Last Orders

by RobertSaysThis

The deadliest creatures will hide behind laughter and jokes. The strongest things in the universe will know not to speak their names. There was a Doctor who was not quite the Doctor. This is the story of how she began to end. (The 11th in a series about a different 13th Doctor, who had the same face but lived in a bleaker world.)

2. Chapter 2

The Doctor was screaming like a broken person, and all of time had broken around her now. Along with her two companions she'd seen Ancient Rome destroyed, a hydrogen bomb exploding above it before even Julius Caesar had been born .

But the real past still existed anyway, somehow. It remained part of a cramping spacetime, which struggled to accommodate thousands of timelines that should never have happened at all.

Reality was collapsing. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that the Doctor had fallen apart as well. She loomed ancient and horrifying against the console's pine, no longer even bothering to pretend she could be human.

"You're scaring me!" Chris cried as something within the TARDIS groaned.

"You're scaring her!" said Chris's mum, ineffectively. You're scaring me. We just saw a nuclear bomb go off, and it's you who's scaring me!"

The Doctor laughed, a soft, hollow sound that didn't fit with someone so full of rage. Around her the TARDIS was bellowing like a storm giving birth to machines./

"Funny, isn't it?" she said. "Nuclear weapons. How they're always there beneath the surface, doing nothing. You forget they're there. And so you give the world a little prod, because nothing too bad's ever happened before…"

She laughed again, somehow even more quietly than before. Somewhere far away a bell was tolling, ringing against the howls and her grin.

"And the prod doesn't do anything!" laughed the Doctor. So you prod again, then again; 'cause it's not like the prodding is doing anything, right? So you keep poking and poking until one day everything BREAKS"—

She was roaring now and Chris was crying. Rain was splattering through the TARDIS in a way the Doctor had said was impossible, a downpour beneath the thunder and the bells—

"IT BREAKS!" the Doctor shouted again, "and just for a second you see the thing you've done! You see it and you beg, because it's just one little mistake, right? And now you know and you'll never make it again, but you're begging to a thing that has more power than a rising sun, and it swallows you—"

–The bell rang out a final bong–

—"and nothing's the same again," said the Doctor as she collapsed down to the ground.

All noise vanished as the TARDIS came to a stop. All that was left was the sloshing of the fallen rain, making a musty smell as it soaked through the rugs on the floor.