Entry 10: [Transmissions (I)]

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled

Thy beauty's form in table of my heart.

My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,

And pérspective it is best painter's art.

For through the painter must you see his skill

To find where your true image pictured lies,

Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,

That hath his windows glazèd with thine eyes.

Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:

Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me

Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun

Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee.

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

(24)

Stating that she loves the way they communicate wouldn't be something she could do with full confidence or an oath on her complete honesty, and this isn't even a fact that she will struggle to deny. She understands the need to lay out a plan, to see the complete picture, with the past, present, future and the likelihood of various possibilities featured into her considerations, before she makes a statement of the kind that might be a point where she chooses who she wants to be, the kind that she doesn't want to find herself taking back... and in the world of Clara Oswald, that's almost every statement:

She hates being wrong, and even more, she'd hate to become a hypocrite. For once, that would lose her the right to complain about hypocrites, and that would probably leave her seething with impotence to the point of popping some aneurism, given that she loathes them with passion.

Those ideas of what she'd like to be, however, have only so much to do with what is actually the case.

If he and her were something distanced, something she'd read about in a book without any consequences for the real word, the admission would have come easily, without a second thought; It was harder to uphold when that stubborn space dork was getting on her nerves with some everyday annoyances, ridiculous to even think of when she found herself terrified and in tears in some faraway place – But it was ever so easy when she was reclining on the console room jump seat, observing him as he spilled sprawling incoherence upon the blackboards lining the walls, her glance lazily idling somewhere between the cryptic glyphs themselves and his funny lip shape, casually at work with the forming of some words, something related to his pictograms, perhaps, or an introduction to their next destination.

She never used to be comfortable with losing herself, even in something as unassuming as a harmless little moment, but this once, she finds herself atypically content to just drift, to spare herself his rambles and take in their destination when they get there, without any preconceived notions or half-drawn plans based on her incomplete understandings to distract her, almost looking forward to the opportunity for improvisation she always used to dread.

A faraway world where no one might even know of her home or what distance separated them should be the furthest from a 'save haven', but somehow it is, and maybe for today, she'll take his kind of explanation and suppose that it must be the lure of going somewhere where no one knew who she was or where she'd come from, and where everyone who'd chose to gossip and opine about her would do so after she was long gone and never had to see their faces again,

Or perhaps, not quite this, not so much what they wouldn't know, but how what they would know wouldn't be overshadowed, how this was an unique space for her actions to speak for themselves, which even she recognized as sounding a little... vainglorious, but that's a thread of thoughts she can comfortably afford not to follow right now, she might as well delay the spoiling of the fun to some tenuously undefined, nebulous construct of 'later', uncomfortably aware that this is probably what he would do, what she ever so often chided him for.

Unfortunately, this just seems to happen to be the kind of unwholesome effect he has on her.

But, she must then ask, is this not what she is all about?

Taking that one bold step to say what must be true despite the things that might make her waver?

To make dreams into ideals and ideals into reality, to take the leap that was necessary to convince everyone around her of of her vision of realities yet to come by making them believe that it had already come to pass?

Sometimes it took as little as just the right words in the right place to invite the desired world in the manner of a warlock's summoning incantation, be they the outline of a pep-talk, the vessels of just outrage, transmission of wisdom or her rather daring masterpiece of shaming the remnants of a civilization that could be aptly described as the ultimate results of man growing proud through little more than a diffusely glowing crack – this was most certainly a game she was adept at playing.

