Selkie unzips her skin

finally determined

through a window in the dark

there he sits all alone

I've been waiting on the love of my life to find

he's been waiting on his Selkie to come back

he said "I know these shores are not like yours

but will you make your home in my arms?"

Selkie battled tide and wave

just to gaze upon his face

hiding behind rocks to learn

if he found a new love

Loralie sings the song for Lovers

who were torn apart then left broken hearted

Loralie hears the cry of Lovers

who the Sea of Fate has separated

Selkie puts her hand in his

he knows the gift she gives

there inside his cabinet

folded safe her seal skin

I've been waiting on the love of my life to find

he's been waiting on his Selkie to come back

he said "I know these shores are not like yours

but will you make your home in my arms?"

Tori Amos, 'Selkie'

("Why do you keep rambling about your dishwasher, is it faulty?"

"For once, yes, it actually is.")

Case in point, he once got very territorial when he briefly assumed that she'd let Danny fix some plumbing-related problem when, in fact, she'd solved it herself. It took her a surprising amount of time to draw the connection that the skills she'd acquired when it came to analyzing and working with futuristic devices might also be applied to the very mundane machines in her own flat, and that there was no reason for them to mystify her anymore. The actual results were... discouragingly mixed, not a dismal failure, yet somewhat underwhelming, she supposed they could have been refined with practice, but once she'd seen that he was actually a lot more invested in playing her personal maintenance man, and actually seemed to like himself in that role despite his grumbling, she'd taken pleasure in leaving all the broken electronics to him and his sonic screwdriver – after all, as she'd once remarked with much more of a wise-cracking tone than she had the right to use, given the subject matter, it was a computer problem that had brought them together in the first place.

She had not been able to determine whether his ensuing sigh had been of the annoyed or nostalgic sort.

At least, he was a lot less likely to go overboard and leave her having to explain why her cupboards were bigger on the inside than his adorably overzealous previous incarnation, but she still tried to avoid leaving him in her apartment for too long, lest she find her fridge disassembled or her ceiling miraculously covered in lopsided mathematical formulas and heaps of disorderly Gallifreyan script, both of which had actually happened.

Thus, the circumstances under which he'd acquired a key to her flat had been significantly less of an emotional bonding moment than one might imagine, and mostly motivated by a vague hope that he might cause his destruction somewhere else.

Sure, he could as well have taken the very spaceship he arrived with and parked it outside, or just skipped ahead half an hour and check again if she had come home yet, but she'd long given up on expecting him to take the obvious route, and a part of her actually liked the idea of him loitering at her apartment and making himself at home there, like he was her honorary flatmate of sorts.

He'd started to leave some of his things at her place, too, although this had unfortunately prompted a serious discussion about the chalk dust everywhere.

Still.

From what she'd gathered, most of his previous playmates had moved onto the TARDIS full-time, leaving behind their places of origin, and thus lived in close quarters with him purely for convenience's sake at first. Maybe they simply didn't have anything worthwhile keeping them wherever they had lived.

But Clara, who already had a relatively fulfilled life and a job she very much enjoyed, had pretty much treated him like any other suitor, any other potential friend, and decided he'd have to show up when her schedule allowed it.

Usually, this sort of 'entanglements' were something that just happened to him, either unexpectedly, or somewhere along the way, but she'd made him court her properly, and it was, perhaps, the first time in his life, or at least the first time since leaving Gallifrey, that he'd really had to do that, and gone out of his way to bring it about, so when their spheres of living actually started to overlap, little by little, it seemed more meaningful in a way, because it had once been optional and was now deliberately chosen.

He'd gotten to observe her in her native habitat, and by now, he'd more or less become acquainted with her charges, her friends, her students, family and co-workers, much like she'd met his superiors at UNIT or his little group of friends at Paternoster Row, and just like she'd gotten to play a part in some important events in his life, he had, by now, become an almost permanent accessory to her flat and workplace.

In the end, she'd ended up drawing him into her world as much as he'd drawn her into his.

Another thing that tended to make her very aware of the difference was his piloting.

Beyond the initial crash landing, she'd seen very little of his previous, frivolously haphazard approach – When he really wanted to, his hands would glide over the keys and levers like wind, his fingers expertly finding the correct keys without even needing to look at them, whirring around the console or pulling over the screen with next to no unnecessary motions, his movements abrupt, blunt, and to-the-point.

