Go read Those Who Walk in Shadows (s/9008048/1/) and then come back, loves.

Updates every other Monday. Trigger warnings as they come. Co-written with Shrrgnien.

Chapter 1: Timefall

Chandvoroghantreludar was doing a thing. This was not perhaps the most specific set of parameters but it was something around 0400 and not even a Gallifreyan mind could work at its best when it was meant to be sleeping and instead was stumbling around, sensually feeling up the wall to find the light-switch. It ought to have come to his hand like a cat wanting to be petted, but he'd offended the walls a few days ago and they were being difficult. He struggled for a few moments before finding the switch and hitting it with a great deal of irritation.

Chandvoroghantreludar stifled the urge to shriek as the lights flared. They really ought to program them so that they eased on, he thought, rather than going straight to All Hail Rassilon mode.

Patroklos growled something under his breath and rolled over, stealing Chandvoroghantreludar's pillow (again) and most of the blankets (as usual) as he attempted to burrow into the mattress.

Knock knock knock knock.

"It's your cousin," Chandvoroghantreludar said distastefully, stifling a yawn and attempting to locate the door through the blinding whiteness.

Patroklos groaned. "It's too early in the morning to talk to psychopathic maniacs, tell them to piss off."

"No, I meant Culsu."

"That's what I said."

Knock knock knock knock. Knock knock knock knock. Knockknockknockknock.

Patroklos threw a slipper at the door, managing to knock over a lamp and failing to accomplish anything useful.

"I don't think she's going to go away," said Chandvoroghantreludar. The frantic knocking continued as he squinted across the really ridiculously bright kitchen. "You should probably put on some pants."

Knockknockknockknock. Knockknockknockknock.

"I'm coming!" he shouted.

KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCK—

Chandvoroghantreludar finally managed to make his way to the door and open it.

"Holy-"

Just before he was buried under the mountain of anxiously hovering hypercubes, Chandvoroghantreludar managed to demonstrate a variety of curses that made Patroklos proud.

Or would have, if he hadn't fallen asleep again.

"You slept through it?!" shrieked Culsu, looking over her shoulder frantically at the pull-out sofa where she'd stationed her wife and daughter the second she'd noticed the timeline fracture. She was developing a cramp in her neck from glancing over at them every few moments, reassuring herself that they were still there. "How can you sleep through the end of the world?"

"Practice?" replied Patroklos.

"Final exams aren't actually the end of the world, Patroklos," said Culsu harshly.

"Says you? I'm impressed, Cthulhu. Marriage has really mellowed you."

"Culsu," Lotivver interrupted. "Will you please tell me what's going on?"

Culsu looked over. Lotivver was used to being around Time Lords and had developed an almost supernatural patience for dealing with situations that were wildly above her understanding. Still, she had her limits; she was a pale shade of pea-soup green, tense and afraid but trying to hide it.

"Not all of us are timesensitive," the Vinvocci reminded her acidly, and Culsu cringed inwardly; she'd forgotten, again, that her wife wouldn't instinctively understand what was happening. Taking a deep breath, Lotivver continued in a more measured tone, "You're scaring her, Culsu." She pulled Loki closer against her side, running her fingers through their daughter's hair.

"No," said Culsu, "this is scaring her. She can sense it."

"Sense what?" Lotivver pleaded. Through the barely-contained storm of fear and frustration, Culsu felt her open up a carefully controlled mental link to Loki, projecting as much calm as she could.

"The end."

"Of what? The end of what?"

"The end of everything."

"Wow," Patroklos commented. "Loving wife and mother."

"Culsu!" Lotivver hissed.

"Shut up," Culsu growled. "Not you!" she added hastily, as Lotivver looked ready to impale her with her forehead. "Just... please," she said, turning the cube away as if that would do anything. "I'll explain everything," she promised desperately. "Once I know what's going on. Please, Lotivver."

She wasn't sure whether it was the plea or if she was inadvertently projecting her fear, but—thank Rassilon—Lotivver listened.

"Loki needs to sleep, if she can," the Vonvocci said quietly. "Unless the world is ending right this second I'm going to put her back to bed, and then you're going to tell me what the hell is going on. Don't curse, it's a bad habit," she added reflexively to her daughter, who was in no state to be listening anyway.

Culsu nodded vaguely, which Lotivver presumably took to mean "no, the world isn't going to end right now", because she gave her one last, lingering look before wrapping Loki in a blanket and carefully bundling the little girl up into her arms.