In another life, given somewhat less convoluted circumstances, she might have been the sort who would keep her wits even as she was dying, and use the very grief her demise was going to cause to persuade a widower to emotionally engage with the children that had been her charges, and goad a lost wanderer into resuming his journey; A selfless act, certainly, that she would devote even her last moments to setting the world and its inhabitants straight, and courageous, too, as she would have been just as afraid of the end she was facing as those she was trying to influence, but there was another side to it, too, to utilize grief as a means to insert a wedge into someone's thought processes, moreover, the grief about one's own end, as a tool for however well-intentioned manipulation... that took a particular kind of cunning, a suspicious mastery of words words words that allowed her to effortlessly swish them aside because they were the very tool of her craft – In that world, she might openly announce the sunspots of her hearts to those who would listen, none too ashamed of her ideas above her station, or to establish in crisp clarity that there was definitely no sweetness hiding behind the dark pools of her eyes -

The space beyond them was, instead, home to an ever-racing mind, for to subjugate reality to her will, she needed to be certain of the gap between it and her vision, to be aware and assured of its tininess and willingness to be bridged through willpower. To that end, she went through life always taking note, always on guard, always cataloging any buttons to push, useful facts to reconsider, stray umbrellas to ponder and Freudian slips she could exploit later on.

It was through attention paid and conclusions applied then, that he was always able to give the correct answer, always cautious to steer the conversation right where she wanted it to go, always ready to enchant and mesmerize, the peerless, silver-tongued queen of vipers, leaving a trail of hopeless suitors in her wake because she would never share her realm, unless it was with someone who could fully captivate her eyes –

That might have been a romantic idea, at least, for a heroine in a fairytale who would never be remembered beyond the youthful radiance of whatever illustration preceded the reports of her tragic death or the cliched old 'happily ever after', but in reality, it could be a much harder cause to live humbly for the causes for whom one might die nobly – at least that was a chosen, controlled, meaningful end that would be remembered in conjunction with a clear, indisputable accomplishment – the murky fog of the future held no such promises, no certainties but the final one, thus, she could care less about her projected life expectancy, her bones in the burnt, used-up ground or previews of her death;

It wasn't so much the fear of physical destruction or some unwillingness to let him make an impact on her life, after all, she already been ready to let that same life end for his sake; But knowing that she would find an end, that she'd have enough to control to chose the manner, the words and the meaning it would have released her from the burden of having to think of her faraway, uncertain future, or the legacy she would be leaving – Released from all pressure, she could do anything, and the thought of leaving her afterimage burned all over his very existence was comforting, at least, as a way to accomplish what she'd otherwise decided would never work out – But this continuation beyond that day was the only one she would have, this was the life in which she got to live past 24 with no mission left to accomplish.

At 27, she was not scared of the monsters under the bed, but of the future that extended into the mists, both its uncertainty and its restrictiveness; In the real world, even the proud queen was subject to the ticking of the clock, ruling all but herself as she inevitably hastened her collision course with the big thirty through her exploits, and it would be especially the queen who'd get to put up with the wicked stepmother sticking up their noses at her persistent single-ness and associated inability to present someone who could turn up with clothes, let alone that whole idea of picket fences, two dogs and 2,5 children; Three years before, she might have stormed out without a second thought at the first notion of offense, but under Cronus' looming scythe, the world succeeds and convincing her that there is a girl behind that queenly mask who doesn't have much more to show for than her big, troublesome mouth.

Chasing the shadow of a clumsy outcast with a dark, dark secret, she stumbles – what was she expecting, just three weeks later, oh so eager to prove that she was all mature and able to move on – she finds a very different kind of animal which soon becomes popular at his workplace and reveals a very different attitude and philosophy toward life; It would have to have been a man with a sense of presence, a certain wisdom and a place for children in his heart, but although all these boxes were ticked, complete with the added bonus of being very likely to actually wear clothes for any potential encounters with her family, but somehow, it was that very presence that made her shrink into place, a thought meriting further analysis at a later date – How tragic, one might think, that you couldn't seem to have two whole beings together, that at least one always had to leave a piece of themselves behind, to let their shine be dimmed, for the two of them to come together and form a whole, and it seemed that if it wasn't her, it would certainly be him, and he didn't deserve that, didn't deserve to try and decipher her thoughts when she'd left her heart where it has always lain, awaiting her return to a certain blue box, and her mind was, in fact, secretly pondering, only theoretically entertaining the potential plausibility of an alternate scenario that might have, could have been in some life, world or reality that didn't seem to be one of hers;

Woe betide him who did not perceive the brinks of the gravity well on which he was tethering as more than the occasional appearances of an obnoxious inconsiderate weirdo; That insolent crooked finger was an invitation to the dance of the double stars.

