Day 6
By the next morning he'd done what he should have done long ago and acquired some basic proficiency in the most widespread Fabronian dialects – the thing with learning Languages is that once you'd passed a certain level of basic skill, you could deduce the bits missing from your vocabulary from context – especially I the bunch of languages you were studying were related. Especially when one had extensive experience with the process and even more so when you had enough experiences with similar types of grammar to risk some lucky guesses – there were, after all, only so much ways to combine sounds into useful messages.
He'd sat in one of the planetarium's comfy chairs for quite a while, further supported by a couple of small pillows he's snatched from some corner of the TARDIS library. His first choice for practice reading were his personal favorites among the Fabronian Literature he'd sampled to far, sprinkled with a few generally influential works that had his curious about their exact wordings, granted, the TARDIS typically translated everything with a good mixture of idiomatic suitability, precise detail and appropriate conservation of spunk, but there was a certain charme to seeing the exact words the authors had chosen and perhaps spent time wondering and deciding about, what their thoughts had sounded like in their long buried heads.
After searching for a few passages that interested him in terms of what the original word choice might have been, he took the time to scribble few reference sheets for the less common or somewhat archaic alphabets of the Planet, just to have them on hand in case he encountered any further writing while exploring the city – as much as he could rely on the TARDIS to translate anything that went beyond his own capabilities, he kind of liked the challenge of deciphering it himself, something he'd rarely have the time for when he had company to entertain; Usually, he'd save pursuits like this for the nighttime trips, these days, they were getting done when Clara was tied up with work of her own.
He could imagine that she wouldn't have found this all too thrilling anyways, especially not after he'd ended up walking around in a dusty abandoned city looking for old inscriptions to make sense of – that was almost... well, an archeologist's work.
Although he didn't like to admit it, his pursuit of linguistics as a hobby had meshed pretty well with River's chosen occupation and even saved their butts that one time he accidentally activated some ancient civilization's teleporter and landed them light years away from the TARDIS, but those days were long gone now.
As he assembled his things, he briefly wondered why he'd never taken her here while he had the chance – this kind of venture would have been right up her alleyway. She might've taken up archeology to track him down and make sense of the contradictory things both the silence and her parents had told her about his person, to go looking for her own version of the truth between the pages of dusty books, but what she'd found was much more than that – He sure liked the thought of her nursing a growing fondness as she thumbed through the pages of his accomplishments, but what really made him proud was that all the stories of civilizations, societies and their notable members must have captivated her heart somehow, or else, she wouldn't have gone back to continue her academic career.
Why she chose to do her exploration of those bygone cultures by examining their dusty remains when she easily had the possibility to personally take a look at them at their peak, he would never understand, but in hindsight, that she'd cheekily defend her work from even his playful jabs showed how far she'd come in creating something for herself in defiance of the destiny the silence had attempted to force on her.
So, it stands to reason that she'd have had a field day with these abandoned corridors; He could imagine that she probably would have provided him with a further list of items to bring before giving himself over to his wanderings, most of which he'd have scoffed at, but her suggestions did have that annoying habit of coming in very handy later on.
Maybe this place had just never occurred to him as a potential destination, after all, the universe was big and there was no shortage of elaborate underground complexes and ruined cities in it. You wait next to any city long enough, and there's a good chance that it might eventually wind up ruined.
Or maybe it was because he recalled this place too well did not want to touch upon the memories of the Time War, or the miserable time in his life that had prompted his second visit. River was an astute one, too. She'd notice if he was hiding something; Sure, he could claim that it was something to do with her personal future ("spoilers!") and count on her younger versions being too careless to ponder what that meant, the older ones sufficiently mature not to probe it any further, but by the time she arrived at the library, she'd sort through her diary pages and find her reminiscence soured by the unmistakeable stench of a broken promise, and she deserved better than that.
