Challenge response #1
Prompted by
honorh : Ten/synaesthesia
Beta-read by the illustrious
spastasmagoria
Thanks ladies! The prompt itself makes a great title. I'll probably post it at Teaspoon later, so concrit is appreciated.
Now here's Ten, lying in Jackie's bed at Christmastime, synapses misfiring all over the place.
It is normal after regeneration to experience neurological anomalies. Retrograde amnesia is the most common, recovery from which occurs quickly if not always 100% efficiently, resulting in a certain degree of absent-mindedness that typically increases after the fourth or fifth regenerations in most Gallifreyans.
Psychological reactions due to rapid neurotransmitter production are also common, ranging from euphoria to paranoia, depressive or manic episodes, et cetera. If the regeneration is unstable, chemical imbalance may result, and maladaptive psychosocial traits may become ingrained in the personality for the incarnation. These traits often reflect the conditions under which the regeneration took place, and will usually be compensated for in the following regeneration. Therapeutic progress may improve subjective life experience without necessitating forced regeneration; however, in extreme cases, this may be the only available treatment for a subject who is a danger to himself and others.
Rose’s voice is, inexplicably, a sort of mottled lavender-blue. The Doctor is pretty sure this doesn’t make sense, and wonders if he’s just confused because lavenders are flowers and Rose is, also, a flower’s name. However, he quickly decides that this is not the reason. It’s quite simply that her voice is, precisely, mottled lavender-blue.
She’s clearly worried about him, and he wishes he could say something to ease her mind. However, he’s a little busy at the moment reorganizing his brain cells, and does not appreciate being distracted by watching her voice get more purple as she gets more upset, and paler when she’s trying to calm down. So he’s trying to sort himself out, calling up information learned hundreds of years ago at the Academy to come up with a sort of assessment checklist, but he seems to have had a surge of serotonin, which is making it difficult to keep his mind on one track.
He notes at this point that Jackie’s voice sounds precisely the colour of a Bartlett pear, and the telly announcer sounds bright saffron yellow. It’s all very amusing.
Another, rarer form of neurological anomaly that is experienced in approximately 3.87% of regenerations, with a higher occurrence in later incarnations, is synaesthesia. This may go unnoticed if amnesia is also present-
Synaesthesia, that’s what it’s called! Mixing up the senses so that sounds had colours, letters and numbers had textures, that sort of thing. Well, that’s a new one. He wonders if Jackie has any Pink Floyd CDs around the flat, figures they’d be fun to listen to in this condition. Then he wonders if there are any other senses that he’s mixed up. Time sense? Probably. It’s hard to tell with his telepathic link to the TARDIS still out of whack. At least Time doesn’t seem to have any colours or tastes or anything attached; that would be weird.
When he gets to the parts of his brain that interpret sound and colour, he finds a few extra connections, and discovers there’s too much excess regeneration energy there still. So he nudges the extra dendrites into the olfactory and taste sense regions nearby, hoping that next time he has a cup of tea, it won’t feel like outrage or smell like teal. He thinks, but isn’t sure, it’ll just make his taste buds really sensitive. It’ll be fun to try them out.
He figures he’ll keep the extra serotonin, too. It’s probably compensatory, and he thinks he’ll rather enjoy it. But the lavender-blue Rose had to go. He likes to think of her as golden, now.
Pastels don't suit her anyway. Yuck.
I'm still taking challenges (see here) so get them to me by the end of today or so and my unemployed self will write you a fanfic.