So, back to the drawing boards, then.

Bafflement is not a state she enjoys, utter confusion much less so, but at least it seems to be the same for him, even though the latter is pretty much his default state these days, so, to an extent, he's in the same boat as her, and like any two adults with at least some strands of rationality somewhere deep down, they are able to approach this as a problem to be solved and find themselves looking for a reliable, systematic method to cut through the chaos.

Somewhat less reasonably, he seems to have picked her as such, as the safety rail he hangs on to, so its up to her to avoid the dreaded scenario of the blind leading the blind in endless circles.

That is, at least, something to craft a strategy around - always easier to know what you don't want than what you do, but if there's a goal of avoiding something, she can, at least, apply her usual methods to pushing into the opposite direction.

So she begins her analysis and categorizing, working patterns out of the incoherence, drawing up maps and throwing up the previous ones that had proven incorrect or outdated;

Finding familiar reactions and signals to be absent, she subjects her scrutiny to a face that gives her no answers, like an investigator seeking to use every single one of some defendant's words against them, or some paleontologist trying to reconstruct some creature's appearance and because they had no access to the living whole.

Whatever he's saying, however it may or may not resemble whatever he was saying before, he might as well have stated to speak a completely different language, and it's up to her to decipher its meaning and map out whatever his words and gestures might translate to – So her vigil begins.

Let's get to know: The Doctor.

Who, as it turns out, is no longer a particularly coherent or sensible person as of now – really, making his previous self look reasonable by comparison is an achievement in and of itself.

There's not much she can do with his frowns or those stares that seem to fall anywhere between quizzical, disproving or simple blunt incomprehension, but little by little, the fog lifts.

That doesn't mean that it's fast or easy, or that she doesn't spend weeks – even months – not picking up what might otherwise have been obvious clues.

He proves to be frustratingly opaque, even when compared to strangers she'd never met before – Her previous progress is not merely undone, it's slowed to the viscous creep of a moving slime mold.

But move it did, sometimes, she did guess right, and apply a comforting little hand or well-meaning question where she thought it might be needed even when it wasn't outwardly obvious; Usually, he'd be trying to concentrate on whatever dangerous business they were dealing with, and that serious focus was all that could be seen on his face or heard in his tone of voice, but things were different, if not necessarily more readable, when they were out of immediate danger, perhaps when he was showing her around their latest destination, or when they found themselves just lightly discussing their plans at her flat.

He's rarely ever completely without a certain tension to him, but there's times when there's less of it, and times where there's more, and he'd have varying degrees of it pulling at his posture, like he was never quite fully comfortable in his skin, and this was rarely more apparent than when she's see him cautiously peering down, his neck in folds, his body otherwise stiffly vertical except for perhaps some sloppy, not quite orthodox positioning of his legs, face usually somewhere between dull mortification and understated dread, plainly not expecting good news, but usually directed at something fairly specific, like, say, her unabashed delight at the sight of a certain green-clad master archer, or general instances of him apparently her actions just as bizarre as she found his, so, at the very least, she wasn't completely alone in this, even if that meant he'd be even less help than his absence would have been; Purely symbolic comforts didn't quite seem to cut it anymore, not always, not sustainedly.

In the beginning, she figured that it made sense, if he, too, was still getting used to it. It was one of those things that got her thinking, how could she leave him, that poor thing? It was only given the passage of some time that it began to dawn on them both that they were stuck like this, with the current state of affairs, with that enforced distance and the passive-aggressive exchanges, or however he would term it; It seemed very much like she was going to be stuck with that man-shaped mass of incoherence. Vaguely man-shaped, a tall and narrow creature that negated all the superficial resemblance there might have existed through the ways and manners the foreign entity within pulled at its conduit to the here and now, for example there was, a close relative to the previously disapproving downward glare, a common sight that came with a similar general posture, perhaps with an optional an authoritative hand on the hip or in the pockets of his trousers, but chiefly distinguished by a somewhat harsher, but also more detachedly- analytical expression, and an odd tilt of his head that reminded her faintly of some predatory bird.