He'd done her, and those who had come before her a great injustice anyways, in assuming that they'd be irrevocably repulsed if they could only see what he'd locked away; But when he couldn't prevent Clara from seeing, she didn't turn and run – She'd stuck it out by his side and gently supported, nay, even inspired him on his darkest day, and that's why he had been keen not to repeat the mistakes he'd made in the past. Aside from the first few encounters from "her" side in which she had been young and reckless, River had always seemed mature and collected, juggling her many secrets with governed pragmatism when playful banter failed her, and this perception he had of her as an experienced, seasoned traveler much like himself, someone who teasingly dangled secrets just above his head and refused to be seen through, this someone who always existed at a distance, might have been a part of why he'd been less reluctant to openly display desire toward her more than he usually did – but all the while he was also painfully learning how much of her attitude was born from simple necessity to keep the timelines preserved and harsh lessons learned from the colossal mistakes of her youth.
It wasn't until the end that he realized how much of her strength was owned to her nerves of steel, a deliberately produced mask she'd upheld for the sakes of him and her parents – although he would have come at her call whenever she'd have asked, the energy he'd been expending to uphold his own wall of denial was something she'd read as a clear sign that he didn't want to be bothered with the reality of her own problems, not when he could barely face his own, and in they end, they had never been able to stand the repercussions of each other's company for extended periods of time, thanks to his own immaturity and the way it had exacerbated the already dismal cards they'd been dealt.
And things with Clara might easily have gone down a similar route, their precious eyeblink of time wasted with suspicions brought on by out-of-sequence meeting, but be it through some quality of Clara's, the bitter lessons of experience, or simple probability making such a double pileup of tragic circumstances too unlikely even for him, meaning that it was time for him to catch one of the few breaks allotted to him, but she'd managed to break through to him despite all odds and become his confidante, and that's why it had been important to him to approach her, or the world in general with... not necessarily more truthfulness, but certainly less filters.
Old habits die hard, however, and sometimes deceptions were necessary to save their lives, or simply all too tempting; In the end, a person could only overhaul themselves so much, especially after such a long time of being very set in his ways. People didn't change overnight, not even if they were Time Lords – Humans might get the impression that they were rather versatile from their ability to remake their bodies, but in truth, he was probably in the best position to know what a stubborn lot his people really were, and he was not as much of an exception as he sometimes liked to think.
After all, he didn't have her with him right now, nor did he inform her about the particular significance of where he was going, feeding her only a name that wouldn't mean anything to her when she'd explicitly asked as he was about to disappear back into his trusted blue box, and by the end of what unbeknownst to him was the end of his first week here, it was beginning to dawn on him that his reason for coming here alone was not really related to not wanting to bore her.
All this, complete with the practice reading, a brief walk to find random writings to decipher (he had a hell of a time with an instruction manual that was written in various Fabronian languages) and the various musings that followed ate up roughly a night and the following morning, or so he'd guessed; He hadn't really bothered with looking outside for days, the city's internal structures stretching out endlessly and packed full with potential distraction to tempt his curiosity.
As a corollary, it had eventually occurred to him that many of the Xalaxians probaby hadn't seen their world's mother star all that often, either. In a human settlement, this would have made the upper spires the abode of the rich and left the lower levels for those who couldn't pay for sunlight, and who, depending on the wealth, advancement and government quality of the place, might or might not have become neglected, but in Xalax and many other Fabronian cities inspired by example, this was not the case: Due to a number of societal reasons, like the lower city's long history, the sensibilities of the space faring colonists who rebuilt if after living in space stations and biodoes for a long time, and the Fabronians' somewhat different attitude toward technology and how to approach safety questions (it was not correct to say that they were more naïve, as their trust in technological methodology extended to how new advancements were to be tested; Being less skeptical than the average human could be an advantage as well, and it wasn't as if humans had never been reckless; But given that they had managed to thrive while the Fabronians had destroyed themselves in a blaze, homo sapiens must have done something right, or something wrong that just happened to limit them just as much when it came to blowing themselves up, or perhaps they'd just gotten lucky, and their fates could easily have been switched around, given that the Fabronians were once explorers, too. In any case, the humans that came to see the Nevetina galaxy found the graveyards of world's end to be a thought-provoking cautionary tale. ), made the lower city and its lush gardens sustained below layers of barren rock the most prestigious and coveted place to live – on the surface, the basic and universal biped fascination with things that were taller than others, perhaps inspired by the young's frustration at not being able to reach the fruit trees (slash tall shelves where the adults kept the candy), had then taken over and assured that the tops of the spires were given to flashy public buildings meant to show off to the neighbors - capitalism on the other hand consigned much of the levels immediately on the surface and therefore closest to the boulevards to shops and businesses, while the middle of the towers often housed living complexes for simple employees or service personnel, like the one-bedroom apartment he'd "borrowed" earlier.
