Category – Vignette
Characters – Nine, Rose
Summary – Time Lords didn't measure time.
Disclaimer – Not mine.
Notes – I wrote this a very long while ago, but discarded it, because I thought it was no good. During a recent clean up of my hard drive, I found it, dusted off, decided it might be all right, sent it off to my beta. She seemed to like it, and it's been well-received on LJ. What do you think?

Beta-d by the stunning paranoidseat.

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Time Lords didn't measure time. At least not in the sense that most beings thought of as 'time' – as set units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, centuries, millennia; the hard ticking of a clock, the rustle of a calendar, the slow decay of stone. Each part made up a whole, which made up another whole, which made up a bigger whole, which made up… ad infinitum.

Time was fluid, like an immense ocean. Most beings travelled through it in one direction, following the unseen currents, and only occasionally becoming caught in eddies. They didn't perceive the flow of the water around them, that was leading in a billion different directions, and they could understand that at any given time there were other creatures in the ocean, behind and in front – everything all existing at the same time.

The Time Lords considered themselves above this, past this, sitting above looking down on the swirling liquid, watching the way it moved, the directions it took. Other beings moved through it and the Time Lords just observed them, and sat back. They were like gods: they knew more, and so it would be wrong of them to interfere – the lesser creatures had to learn things for themselves after all. When they did deign to come away from their perches they did so with the air of someone who knew they would be obeyed. This is our will, and so it shall be.

Gallifrey still counted time, marked its passing like those lesser beings – but not, because they weren't. Yet the planet still turned and day became night, became day again and so on. Days became years and years, millennia. 'Time' was a useful way of keeping track, a marker for one place, one moment – a way of filing things. A way of counting them

Time was just another method to sorting things, or counting them, really. Humanity measured sixty seconds to a minute, and sixty minutes to an hour – three thousand six hundred seconds in an hour, if you could bothered counting that long. They counted this because it fit or seemed to almost fit, even though there were more than twenty-four hours in the Earth's rotation and more than three hundred and sixty-five days in its path around the sun. But humans had always liked things to fit nicely, to flow smoothly, and they balanced it all by adding an extra day to every fourth year, subtracting one every hundredth and putting it back in every four hundredth. If time wouldn't fit, then they made it.

It had been three hundred and sixty five Earth days since the destruction of Gallifrey. Three hundred and sixty four days since he had woken screaming in a new body; aware, as only he could be aware, that he was alone. The universe was silent and empty and he was alone.

Time could be measured by other things. The beating of a heart for example. He could measure, could count, how many times his hearts had beaten since he'd lost his world. But he had two hearts, and so Time would pass twice as fast and it would be twice as long since Gallifrey had disappeared into the flames, like some mythological apocalypse.

One year. Humans would mark this day as they did all days, and if he'd been human he'd have dreaded the approach. A month, then a week, five days, three days, two days, tomorrow. Humans marked days indiscriminately. They marked the day of their birth, the day of their marriage, the day of their mother's death, days of freedom, days of war, days of celebration, days of disaster. Each was carefully noted and waited for with trepidation or anticipation.

Time Lords had never marked days as such, because that would be admitting their attachment to time. Truth be told, he'd never marked any particular anniversary himself. Days were counted on planets by the path of the sun across the sky. He lived in a box, where a sun had no great meaning. Days could be counted by beings who slept, and at every waking knew one had begun. He slept rarely, and the thought of counting the days like that would mean there wasn't nearly enough time between him and the passing of his planet.

For all this, he was very aware of the way other species kept track of time. The human count was perhaps the most familiar. He knew its flow from one breath to another, from one heart beat to another. He could count the seconds it took for the kettle to boil and his tea to steep. He knew the seconds that Rose slept each night, and how many it took her to shower, and dress for breakfast. She always blinked at him in amazement – he had her tea ready at the perfect flavour and temperature when she turned up in the kitchen each day.

He laid his head on her chest and listened to the beat of her heart as it slowed and relaxed into sleep. Each thump took him another moment away from the destruction of Gallifrey. The heart was a difficult thing to trace time by, it beat hard and fast when the body and mind moved quickly, and slower when the body was still and the mind slept. It may be more accurate, but far more difficult to track. Earlier, as he lost himself in Rose her heart had beat fast, and time had sped by and slowed to stop until everything had seemed timeless.

She had kissed away his tears as he moved above her. He was as lost as he had been since he'd lost his people, and he had taken the comfort she offered, had taken the moments where nothing else existed which she had given him. But she was tired now, her body was human and humans needed sleep at the end of every day. So he listened as her heartbeat carried her into sleep. It would keep beating through her rest and to her waking. Then when she woke it would be a new day, and it would be more than a year since he'd lost Gallifrey.

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