That was perhaps, a more archetypical function, less of an uncertain position, when he knew for sure that he was seeing something he didn't necessarily like, but still succeeded in holding him with a certain morbid fascination, when he seemed calm and in-control even at the wrong end of the occasional laser gun, something she could fit into common scenarios and ideas of hierarchy present in her mind, but there wasn't much more comfort in such an intangible abstraction, the scowling stranger in timeless black;

At least, it wasn't that unusual a role for him to wind up playing in the scheme of things, when in doubt, his tried and true tricks and tactics to negotiating various mortal dangers were always something he – both of them, really – could fall back on, in this private little upside-down world they had sealed themselves into.

And besides, she knew better than anyone that he was usually rather more ridiculous than that, that she had found herself categorizing his frowns should be proof of that. At least that's what she hoped, because she wasn't too keen on the possibility that it could say something about her as well (particularly the 'categorizing' bit – and by now, she was sure that he would never let her hear the end of it) – but be it only for the sake of getting back at him, she would have to mentioned that there was not quite as much dignity about his most typical approach toward experiencing the world, how he'd go about the landscape when he was mostly concerned with investigating and putting the clues together, too direct to be labeled 'hesitant'; but too liable to lapse into unannounced, fast movements for a classification as 'cautions', either.

The word might be 'probing', or indecipherable beyond 'slightly arched forward', face and hands held out before the rest of it, taking in the world wild, deep-set eyes, moving his arms about with wide, abrupt gestures that completely lacked any of the boyish 'floppiness' of his previous incarnation, his stare rarely revealing whether it was focused at some telltale detail somewhere faraway, or nothing at all.

This, at least, seldom denoted actual displeasure or hostility, most of the time he'd simply be trying to concentrate, unabashedly stressed, at most, perhaps even excited, judging by the way he'd speak sometimes, so with time, she stopped seeing this as something unusual or expecting anything else; Even when he tried being nice, he'd inevitably fail due to his complete inability to filter his words and how it combined with his sense of tact and appropriateness, or rather, how those were as nonexistent as ever. Besides, it was one thing to see him pull that act in the face of a situation that was already terrifying enough on its own, without the addition of further big gray-haired stick insects – and he always, always unfailingly found the way to describe the current situation in the most unhelpfully terrifying worlds known to man, managing to make even something as simple as the existence of a moon sound like the premise for a horror movie – and it was another to watch him keeping that same posture up while also running for his life. You can only take a person seriously for so long after seeing them waste the most inappropriate, life-or-death-situation moments looking like he might stumble over his own two feet at any given moment, especially if that person was, allegedly, a grown man.

So, at first, it was a matter of kicking back the ball he'd thrown into her court – if he was going to dispense with the politeness, then he couldn't expect her to bother with it, either, and if he was going out of his way to frustrate her, then it shouldn't surprise him that he'd get to actually witness that frustration now and then, because he'd driven her to the limit of what she could conceal, and she'd wind up tearing her hair out if she didn't find some place to vent.

He didn't take the hint, because, of course he didn't, but he didn't seem to terribly miss the politeness, either, or even perceive that much of a difference most of the time, perhaps because he doesn't seem to believe in it anyways – how much of it is a random product of what the regeneration lottery happened to throw up this time, and how much a conscious life decision in the light of his recent experiences, she might never know.

But with time, the current state of affairs starts to register as "normal" the usual deal of the exploits she fills her days with, sometimes more of it than should logically fit into her weeks, and found that she did not necessarily need it to function, either. Not only does she get used to this, she's more likely to answer a forced, incredibly transparent attempt to placate her with forced, unsuccessful attempts at niceties with a raised eyebrow rather than anything resembling delight, and their time together becomes – what it's perhaps always been, but to a stronger, deeper degree: An outlet for parts of herself that couldn't find a home in any of her other activities, and he's as much of a part of it as any of the tasks they get up to.