The poor in Xalax had not been many, but the authorities had not wanted them in plain sight, so that they'd been given their housing in the vicinity of larger bits of machinery, where the ambient noise from water treatment plants or ventilation shafts made the more affluent people unlikely to buy anything, or near the outer walls, either in the medium tunnels or precarious tunnels added to the outermost reaches of the outer city where they extended into nearby natural cave systems outside the main dome, where they would obviously be without protection if some explosive event were to displace the whole structure once again, but to the Xalaxian's credit there were regularly practiced evacuation protocols that had ultimately never been needed.
As with humans living in very high latitudes, or even susceptible to plunging into sustained polar night, some individuals might require some pretty good imitations of sunlight to stave off adverse effects (the natural climate around Xalax was comparable to the shores of the Mediterranean), but to the engineers, architects, city planners and healthcare providers, this was just another requirement among many to master and manage.
As for the Doctor himself, he'd spent so much time living either in frosty Trenzalore or the endless, fully automated corridors of his own spaceship to really find anything extraordinary about the lack of natural light. The internal maze of the TARDIS was in many ways more advanced in its offerings and comforts than the Fabronian cities, even if it typically only housed a crew of one to four people.
Xalax, at its last true height, held billions, and it's inhabitants didn't even have access to dimensional engineering or phase-shift technology – and those observations and comparisons, it occurred to him, might've been quite the adequate tool or opportunity to give someone a vague sense of what Gallifreyan cities had been like – At first glance, the planet might've looked sparsely populated, much of its icy mountains, silver forests and rocky plains looking untouched or rural to the untrained eye, the occasional band of hermits, monks and deviationists roaming across the harsh and unforgiving terrain its resilient inhabitants had evolved in (as its landmass was greater then earth's, so were the areas dominated by central-continental climates, and owing to the planet's larger size, the gravity was a fraction stronger.), most major institutions centralized in one of its few yet well-fortified cities – but this was a civilization so advanced its technology could be subtle, elegantly concealed until needed and so astonishing in its potency that it might look like magic to visitors, had those ever been particularly welcome, and as for those cities, there was no straightforward two-dimensional map that could have captured its impossible twists, turns and impossible figures.
No need for new structures when you could just enlarge the old ones and still keep the exterior aesthetics of your venerable forebearers – that would usually still be around to boss you around and complain about your architecture, anyways. The billions of Gallifrey were never all too noisy and, on average, content with their confines in a way humans would rarely ever have been; They never got tired filling up space with new things for the heck of it.
Perhaps the occasional youth, not fully processed by the system or one of those incompatible little flukes that were a side-effect of evolution, might've made the occasional bits of noise, but there wasn't much incentive to listen to them on a world where those in power had occasionally held their offices for longer than humans had had written language by Clara's time and could answer each half-formed thought or idea with a well-practiced chastisement. The commonly portrayed idea was that getting into any position to change anything required a lot of discipline and patience – something he now knew to not be strictly speaking true, given the times he'd gotten the presidency dumped in his lap, or how Romana had seized it at an age when he was but an obscure little researcher living in his illustrious family's shadow (Though he wouldn't have taken her job for the world, he can't say that he didn't envy her just a bit. It would be at least partially correct, albeit grossly incomplete to say that she'd had his help, but he'd needed quite a bit longer to figure out what to do with himself. )
But generally speaking, childhood and youth were but the blink of an eye in the overall existence of the typical Time Lord, and so the brief state of being a 'newcomer' to the world wasn't given much emphasis or attention, to the contrary, it was expected that the youth get themselves disciplined, educated and ordered into the system as soon as such a thing was practicable, and letting kids be kids, or youth be youths, was an unfortunate side-effect at best.
