Day 3
It wasn't just the sky that reminded him of home, however, for one thing, there was the proudly-displayed, relatively advanced technology level. The futuristic devices were everywhere, they were something that must have existed for a long time, not just a newfangled thing reserved for the rich and eschewed by the distrustful.
The showers he'd used were sonic, and in the time he'd needed for basic cleaning, the automatic, drawyer-like contraption he'd stuffed his clothes into had opened up and revealed his jacket, jumper, hoodie, trousers, socks and question-marked undergarments, all squeaky-clean. The only thing he'd really had to bring was his razor, seeing as the inhabitants of the city either didn't grow beards, didn't shave them, or perhaps placed very great emphasis on shaving so that each and every man within the walls of Xalax had taking his utensils with him when the place was evacuated. In any case, he didn't find anything resembling a shaving tool in the many dwellings he broke into, which led him to theorize that they hadn't been needed. After all, the Fabronians had even dispensed with the need to do their hair in the morning, since they'd slept suspended in anti-grav-pods, which probably did their backs and necks a lot of favors, but would also have flaunted the efficiency of their power sources to any outside visitors who might have wondered how they could use electricity so frivolously.
He'd even had a chance to sample the local cuisine from a still-working synthesizer, long after the recipes had faded from living memory, and had to suppress an involuntary cringe – There were plenty of 'traditional' dishes available, from earlier in the city's history, from numerous other parts of the planet, even a handful very basic things from neighboring the neighboring star systems, but the most popular thing, hands down, were everything-flavored nutrition blocks-
He'd never known if Leela ever fully adapted to those, or if it all ended with her and Andred both subsisting on random little animals she'd caught.
He wouldn't put it past her.
He still had a machine for making those lying around in the TARDIS somewhere, hadn't used it in centuries – while he made an effort to endear it to Ian and Barbara, that lasted until the two of them made the decision to go buy some Earth fruits for Vicky, who probably hadn't seen very many of these while she had been stranded on Dido with a murderous psychopath.
So, the next time they were lucky enough to land on a human colony world, Barbara returned with a basket full of mostly Strawberries (Vicky's favorite), but also a variety of other fruits, and, of course, he'd been invited to try them, too. After being distinctly unimpressed by a pear and an undefined smaller citrus fruit whose exact type he no longer remembered, Ian convinced him to give a Banana a try – Back then, he hadn't unlearned that Time Lord pompousness to an extent that would have allowed him to express the phenomenon on his taste buds with a response more enthusiastic than, "Mh, these are indeed quite good, my boy." and the "Yes, indeed." that followed when he sampled the strawberries, but let's just say that the 20th century teachers never found out where all fruits kept disappearing to so quickly.
Vicky did, because she had more or less the same idea as him, which, sooner or later, ended in two TARDIS occupants making a stealthy late-night trip to the fruit bowl at the same time.
Of course, he'd just raised his index finger in a quick shh!-gesture to his lips, and she'd nodded with a mischievous glint in her eyes and quietly extracted her strawberries –
Those were the days.
If that synthesizer could think and actually perceive him browsing to the 'favorites' of its previous owner, it might be thinking the same. The Fabronians had never quite reached the level of technology where one could just input the name of a random dish and get their nutrition blocks with that exact flavor, instead there was a fixed, if fairly broad selection to choose from.
(That's when it quite bluntly occurred to him that he still missed Vicky.
After at least sixteen centuries, he still missed Vicky.)
One way to tell that the inhabitants of this city had been using these for years was that the various colorful bricks weren't ordered by whatever flavor of food they were supposed to be imitating, but by functionality first – Depending on how much physical activity you did or didn't participate in, you needed a different dosage of nutrients and calories, there was everything from the equivalent of a light sugary snack to boost your alertness and a little orange cube that was supposed to keep a grown man sated and on his feet for a full day of physically strenuous work – judging by his favored selections, the last occupant of these quarters had been an average-sized 150 year old male with a desk job, working late hours, judging from his very habitual reliance on mild, caffeine-like stimulants in the morning, and what else could he possibly deduce?
Ah, of course. Dark skin, probably a sort of smoky taupe. Meticulous, too, given that he'd adjusted the precise dosage of certain vitamins with light-dependent synthesis paths for his very in-doorsy life style, just a difference of micrograms, as expected from an office drone.
As he clicked through the 'menu', the Doctor had half a mind to gather up some random knickknacks from the nearby storage units and see if he could go back in time, follow this guy to wherever he'd evacuated to back in the day, and bring him back his stuff, less because of any consideration that the man might terribly miss his fine robes, his cleaning robot and that little flowerpot whose contents had long since crumbled away, than simply to see if he'd guessed right.
