"Well, if you change your mind," Derek replied with a smile, moving toward the mat and settling onto it. "And I think you did, actually," he agreed, lifting his eyebrows. If he was honest, his curiosity had been piqued, but he was dubious, at best, at her ability to wow him after everything he'd been through back home and then this displacement, to boot.
It wasn't until she sat down with him and they were both unmoving that he noticed it. The problem with the gymnasium — one that he'd forgotten, since high school, had existed at all — was that the acoustics made it difficult to focus on any one sound, because everything was so goddamned loud and all of it bounced around: footsteps, voices, creaks in the floorboards beneath the array of mats he and Kira laid out before every class.
And it was interesting because it took him a second to register that something wasn't right, but it took him almost a minute to register what that something was. His head tilted just so and his eyes shifted out into the expanse of space in the gym just to focus on nothing so that his ears could do the heavy lifting. It was difficult to pinpoint what was different until he realized that what was different was something that was lacking.
He looked back at Clara sharply when she spoke. "What? Oh, 2015," he replied, looking her up and down reflexively. What the hell was she? Hottest zombie in existence? What kind of thing didn't have a heartbeat???