Lindworm

By TwinEnigma

Warnings: Pete's World, Spoilers for Stolen Earth/Journey's End, Angst, parallels to fairy tales

Characters: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor (aka MetaTen, Handy, Ten Too, 10.5, 10.2), Rose Tyler

Disclaimer: I write for fun, not profit and I'm not the BBC.

1.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful queen. Her husband had left for war and she was very lonely and sad.

One day, she came upon an old woman and told her of her troubles. The old woman was kind and told her she could help. That evening, she should go to the north corner of her garden and there she would find two white roses. She should eat them both, but remember to remove the petals.

The queen went to the garden and found the roses. She was very careful to remove the petals on the first rose, but it tasted so good that she forgot to remove the petals of the second. Soon thereafter, she was pregnant and there was much rejoicing.

When it came time for her delivery, she gave birth to a great and terrible lindworm...

He is born in a burst of energy, sprung fully-formed from his severed hand. A part of him finds that very fascinating as a sort of mythological parallel to legends of Earth's Athena, but now is not the time because everything is burning and tick-tock-tick-tock, time running out, every second colliding like a chain reaction of sparks and fire. He breathes and the air is too hot. The TARDIS screams in the back of his mind, hurting and struggling to stay alive, and there is Donna, staring at him.

"You're naked."

Why so he is.

Everything is sparks and fire as he brings the TARDIS about and he is alive. But... oh, that's disgusting. One heart beats in his chest where there should be two, minor physiological differences here and there where the regeneration energy had jury-rigged the missing parts, and... And he knows every flavor of Pringle ever and ooh, she's in his memories, painted through them like a slash of ginger fury and he can see how she sees herself and it's just horrible because it's not true at all. She's brilliant, molto bene, bellissimo!

Donna tells him where the others, where the other him, all are: they are the prisoners of the Daleks. He doesn't waste time and immediately starts on a plan. It fails, but then there is Donna, who is suddenly flaring brighter than ever, a wild card, a twin sister that he's only just realized, and everything is shiny.

Dalek Caan's words singe and he turns back because there is truth in them, truth that he's forgotten. Somewhere along the line he'd forgotten that sometimes he must stand up and do what is hard because sometimes there is no choice and the greater sin would be to let the cancer that is all things Dalek metastasize. He's still cooking, just like he was before, so he remembers these things he'd forgotten more keenly. A lot of him is still undecided, but he already knows that he's a no-second-chances kind of guy, a man who does what is right not because it is easy, but because he has to. The Daleks have had all their chances and wasted them all. He knows exactly what he has to do.

He does it.

And in doing so, he is deemed a viper.

AN:

Continuing with the theme of fairy tales and springboarding off my one-shot, Broken Aesop, Lindworm is going to be sort of an odd one.

Genocide of the Daleks... not so bad really, considering what that army would have done to the rest of the universe.