Title: Family of Mine
Fandom: Doctor Who
Author:
strange_charmed aka
kilodaltonCharacters: The Doctor (10th), The Family of Blood, (mentions of Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, Joan Redfern and Martha Jones)
BetaBabe:
zazie11Wordcount: 300
Summary: The Family of Blood considered eternal life to be a gift ... but the Doctor knew better.
A/N: For the challenge at
who_contest, prompt "Family"
It wasn’t a gift, not really. Curses can come in pretty packaging, after all. But under the façade, there is only dust: an eternity of wishes and dreams burned into submission by the smoldering ash of regret, then crushed by the insufferable stranglehold of time.
A long life isn’t always a better one.
Time is an enchanting curse. It is a golden tangle, glowing luminous with possibilities. But it doesn’t heal all wounds. Instead, it wraps tighter and tighter, cutting and burning and never, ever yielding its endless constriction. Eventually, time always wins.
Everything else withers away. Everything dies. Everything that matters.
And in the end...
Rose had once tried to give Jack a gift, albeit one she couldn’t control. It was an attempt to right a wrong that never should have been committed.
Well, so was this, in a manner of speaking.
There was no-one else in the eerily quiet field that night, just him and them. Him, wearing the wrong suit, the wrong name. Them, wearing the wrong bodies. He thought of the wrong blonde in love with the wrong man. The degradation of companion to servant. Young boys caught in a war of his own unintended making.
He thought of the life he could never have, would never have. Pretty packaging, that.
Time spun around all of them, twisting tighter and tighter, like a noose.
In the distance they could still hear the crackle of fire engulfing the village, see the glow from the slow burn of the schoolhouse. And the slow burn in their captor’s dark eyes. There was no-one left.
No one to take a stand, no one to stop him...
Tough.
In the end, you just get tired. Tired of watching everything turn to dust.
They walked in hushed silence.
The fires raged on.
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