"Come on, sweetheart," Lotivver said softly. "You're safe. Let's get you back in bed..."

Culsu turned her attention back to the cube. "You have to feel it," she insisted, "it fractured! It must have been a massive paradox, big enough that the entire timeline was orphaned to maintain the sanctity of the universe!"

She heard Patroklos stifle a yawn. "Well, go big or go home. Whatever it was, just be glad it wasn't any smaller or the universe might have been able to handle being a little less sanctified. Have I mentioned it's 0400?"

"Have I mentioned the Faction Paradox appears to have been erased from reality? Have I mentioned that there are eight less planets in the Home Constellation than there were yesterday?"

"Yeah," Patroklos yawned. "And it's five spans ago. And 0400."

Culsu paled. "Five spans ago? By Inner Time?"

"Yeah...? Hey, how's the kid? The shift must've been rough for her, she's just a little thing."

"She's confused."

"No kidding." Culsu jumped as she felt a tentative hand brush against her side before settling around her waist. Lotivver—always so very careful of her spikes—rested her forehead in Culsu's hair with a tired sigh, and Culsu reached out and brushed her mind gently. She couldn't quite muster 'reassuring', but she managed a wordless I'm here.

"So the world ended," Lotivver said.

Culsu sighed and handed her a mug of hot, vibrant purple Vinvocci tea. "Yes."

"And then it came back because destroying it created a paradox so big it erased itself from reality."

"...sort of." Culsu had to restrain herself from explaining it technically. Correctly. "No," she wanted to say, "it's nothing like that at all." But Lotivver was already rather put-upon, so instead she forced a smile on her face.

It came out as more of a grimace, really.

Lotivver's lips twitched tiredly. "When I've actually had sleep," she said, "You can explain it to me again. So we've gone back in Time?" She wondered ruefully when the capital T had started dropping itself in. Such were the side effects of living with an Oakdown.

"No," said Culsu, "that's not how Time works."

Lotivver gave her a Look, as well as a quick mental image of bright purple tea being poured over Culsu's head.

"We've been... temporally reallocated. To a parallel universe. The most stable universe."

Lotivver looked at her again. "And... that's a good place to be, yes? We want to be in the parallel universe because this one didn't explode?"

"No. It's a linked universe; they act in tandem. We've only been placed in an earlier chronological portion of Gallifrey's worldline so that the paradox that caused the orphaned universe to become unstable doesn't happen."

Lotivver leaned forward. She was exhausted and she had never understood Gallifreyan tenses and paradoxes gave her a headache, but she had never been stupid and something in Culsu curled up in despair at the faint suspicion and beginnings of understanding in her eyes.

"That sounds like it should be a good thing," Lotivver said carefully. "So why are you still panicking?"

"The destruction of Gallifrey isn't the paradox."

"So... what is?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out, Lotivver!" she exclaimed. "I don't know! Nobody knows!" Lotivver reached out instinctively to hush her, glancing over her shoulder at Loki's bedroom door, and Culsu tried to keep her voice down as she continued. "The paradox—whatever it was—was involved in the destruction of the Nine Gallifreys—"

Lotivver mouthed Nine?

"—to the extent that unravelling the paradox negated Gallifrey's destruction."

Lotivver stared at her with the unconscious 'struggling-to-make-sense-of-Time-Lords' half-frown Culsu had fallen for at the Academy. She gave her a minute.

"Well," Lotivver finally said. "Negating the destruction of Gallifrey sounds like a good thing."

"It is," Culsu told her, staring into her mug in favor of meeting Lotivver's eyes. It wasn't a lie, exactly. She was alive, Lotivver was alive, Loki was alive. That was always a good thing.

Lotivver wasn't fooled by the deflection. "But?"

Culsu forced herself to look up. "But it's going to happen again." She took a deep breath. "In three years' time, Gallifrey will be destroyed in an echo of the worldline it parallels. And there's nothing anyone can do to change that, not without destroying the Universe itself."

Lotivver nodded slowly. "And... destroying the Universe is still bad, right?"

"Right."

"So we should start thinking about moving, then."

Culsu looked unbearably sad. "You don't understand," she said. "I was hoping you would. So I wouldn't have to explain it."

Lotivver just looked at her for a few moments, before carefully setting her mug down on that stupid tiny end table and leaning in. "Explain what, Culsu?" she asked quietly.

