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Time has no meaning in a TARDIS, not even to a Time Lord. Although his senses still work, time still awash around him, Hallan realizes he has no idea how much time has passed since Eris cured him, unfroze him, saved him from an unconscious existence.
They have designated rest periods, of course, as mandated by the TARDIS, Eris’s TARDIS––their TARDIS, Eris says, in a touching display of generosity typical of him––but these don’t divide so easily into night and day. The TARDIS is a touchy thing, old in this time even if it was new in Hallan’s. Age and neglect have left it temperamental, touchy. It will have ridiculously long rest periods, followed by a day that doesn’t last more than a few spans, or vice versa. Sometimes, it has several ‘days,’ if that’s what they can be called, that are almost Gallifrey-normal, only to be followed by wildly inconsistent patterns, like the TARDIS can’t quite figure out what time is. This is slightly worrying, but Eris has assured him it’s fine, and Hallan trusts Eris.
(This is still something of a revelation to Hallan. For Time Lords, trust doesn’t come easily: how could it? Their entire culture is built on deception and coverups. Hallan wishes he could say that only the politicians and the CIA are guilty of lies, but that itself would be a lie: just look at the Andred debacle. Still, he trusts Eris, against all the Time Lord etiquette he’s ever learned. It feels good to be a rebel, he’s learned. It feels good to be improper.)
He’s getting used to it, he thinks, this feeling of timelessness, an eternity of those lazy afternoons he had as a boy, before the Chancellery Guard or the Academy, those days where the suns seemed never to set, and he could run in the fields of his family’s home on the plains along the banks of the river Lethe. His childhood had not been an idyllic one––he was sent to the Academy young, as expected, and from that point on, his life became one of strict routine and discipline, something that would continue into his life as a commander in the Chancellery Guard––but it was perhaps the most idyllic his life had ever been, until now.
His favorite moments are the early-morning moments. Time doesn’t exist in a TARDIS, of course, since TARDISes are by definition extra-dimensional, but they’re the moments Hallan thinks of as early-morning. The TARDIS still has its lights dimmed, indicating that it’s a designated rest period, and Hallan can see the form of Eris lying in bed next to him, pressed up against his chest.
In the early-morning dark and quiet, Eris remains fast asleep, and Hallan can brush aside a soft lock of dark-brown hair that’s falling in the other man’s face. He can be soft, gentle. He doesn’t have to feel guilty, guilty that Eris is stuck with him, guilty that he’s alright when so many on Gallifrey apparently are not, guilty that their life has become so relaxed, the exact opposite of what he’s been used to for centuries. In the early-morning dark, he can forget all of that. He can hold Eris close, breathing in his warm scent, feel his cool skin against his own. He can let the tension he constantly holds within himself relax, relax into Eris.
He loves the little moments in their not-quite-day when Eris kisses him, too. Doesn’t matter what sort of kiss: the little pecks on the cheek Eris is so fond of; chaste, closed-mouth kisses; slow kisses, so long that they nearly have to activate their respiratory bypasses; kisses of passion, hot and fierce, hands everywhere, pushed up against roundelled walls. It’s not something Hallan would ever have tried on his own, and it’s not something he would have done again after Melyan, but with Eris, it’s okay. It’s more than okay, actually, because he rather likes kissing, and he rather likes Eris, and he really likes kissing Eris. It’s something completely against his nature as a Time Lord, against all their etiquette, all their most basic rules. If they were on Gallifrey, they would be social outcasts, allowed in society for their roles in the Chancellery Guard and the CIA, ostracized for their ‘unnatural’ behavior, simply because they love showing their love. Even touching through fabric is considered strange on Gallifrey––at least, provided that hasn’t changed since Hallan went into cryo.
No, if Hallan and Eris were on Gallifrey, they would be considered almost the same as Andred and Leela had been. Social outcasts, only marginally better than Andred and Leela because they’re both Time Lords. (If anything, it wouldn’t be better, only a different breed of bad: conservative, xenophobic Time Lords––and Hallan might have been one of them, at one time––could say that Leela was an alien seductress who had lured her husband away from civilized living, making him wild as she was. It was all utter nonsense, of course, but these are Time Lords. They’re logical until it benefits them to be otherwise, something Hallan didn’t realize until his planet was plunged into civil war.)
Regardless, he loves kissing Eris, and he loves that Eris likes to kiss him. Hallan had never been close to someone either physically or emotionally before Eris, so he had never truly understood what he’d been missing. Now, he can’t get enough of it: running his hands through Eris’s soft hair, kissing him senseless, tracing his fingers along cool skin.
He loves the middle-of-the-afternoon moments, too, he realizes, even though there’s nothing all that special about them. The moments when they’re sitting together in the sitting room the TARDIS has created for them, sometimes nearly on top of each other, sometimes in separate chairs, sometimes talking, sometimes not. They like to compare their knowledge: Eris, Hallan has gathered, wasn’t the most attentive student in the Academy, but he knows recent events, since he was actually conscious throughout all of them; Hallan doesn’t know recent events, owing to the fact that he was frozen, but he knows what Eris calls “history” because he lived through it. They talk about the Time War, Hallan biting back protestations about learning of the Time Lord’s future. It might feel like the future to him, but it’s happening in the present, around him. Around everything, in all of Time and Space. He isn’t learning the future of the Time Lords in some clandestine way, that future is happening around him. It all messes with his head more than he would like to admit.