She knew that there was a time when he could barely get this ship to land at a specific destination, but seeing him like this forced her to realize how many long, long years had passed since then. There were still times where he didn't wind up quite where he wanted to go, or left her waiting for a few weeks, but those were better attributed to his general scatterbrainedness than his piloting skills in particular – he wasn't even out of practice, in any sense of the word that she would have recognized – once the aftereffects from the regeneration had fully worn off, it became quite apparent that working the controls of this ship had become second nature to him, that it was so deeply engrained that it was just a matter of picking up right where he left off, except that he didn't feel like reviving any of those long faded reckless driving habits.

He was long past childishly pretending that the stabilizers didn't exist, if he judged that he's need the, he used them, and if not, he didn't, although he was experienced enough to manage without them more often than not.

He still didn't do this by the book, and he never would, but by now, this had peaked in the ability to effortlessly pilot this vessel without the safeties on, working out all of its specific little knacks, tendencies, tricks of the model that one could only learn by using it, and eventually, the skill to pull off stunts and tricks that the engineers and designers of the Type-40 had never intended nor though possible.

Through the lens of understanding, the quick and sparse motions of his hands became akin to the caress of a lover after years and years of sharing a marriage bed with his bride, long after patience, dedication and faithfulness had inducted into every last secret of her body, and taught him exactly where and how to direct his touch, like a masterful musician at work on his instrument of choice.

The difference was starling, not just by itself, but because of what it implied in retrospect, about the amount deliberate sloppiness he must have applied, the kind of hoops he must have jumped through to make the piloting experience every bit as 'fun' as it had been in the early days, and of course, the downright suicidal levels of gross, self-hating negligence she must have been exposed to each time she agreed to become a passenger on this craft.

The present state, however, was just as understatedly frightening as the previous one.

Of all sudden, she found herself forced to recognize the full implications of something she'd only known as a theoretical statement before – That she was in the presence of the single most experienced time traveler in the universe, a man who'd gone further than anyone else, who'd had literally ages to hone his already superhuman instincts to navigate even the most extraordinary of circumstances, and he'd been bonded to this particular ship for so long, spent so much time tinkering and improving it, that he'd probably come closer to using it at its full potential than anyone before him, including those who'd moved on to their newer, fancier models, none of which would ever see as much action as this particular craft.

And by now, he was no longer bothering to sugarcoat it, no longer pretending to be anything else, not going out of his way to be anything at all, neither reasonable nor over-the-top whacky, merely letting his true merit shine through. When he acted childish, it was never to conceal anything but because he felt like being childish in that particular moment, and when he didn't, there was this sheer monster, this abyss to be seen, the most 'tangible' thought of his perhaps, ironically, being that he might just deserve to be seen just like this, and that he should throw away whatever useless pride ever drove him to hope for anything else.

These days, she finds herself picking up some rudimentary time-machine piloting skills of her own, and she might very much need them, because his mastery of the intended functions of this time capsule merely turned his irrevocable madness toward a different outlet.

He was, by now, in the position to be more than just a skilled practitioner, and personally work to further advance the science of time travel beyond the achievements of his ancestors.

The realization that he could, and that he was in a pretty unique position in terms of how to approach the remaining big questions of the field – because there were always remaining big questions in any field – might have come to him at any point between the feat he'd accomplished at Gallifrey (with a little help from himself, himself and Clara) and mere minutes before he'd thought of whatever preposterous idea he'd concocted, and shown up in her vicinity at some inopportune moment, his eyes taken over by a strange light.

Not all of the serial experiments turned out quite as much of a breakneck enterprise, or as imbued with more primal motivations as the one that led to their trip to the end of the universe, but 'serial experiments' was certainly the word for it. She saw him working a lot more deliberately and methodically than ever before, although that 'methodical' should never be misunderstood as 'cautious' or 'reasonable' – He might have occasionally pursued a little enlightenment on the side before, and merely obscured it with a variety of obfuscating window-dressing, but his decidedly more systematic approach makes itself felt, yet merely assures that his madness gets channeled down the most efficient paths, for the best possible results or possibly maximum crazy; And since she had the dubious honor of being the muse that had inspired him to go further than anyone had even gone before in yet another way in a list of many others, she was the only... lab assistant? He would be satisfied with.

