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The children fussed around her and well-meaning friends brought food and wreaths and advice, and she told them all she was fine, honestly; and she really was, until a week or so after the funeral when she caught herself setting two places for dinner, and then she sat down on the kitchen floor and cried as if she'd never stop. That night, sleeping fitfully in a bed that was much too big and empty, she dreamt about things she hadn't thought of in decades - walking with monsters and kings; Vicki dragging them off to the next adventure; Susan dancing in a classroom when she thought no-one was watching; Ian young again, shy and uncertain the first time she kissed him. If she dreamed of the Doctor, she didn't remember it.
Weeks went by, proving right all those infuriating people who had told her that life goes on. It was grey and drizzling the morning she took flowers to the graveyard, knowing that Ian would have teased her for coming out in the rain when she knew he'd never cared for flowers anyway. The thought made her smile, just a little, as if she was trying to remember how.
She knew it was there before she saw it; a tug at her mind, like the phantom pain of a missing limb (oh, Ian…) and Barbara realised that her heart was still beating after all as it began to race.
There was a police box, incongruous to the point of absurdity, sitting outside the church as if it had sprouted there, and for the first time in very many years she forgot the aches and pains of age and started to run.
Two endings:
Her children and grandchildren never know what happened that day in the graveyard, that she was offered the universe and turned it down. There is so very much they don't know about Barbara that it makes her laugh to think of it. It dismays the young, she thinks, to see old people laugh when they don't get the joke.
She dies a few years after her husband, slipping away in her sleep. Clearing out the house after the funeral, their eldest daughter finds a picture of her parents from before they were married - some sort of period piece, clothes and style faked up to look Victorian. In her mother's handwriting, London, 1887 - remember, Ian? Susan puts the picture to one side, thinking that she never did understand their sense of humour and their private jokes. She doesn't notice the old man in the background, the one who was at the funeral, who left lilies on the grave and walked away without a word.
Or…
The mind plays tricks. Surely, Barbara thinks, he used to be older? In her head Susan is forever sixteen and dancing, and her grandfather is laughing to himself over some private joke, capricious and sly and gentle and old. It's a shock to realise she's caught up with him.
Steven and Dodo don't know what to make of her, or what she is to him. The two of them remind her of her grandchildren, all squabbles and affection. Her real grandchildren will manage without her. One day, she promises herself, I will go back. Yes, I will go back.
He is fussing over the scanner, clucking his tongue and muttering to himself. She leans against him and reads the co-ordinates, as she is learning how to do. They are too far from Earth to see its star. Once she would have thought of that as far from home.
Well! he says, Shall we see what's out there, hmm? And she is holding out her hand for his before he has finished asking.