"Doctor, you can stop now!"

- Donna Noble

The screams of the Racnoss Empress rang through the tunnels. Below her rushing water flooded the deep pit where her children were, drowning them. The Doctor's face was hard, his eyes cold as he simply watched the destruction and pain he had brought. The deepest, darkest, most secret parts of his hearts filled with an almost savage glee at hearing somebody else voice the pain that was consuming him. To know that somebody else was hurting almost as much as he was. And it is this darker side of his personality that makes so many people afraid of the Doctor, this was the side of him that made entire species tremble in fear at the very sound of his name. And he thought they were right to fear him- what kind of man would commit genocide?

If Rose could see him at this moment, he knew she would be terrified.

She had been the one to stop him, to keep him from spinning out of control. But now she was gone and he was alone, hurting more than he could ever remember since he had been forced to condemn his entire species... and he no longer cared. The water rose higher and higher sweeping everything away in it's fury. Great bouts of fire and explosions surrounded him, and still he did not move.

The Racnoss teleported back to her spaceship and wearily he turned to leave, only to find that the stairs and ladder had been destroyed by falling rock, leaving him with no way to escape. As a man who had been running for so long he felt a spark of instinctive panic, for it was very likely he would die too fast to regenerate. But it soon faded- he was just so tired. Tired of losing. Tired of running. Tired of pretending to be strong. He had lived long enough. He would die in this lonely space beneath London, and he doubted anybody would weep for him because nobody would ever know. People were used to him disappearing on them.

He tossed aside the remote and slipped his hands in his pockets, taking a deep breath and letting the water rain down on him. Watching as the world fell apart in fire, water, and stone. The humans would have to save themselves this time.

Until now the doctor had been like a librarian, the keeper of thousands of stories of a thousand people, always there at their end but never ending himself. But eventually all stories must come to an end, so the man called the Doctor; a person who had watched the rise and fall of nations, changed the course of history with only a few words, a timeless hero who never aged and traveled through time and space in a blue box that was bigger on the inside, died alone in his misery. Too fast to regenerate, feeling bitter at the unfairness of his life.

He died because nobody was there to save him from the most destructive force in all of time and space: himself.

. . .

Sirens wailed along the street their lights flashing wildly. To one side a young officer was giving a report over a walkie-talkie. "All the evidence is that he managed to stop the creature- some sort of red spider. Blew up the base underneath the barrier, flooded the whole thing. Over."

A voice crackled through the radio, tinged with impatience, "and where is he now? Over."

"We found a body sir. Over," the young officer replied reluctantly.

"Is it him? Over." The voice over the radio was detached and business like, as though asking about the weather.

A stretcher was wheeled past and he gazed at it sadly, a red blanket concealing the body. It hit a bump and an arm slipped over the side; a man's arm covered in a brown suit, now hanging out in the open.

Unnoticed something slipped from the lifeless fingers, and as though in slow motion the Doctor's sonic screwdriver clattered to the ground. It laid abandoned and forlorn on the black asphalt as the stretcher was lifted into the back of an ambulance.

"I think so. Just didn't make it out in time." The young soldier paused, looking sadly at the stretcher, "the Doctor is dead. Must have happened too fast for him to regenerate. Over." He sounded as though he still couldn't quite believe it.

Off to the side Donna Noble looked on, listening to the conversation and feeling as though there was something very wrong about it. She didn't know who this mysterious doctor was so she didn't understand the feelings that were rushing through her at the news he was dead. Why did she care so much? She wondered what kind of doctor he had been, odd that the officer hadn't used the man's name.

. . .

Down in a dark street a mysterious blue box, abandoned and ignored, sat waiting for almost a year before it finally died just as her beloved Time Lord had. All the children of time felt it go just as they had felt it when the Doctor died, although both times they weren't exactly sure why their hearts hurt. Why it felt as though something essential and enormously important was now missing from the universe. None of them had any idea the Doctor was dead; a man so incredible he was only thought of as a story to all but the dreamers of impossible dreams. How could such a person ever exist? But it didn't really matter. Because after all, aren't we all stories in the end?

"You make them so afraid. When you began all those years ago, sailing off to see the Universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name. "Doctor." The word for healer and wise man throughout the Universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means "Mighty Warrior." How far you've come."

- River Song

My first completed Doctor Who FanFiction! Review?

I just remind myself that because of Donna this never happened, so I was okay with writing such a painful story.

Many thanks to The One Eyed Witch for doing a Beta read for me.