Title: Things to Do When the Universe Ends

Rating: 15

Setting: Post-season 4 for Ten, way after Chosen for Dawn.

Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Dawn and a couple of OC's.

Disclaimer: They're not mine. They're not Morag's either.

Summary: The Doctor's had odd companions before. Still, it's not every day you pick up an anthromorphic embodiment of a principle sitting around at the end of the Universe, is it? Now, if only he could get over the feeling that SHE picked HIM up.

Author's Notes: Written by myself and Morag MacPherson cliffhanger style, desperately trying to stump each other. There will be panic, there will be chaos and there will be constant swearing at the other author.

Part 1 - The End and What Comes Next

(by Morag MacPherson)

The Doctor couldn't help himself.

Really, he couldn't.

From the moment that the Master had told him that this was the end of the universe, the Doctor had experienced this compulsion to see if there wasn't by any chance a little something more. He just couldn't wrap his five dimensional thinking around the idea of the universe having a terminal point. Not without, well, at the very least, he had to see it for himself.

What was he expecting? The White and Black Guardians, wiping down the tables and turning out the lights? He didn't really know. It all came to a head when he wound up getting drunk on rice wine with Lao Tzu and his flatulent water buffalo. Lao Tzu pronounced that a thing which occurs unobserved doesn't really happen at all, and that if the universe was truly destined to end, than who would be a better witness to its demise than His Most Eminent Timeliness*?

Thus it was that the Doctor headed to the end of the universe with an uncharacteristic (in this incarnation anyway) five o'clock shadow. Also, while wearing his blue slacks with his brown jacket. And smelling, ever so vaguely, of alcohol and methane. But after all, it wasn't like there was going to be anyone there to see him.

Except there she was, sitting in the black of the firmament.

The Doctor stopped cold in the threshold of the TARDIS. "Who in the blazes are you?"

She looked down at her own body before answering him. "I'm the anthropomorphic embodiment of a dimensionally transcendent physical constant." Now she looked up at him. "I think they used to call me Dawn."

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*The Doctor was never sure if Lao Tzu gave him this title in earnest or if the old coot was making fun of him, but suspected the latter.