He liked to think that he rebelled and stuck out from the very beginning, but once put in a different context, he couldn't deny that he'd done his share of absorbing and adapting to be able to live in a place that he had not been able to leave for over four hundred years; For a human, their formative years would take up a fourth of their existences; They didn't have non-complicated sounding words to distinguish between the objectively quite different processes of maturation and accumulated decay, having seen them as a continuum until they got themselves microscopes.
(The Fabronians, he supposed, could have been regarded as being somewhere in-between. Like Time Lords, they'd be regarded as being still somewhat green behind the eyes until they'd seen at least their first century, but they'd have long since finished their education by then, and with some variation depending on the time period, that might be a good third of what they would live. )
Childishness was underrated, that was basically one of the … tenets of what he was saying.
But everything in moderation, as they say.
Including moderation.
There's another thing he turned out to be mistaken about: The museum illustration on the floor below doesn't end up being the last painting to ever be drawn of the little merchant girl whose remains he'd seen exhibited down there;
After more than enough time clicking and swiping through books, he's somewhat better informed but also itchy for movement; The first thing he does is go back down to look up what "Xanthos Helepolis" equates to in its native language; It's a more complicated cultural reference that he now understands; The name hails back to ancient history, something an ambitious scientist might've thrust upon his finest creation, or maybe Xanthos, contrary to the Doctor's initial impression from his career summary, might've been feeling a bit self-ironic: The title, as the counterpart the TARDIS had chosen, was taken not from a legendary hero, religious figure or philosophic concept, but from a legendary siege weapon – While the terrestial version was basically an ancient greek Death Star, a superweapon foiled by an obvious weakness, the Fabronian "Helepolis" fared a lot better and came to cause quite a bit of terror and sorrow before meeting its undoing, quite like Helepolis-the-man, but it didn't stand to question that whoever had chosen the epithet (the uninformed, propaganda-gorged public being another option) had named him for an object, a weapon no less.
He supposed that it made sense by military logic, after what he'd seen, but still, he'd never get how they could sometimes be so... obvious, scream out what he might suspect they were secretly thinking, but should have been to shameful to say out loud.
For all they disgusted him, he couldn't really fault the Daleks for screeching out their diabolical intentions; Their creator had left them no other option. But most citizens of the universe had an option, secondary pieces of software added to the primitive reptilian drives, and still, now and then, chose not to use them – and he was one of them.
Then, mentally grasping at any welcome distraction, he recalls one of the texts he read, some essay about what passed for watercolors on Fabron, or at least a rough equivalent, and a mental note he'd made to try out that technique so far, and possessed by a sudden impulse he decides to put in a stop for what is essentially the work of processing.
He does diaries, scribbles notes, vents his impressions on the lost city, sketches its spires into his journals with a remarkable amount of atmosphere and impression captured in surprisingly crude arrays of lines, the right stroke of detail here and there, or the reflections of the light as he depicted them doing the trick to make the observer's brain add all the other work.
At some point, he got his materials and decided to do some painting, leaving colorful stains on floors that would probably never be walked on again once he packed all this up and left this place for good.
He doesn't quite know how the rudimentary outlines on the sketch wind up becoming the merchant girl, but they do; It might be because his glance briefly brushed over her portrait when aiming for Xanthos' name plaque, and tugged on the network of associations he'd built around the sight.
He's got half a mind to make this the 'historically accurate' edition, starting with her hair color and a different set of jewelry, but if he went down that road, some stubbornly competitive part of his might lead him to jump in the TARDIS, leaving his strewn-about instruments and papers just where they were, and sketch the girl as she'd really been when she had flesh on her bones; There was nothing limiting his capacity of finding that out, but that was not really something he wanted to do to himself.
