(no subject)
Four months almost gave Ears cause to regret regaining his sense of the passing of time. He felt every moment, most of them spent lying, arms folded under his head, on his bed in the attic bedroom he'd claimed, the one at the other end from Horatio's. The urge to sleep all hours lessened day by day, though he still depended on Kate to remember to eat.
Time skittered through his awareness, more annoyance than anything else. He was stuck, here in Jack's house, in Jack's Cardiff. The Nexus irritated him, and he stopped going, altogether. Time moved too unevenly there, once he grew accustomed to the quicker race of this world, and it was a bit nauseating to go from one to the other. He didn't tell this to anyone, just stopped leaving, put his PINpoint in his sock drawer (why did it still feel so novel to have a sock drawer?) and left it there.
The world outside the front door felt smaller every time he went outside. He considered leaving this big itchy house. He could feel it working on him, the time eddying around it like a rock in a current, slowly, so slowly scouring away the fog of his amnesia. More memories surfaced each week. He remembered a girl named Susan, brilliant and Gallifreyan, and therefore probably dead. She had been... family. So strange to consider, and yet he missed her fiercely. And there had been others. She was blood, but he'd cobbled such a big family, hadn't he, and scattered them across the stars. Had he abandoned them all the way Jack had been abandoned? Were they alive, or dead? Did any of them mourn him?
He went out every morning to get the mail, making the pile on Jack's abandoned desk grow larger and larger. He'd stand there, at the foot of the walk, bills in one hand and the other on his pocket, where the small blue lump shared space with Jack's disk. It felt heavier than four months ago. He never crossed the lane. Here or there, same small planet. He could feel the way it whirled and tossed, and his recovering memory furnished it with eight sister planets, and all their moons and orbits. He predicted two comets in those months, and brought Kate out to see them both. They did share that. But they had both orbitted Jack, and without him, those orbits were stalled and they rarely really met.
When he came back inside, he toed off his shoes by the door and stowed them meticulously away in the closet. Small, tidy habits kept life quiet. His mind wandered laboriously out into the world as he left the mail on Jack's deck and drifted around his study to sprawl on a sofa there. All those blind minds he couldn't remember how to reach, just there. He was nothing but an observer. Hello he murmured to the deaf world. But he knew there was no one in this time to hear him, to answer. He knew, and remembering made his hearts ache, that he'd killed them all. Maybe this was his purgatory for that. Kate alone kept it from being a hell.
Time skittered through his awareness, more annoyance than anything else. He was stuck, here in Jack's house, in Jack's Cardiff. The Nexus irritated him, and he stopped going, altogether. Time moved too unevenly there, once he grew accustomed to the quicker race of this world, and it was a bit nauseating to go from one to the other. He didn't tell this to anyone, just stopped leaving, put his PINpoint in his sock drawer (why did it still feel so novel to have a sock drawer?) and left it there.
The world outside the front door felt smaller every time he went outside. He considered leaving this big itchy house. He could feel it working on him, the time eddying around it like a rock in a current, slowly, so slowly scouring away the fog of his amnesia. More memories surfaced each week. He remembered a girl named Susan, brilliant and Gallifreyan, and therefore probably dead. She had been... family. So strange to consider, and yet he missed her fiercely. And there had been others. She was blood, but he'd cobbled such a big family, hadn't he, and scattered them across the stars. Had he abandoned them all the way Jack had been abandoned? Were they alive, or dead? Did any of them mourn him?
He went out every morning to get the mail, making the pile on Jack's abandoned desk grow larger and larger. He'd stand there, at the foot of the walk, bills in one hand and the other on his pocket, where the small blue lump shared space with Jack's disk. It felt heavier than four months ago. He never crossed the lane. Here or there, same small planet. He could feel the way it whirled and tossed, and his recovering memory furnished it with eight sister planets, and all their moons and orbits. He predicted two comets in those months, and brought Kate out to see them both. They did share that. But they had both orbitted Jack, and without him, those orbits were stalled and they rarely really met.
When he came back inside, he toed off his shoes by the door and stowed them meticulously away in the closet. Small, tidy habits kept life quiet. His mind wandered laboriously out into the world as he left the mail on Jack's deck and drifted around his study to sprawl on a sofa there. All those blind minds he couldn't remember how to reach, just there. He was nothing but an observer. Hello he murmured to the deaf world. But he knew there was no one in this time to hear him, to answer. He knew, and remembering made his hearts ache, that he'd killed them all. Maybe this was his purgatory for that. Kate alone kept it from being a hell.