Chapter Text
i.
“Grandfather,” the girl says. “Grandfather,” she says again. The old man doesn’t look up from his plate. She can see his hand trembling. This is later.
ii.
“You know he’s never approved of me,” her father says. Her mother laughs, a bright sound that makes her up from where she’s playing under the table to watch her parents. She likes seeing them together, fingers intertwined.
“Father doesn’t approve of anybody,” mother says, “but he likes people who stand up to him. Besides, it’s our choice.”
“He could make things hard for us.” Her father is smiling, but she knows there’s worry underneath, she can always tell.
“He knows I could make things hard for him. Besides, he might not like you, but he hates politics more.”
“Thank you for that,” he says with a dry humor that she’ll try to hold onto.
She goes back to her game. Her parents talk about a lot of things, if it’s important they’ll talk about them with her. She’s a tranquil child. This is earlier.
iii.
“You say there was an accident.” The man isn’t speaking to her. She decides that means she doesn’t have to listen to him.
She might have to sit on the uncomfortable chair and wear the heavy robes, but she doesn’t have to let the words have any meaning. It’s like when her father would bring home a new piece of music and they’d turn off the translation circuit to just listen to the rhythm and sound. She doesn’t like this song.
“She can’t stay here,” Mr. Qeesh says. She has to listen to him because he works with her mother. She likes Mr. Qeesh, who really has a much longer name and is a ‘lord’, but winks and tells her that it’s a secret even though her parents know. They have secrets too.
Had secrets. Worked. Used to bring home. She knows how the words change tense. Her mother had praised her assignment on the differences between time traveling and non-time traveling species tense usage. Her mother had said that she was destined to grow up a scientist with that sort of attention to detail, but she had known that was just teasing for her father. She could’ve grown up to do anything.
She thinks Mr. Qeesh sounds sad. If she could speak, she would know for sure what sadness sounds like, because it fills her like one of the balloons they’d seen at the carnival and she doesn’t know what will happen when it pops.
“I am aware.” The man who isn’t speaking to her doesn’t sound sad. He doesn’t sound like anything at all, but she sees something in his eyes. “It was all most irregular, to begin with.”
“You’re going back home.” Mr. Qeesh says to her, playing as if that means anything. This is her home.
“Yes. The grandfather.” Now the other man’s voice matches his eyes.
iv.
School is terrible. Ana, who isn’t older than her but acts like she’s older than the teachers, says that school’s supposed to be horrible. Ana says it in the lofty voice she uses when she’s announcing the answer in maths, but she knows Ana is wrong this time, even if she always gets her answers right.
She doesn’t know what school is supposed to be like, but nothing’s supposed to be horrible. There are things that look that way, but most of the time that’s just because you don’t understand why people are doing them. She would try to explain this, but she already knows that would make the other children whisper again.
She supposes she has learned a lot of new things at the Academy. Before she hadn’t known many other children. She hadn’t known that they say things like ‘anthropologist’ in mocking ways or look down on a woman who could have lived a sensible life as a scientist but instead hared off to an alien planet or consider not returning from an accident something embarrassing. She hadn’t known that tutors would think much the same.
v.
The old man who is her grandfather huffs about how the man who never spoke to her just left her at the gate to his house. He pats her awkwardly on the head and mutters something about things not being right.
He’s familiar, her grandfather. She realizes that she had known him before, before, and maybe Mr. Qeesh hadn’t just been playing about her going home. She knows what the red grass feels like when she rolls on it and the sound the silver leaves make. She knows the shape of the house, and that it feels different.
She thinks maybe it’s the sadness, at first, a balloon that keeps expanding even as it sometimes feels like her lungs are contracting in response. Lots of things feel different through the sadness. But she knows a quantifiable difference between states of being. There are things that seem smaller because she’s bigger. There are a few old toys that she remembers but are for tots. There’s a new picture on the wall where there used to be a painting, she can call up old models of the house to prove her memories right.
