for oncoming_storms: Deja Vu

"You can't do this! It doesn't have to end this way!"

BLAM.

There's pain and it's blinding and he collapses backwards. Martha screams. Her hand goes to his chest, and he feels weak and burning and weak and---

"You don't have to do this," Martha's voice is significantly calmer, but she's so much calmer in these sorts of situations. All that medical training has paid off.

"Oh, but I do." His hand rises up, and a button on a red cylinder is pushed.

"We'll get it right next time."

+

Something is wrong with the world.

He can feel it.

Something's wrong with the way the trees are blowing, with the way the air feels. It's wrong. It's familiar, but since he's never been on this street before it can't be, but it is. The briskness of the November air bites his face with an extra sting of wrong.

He knows wrong well. He's fought wrong, and abandoned loved ones to terrible fates, all because of wrong.

"You all right, Doctor?" Martha's voice cuts through the haze. It's a machete to the proverbial jungle of wrong.

A bike rider zips through traffic, and the Doctor already knows that a newspaper will fall out of his bag. It does, landing five feet away on the pavement. It flops and lies there like a stick of butter on a skillet, fat and sizzling in the wrong of the world.

(  He steps forward and picks it up. It feels like it should burn, but it doesn't, and he doesn't know why he thinks it should. )

Muse: The Doctor (Ten)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 3,128