"It's not just Gallifrey that's destroyed. It's everything of Gallifrey, retroactively. Everything... connected. When Gallifrey dies, so does the Matrix. It will never have existed in the first place. Everything, Lotivver." She couldn't bring herself to spell out exactly what that meant.

Lotivver was silent for several long heartbeats.

"Five spans?" she said finally.

"You could survive it," said Culsu, her voice shaking. "You're not Gallifreyan, it wouldn't take you. You could have a normal life after this. You could be happy."

Lotivver gave her wife a reproachful look before standing and taking away her tea. "It's still early," she said. "We can try to get a bit of sleep, at least. You look worse off than me, Culsu. Try to get some rest, I'll be there in a microspan."

There were no words in any language for how badly Culsu did not want to let Lotivver out of her sight, but this was no time to get possessive. (A part of her whispered irritably that this was the perfect time to get possessive, but she ignored it.) It was only to be expected that Lotivver would need a few moments to adjust to the news.

Five spans. It might as well have been days. Nearly a hectospan trying to maintain a relationship from opposite ends of the universe, a fraction of that building some semblance of a stable life together, and now...

Loki's only four spans old...

A gentle knock made her turn around. Loki, frightened and with tearstained eyes, peered around the door. Lotivver nudged the girl into the room, smiling at her shyness and scooping her into her arms.

"She couldn't sleep," Lotivver said, closing the door with her foot and rolling their daughter carefully into the middle of the bed. "I thought it might help to be together." Her voice cracked, and Culsu sincerely doubted she was just talking about Loki anymore.

"It's scary," Loki whispered. "Makes me feel weird. Sickish."

"It doesn't feel right," Culsu agreed. "I don't like it either. I'm just bigger, so it doesn't affect me as strongly. But we're safe," she said. Lotivver met her look over Loki's head. "We're all safe together, we're going to be all right."

"Tired," Loki sniffled.

Culsu's hearts broke. "I know," she said. "I know. Come here." Loki leaped at her, flinging her arms around her neck and crying. Culsu yelped and bit her tongue as Loki buried her face in her mother's chest; for all that Loki was flesh and bone a Gallifreyan she was still half Vinvocci and, unlike Lotivver, was still getting used to the really quite painful trio of forehead spikes she'd inherited from the pointy side of the family. Lotivver's lips twitched and she stared very hard at the wall with a patented No I'm Not Laughing Why On Gallifrey Would You Think That expression on her face.

Culsu resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at her, on the grounds that she was a grown woman with a wife and child and successful career, and not a six-span-old.

"Lotivver?"

Lotivver stirred slightly. "Mmrm?"

"I love you."

Lotivver gave a sleepy smile. There were no words for I love you in Gallifreyan, so Culsu had learned them in Vinvocci, despite her spans of griping over the imprecise nature of Lotivver's mother tongue. Somehow it made the words sound all the sweeter.

She squeezed her wife's fingers where they intertwined loosely with her own over their daughter's hearts. Loki, with that mysterious gift of children, had cried herself out in her mothers' arms and then fallen asleep almost immediately. She looked, if not peaceful, at least still and easy and safe, curled up against Culsu with her little baby spikes poking through her bangs. She was every inch the young Oakdown, despite the healthy kiwi color of her skin—she'd inherited Culsu's beautiful dark eyes, and her hair, straight and black and constantly tangled from rounds of four-dimensional Pillow Fort, hung over her face and fluttered as she slept.

Lotivver didn't bother checking her mental shields at the sight; she felt Culsu shift and a second later her sudden outpouring of love for the two was met with a warm brush of the same.

"She'll be nine, when it happens." Culsu's voice was soft and even.

Lotivver swallowed. "It doesn't seem real." It was one of the first times she had ever been intensely grateful not to be timesensitive.

"It doesn't seem real to me, either," Culsu said quietly. And then, "It's not fair, Lotivver."

Lotivver, despite her body's protests, pushed herself up on one elbow. I know, she projected, letting all of her own pent-up fear and misery tail the message. Checking that Loki was still sleeping, she shifted closer, so that Culsu's forehead brushed hers and Loki was nestled between them.

"We'll be all right," she whispered, running a thumb over the back of Culsu's hand and pressing a light, chaste kiss to her head, her temple, her wearily closed eyes, her lips...

I love you, Culsu said again, but this time there were no words, only an impression edged with lancing pain, more vast than language could capture.

