Black And White
by
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx

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Title: Black And White
Fandom: Doctor Who (2007)
Characters: The Tenth Doctor
Prompt: # 074 - Dark
Word Count: 3'085
Rating: T
Summary: There's a darkness aboard the TARDIS, something that shouldn't be there. But unfortunately for the Doctor, extracting it will be a tad harder than he first thought. How do you extract darkness when it's part of who you are?
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who. Thank RTD and the BBC.
Author's Notes: Set post-LotTL, so spoilers ahoy! AU (Let's pretend the whole 'Titanic crashes into side of TARDIS' thing never happened …) Two-parter ... or there abouts ... (grins)

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1.

There's a darkness, here.

I can feel it. I can sense it.

Something deep, something hidden. Shrouded in a veil of secrecy and coated by years' worth of accumulated lies and false promises, it follows me, watching me from the shadows, waiting for the moment when I slip up, when it can finally unleash its evil and drag me down with it.

I can sense it.

But I can't see it.

I begin to wonder if it's not just tiredness and overwork screwing with my brain. If it's not just the fact that I'm still trying to get used to being alone again that's making me paranoid …

And as soon as I think that thought, the darkness vanishes.

Maybe it's all in my head …

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I can't ignore the fact that I hate this. The TARDIS, bless her, tries to provide comfort, and for the most part she succeeds. I don't know what I'd do without her – I certainly wouldn't have lasted all these centuries had she not been here to keep me sane. Well … sane-ish, anyway.

But even so, the loneliness is becoming more and more overbearing, the more people I lose.

And I know, I know for a fact, that as the loneliness grows, so too does the darkness inside me.

At first, I was naive enough to believe it was a physical manifestation. Y'know, a living thing. I mean, sensing things is what I do best, even if I do say so myself. My sense of imbalance is profoundly acknowledged – I can almost always tell when something isn't right.

And I figured that, like every other time such an imbalance occurs, my unrest was being created by some nameless, faceless evil creature inside the TARDIS, bent on conquering some nameless, faceless planet or other in a vain attempt to secure personal glory and self satisfaction.

Wait, though …

Oh dear … nameless, faceless planet … that's not like me. That's not like me at all.

You see? My naivety made me search the TARDIS from top to bottom, from left to right and all of the diagonals in between, searching for something that could be responsible for the darkness I felt … but all the time, I was directly on top of my unease.

Because it's me. The darkness that's causing my teeth to ache so badly I want to pull them out, causing my skin to bristle constantly, causing the hairs on my arms to stand on end … it's all coming from me.

Nothing in any Universe can ever be called nameless or faceless (well, unless the Wire is involved, in which case 'faceless' would pretty much fit the bill), and yet through my tiredness of fighting, through my reluctance to face the Universe alone again, I'm growing cold. I'm becoming reluctant to see the wonders of the worlds and blurt names out to innocent bystanders in a grand show of impeccable knowledge.

And I can no longer clearly distinguish the differences between good and evil. The barrier between the two is blurring.

Things aren't black and white, anymore.

They never were, but I was too caught up in my need to travel and marvel and astound to notice. I praised myself on being one of a select minority who could always see the bigger picture but … really, I've been completely ignoring it for all these years.

The races I've wiped out, the planets I've destroyed, the homes I've demolished, the lives I've taken away … how many of them really deserved it?

Not even half of them.

So many innocents have been caught in the crossfire. And even those who were reverently evil … well, they'll have had families and lives. They'll have had some 'good' within them at some point. They may even have been acting on what they thought was best, on what their culture thought was the 'right thing'.

I've run in headfirst, all guns blazing, reputation as being a Universal 'cleanser' plastered in big letters across my chest and the fate of an entire planet (usually Earth, for some reason) on my shoulders. And I haven't even stopped to contemplate just how much right I really have to do it. How much right I have to kill one species in an attempt to protect another …

But I'm contemplating, now. Being alone in the Universe means I've got a lot of time to contemplate, and in fear of losing what's left of my somewhat shaky sanity, contemplation's about the only thing I can do.

Too bad it's only serving to make things much, much worse.

As the realization that I don't really have any right to play 'God' with the Universe finally hits home, the darkness continues to grow inside me.

And all I can think is that it's penance for the trouble I've caused over the centuries, retribution for the deaths I've dished out and the lives I've torn to shreds.

The darkness grows inside me.

But I accept it.

I deserve it.

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Hmm, I stand corrected.

Isaid it wasn't a physical manifestation, didn't I? Yup, that's exactly what I said.

Now I wish I'd kept my mouth clamped shut.

Standing here, staring up at the central column in nothing short of annoyance, I can no longer ignore the swirling black tendrils that are slowly coiling themselves around the support beams above it, inching closer and closer towards the walls on all sides.

I foresee that in approximately twenty-two and a half minutes, the ceiling will be completely covered.

And that is so not good.

Being the, pardon my language, 'smart ass' that everybody seems to think I am, I've just realised that I know what it is and how I have to get rid of it.

But that knowledge isn't really going to do me much good.

I 'bless'ed the TARDIS earlier on, didn't I?

I take it back. She's being mean, again.

I think she thinks that if my 'darkness' is a living thing, I'll be able to tackle it like I do any other alien threat I find myself up against on a daily basis. And because she has so much faith in me, she believes that I'll conquer it before it can completely consume her. I think I should be happy about that – she trusts me implicitly, see.

But the snag in her little plan is that to conquer that living darkness, I have to conquer the darkness inside me, and there's absolutely no way I can do that without taking away a part of myself – something I swore I would never do, no matter how hard things get. I can't take away my pain, no matter how much it hurts, because emotions and past experiences are what make us who we are. And to get rid of the darkness, I'd have to get rid of the things that have caused it – my memories of the people I've lost, the places I've destroyed, and the creatures I've annihilated.

And I simply can't do that.

Glancing sky-wards, I have to admit that my 'twenty-two and a half minutes' prediction is a little too generous. Perhaps I should have said fifteen.

Great. In fifteen minutes' time, the TARDIS is going to be little more than an amalgam of my internal darkness, forever lost to a blackness that I myself have brought on. And there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop it.

I think we're doomed, old girl.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you liked! Part two up tomorrow!

And comments are awesome!

Blessed Be!
Hugs,
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx