Title: Time and Space
Author: SCWLC
Rating: K or G or something like that.
Disclaimer: I own nothing that anyone remembers from anywhere else.
Summary: The metacrisis had an unusually perceptible effect.
Notes: So, I was reading earlgreytea68's Chaos series, and I had a thought. This is not based on that universe per se, only on one little aspect of it that intrigued me. In that series it's very clear that the Gallifreyan members of the family have genuine difficulty with the concept of limited space. The Doctor and his kids being convinced that he can fit everything in the TARDIS into a 65 square metre area, for one. But there's also the fact that all the Gallifreyan ones don't get or like jigsaw puzzles. Which led me to wondering if that wasn't just familial distaste, but something deeper. Something like an evolutionary atrophying of senses unrelated to the time sense. Which led to this fic. Maybe it's directly contradicted by something in the series, I don't know, but it's just a thought on my part.
After the full Time Lord Doctor left them on the beach there was so much to do, the metacrisis Doctor didn't have the chance to notice. Indeed, there'd been so much happening that he simply hadn't processed this particular change.
First there was getting off the beach, getting to the town near Darlig ulv Stranden, calling for Pete's personal zeppelin to pick them up, the trip back with Jackie rabbiting on in his ear constantly about Tony, shopping, marrying Rose, Pete, zeppelins, Mickey, the metacrisis that created him, Rose, being left on the beach . . . the list was seemingly endless, and he was caught up in Rose's warm hand in his own, the way she was accepting him as the Doctor despite that he was the inferior human model.
Then they landed in London and there was more activity flurrying about until finally he and Rose were settled into separate rooms for the night at the mansion where Pete, Jackie, Rose and Tony lived. Exhaustion from his regeneration, from the stress, from exertion claimed him, and he was dead to the world on the bed.
Late the next morning, when he woke, he started to catalogue his senses, the way his time sense had dulled, from a perception of timelines into infinity, to merely timelines for mere decades into the future and past. His abilities to check timing, to calculate how much force to use to get up off the bed, the distance before he fell off the edge, it was so dull. It made him feel impaired.
He sighed, opening his eyes and looking up at the ceiling, ten feet up, and wondered where he'd got that information from. He hadn't calculated it, hadn't used his sense of how long it would take something to fall from that height to determine distance. He'd . . . determined distance, and could then derive time from that.
The Doctor sat up, disconcerted, and looked around the room, testing out this strange new physical awareness. It was a strange perception, entirely divorced from his usual means of interpreting his surroundings. He put his hand in front of his face, able to estimate the distance at ten centimetres, both by knowing the time it would take to close the distance at a specific rate of speed, and from a three-dimensional perception that had been granted him by this new, partly human body.
That was it! This was human perception of space, that human perception that made so many of his companions confused upon dealing with the multiplicity of dimensional spaces within the TARDIS. He moved his hand forward and back, amazed at the way his visual impressions now created such an accurate view of the world around him.
He thought about his companions pointing out the obvious to him, Rose, pointing at the London Eye or television aerials, thought about Donna's shopping and her need to constantly buy new things and match colours in arcane ways.
Rose knocked on the door. "Doctor? Are you up? Breakfast's starting and I think Mum made sure there're bananas just for you."
Feeling off kilter now that he was paying attention to his changed perceptions, the Doctor tried to use nothing but his new spatial awareness to make it to and through the door. "Hello," he said, taking in Rose's clothes for the day. He always had, but this time he was vaguely aware of a suddenly burgeoning sense of monotony when it came to his clothing.
"Come on," she said with that smile that always riveted his attention right to her.
But now, with this new perception, he wasn't seeing her as a collection of timelines and varied calculations to quantify the visual information he was receiving, she was something very physical and very present in front of him. The temptation to reach out and touch her was overwhelming, and the Doctor pulled her into a hug. "Rose," he mumbled into her hair, breathing in the scent of her and feeling a strange solidity to her that he'd never felt before.
"Are you all right?" she asked, sounding worried.
He took one last breath, said, "Yes, I'm brilliant," then redirected the conversation with, "Bananas you said?"
