Written for 31 Days on Livejournal.
Title: Nostalgia
Day/Theme: July 2, 2011 - The past and the present overlap like double exposure on film
Series: Doctor Who
Character/Pairing: The Doctor
Rating: G
A/N : I didn't have any particular Doctor in mind when I wrote this, except that he's probably set post-Time War.
The Doctor hates to visit the same place twice. It's probably a Time Lord thing, really, though he never got the chance to ask and never will now. It does seem to tie into how he perceives time, and his amazing memory.
What happens when he visits a place twice is that he can see how everything used to be, will be. He sees the remnants of what used to be there, observes the beginning of what he saw in the future. The pictures run alongside each other in his brain, confusing him with spectres of friends and enemies long dead, unborn.
They're quite clearly not real, of course. Just - distracting, and he can forgive his Companions if they think he seems a little distant on those trips.
Visiting the same time is fine of course, but that was a given considering how large the universe is, was, will be. He keeps the repeat journeys to a minimum, and claims boredom if questioned.
Earth, too, seems to be immune from the strange overlap, if only because the planet changes so much that there is little familiarity for ghosts to cling to.
Perhaps that is why he likes it so much.