December 5 (I'm still alive, promise, just swamped!) prompt - Recognition.
It was his skin, he was sure, had regenerated before, many times. But oh, it felt wrong, looking at once familiar things from a new height that now made them strange and unwelcoming. The shape of Adric’s shoulder under his hand, now too wide, and it surely couldn't only be that the boy was growing, they didn't change that quickly, did they? But perhaps they did, because Adric now shrugged away his touches, did not look at him for the same affirmations of pride as the Doctor remembered from his last regeneration. He wasn't sure if that hurt, or whether it was simply the disconnect between now and then, between who he definitely had been, and who he possibly could be now.
He was thankful it was at least not the outright hostility he faced from Tegan, the unhappiness underlying every tense motion, an anger that lay too close to the surface in any reasonable discussion he attempted to have with her. He could admit to himself, from a detached stance (ie, not in any proximity to Ms Jovanka) that he tended to feel the same angers, one of the very few noticeable emotions that seemed to stir in him these days. He knew feeling that anger toward her was not fair, that she had experienced more unhappiness in his presence than should have been experienced in such a short lifetime, but could not seem to help himself, and the sniping and abrasiveness let him feel more- well, personality than these scant days of existence had so far allowed him to. The Doctor (and he was the Doctor, wasn't he? the mirror didn’t answer him as certainly as it once did) wasn't sure he liked that aspect of himself. Days rather than hours now, and he still didn’t fit within his own skin, within his own TARDIS. His own name. So many seasons lived out, and he knew not what name to call himself.
The hardest he had come to find was neither oldest nor youngest, neither the lack of familiarity nor someone he saw uncomfortable flashes of himself (who he once was? who he could become?) in, but the most calm and quiet of them all. They had all suffered losses, and he should ache for all of them, feel blood pumping through what could be his hearts but that still felt too cold for such grief, but Nyssa had seen it done in the name and face of her father. Had seen what he had once been then take the hand of her father’s body and work with him. She had too much dignity to scream at him as Tegan did, he surmised, a scientist’s too strong a grasp on necessity being the mother of invention to condemn who he had once been for such an action. But, though still unadept at reading his own emotions, he could see in her eyes sometimes a distant fear that never translated itself to her voice, the recoil from his hands that had touched what had once been her father's.
Strange, he thought absently. Disappointment, anger, fear he could recognise in other’s faces. But then, perhaps, he had not yet had a chance to see joy, pride and comfort in the faces of those that travelled with him. Seconds, hours, days that ticked away and all he could be sure of, all that retained of his identity from the nebulous line of past and present was that time ticked away in his brain, in his hearts, with the surety it always would. Perhaps time would become kinder to the four of them, this disparate little group all so far away from home.
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Things I did to prepare for Key:
brought my laptop to work
put on a movie for one of my classes so I could download the game
-movie was rated R, there were so many tits in my classroom, absolute fuckup
made another class watch a video on youtube and reflect on it, told them I was grading videos from seniors
-put in headphones and started playing the game while 'teaching'
continued playing the game while one of my classes was testing
-pretty sure someone cheated, did not have capacity to care - had already caught someone that morning, didn't want to go through the process again
-lied to them about grading senior papers too
breakfast for dinner
gave my next day's first, third, and fifth periods to a coworker (I didn't have 2nd or 3rd)
fell asleep at work today
(continued to let my class watch the rated R movie so I could actually grade the papers I was supposedly grading before)
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