magnificent,"
"Oi, don't swear," the Doctor chided him, coming up behind Rose.
"Sorry. But it is fantastic. Listen to this," he puffed out his chest and sat straighter in the chair, holding the book before him with one hand and read in his best attempt at stage projection. He stumbled over some of the words as he recited "The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them. Whither are they vanish'd?"
The Doctor responded in a highland burr, "Into the air; and what seem'd corporal melted, As breath into the wind…"
Tony grinned at him. "Do you know them all?"
"Oh yes. I may even have inspired some of them. Well, one of them. Well, a character. Or two." said the Time Lord, preening a bit.
"Okay, let me try…" He picked up one of the other nearby tomes and lifted it. He flipped to a page at random and ran his fingers down the text, eyes scanning it rapidly. "Where is but a humour or a worm."
The Doctor smiled broadly and replied without a missed beat, "Well, everyone can master a grief but he that has it."
"Congratulations, you're both brilliant," Rose said teasingly. "Did you want to get a book, Tony?"
He reached for the leather copy of Macbeth. "Don't bother, I've got a copy signed by the Bard himself in the TARDIS library."
"The TARDIS has a library?" Tony asked, eyes wide.
"Of course it does. Any proper time machine needs its own library," replied the Doctor as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Well, then, this can be the first book for the library in the new TARDIS." He picked up the book and walked to the cash to join the queue – it was nearly Christmas here, after all – the Doctor and Rose a few steps behind.
"You'll never get him out of the library now you've told him about it," Rose said, smiling. "He's a voracious reader."
"Good, because he's going to have a lot of reading to do."
"What do you mean?" She stopped, pulling him out of the main aisle, between a pair of tall book cases.
The Doctor looked at her, a bit confused. "Well, he needs an education, a proper Time Lord one I mean, and the Academy is long gone so I might as well teach him. He's two years behind already, not that it'll be hard for him to catch that up in no time"
Her jaw went slack and her eyes narrowed. "Don't you think you should have talked to me about this first?"
"It's occurring to me now that I might have done, yeah," he said, running a hand over the back of his neck in a nervous gesture. "Let's revisit this at a better time, eh?"
"Definitely," Rose said. "Don't imagine I'll forget."
"Oh, I wouldn't dare hope."
"Watch it."
They walked towards the front of the shop to wait for Tony when something caught his eye. The Doctor stopped and turned to a small display of books. Fighting the Future, said the bold title. A tall, well-dressed black man stood on the cover, looking powerful.
"Joshua Naismith," he read the author's name aloud. "That man, I know that man. The Ood showed me. He's connected to all of this somehow."
Rose picked up a copy of the book and turned. "Well, let's pick this up and get back to the TARDIS. Looks like we have some homework to do, eh?"
She reached into the pocket of her coat and was glad to find that, after having last worn it on Earth years ago and left it in the TARDIS during her years away, it still contained some pound notes. She handed the book to Tony along with the notes.
A short few minutes later, the three travelers stepped out onto the streets of London. Tony carried the small plastic bag from the bookshop and walked ahead. The Doctor took Rose's hand and they strolled along behind the boy, swinging their arms between them.
That evening, Rose and Tony were ensconced in the TARDIS library while the Doctor ran out to do something that he refused to tell them about. Tony had been struck silent in awe when he entered the room for the first time. Case upon case of books lined the walls of the room over two levels, and there were long, tall bookcases in a dozen rows resting in the middle of the floor of the first level. Near the fireplace was positioned a cluster of deep brown, studded leather chairs, a matching sofa facing the hearth, and a collection of small tables suitable for cups of tea, here and there. Desks from a dozen different eras were scattered here and there throughout the room, many of them stacked high with books. There were piles of bound tomes in a thousand colours and various on the floor beside bookcases and under desks.
The library was a bibliophile's dream, and Rose remembered her own reaction when she had first entered it. She hadn't been much of a reader, then, but had felt so at home in the warm room, with its hovering atmosphere of knowledge waiting to be breathed in like the scent of old paper and binding glue. She and the Doctor had spent many of their most memorable evenings in here, and Rose had fallen in love with the written word as much as she had the man who often read poems and plays to her, his theatrical nature bringing them to life before her.
Tony hadn't left the room since they had gotten back earlier in the day. He seemed to have claimed a chair and one of the small ottomans for himself, and was nearly finished Macbeth. The TARDIS had kindly lit a fire in the grate for them and the room danced with the light of the flames.
Rose sat at one of the many desks – her personal favourite, a Renaissance-era lacquered French piece with a velvet-upholstered chair – perusing the Naismith book for anything that might explain why this man was significant enough for alien telepaths to show him to the Doctor. All she had gathered so far was that he seemed like a right pompous git.
The deep clang of the TARDIS' cloister bell echoed around the library and Rose's head shot up. Tony, pulled from his book by the sound, looked over at her, worried. "What's that?"
"Means something bad's happening, or going to happen," she said. Together, they left for the console room.
"Rose," Tony said. "I think I know. I heard him, in my head. Come on!" He took off at a run, out the TARDIS doors and into the wasteland of rubble and construction materials in which they were still parked. Rose followed him in the low light, slowed by the need to dodge piles of detritus here and there.
They hadn't gone far when she saw the outline of Tony stop and bend down.
"He's unconscious," said the boy, bent over the prone form of the Doctor.