She supposed that there was some high opinion implied in that, in the act of him interrupting whatever he'd been doing out there in the vast blackness and coming all the way to Earth when he wasn't confident that he could handle something alone, some appreciation for her skills, wisdom and company, but that was a distant, formlessly abstract thought in the moments she'd actually spend having to deal with him – Once he'd worked himself into a frenzy about a particular question or theory to pursue, it would take some drastic measures to snap him out of it, and while she was sure enough that she could strongarm him into desisting if it came down it, she wanted to save up shots of that magnitude lest they be subject to diminishing returns – She wanted to be sure that he would know that she was serious when she was serious, let there be no confusion.

She'd known from her time with his previous incarnation that he had a certain inclination, even a need to keep himself busy, that he tended to get carries away while he was working and might just wind up rearranging the contents of her garage into an eccentric-looking vehicle when he'd only meant to mow her lawn.

He used to be the type of person who could never stop moving; and a general rule, he'd default to reading or tinkering with the console if there was nothing else to do. Those last two things still held true, but the childish, boundless energy seemed to have been entirely replaced by a driven restlessness, that may or may not have been a colder, dryer manifestation of some shared, underlying quality, but the resulting visual was a very different one from his previous brand of youthful and endearing.

When his mind could actually be persuaded to focus on something, he could spend days on end working like a man possessed, working on his ship's various machinery, bent over his workbench or amidst piles of scrolls and writings, comparing data, making preparations, rewiring the sensor arrays, pounding a few coordinates into the central console before storming out the doors without as much as a basic environment scan to check this and that, not too rarely visiting very different times and places in short succession and dispensing with anything resembling rest; In the 'best' case, he'd spend some of that time chewing various sugary snacks without much of a nutritional value, but when he was particularly immersed in what he was doing, even that basic a concern was liable to completely vanish from his mind – Not all of his investigations were strictly about time travel itself as much as they were using some of his newer methods to answer questions from diverse fields of study, questions that, when she was lucky enough to have heard of the subject matter at some point in her life, struck her as either mindbogglingly obvious things or verging on joke material, but as far as this world's proven propensity for patent ridiculousness was concerned.

When his exploits did veer into the territory of fundamental research, what knowledge the sum of her previous experiences had allowed her to amass led her to piece together a suspicion that some of it might just be meant to explore possibilities that he hoped might eventually crystallize into viable methods to retrieve his lost planet from wherever it had gotten to, and the way the console room invariably tended to transform into even more of a mess of chalk dust, tools and reference materials of when he thought he might have a lead on any such thing seemed to confirm those suspicions.

Among other things, he had been experimenting with inputting his thoughts directly into the ship's navigation matrix without any further man-machine interfaces in between, which seemed to oddly echo her own struggles more and more the longer she thought about it. Those long days had a tendency to leave her acutely aware that, when she chose to speak to him, what actually happened was that some part of her brain would try to wrap her intentions into words, and then order her mouth to produce some equivalent in sound, in the manner of a signal being encoded before it could be safely transmitted. Sound was not even the only available medium, the same meaning could be expressed with many different, more or less accurate strings of words, that did not even need to become sound at all. It was, for example, possible to transport those same words through written symbols or sigh language, and on the level of the intentions themselves, one might be able to completely dispense with the words and convey them with gestures alone. Upon closer inspection, even the words themselves were just another class of symbols that might be substituted by letters of a different alphabet, or an equivalent in a whole different language – it would then fall to the facilities in his head, both software as well as hardware, to identify the communications, divide them into words, and infer her intentions.

More than that, he was not necessarily operating on the same system architecture as her and might store or process the same input somewhat differently –

So basically, attempting to get him to listen to her led more or less to the same process that took place when he entered a set of coordinates into the keyboards of the console. To lower the numbers of the steps in-between was to allow less opportunities for nuances of meaning to get lost or muddled in translation, and thus, to increase the chances of reaching an understanding – and this, not even quite as metaphorically as one might think, given that this ship was more or less sentient, and, as Clara had the personal misfortune of of finding out, quite temperamental at times.