He can take her, in full, raw and unpolished, and that is – perhaps responsible for the instants of peace she keeps chasing after, even at the price of maintaining this generally stressful life. If he's being a bad influence on her, or offering her liberation each time he comes to whisk her away, she can't say, but at some point, she wakes to a world where these exchanges, this dynamic of sorts, has come to play a fixed part in the orchestra of her life, not all of it, not even a principal part she couldn't do without, but something she'd miss if it were gone one day, something with which her life would always be fuller and freer than it would be without, even if she had all other riches and amenities of this world at her disposal.

In the end, there was no way for him to grab all of himself, and for her to take all of herself, to go back to before they were 'them'; It would be like cutting up a limb, like saying goodbye to the parts of herself that had become a part of him – She could live without them, certainly, there were many people out there who, after the investment of some hard work, eventually continued their lives just fine despite the loss of a limb, but it wouldn't leave her unchanged, she would never be the same.

If she were to cut him off, she would bleed, and that was exactly what she'd been trying to avoid.

The things that are easier to make out, are, to her surprise, not those which stayed the same –

those will always come wrought in a package of uncertainties, doubts about just how far these similarities went and lines that may or may not be about to be unwittingly crossed –

but those who come with clear counterparts, indications of just what has been switched for what and what she needed to substitute to get some rough equivalent of their previous daily proceedings.

They gave her both patterns she could analyze and work with, and allowed her to cushion any wounds that might still be too raw to be touched again just yet – The patterned blouses and jackets she had bought because the prints had reminded her of his bow ties still filled her drawers, and it would be just plain silly for her not to wear them, to let this stop her from getting on with her life like a grown adult who owed perfectly good clothing that cost her money, which a teacher's salary didn't exactly provide infinite quantities of, but she was not quite ready to let herself feel the brunt of this realization and mentally debate the merits of carrying on an legacies by herself, or consider too thoroughly that she would likely never see him straightening any of these damn things ever again.

Bottom line: They were no longer there; He no longer did that, and even if he were to don a bow tie for some formal outing, it just wouldn't be the same and might just tear her heart in two if she were ever forced to witness that.

But there was something else he did instead, some little vain thing, something she could connect to a similar thought or spirit: She didn't now what had possessed him to opt for that red lining, but he apparently thought that it was a pretty great idea, and given how he acted, at least some of its flashiness had to have been intentional – But when he thought he was having a particularly cool little moment, when he was in some mood for some showing off, he'd make sure to do something with that jacket, just to draw attention to it, or even when there was nobody present whom he might impress, just as a psychological thing, for his own ego, because he liked himself in the role, like the stage performer you might expect that ridiculous jacket to belong to – He might stuff his hands in his pockets to flash the bright color to the world, or he might otherwise fiddle with his jacket in some way, open it up if it was closed before, close it if it was open, just any kind of demonstrative little gloves-coming-off gesture for the sake of gesturing.

That was something she recognized from before, but more importantly, it was something that made her smile, something she could recognize when others did not – He might seem all serious and commanding, even imposing, as far as his expression and tone of voice went, but there was just no taking him seriously after she'd caught him fixing his outfit in the middle of an epic speech, he just could not suffer to save the day without an impeccable getup.

This was indeed the same man who'd interrupted a significant phone call intended to calm her down for a minor vanity related freakout about his hair, but by now, this was besides the point: He had always been showy, but she was used to him doing it in a sort of casual, cheeky way, and seldom quite this brazen, even petulant; There were a few vague flashes in her head involving black leather jackets, horrid yellow stripes and far too many frills, but all in all, he was showing her a new side of himself, not even bothering to make it a secret that he wanted her to see only him, watch only him as he strove to impress her with his absurd exploits, look at only him and possibly pat him on the shoulder for how awesome he was being – not literally of course.