Had he gone to her era first, and never seen this museum, another minimally different skeleton from the same period, even the same cluster of graves, could have easily taken her place without mattering much to the fates of the researchers who'd excavate the bones and the museum visitors who might have been inspired or warningly admonished by this window into history but now that he'd seen this place, interweaved it with his thoughts and even motivations, she was part of his causal nexus, and he was no longer sure whether anything in his power that could have shifted her fate.
Instead, he draws her much as she appears on the illustration he'd previously seen, white hair included, except that at some point, he started sharpening the edges of her face, tweaking the shape of her eyebrow to make her gaze appear firmer, swapping the jewelry for slightly more distinguished choices, intricate red garnet stones hanging from her ears and neck, a common traditional gift for a daughter that was ready to leave the house, as he'd learned from a few novels set in that period and the occasional blemished artifact of such items in the museum.
Even making her a young adult would only give this potential, imagined version of her a fraction of what she could have had, but it was a futile exercise he was willing to waste his time on; If nothing else, it was cathartic in a fashion that was indirect enough.
After that, he proceeded to capture some more impressions in full color, scenes from books, events described in this museum; Maybe one day he'd go to see them for himself and get to compare the products of his imagination (and those of subsequent Fabronian painters) with the real thing, or perhaps come back here and wander into other, subtly different versions of this reality in the wibbly-wobbly cavern of possibility that was the universe.
He's had more than enough inspiration to picture all the past and future occasion of this city breaking apart in glorious, dramatic detail; Though he would not be completely flabbergasted if he encountered something all new (that, too, was a part of knowing this universe) it was hardly probable that nothing of what had occurred, what it had looked like, wouldn't resemble anything in any other city he'd seen destroyed, not after he'd seen Arcadia cracked open; It was more a question of which of several likely scenarios had actually taken place; He'd need a closer look at the stilts and fundaments of pre-dome Xalax to know for certain wether it's circular shields and rings broke into segments when they were swallowed by the waters of the lagoon, so for now he judged by whatever would improve the painting's composition.
He felt like wild brush strokes today, intersected with baroque plays of shadow, movement and complicated body postures, the garish, almost pictogram-esque depiction of smoke and fire contrasting with the wind-whipped white robe of a lone figure trying to stay on their feet; He gave more detail to individual little things or the scattered, horrified citizens than to the larger components of the catastrophe, the flooding waters themselves were well-placed nuances of color and little else; By its side, the image of a youth who was trying to climb out of the rubble had been given particular attention, and endowed with as much lifelike detail as her small fraction of the canvas allowed, down to the dust specks on her scraped skin and the frayed ends on her tunic, a not inelegant, but simple garment that, together with the basket she was carrying on her back and the lack of extravagant jewelry beyond simple red glass bead earrings, a metal ring around her right arm and a heavy barrette of yellow metal and blue stones that held her thick black hair in place, marked her as a simple laborer or vendor; The small boy next to her was dressed to indicate a similar status, possibly her little brother, cousin or unplanned-for son, or possibly just someone she was babysitting; The Doctor hadn't really decided, but he spontaneously decreed that the girl's barrette would be a family heirloom, and went to apply some light, curved lines to suggest an engraved pattern.
Whenever he found that he had nothing more to add to given painting, he'd methodically put it aside, (perhaps for later revision) and continue with the next canvas, brushes and fingers in hectic motion that seemed almost self-sustained.
And he was so focused on the technique and detail – a rosette of elaborate clothing folds here, a gradient of colors tinted with the flickering light of a campfire there, some bundles of straw in the background – that he only belatedly reached full awareness of the whole his whims had created, something that only peripherally related to this time and this place, that wasn't an accurate depiction of anything else either – as that would have required planning – but he knew where its individual elements had come from, why it was a small rural festival setting without the exact look of everything being preserved in more than a paraphrased way, a campfire for a campfire, a grill for a grill, not necessarily the exact type from back then, not that he even remembered – but he would never forget the short individual in the long red dress dancing along with the other village girls.