Sometimes, they discuss the Civil War. Eris likes to hear stories about Romana and Narvin, especially from Hallan’s jaded point of view. The younger Time Lord can’t seem to reconcile the Romana and Narvin he knows with the Romana and Narvin Hallan knew. For that matter, when Eris speaks of Romana and Narvin, he makes it sound almost like they’re married. Like the CIA is one big, happy family, and Romana and Narvin are the loving mum and dad. If it had been anyone other than Eris telling him that, Hallan wouldn’t have believed them. But this is Eris. Everything he does is earnest, except maybe when he’s teasing. Hallan can’t quite figure out how this adorable, expressive, alien-loving, excitable Time Lord got into the Celestial Intervention Agency. Doesn’t make sense.
But he loves their midafternoon moments all the same, those lazy hours where they read or talk. Eris likes it when they sit on the sofa, and he can rest his head on Hallan’s lap. He likes it when Hallan combs his fingers through his hair, and Hallan in turn likes the lazy circles Eris will trace on his arms and chest as they sit in companionable laziness.
(Laziness, by the way, is as foreign a concept to Hallan as everything else that is part of his new life, his new normal. It goes hand-in-hand with things like relaxation and being easygoing, and none of this is familiar to Hallan. To just sit with nothing to do, hand brushing through someone else’s hair, murmured voices and companionable silence, goes against all his training.)
As time goes on, although again, this is a TARDIS, where time has no meaning, Hallan finds that the mid-morning routine has grown on him more and more. Eris has introduced him to a drink called coffee, something Hallan has grown inordinately fond of. He knows he’s a Time Lord, he knows he shouldn’t enjoy things as base and normal as sensations, but he likes the taste of the coffee, the smell, the bitterness in the back of his throat. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, if Time Lords allowed themselves the pleasures of sensations, maybe they’d be better off for it. If Time Lords had a large, steaming cup of coffee partway through their morning, pausing to savor it and enjoy it, maybe they’d all be a bit better off.
Hallan likes his coffee the way Eris prepares it, with a dash of other spices, spices that are warm. It makes the coffee taste and smell of cinnamon, just like Eris smells of cinnamon and warmth and everything that’s right about this sort of life. He only grudgingly drank it because Eris wanted him to so badly, but now it’s his second-favorite physical thing about this life onboard the TARDIS, second only to Eris himself.
In all of this, he can’t help but think that there’s something wrong with this. His life, his life before all of this, before Eris and cryo, back in what he still thinks of as his time, was nothing but nightmares and terror. He thought that every day would be his last, and he could only keep going because his planet needed him, because his madam president needed him. His existence had been single minded, driven, focused: he had to stop Pandora and keep the president safe, no matter what. He was a member of the Chancellery Guard: not only did they function as a sort of Citadel police force, they were solely responsible for keeping the president safe. He still remembers how disgruntled he and all the others were when the president appointed Leela to be her bodyguard. It had seemed at the time to be a flagrant abuse of her authority, a rude gesture directed at Gallifreyan tradition, and at the guardsmen in particular.
Now, of course, his life is the total opposite. Like less civilized, more religious societies believe: it was as though he’d died and gone to heaven, with Eris as his personal angel.
It’s nonsensical, of course, but Hallan can’t get it through his head that this is actually real. He has a life, a real life, and it’s full of happiness and laziness and softness and warmth. It’s full of Eris, who’s like the living embodiment of all of that.
And even if Eris has hidden sadness, pain from Knyla and his time on Gallifrey, he chooses to look past it, move past it. He has happiness with Hallan, has happiness onboard their TARDIS, just the two of them.
Hallan remembers his fellow guardsmen, his friends, who died in the Civil War. He remembers encountering the Broken Man on Davidia, before anyone knew it was Castellan Wynter, grudgingly holding Melyan, who had retched at the sight of the burnt Castellan. He remembers Pandora unleashing the dogma virus on everyone she could. He remembers, if he can stay in that odd, religious mode, something very like hell.
He remembers the few things Eris has said about his own backstory, about living on Gallifrey in the era of the new Rassilon, in the beginning of the Time War. He imagines Eris had a very similar existence.
He holds Eris close to him in the early morning darkness, holds him close and breathes in that warm smell, like cinnamon. In his sleep, Eris shifts slightly, moving closer to Hallan, head against Hallan’s chest.
They both can breathe now. They both can rest.
And Hallan can rest his chin on the top of Eris’s head and shut his eyes, allowing a few more minutes of sleep before he gets up. In the darkness and quiet, he can hold Eris tight, and he can whisper, so quietly that he himself can barely hear it, “I love you.”
And in the early morning darkness, when there’s no sound except the hum of the TARDIS and the slow, quiet breathing of two Time Lords, he hears, ever so quietly, a murmured reply, as Eris transitions between waking and sleeping.
“Love you too.”