"I did say," she told him, lacing her fingers through his, and he couldn't help but marvel at the strangely solid perception of space he was now feeling. Time was muted, but space, the three dimensional world had developed a presence he'd never imagined, a sense of reality that was unshakeable. It was actually rather a comforting feeling. He pondered it as they walked down the hallway, then down the stairs, switching between using this new, apparently human, spatial perception, and using the temporal perception he was used to. It felt a little like walking with his eyes closed for brief periods, then open again. Only when his eyes were closed they'd been replaced with an EM sensor or sonar.
Sitting down at the table, he continued to experiment with this new way of seeing the world, in terms of space, rather than time.
Jackie snapped at him the third time he knocked over the marmalade trying to get it to spread some on his toast. "The least you could do is be careful and not go flinging yourself all over the table."
"Sorry," he said absently, as on his third try he managed to get his hand around the jar and pick it up.
Rose was concerned, though, and asked, "Really, Doctor, you seem a bit . . . not okay this morning, yeah? Is something wrong? Are you sick or something?"
"Not in the least," he hastily told her. "Fit as a fiddle! A flagrantly foxy, fantastic fiddle!"
"He's fine," Jackie said, rolling her eyes.
Tony stared at him, clearly fascinated, and Pete looked flummoxed for reasons the Doctor couldn't quite understand. "You're avoiding the question," Rose told him firmly.
"It's nothing, really," he reassured her. He just wanted to take the time to get used to this. His new perceptions of the world were no different than getting used to new teeth. Right?
Rather than run the risk of causing Rose further worry, he was fine after all, and to avoid risking further fury from Jackie, he used both sets of perceptions over breakfast, thinking about how very much this new set of perceptive skills gave one a very linear perception of causality. It also amplified his awareness of touch in ways that had nothing to do with collecting chemical sorts of data, and everything to do with understanding the foundational nature of reality.
Tony had whinged and wriggled until Jackie let him leave the table, collecting a simple child's toy where the toddler matched the wooden silhouettes of eight Earth animals to matching depressions in a board. It was ridiculous. He was a 900-some-year-old Time Lord, a master of recreational mathematics, but this three-dimensional perception of reality made the process of seeing the way the two shapes fit together had him almost hypnotised.
The little boy appreciated the adult attention being paid to his toy, and the Doctor got to experiment with making estimations with his spatial awareness, rather than temporal awareness, without anyone being any the wiser.
"He'll make a great father," he heard Jackie murmur to Rose in the background.
Rose hushed her mum. "Don't push. He's got a lot to adjust to before you start in on asking for grandkids." Then she came over and crouched next to him. "Sorry to interrupt the male bonding time," she said, "But Dad wants to take you out to Torchwood so we can arrange for you to have a proper-looking ID."
He sighed voluminously. "I suppose you'll want me to get a 'real' name," he said as he followed her and Pete out to the car.
"Not at all," Pete said cheerfully. "You'll have to have something on your birth certificate, but we can register a legal change of name backdated to age eighteen. Like Sting."
That perked him right up. "Actually," Rose mused, "You should probably pick the silliest name possible, so that everyone will understand why you'd have something, anything else." This last was said in tones of fake drama, and after some thought, the Doctor agreed.
After some discussion they worked out how old he was (thirty), where he'd been born, (London), what his education was, (undergraduate degrees in maths, linguistics and biology; PhDs in astrophysics and chemistry – he was now under orders to produce two thesis papers they could slip into a university library somewhere to back up his claim) and the name he'd supposedly been born with that he'd wanted to change so badly. "What'd you pick?" Rose asked.
He grinned cheekily at her. "Algernon Randy Shelby Elvis," he declared proudly.
Rose laughed, which made her seem even more beautiful than she was when she wasn't laughing, while he had an argument (which he won) over whether or not Elvis was a surname.
It was after they were closeted in Rose's office, no one but him and Rose there that she finally asked. "Doctor, what's wrong? Don't try to fob me off with some nonsense. You've been acting strangely the whole time since this morning."