The swirl of long brown hair seen from the back was merely a pointed allusion, but her face, had he chosen to draw it, wouldn't have been something he'd have to haphazardly reconstruct from hazy memories; Whatever wrenches the future might throw, at his relative present, he saw that same face with as much semblance to regularity as he could probably stand.
Funny how beyond the city's abandoned towers and the plains that surrounded them, outside his stretch of neutral zone, there were people living their lives without knowing that they, and this whole huge galaxy, probably owed its existence to the intervention of a single girl from a faraway world who might not ever remember very much of it; He could have taken here to some of the places they'd visited, and she might not have felt more than a vague sense of Déjà-vu; The colonist village itself might have evoked a stronger reaction, but since it had been implicated in the Time War and hadn't been populated for all that long before its fiery end, it was forever inaccessible to him. But that specific chain of events and the now devastated region were a fairly small splotch of temporal scar tissue compared to the galaxy's full expanse of lives, cultures and stories, and the endless destruction, rewrites and anomalies a prolonged escalation of battle between Daleks and Time Lords would have subjected it to; And he didn't think he could have prevented it alone.
Then again, he couldn't have stopped the reality bomb or the time cracks without the deeds of Donna and Rory, respectively, and there were many citizens of the universe who didn't know of them, either – In the end, the memory, or its imperfect, endlessly ruminated and reinterpreted remainder, would always stay with him as something he'd carry with him for as long as he could, and that was so common a reality in his life that he'd long since stopped analyzing it to bits and moved on to just trying to live with it.
It's not like he wanted Clara to remember her demises, all the times the Daleks got to her first, or what she might've glimpsed of the days yet to come for him, but there was a certain feeling of loneliness about being the only one to know one half of the story, or at least, the parts of it he'd since recognized for what they were. He might never know how much of the last few millenia's worth of lucky coincidences was actually her doing, and he might never stop wondering.
The full story might never be known to anyone, as it was with most if not all stories when one really thought about it.
Given how everything had turned out, it might be for the better that she didn't recall certain things that had transpired on the lucky occasion of him finally putting the pieces together –
("Who told you that?" "I think you just did.")
At this point, he wasn't going to go all sentimental and go with a phrase such "but as long as I remember" as it was, to his liking, a tad to cheesy, self-centered and just and invitation to this mischievous universe to strike him with amnesia – the people who looked up to him as a hero and a symbol for the valuing of all things might expect him to remember everything, everyone, but a long, long time after demon's run and that one valiant defector from the gamma forest, he'd come a few steps closer to accepting that he was a limited being which sometimes had to prioritize, not in value but pragmatic usefulness; Not that this necessarily meant that he didn't find the things in question worth remembering, though some obviously annoyed him.
But his continued existence, he's immediate affecting of, and interacting with further thing and people – this was proof of what she'd done.
By the very merit that he was here, and that this place was still here, it couldn't be as if it never happened.
He didn't know if it was night outside these walls right now, if all the little dots of light of the Nevetina-Galaxy were aligned, many of them shining over cities just as illustrious as this one, but one of the lights that would have gone out over Trenzalore's skies if the Great Intelligence's interference had been left unchecked was most definitely this Galaxy, condensed to a single dot by vast stretches of distance.
He'd had a long, long time to stare up at Trenzalore's particular arrangement of stars with wistful longing for what he thought were glory days that would never come again, and perhaps a sense of resigned contentment over a job done to the best of his abilities, assigning names, shapes and associations to constellations the original colonists hadn't even bothered to name because they held little of any absolute or fixed nature to the settlers before the town had come under siege – People who could build a cheesily-themed town in space knew just how different those stars could look from any other angle, but when the people became trapped there and were faced with the harsh truth that this might be true for their future generations, they were in need of a mythology, and his endless fount of stories fit the bill well enough – It's not like he couldn't relate, his children and grandchildren, if they still lived, were likewise trapped on the other side of the crack. With his stories springing from the same mind as his random associations, they integrated seamlessly with his haphazard appellations for the canopy's patterns, and so they became accepted among the Trenzalorians, at some point becoming something that had been established for generations, and existing as such around him a he struggled to hold on to the memory of the long-withered children whose perceptions and interpretations had helped to shape the legends.
