Notes: Dark Doctor. Drabble. Also serves as a headcanon for my DarkTen muse.
Nightmares
The Doctor doesn't sleep much; but when he does, he dreams.
His dreams are filled with terrified, painful screams; cries of Exterminate!"; whole planets—his planet—burning.
At other times, he dreams of those he once knew and are long since gone. Romana, Peri, Tegan, Adric, Grace, Ian, Barbra. …The list goes on. They accuse him with harsh, silent glares and angry words as they close in around him. "You left us!" they cry. "Just dumped us off in the middle of nowhere when you tired of us."
"You murdered us!" Adric and Romana's faces swim before him, mere shades of their former selves They're barely there, and their voices are like the hiss of a snake. And, in more ways than one, they're right. His Fifth self more or less did nothing and let Adric die; he'd had no choice but to destroy Gallifrey—and his species, his friends and family—during the War.
Lately, however, he dreams of the Wolf. Instead of the Ood, it is she who comes for him—a golden goddess of Time foretelling nothing but death and destruction. The Bad Wolf.
(The Guardians, he thinks, have nothing on her.)
And still she wears his human lover's face. Her brown eyes shine gold, her expression chilling. It's disconcerting, terrifying.
But then, Love and Death are more alike than people think. The only difference is that Death is sometimes kinder.
Whenever he wakes, his respiratory bypass kicks in and snatches the breath from him before he can scream.
He never does go back to sleep after that.