Title: Sparrow
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Length: 200
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Lost Spook for encouragement & sanity-checking.

Written for DW Allsorts, claim: 50th anniversary and related, table: 3 birds, prompt: Sparrow. Posted to Fan Flashworks Amnesty 31, challenge 'Win or Lose.'

Summary: Falling is inevitable.

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Like fuel on the fire, like smoke on the wind, sparrows wheel and float and turn in clouds of movement, unreadable portents trailing from their wings. What currents guide them? What strands of time and space and energy are drawn — etched, engraved, spun out, pulled thin or snapped — by the patterns of their flight? Is it war in heaven, conflict beneath the earth, the silent screams of firmaments rent asunder that they weave? Time Lords do not hold with augury, with seers or oracles or pythias. And yet the dice, the bones, the tally-sticks and rune-marked stones know them, see and hear and speak of them. And all they say is War.

Some of them also say that there will be (is, was, could be, will be again, always has been, might be again, once, never, now) a War Doctor for the healing of this inevitable, inescapable, unsurvivable, all-encompassing conflict. It is in the whisper of flames, the slow, gold-red drip of imponderable elixir, the lightning shadows of sparrows flickering on sunless, moonless, starless ground. Who? When? How?

And all it will take is the fall of one sparrow. One particular sparrow, even now falling, pulled down into the gravity well of one particular planet.

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