It was not that wanting itself, he had implied, if not outright indulged his own transparency before, but it was the almost obnoxious openness, the direct deliberateness that was new, and, to this extent, perhaps even unprecedented.

(What a rare and charming trait, she thought, once the greater picture had become more clear to her; He could stomach it if she were to honor others with her attachment, he could suffer others to touch her, but when it came to her awe and admiration, her heart and soul, let alone her will and intellect, he just could not compromise.

What a gem, in this world where many men still confused the moment a woman let them lay hands on her body with an occasion on which she would have thrown all her honor an self-respect at their feet; She had a will to choose, too, and all the devotion she would ever give would be chosen, not taken, however deep its well might be)

As a general principle, she came to conclude that she had a much better chance of guessing what he was thinking or feeling by looking at his hands than by examining his expression or his tone of voice – in his wild gestures, she could find the excitement that was once so very close to the surface, but when he was uncertain or doubtful, his hands would stay close to the rest of him, often stuck together, fingers intertwined, thumbs displaying some fitful motions, with a hand near his face and mouth representing a particularly dim sigh.

In such moments, his inward sort of posture would often underline his narrow, partially tucked-up shoulders, and how his hands, in their tangled state, with his stock of gnawed-on fingernails on display, seemed far too big for anything that one might expect to be attached to his lanky frame, a crumpled, disproportional thing, both the mass of his clasped hands and everything else about him.

Once she caught on to this, those more withdrawn hand gestures showed themselves to be quite a reliably present, and, in hindsight, an often-missed predictor of impending bombshells, looming problems he felt were out of his hands or had no uncomplicated solutions, admissions of truths she wouldn't like, all in all a convenient litmus test to confirm her suspicions that he was, quite frequently, significantly more affected, even disquieted by the dreadful going-ons they encountered than he was willing or able to express.

He might not even be consciously aware of the minute vents through which his tension, doubt and uncertainty found their ways to bleed through, if he appreciated her tentative attempts to calm him with a steady hand on his arm or chest, his face wouldn't show it, but if nothing else, it gave her a pretext to let out the breaths she didn't know she had been holding – It was an arrangement they could both work with, a silent, natural understanding that passed between them as two individuals who had learned to tie themselves into artful knots for the sakes of those who might look to them for strength; For those who depended on them – including each other – neither of them could afford to waver, or to take the time for dramatic dawdling.

When trying to build a bridge by baring her own example, she would tell the young children and lost souls of this world that the last time she ever tasted the fear of being lost was back when her mother had consoled her on the day she'd been forced to face that worst-case scenario, in hopes that they might be more successful in that respect than she had been, but the truth was that she felt the chills licking at her spine whenever she encountered anything resembling a maze, let alone the reaches of the empty void – but at the very least, her mother's example had equipped her with the tools she needed to master that sort of situation, the strategies to keep the panic from taking over. In the blackest hours, out in the deep dark of the cosmos, the presence of another person had to suffice – as long as there was someone with her, not even in a tangible way, not even through an overt acknowledgment, not even right before her, but at least somewhere out there, she should be able to keep it together. His simple, silent presence, his mere existence, even just the promise of his arrival was all she would need – In the past, there had been numerous incidents where she'd had to brave the shadows on her own, sometimes without prior warning, and sometimes without the means to make sense of his reasoning at the time, but in the end, she knew that he would always have her back, and she had spend a long time trying to make him understand that she would always have his, wherever he went and whatever he may become in this world.

She'd consecrated herself to the hard, taxing work of getting that into that thick skull of his, her dedicated labor of excavating his layers of sediment and sunken palaces, and she was making steady progress – These days, he sought her in ways as minute as the simplest eye contact, just a brief, firm glance held between them before he carried on with whatever urgent situation had put him in that much of a state to begin with, but by the time he'd turn away, her watchful eye with its intricate understanding of detail in general, and the nuances of his particularities specifically would have noticed him easing up somewhat, or as close to it as he ever came when the situation did allow for it.