She knew from one of their run-ins with UNIT that he'd been a long-time fan on antique vehicles, even of the non-alive variety, but she'd been forced to realize that this went a bit further than the usual case of a boy talking to his car by the time she found herself pleading with the moody time-capsule in exhausted exasperation. This ship was, by its very function, a means to bend, warp and slip through the very dimensions of spacetime, and it did so by means of harnessing an entire star that had been harvested, or possibly even created to serve as its power source, eternally frozen in the moment of its collapse, but it was also a a chimeric mosaic of mechanical and biological parts and slightly telepathic, to, boot, probably because it had to be for some of its various functions like the ever so practical translation matrix. 'She' – this being the term the Doctor used, without having ever insinuated to Clara whether it was in any way based in actual biology or a cultural convention, or merely part of his own personal affectionate treatment, like a nickname of sorts – was very much alive and had a will of her own, and not just in the sense that would also have applied to Clara's goldfish, and her coexistence with her pilot was very much based on a kind of chosen, mutual symbiosis, the ship was supposedly 'primed to his imprint' whatever that was supposed to signify – There was a level to their connection on a physical level, or at least a special mental bond, that exceeded anything you might find between a boy and his favorite car, pet or a named weapon in a way that existed completely outside of Clara's personal life experience.

The closest she had to 'symbionts' coexisting with her were the bacteria in her gut, but unlike them, this ship was complex enough that it could be considered to have self-awareness and personality.

But there were still aspects to this that she could understand without having to be a Time Lord for it, in part because, as mentioned before, the Doctor and his TARDIS were an unusually close pair of spaceship and pilot, and her nature as a person just added to it – He had almost exclusively used this ship for many, many years and eschewed newer models that might have been more reliable, but would have required him to get used to their systems and relinquish some of the mastery he'd achieved with his own imperfect, but familiar craft; Already a museum piece when he got hold of her, this particular TARDIS' long existence had let to quirks and malfunctions accumulating, but he'd also continually made his own repairs, adjustments and modifications and since she was alive, one might assume that she'd gained and profited from as much as her 'thief'. But there was also a factor of their affinity as bonded creatures and their relationship as two 'people', by the widest definition. They got along well, they matched in their natures, in their combination, and he probably gave more importance to that than his dispassionate, haughty brethren who just saw their advanced, awesome creations as machinery to be used. The two of them were an unique entity unto themselves, one that would not have been possible without the civilization of Gallifrey to bring them forth (although they would not have become what they were without their encounters with the people of Earth, either), but the things they had done, the things they had seen, been involved with and lived throughout had made them a different sort of entity, with the TARDIS perhaps developing and cultivating her sentience further than many of her sisters, and him becoming widely feared as far more than just another Time Lord – but on the other hand, they habitually landed in the middle of Clara's living room, and she knew better than anyone else than anyone else that they were sometimes better described as a catty, grumpy cow and a ridiculous, embarrassing man-child, respectively. That, however, also made its own kind of sense – since they both had stubborn personalities, they might not always agree on where to go, but that still mean they were 'similar' and Clara heard him implying that he ultimately valued his particular ship exactly because he might occasionally be surprised by where he wound up, the reckless man loving the thrill and risk with antique, unreliable technology and its do-it-yourself potential coexisting seamlessly with an adventurer's fondness for a similarly brave and curious partner whom they could still rely on in a pinch, but still contributed cool ideas of her own.

In a way, it wasn't that different from Clara's own turbulent relationship with the troublesome man, in that the configuration of their flesh might have been very different, but the affinity in their minds and spirits vastly outweighed the differences in their perspectives or the occasional clashes that were ultimately necessary results of their similar natures... except that given his time machine's status as an antique even by Time Lord standards, he'd be the younger partner in that particular setup, so there's that.

Even as one of the few human long-term passengers that hadn't made the TARDIS her primary residence, Clara might have been more aware of the dynamic between the two than the average member of their fellowship, just from the sheer amount of mischief, planning and even dark humor involved in the various pranks she had been subjected to, and the insidious ways their cautious execution had ensured that everything but the cutest trivialities never took place within earshot of both their favorite idiot.

After Clara had thoroughly proven that she had his best interest at heart (or at least, that he was unlikely to give up on his fascination with her anytime soon) and a few... let's say, 'insightful bonding experiences', the two of them seemed to have reached a bit of a truce; While the cheeky blue time machine would still send the occasional prank her way (just enough to keep her on her toes), she'd also been granted access to rare privileges like the ability to open the doors with a snip of her fingers, at least whenever the TARDIS happened to find it funny.