He never could put one over on her, could he? He settled on the edge of the desk and said, "Nothing's wrong, it's just . . . it's difficult to explain." He looked up at Rose, but she just settled next to him, took his hand in hers and smiled encouragingly. "It's because of the metacrisis," he started slowly. "You see, while I'd always changed a lot when I regenerated, there were always certain species-based limitations in how much." He frowned a moment, then brightened as he thought of a good example. "Like how some people have better hearing, for instance. So if you're sneaking about and such, they might hear something creaking that you wouldn't be able to at all, simply because their hearing is fundamentally more sensitive."
The Doctor glanced up at her, and she nodded in understanding. "But you're saying that, since me and my imaginary friend with the great hearing are both human, neither of us would be able to hear, say, what a dog hears."
"Exactly!" he exclaimed. "But this change . . . I know I always talked about how much more sensitive my senses were, and they still are more sensitive than a human's, but humans have this perception that . . . it's almost impossible to explain. It's just . . . it's the difference between perceiving the world in three dimensions, rather than four."
Rose looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"
Groping for the words, the Doctor said haltingly, "Well, before, when I'd look at that wall, I'd be able to tell it's about two metres away. The way I did it was because I always knew that it would take one point three six five seconds to get there, which I used to calculate the distance based on time and velocity of approach. Or this morning, Tony's toy with the animal silhouettes, I'd calculate distance based on time and the volume of the object and compare it with the volume as calculated by timing of the receptacles. But in this half human body, I'm suddenly seeing the world in shapes and physical spaces."
She blinked rapidly. "I'm not sure I really follow," Rose admitted, "but I think it's because I'm having trouble seeing how you didn't see shapes like that before."
"It's most likely a capability Gallifreyans evolved out of," the Doctor said with a shrug. "There's only so much information one can process, and once the time sense became so highly developed, other senses received less use and atrophied via evolution." An apt comparison came to him. "Bats tend to have bad eyesight at best because they've developed their sonar to the extent that their eyes are no longer genuinely necessary to flight."
"So you've been experimenting with sonar?" Rose guessed shrewdly.
The Doctor nodded. "In effect. It's just such a different way to see things," he explained, "And I'm finding it explains some things about how and why it's so hard for humans to adapt to some parts of the TARDIS."
"What do you mean?" Rose asked, clearly curious.
He frowned a moment, then pointed at the wall. "How far away would you say that is? Just an estimate."
Rose eyed the distance and said, "Two metres."
"And how did you do that?" the Doctor asked.
There was a pause as Rose parsed through a concept of spatial awareness that was so deeply ingrained in her it was completely instinctive at this point. "I guess I know what a distance of a metre looks like, about, and I just sort of compared it in my head and came up with two."
That sounded about right. "You see," The Doctor told her, "As a Time Lord, I didn't see it as space, I saw it as time. The amount of time it would take me to cross that distance at a given speed, in this case 1.389 metres per second. Knowing it would take me 1.35 seconds to cross it, tells me the distance is 1.876 metres."
"Wait, you mean every time you were judging distances and all, you were doing all that multiplication or division in your head?" Rose asked, looking baffled. "But you can see things, I know you can. Could." She shook her head. "Whichever."
"But not like this," he explained earnestly. "When I was playing with Tony earlier, I wasn't humouring him, I literally was learning the same hand-eye coordination that toy is meant to teach. A time tot wouldn't have put those pieces together because he or she was matching shapes seen, it would be a matter of calculating relative positions and volume of areas."
Rose shook her head. "I'll have to take your word for it, because I can't imagine such a thing."
He smiled. "Of course. Because you haven't the experience of time sense and what it entails to compare it to. I just need to you trust me on this one."
"Of course," she parroted back with a smile. "Does that mean that you'll be spending time with Tony, using his toys to learn all that stuff we regular humans learn at his age?"
"Not a bad idea," the Doctor told her, and joined Tony in putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
They became his new hobby, along with those little model airships, Lego, and at Christmas Rose gave him an enormous 3D jigsaw of Hogwarts to build. By then he had gained the practise he needed, but the daughter he and Rose had on the way gave him a new excuse to look at all the toys in the shops all over again.
Rose even chose not to call him on it.