Since he'd had a lot of time there, those stars had almost become glowing, heat-wallowing objects of his madness, of a life of thrills that, no matter how iron his determination to protect the village, was not an easy one to give up. He'd never liked sitting still and made a point of never getting much practice in it over the years, so that he'd almost completely forgotten how to do it by the time he met Amelia, so fidgety moments were to be expected, and he couldn't always fill them with rambling at the local kids (or Handles), not when he was keeping a watch out for stray cybermen in the middle of the night.
It figures then, that he'd catalogued and identified most of those dots, produced hand-made star-charts annotated with each astronomic object's names and brief allusions to any personal encounters he might've had there; Sometimes, he'd use that knowledge to impress the local kids and ask them to point at a celestial body so he could entertain them with stories of the local populace, or, if those were nonexistant or not suitable for casual storytelling, he'd talk about something in its vincinity.
Nevetina was one of those points he could identify, far, far away so it could only be seen as a pale cloudy dot by the naked eye; And while his ventures there were nothing fit to be told to young children, nor likely to comfort a populace that lived in daily fear of Daleks or the man who was fighting to prevent something like that hell from starting up again, his encounters with the local civilizations were still something worth describing, as much as he wished that they'd taken place under happier circumstances; He'd gotten to a point where he felt ready to stop denying that part of his life, and he'd be doing both Clara and himself a disservice if he didn't fully follow through with it, not that his Elaborations on the Galaxy's people called for more than vague allusions to the background threat of the war.
One place he couldn't see, however, was the Milky way. He couldn't catch even the most rudimentary, distorted smear of light from Sol, and that vexed him as much as it probably should, in a way that the presence of the misplaced bit of milky way just beyond the crack could not fully remedy.
Even if he had been able to see it, the light years in-between would have assured that any artificial lights he'd have picked up from that direction would belong to the Silurian civilization, with some bulb lit by a young Vashtra possibly somewhere mixed in there, but it would have been something, a purely symbolic comfort at least.
It might have helped the ironic situation where the humans of Trenzalore, isolated as they were by centuries of besieging, learned most of what they knew about the world that gave birth to their ancestors from an exile like himself; Although, by the time he came to Trenzalore he'd probably spent more time on and around Earth and its people than he ever did on Gallifrey, though Trenzalore soon ramped up a similar count; But he still couldn't describe the Earth from the same sort of perspective that a native might have, like someone who had grown up with Earth as their "default".
That might have been why the Nevetina Galaxy stories proved moderately popular, because the children of Christmas town recognized themselves in Clara's equally provincial colonist echo.
But ever so often one of the older kids would recognize this "Clara" character from a wildly different context in another story, and turn to the others in a whisper: "Little sis, did he ever tell you that one? The part with the haunted house perhaps? No, it's not a ghost story, it's a..."
Eventually, though, it seems unavoidable that he gets so lost in the labyrinth of his thoughts and reminiscences that he loses track of what he was supposed to be thinking, or doing, or pondering in the act of deciding what to do next, and leaves behind a few half-read books and unfinished sketches as he starts to become aware of a tingling itch in his fingers that he generously chose to interpret as a sure indication that he'd sat still for too long.
There's probably a deeper restlessness somewhere, gaping deep within at the root of his being, some existential horror vacui that sublimates into the drive that keeps him moving, but it's not something he wants to be alone in a room with.
Starting at the edges, he's overtaken by something like a dry and chilly kind of energy that feels somehow virtual, like the cold comfort of sugar and caffeine after nights without sleep, or a feeling like an immediate threat forcing him into continued vigilance, and the well-practiced circuits of his mind began concocting a plan that he hadn't asked them for.
At some point in a process of tentative idleness being repeatedly interrupted by increasingly less half-baked preparations, he made his decision, with a result that was probably rather predictable, but the kind of 'default reaction' that he was willing to risk that for:
It was time for a little expedition.
Tomorrow, the Doctor would be venturing into the depths of the lower city.