(Then again, the flowerpot, despite its relatively simple design, looked like it had been painted in colorful varnish by hand, unusual in a place where everything was made by robots and no one lifted a finger anymore. It certainly hadn't been made by any sort of professional, the application of the varnish was so laughably amateurish, its thickness so uneven, that some of it had cracked and fallen off over the centuries. The pattern it was supposed to form was pretty crude, too, like something made by a small child. )
That they could precisely adjust the composition in such a way was yet another advantage of assembling these compact little bricks from scratch by synthesizing and combining the base substances rather than processing any sort of plant or animal matter as base materials, and of course, that they were widely successful at knowing just how to combine those 'ingredients' spoke volumes about their not merely intricate, but actually largely complete knowledge of the layout of their own bodies – a neat side effect to this was that these cube meals wouldn't spoil if you left them in the open for weeks, and in a word where the artificial was celebrated and treated with prestige instead of used to prep up cheap products, the quality standards that people expect of anything fancily advertized set in – So there was no need to worry about any of the colorants or additives giving you cancer (at least if 'you' were an otherwise healthy Fabronian), but that was besides the point – The inhabitants of Xalax – even the Doctor wasn't sure whether to call them cooks or engineers – had done what their Gallifreyan counterparts had never quite pulled off, and turned a basic act of annoying daily maintenance such as the regular intake of artificially assembled metabolic fuel into an art form of its own – among the available choices were fancily named things like "Sphere of Destiny", "The Cube Experience" or "Rhomboid surprise", apparently beloved classics that the room's former owner found too fanciful for his overworked office drone tastes.
Having avoided mostly artificial menus for centuries if not millenia, apart from the occasional bit of standard fare of virtually tasteless field rations omnipresent on deep space missions or in times of prolonged interstellar war and various kinds of 20th century candy (as far as that counted), he'd found himself spontaneously overcome by a bizarre mixture of nostalgia & curiosity, and for the first time in several centuries, a fresh "Cube Experience" materialized in the city of Xalax and proved indeed pretty cubic, sort of blue on the outside and red in the middle.
The nifty little machine's investors even had the foresight to make it supply an equally square plate and something like a spoon, both highly ornate with abstract patterns at the edges, composed of a blueish-white material resembling the substance that comprised the walls.
It's consistency was agreeable enough, more granular than gelatinous, as if it broke up into rounded bits by itself when the cutlery dug into it, with the final result perhaps resembling a spoonful of pomegranate seeds or tapioca pearls, the taste, on the other hand, was nothing like what it looked like, with the closest analogue he could muster from his memory being a tea made of ginger, mint and liquorice that Clara had once served him a long, long time ago before Trenzalore, but with much more of a fruity sour-ish component and a note resembling blueberry, another thing that hardly tasted like it looked – dark blue as they were, if he could assign their taste a color it would be a warm pastel yellow.
He found himself suddenly wishing there were someone to discuss or argue with, about Fabronian cuisine, or possibly, blueberries, on some level, he thought it would be best to have someone agree with him, and that was usually the point in his undertakings where he went to get the Ponds, or visit them, or whatever. River, like most of the other potential taste-testers he could imagine at his side, would probably tease him about it and never let him hear the end of it, Rory would probably find it impossibly weird, but with Amelia, he had the firmest faith that she would most likely get it, that 'tasting colors' thing or at least the general gist of it, she was always someone who'd learned to see past the grids and demarcations of this world, who'd refused to dismiss the things others would rather ignore to have this illusion of a small, manageable world, and led her hears to the ideas and points of views no one else wanted to consider, who knew, she might even get the other two to admit that they, too, shared the unique little insights that brought the four of them together –
And just like that he'd allowed himself to forget, just for an instant, that 'going to see the Ponds' was no longer an option and had not been an option for a long, long time now.
After centuries, he still hasn't managed to get it into his head, that they are gone now and forever beyond his reach – He used to go without seeing them for years, but whenever he'd felt like he was losing his battle against the encroaching darkness, cold and solitude of the world, they'd been there for him to return to, until one day, they suddenly weren't, and the suffocating wrongness of that was something he might never come to terms with.
There had at least been a possibility, a sketchy blue print of a world in which they'd stayed with him for longer, and he knew because that last weeping angel had devoured it – Had he strapped that thing to an operating table and found the means to take it apart, he might even been able to calculate just how much energy the creature had acquired when it fed on those wiped-out days.
He recalled sitting by Amelia's side as she dreamed, her tiny form barely filling her bed, telling her that, in the worst case, he might wind up as a story in her head.
In the end, it had been the other way around, and she'd lived on as a story of his, one of the brightest and most favorite ones, the one the children of Trenzalore had always asked him to repeat, "Please tell us! Tell us again about 'The Girl Who Waited', tell us more about the story of Amelia Pond!"
There were so many things, and places, and people most of all, that he kept a lingering tenderness toward, that the combined force of their sum was like a consuming fire, and before he knew it, that long-derailed once innocuous train of thought led him to season his plate with the salt of his teardrops, suddenly very aware that the place he was having lunch in was a long dead man's personal living space, and that apart from a variety of small rodents, he was the only living thing in a circumference of several hectares at the very least.
Massaging his forehead with a pair of fingers, he re-purposed his thumb to wipe away the leaky wetness at the corners of his eyes, a ghost of annoyance and embarrassment visible on his otherwise restrained features, and in that instant he was, of all sudden, fiercely glad that none of the aforementioned people were here to witness this unbecoming display.
(After some consideration and some prolonged poking around in the half-eaten lunch he could no longer muster much interest in, he decided to empty the dried-up contents of the little flowerpot on the floor and slip it into the right pocket.
Before the door slid closed behind him, he briefly registered the sound of the forgotten cleaning robot whirring to life, faithfully moving to clean up a mess its former owner would never care about.)