It wasn't much, but it was enough for their purposes, and under the circumstances, it had to be.

And thus, she'd learned his language anew.

She'd familiarized herself with a new set of intricacies, learned what to make of the little gesture she'd provisionally dubbed a 'face shrug' because it indicated just about the same thing as a regular one, but involved little motion other than a raising of his eyebrows over his usual blank stare.

She'd taken note of his propensity to forget about the lower half of his mouth when particularly indignant so she could watch out for the string of amazingly rude hostility that usually followed, given that his recent dissatisfaction with his own reflection had put his ego in a somewhat touchy state as of late. Her best bet was to try and remove him from the equation somehow; Expecting him not to provoke the other person into equal hostility was futile, the only indicator that he was, in fact, a grown man manifested itself in the unprecedented crudeness of his words – She'd heard things come out of his mouth that damn near disproved her faith in humanity, things which his previous self could not even have pronounced without an inordinate amount of blushing and stuttering.

One might assumed that people were more forgiving of his rampant vanity in the centuries he'd spent looking like a cute, nonthreatening puppy with an incidentally gorgeous butt, let alone in the days his the very, very distracting 'sand shoes' incarnation, but paradoxically, it was all the more apparent now that he found himself disproportionately miffed over his eyebrows – in Clara's opinion, a sure sign that his ideas of his own hot stuff credentials had gone unchecked for far too long. Nothing made him quite as much of a pain to deal with than a state of moderately bruised pride.

But for her to buy his staunch denial that he looked any day over her own 28 years, he was enjoying his recent reliance on the tried-and-true "Screw politeness, I'm a senior!" excuse way too much, although really, any pretext to justify his usual randomness was fine by him as long as he got his weekly share of opportunities to gratuitously terrify people.

Really, she could stick him in her average classroom full of rambunctious 15-year-olds, and he'd fit right in with his choice of jumpers, his scruffy, standity-uppity hair and his persistent refusal to act like a sensible person.

Speaking of his hair – contrary to her initial impressions, she was forced to concede that he actually did put some at least nominal effort into the maintenance of his hair, nay, even regularly spent some time putting it in varied styles before turning up in her cupboards. Those temporary arrangements could fall anywhere between vertical, more elaborate modern asymmetrical styles, elegantly swept-back, or something less voluminous, more patrician-looking, but in the end, his head seemed to be host to some Harry-Potter-esque, inherently chaotic quality than ensued that his unruly locks could not maintain any semblance of order for long, and his tendency to get himself unannounced drenched covered in alien goop didn't help, nor did his habit of running his long fingers over his face and straight into his hair when exhausted or exasperated.

She really wished he'd stop doing that, except she really didn't, but would have felt right to cherish the sight as her private little fantasy he would never know of if it wasn't a gift that was willingly given, but just a momentary coincidence.

If he knew, he'd probably take a moment to lick his lips with a hard expression and furrowed brows, which by now, she'd found to be his way of denoting something like "Okay, this is gonna suck" or "I'm apparently not getting out of this easily" - She quite distinctly remembers that gesture from their reunion in the restaurant-slash-den-of-the-killer-droids, possibly the first time she personally witnessed it, when it finally dawned on him that the conversation wasn't exactly going his way, or maybe it was something she'd said – Yes, of course, the vanity button, hindsight is 20/20 – his hair or something, this – vanity, not hair – being what probably landed both of them there in the first place. He was quick to press it right back, too, in a way he'd never have done it before, but also, not entirely out of order for her closest confidant of over three years to poke fun at in a moment of annoyance, three years, three years for her, a lifetime for him, you'd think he'd have earned that privilege by now - ("It was the only one out of place, I'm sure you'd want it killed."), and they'd been sort of stuck in passive-aggressive mode ever since – that's how they'd stayed, locked into their cacophonies of disharmony, always missing each other by the slightest margin.