Later, he had theorized that it was something about her unique existence that had led the ship to regard her as an anomaly to be wary of before her encounter with his time stream had actually taken place, because her existence was such a small action, but held the potential to disengage a very large cascade of reaction that would branch out, scatter throughout the universe, and fold back on itself – the incident that caused all this took place on but led her to have played a part in bringing the two of them together and thus causing the events that led her there in the first place (not that Clara really remembered having played the matchmaker for the Doctor and his TARDIS; He'd told her not to force herself to remember too badly because there were some among her various deaths that would not make for very pleasant memories, including a few incidents where "the Daleks got you", but she could not help sort of wishing that she could, in part because of the possibility that she might understand him better if she remembered the few times she must have been raised under the same Sky as him; On the other hand, some part of her felt an uneasy resentment about the thought of remembering anyone other as her parents as the ones she'd first grown up with)

To her, her encounter with his time stream was an isolated incident that has once been in her future and now lay behind her, but from the TARDIS' temporary transcendent perspective, so his explanation, her being was something that extended all along their path together, following along the scar he'd left on this world, following him from beginning to end as surely as his trusty time machine did, and being perhaps the only existence that shared that status with her, so that was due to catch her attention, or so he had explained, and her presence back then, before performing that stunt, had been an intersection point with the fragile start of everything.

Clara herself still suspected that his spaceship was simply a little jealous.

So they had a complex sort of relationship, too, as much as may have been a focal point thereof – all of which made the few occasions on which she'd gotten to do the mental connecting herself all the weirder. On some level, it was just a somewhat experimental way of using a machine, for a specific purpose, and his unchecked recklessness had assured that she'd gotten her chance to try flying the machine alone without any guidance beyond her observations of seeing him go about the task day in day out, for what little these may or may not have helped. But the first time he'd been standing right behind her, his large elegant hands firmly guiding her fingers inside, so close she could feel herself lightly brush against his shirt and jacket here and there, sense his breath on her neck, distinctly perceive his presence all around, although there was still, as always, no real warmth to it, this, too, more of an utilitarian gesture than anything else, and right then, he'd been too busy whacking his brains about his various theories and considerations, and perhaps, some underlying tension from a very different source, a primal fear he'd never quite managed to shake off, to even consider that this very same gestures could have been carries out with very different goals and meanings in mind, or that the scarcity of such closeness these days would by itself, give this event a potential for significance – Their closeness, bizarrely, made her aware of all that mere motion through a distance of space could never connect, that their flesh and blood was constructed very differently between the thin barriers of their roughly comparable, but ultimately very dissimilar skin, her hand were smaller, warmer, darker, smoother than his. But there was another source from which a sense of double meaning trickled into the moment, finding their way not from superficial resemblances or very subjective base urges, but the realm of the abstract, the considerations of equivalents, metaphors and implications, layers of being; The telepathic interface consisted of a side of the console where the openings of the main panel covering it didn't reveal buttons or levers, but allowed direct access to the biological components – At first glance, she'd assumed that these threads of white material would feel rather sticky, like chewing gun pulled apart or some sort of viscous goo. Instead, they turned out to be rather like coral, superficially appearing as though they might feel soft and pliant like animal or mushroom tissue, but turning out to have a stony, mineral-like consistence like flint, porcelain or the shells of a clam, though she could feel the stirrings of activity that was not quite pulsating because it wasn't the substance itself moving as much as it was some presence flowing within it, perhaps the sae energy that gave the material it's diffuse inner glow – At first, she thought that the 'tissue', if it could be classified as such, was being lit by some lamps for better access, examination and perhaps to indicate the functions of the various slots, but upon closer examination she concluded that the light was coming from inside the material itself, intensifying in brightness like the blue tint of water depending of how thick a layer or string of material was, and sure enough, she could feel the tingle of a presence or connection, the vague sensation of a tunnel opening up where the back of her mind used to end, just a little bit, so slight she'd find herself asking if it was really there and not just her imagination unless she explicitly concentrated. If there were colors, she'd associate it with pearly cream, peach or the minimal pink of certain seashells, a light, 'mineralic' presence compered to the clear direction of her own thoughts. As a human with no particular psychic talent, she may simply not have had the talents necessary to make out anything more specific, or characteristic, but that ought to be her, the being... person even, who was responsible for some of the more... 'adventurous' bathroom breaks of her lifetime. It would have been a very different, perhaps simpler story if she'd presented herself in a familiar image, that of her usual wooden blue guise perhaps, if she'd used a copy of Clara's own form like she'd done for the holographic voice interface, or shown her a metaphoric analogue like perhaps a kooky-looking grey lady in a frilly blue dress, but this was much more raw, and, admittedly, harder to make sense of. But it was a part of her, that presence, and the glowing white material she'd just inserted her fingers into, which meant that, in a more extended way, it was also a part of him.

