You Can Hear It in the

"He leaned back in his chair. Much had changed in a year. So much more than he’d experienced over the course of five-hundred years, when he thought he’d seen it all as the Balladeer. The world had come to forget him, but the Doctor did not. He had changed, had learned to live without the heart he was born to hold and how to forge one of his own.Through his studies at the Akademiya, through his work for Nahida, he was finding all the things he could be. Not a failure, not a puppet, not a villain.He found himself looking to Layla. Perhaps that was the greatest change of the past year, the one that really shook up everything he’d come to believe over the past five hundred years.He’d once thought he’d never love another after Niwa betrayed him, after the child died, after Tatarasuna and his own mother had turned their backs on him."ORWanderer enjoys Nahida's birthday celebrations with Layla.