She’s right that grandfather feels different, too. He says things about making complaints, but she doesn’t think he makes any. He had spent a lot of time in his workroom Before, too, but now he barely ever storms off for one of the talks that her mother had shaken her head at. He doesn’t talk about some project he’s passionate about, and he’d done that back when she was too young to really understand. Her mother had shaken her head about those too, sometimes they’d fought about plans that were never going anywhere or obsessing on the past. Mother hadn’t been happy when Grandfather had shown her how to write Old Gallifreyan with a ‘pen’. Grandfather had snapped back even more when father had defended it. Dinners are much quieter now; she doesn’t think it’s just because he doesn’t want to think of the emptiness where her mother’s voice should be.
vi.
Ana is probably her friend. She would say that Ana is her best friend, but that just means her only one, and the other girl would sniff at the word to start with. Ana doesn’t have any other friends either, because she tends to be first. Even when she isn’t, some whisper that it’s on purpose, which is somehow worse. She pretends not to know Ana is upset.
She pretends a lot of things. She pretends to care about schoolwork but not to care too much. She pretends she doesn’t miss seeing the real outside. She pretends not to think of her parents. She pretends that she agrees about what’s important and what’s not.
School seems to be all about pretending. She’s afraid that she’ll learn to believe it.
vii.
Grandfather used to have friends. She remembers them, too, in the way she used to remember he grandfather before he became a solid presence again. Sometimes there would be arguments when they came over, her mother said once that her Grandfather could have a falling out with himself if there was no one else around, but they were usually arguments that ended with a smile and a brief touch in farewell, still close enough to make contact.
The most frequent visitor had been dark haired and quick to smile. She thinks, remembering through different eyes, that it might not have always been a nice smile. When he was there conversation at dinner had been bright and quick and sharp and as much as it made Grandfather come alive, sometimes it was sharp enough to cut. He hadn’t approved of her father’s work any more than Grandfather had, and he’d shared her mother’s thoughts on her Grandfather’s ‘pet projects’. There had been times when they’d smiled at each other like the expressions were one of the knives her father had brought to her other home to show her.
But he had worked with Grandfather as often as they differed. His smiles for her had been kind. He’d put his hand on her head once and spoken of potential, almost sounding proud.
After she comes back, she only sees him once. He has new robes and tried to speak like he barely knew Grandfather until Grandfather baited him into a fight that ended with him storming away and Grandfather locking himself in the library for over a day. Soon after that she goes to school where she learns about Chapters and Titles and that some people are spoken of with respect and others are considered failures. She learns that people you think you can trust sometimes walk away to spend time with more important people, no matter what those people said about someone who used to be their friend.
viii.
She loves breaks from school. Even if there’s a sadness to the house, it’s a thousand times better than even the best moments at the Academy. At the house she doesn’t have to pretend. She can look through the collection of things from Outside that Grandfather let her keep after she promised she could keep a secret. She can run around and play and not worry about anyone watching.
She knows something exciting is going to happen as soon as she arrives to find Grandfather waiting at the door to usher her in, full of the secret mischief she had almost forgotten he used to be so full of. He won’t tell her what he’s planning, or where he disappears to, so she lies back on her bed and dreams of the adventures she reads about in the books the other children usually scoff at.
Finally, almost right before she goes back, Grandfather leans across the table, as if sharing a secret even though they’re the only ones there.
“Well, my child, what would you think of going on a little trip, hm?”
“Right before school starts?”
He hesitates, worry warring with the excitement he’s so full of he’s almost bursting. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t have a chance to return to school. Perhaps –”
But whatever he was going to say is lost in the fierceness of her embrace.
He laughs, “Let me breathe, child, let me breathe.”
She has to let go eventually, but she that night she sits up dreaming of being anywhere else.
ix.
“A girl, hm? Good choice. The less chance she’ll take after that man you’ve decided to attach to the better.”
“Oh, must you, father?”
“Just a little joke, my child. A fine tot. Yes. Very fine.”