Perhaps, if she were able to look deep enough and listen closely enough, she might have been able to feel her way through the link to wherever he was linked to it, or seen him as reflected and perceived by a being that was even more dissimilar from her than he was, something that didn't even share a similar form, but, quite possibly, some of the passions that brought them together.

It irritated her, that she'd gotten the opportunity for this sort of direct communication, but lacked the ability to do very much with that opened canal.

Yet, even for the purpose of more pragmatic concepts, it struck her that being allowed in there, to plot the course of their journey, could very well be seen as a sign of great trust, intimacy even. There were various forms of that, many things that thinking beings could share with each other, their space, their belongings, their thoughts, the days of their lives; And she'd known that, intellectually, she'd professionally discussed the subject many times as it came up in literature, but on the other hand, she'd always expected that she would find all of these qualities in the same person. Once upon a time, she'd lost her heart to this really clever boy who liked to wear bow ties, and little by little, he'd understood her, his words and deeds touched parts of her being that no one before had ever really reached, but they'd also become a very physical couple, always touching each other in one way or another, his lips, fuller and firmer then, were always peppering her cheeks and forehead with kisses. Never did she expect her life to turn into some mockery of a philosophic thought experiment, where she had one place to offer her her refuge and closeness in strong, supportive arms, and this confounding distant person who could ignite her with little more than faint brushes of his hands and the mere sound of his voice.

It would be one thing if she'd found herself torn between two opposing desires that called to different parts or principles inside herself – that could have been arranged in a way that gave both their proper space. But deep down, she knew which one she'd prefer if it really came down to, and the searing weight of that truth pressed down on her conscience and squeezed itself into the cracks between the partitions of her little world, coalescing into more and more of a concrete wall that would have to have to be messily broken down at the cost of an ugly pile of rubble if anything should slip out of its designated spaces.

(But in here, in this compartment of her world, there were times where she just knew, when she gave no thought to anything else and any and all reasons she would have had to delude herself slipped from her mind in the heat of a moment.

Here, inside this blue box, she knew that all three of their fates were unquestioningly intertwined; In some ways, it could be said that they had all come this long, long way together, which was a cool thought she felt free to be unabashedly proud of, but also, all in all, a bit of an abstract reassurance; To the TARDIS, it might all exist at once, to him, much of it was still to come, but for her, much of it was in the past and had only a limited bearing on where her journey would continue from now on, particularly as far the more or less linear part of her existence as a schoolteacher on Earth was concerned.

Yet even now, the universe seemed to find strange new ways to lead their paths back together, as if any suggestion of their parting were equivalent to a fly's weak struggling in the sticky abode of a big fat spider whose careful of her web would only ensure that they got themselves even more entangled in the threads of her handiwork.

Every road seemed to somehow lead her back to his door, or at least, every road she was actually going to follow; even long after that initial entanglement, things kept happening, things such as the crossing of their paths at the national gallery, or her second – and for the TARDIS, the fourth – visit to a particular dusty barn not too far from the slopes of Mount Perdition.)

Perhaps it's the human mind's obsessive wish to retroactively arrange everything in a narrative that makes sense, in retrospective, she doesn't know. If things had gone another way at any step of the process, if they had since parted and never uninterested, she might now be using the same memories to convince herself that they had been talking past each other from the very beginning.

He was filthy and disoriented, and the whole place stank of rotting meat, but had he not said something beautiful, somewhere in between using their argument as a pretext for reconnaissance, or perhaps the other way around?

His very own, stark sort of beauty she had not yet learned to appreciate, but there it was, his motion as he'd leaned forward for no other reason than to grab her hand, a full-body motion betraying a particular intensity that he reserved for only her, an understated tenderness in his voice, in his eyes, a gleam of feverish desperation –

"Honestly, I don't want you to change..."

Back then, she'd looked at him like a boundary had been crossed, and her reaction to his attempts to lighten the conversation was much the same -

("No, don't smile. I'll smile first.")

But, and that was the main point of her belated realization, there hadn't been an immediate disconnect, not for either of them – She'd rushed to his side without a moment's hesitation when he'd first collapsed, but that was before he'd given her a voice and a definite set of mannerisms to associate with the face, a potential stranger to fill the blank space –

And this was to be his welcome, after longing to see her for so, so long.

Odysseus, returning from his journey, returning to town in disguise, returning to glimpse whether his beloved wife had found somebody new, about to find his house in ruin.

So she finds herself looking back at his words, once more, now with clarity:

"Am I home?"

"If you wanna be."

Afraid that he might leave her behind, doubtful that he would even come back for her, she wasn't sure if he wasn't looking for an excuse to be rid of her. She came to dismiss this as the irrational, nonsensical product of her own uncertainty within the next ten minutes, but that still left the question of what his own experience of these minutes had been like...

He spoke of the furniture. He monopolized the blame. He struck a pose with his new outfit. Everything, anything to get her to respond, to talk to him like she always did, or even to roll her eyes is disbelief like so many times before, if that's what it came down to... but she didn't.

So, he obviously gave her the option to leave, for the same reason that he hadn't given her the option to stay when they first arrived at Christmas town – because he understood her well enough to know that she wouldn't even voice the alternative as a possibility.

He had already seen that she would infallibly put duty over her own well-being and her place in the painstakingly built frameworks of her life, and she had already been ready to give so much for him – He couldn't possibly demand any more of her, and even though he practically begged her not to, it was a matter of principle to let her know that the doors were always open for her to leave.

But even then, his words were laced with a second layer of meaning echoing close behind, something broader, less specific – Even he had not completely conceptualized just what exactly he was offering there, beyond the general suggestion of a direction, leaving her to step into what had usually been her space, to be the one to draw the specific lines and boundaries as the one with the technically busy schedule, but even without her adding any further specifiers, the rough gist was clear enough:

If she wanted to go home, she could step outside these doors;

But she might also, if she be so inclined, consider this an invitation to find her home right here –

Not in the profane, potentially selfish sense that he wanted her to merely change the location of her belongings, of restrict the facets of her life to those that took place here, but a the higher, abstract sense, the very meaning of the word "home" – a place she could always return to, somewhere she could create a space of her own, where she would always be welcome.

It was apparent in his pained, bittersweet smile that her lack of response to a statement like this would be a source of discouragement, but even if she said nothing, he was leaving the door open;

Even if she had left right there and then, he'd at least wanted her to hear, wanted to know – That if she ever needed shelter or refuge, come hell or high water, if a dark day should come, she could have turned to him much like he had turned to her in the past, and he would have shared with her all that was his, or at least as much as he could give her, of his life, of his journey, of his company.

"Better get that, might be your boyfriend."

And if she had understood him back then, her answer would have been different.

"So, who was it?"

That damned fool and his nerve to decide it all by himself, for them both.

That fool and his illusion that the final words would somehow hurt less if they came from his own mouth.

But what could she say, what high ground could she possibly have claimed?

She was guilty of exactly the same, and if any of this had been a mistake, it was time that she let him know that it was hers as much as his.

What a bunch of fools they were.

Utter, complete fools that were utterly, completely deserving of each others foolishness.

They'd broken up even though they both still loved each other, and they had parted ways even though they both wanted to stay by each others' side.

They'd separated, because it was more important to them to stay in each other's lives no matter what, than what specific role they might get to play in that life. And they'd bid each other farewell because they valued the other's happiness even more than that, so much they were willing to endure their suffering in solitude, and because of many other reasons that, to anyone else, would have looked more like a set of reasons to begin a relationship than to end it –

But good people had died, tears had been shed, dreams had been shattered, inconvenient facts had become apparent, and at the end of the day, they both saw themselves justly punished, ultimately, punished by only themselves, of no help to anyone.

What a pair of hopeless cases, old, spent, silly, ridiculous, presumptuous fools!