For a long time, they were silent, feeling Loki's tiny hearts tapping away beneath their clasped hands.

"Lotivver," Culsu said again, barely a breath. "Let's leave."

"What?"

"Run away. Leave Gallifrey."

"I thought you said that wouldn't work...?"

"It won't. But we should go anyway. Five spans. Just the three of us. Travel in time, see the universe..."

"I've seen a lot of it," Lotivver reminded her. "The happiest day of my life was when I came back."

"I'll remind you about that on Loki's birthday," Culsu muttered. "And our anniversary. And—"

"All right, I get it," Lotivver sighed, grinning tiredly and making a halfhearted swat in Culsu's general direction.

Careful, you'll wake Loki, Culsu chided. "She's the daughter of a Time Lord," she continued in a low murmur, as if the conversation had never been interrupted. "She should see as much of time and space as we can show her. And I want to be with you," she added softly. Slim, pale fingers fluttered anxiously over Loki's hair, Lotivver's wrist, before twining back through her wife's and squeezing, holding her family tight. "Just you. For as long as I can."

"Culsu, you said you hadn't touched the interior dimensions. Those were your exact words."

Culsu nodded agreeably as she continued unlocking a door that hadn't been there a moment ago and could not possibly, according to the laws of physics, exist.

"If you try to tell me that you haven't altered the dimensions, I swear..."

"Swear what?" said Culsu cheerfully. "And I haven't, actually." The door, finally unlocked, swung open, revealing an empty room with divots in the walls and another door on the opposite side.

Lotivver blinked.

"Culsu," she said with exaggerated patience, "That looks a lot like altering the internal dimensions." The room in question, had the laws of the universe applied to it, should have extended past the exterior walls.

"I said I didn't alter the dimensions of the flat," said Culsu, as though she was talking to a child. "This isn't the flat."

"Culsu..."

"Lotivver, meet the Type 60 Mark 1 TT Capsule. She prefers to be called Granny. You've, um, been living inside her."

Lotivver stared at her.

"For... about five spans."

Lotivver's eye twitched.

"Don't be rude," Culsu said weakly. "Say hello."

"Um," said Lotivver. "Hello."

There was a distant sound like a large pair of wheezy, mechanical lungs.

"She likes you," said Culsu brightly. "I mean, she already liked you. She's liked you for a while."

"I don't think we've met," Lotivver informed the wall.

Culsu grinned nervously, shuffling her feet. "Well." She coughed. "Not formally. But, um. Granny's been here for quite a while. I mean, I always sort of had the idea and I started asking around, so I'd have plenty of options, and it turned out Granny had been looking for ages only she couldn't find anyone to partner with after the war, and she was afraid of being decommissioned so I sort of brought her home with me. And then I had to hide her—"

"Why?" Lotivver demanded, concern briefly taking over. "Who's after her?"

Culsu coughed again and studied her feet. "Nobody, only I sort of hadn't warned you about her so she disguised herself as the front door and I moved all the furniture and rerouted the console room through there and wrote a programme to make the entryway look like the living room so you wouldn't kill me."

Lotivver took a very long, very deep breath.

"So," she said slowly, "instead of, you know, talking to me, you decided it made more sense to hack into a timeship, rewrite its programming, rearrange the rooms, biolock access to the rest of the ship, create a perfect replica of the flat, and then park so it looked like the front door."

"Yes," said Culsu, somewhat desperately.

Lotivver knew she should probably be extremely angry right now. Logic—nice, normal, non-Time Lord logic—dictated that anger was the proper response to learning that one's wife had been lying to them for five spans in order to disguise the presence of a third person living (quite literally) in the walls.

But it was just so very Culsu. Lotivver watched her as she stared hard at the floor, her cheeks flaming red, and burst into laughter.

"All right," she said when she could breathe again. "All right. Let's meet Granny."

"You know," Lotivver pointed out as Culsu parked, "we could have just walked."

"Granny needs to get eased back into things, Lotivver; she hasn't flown in ages."

There was a faint impression of affectionate acknowledgement in the back of Lotivver's mind. She'd felt it before, in a way, when Culsu was 'introducing' her to the sentient immortal timeship she'd been living in for five spans; it was a very strange kind of consciousness, not like anything she'd felt before, and it was incredibly difficult to nail down. She doubted whether she ever really would. Gallifreyans were difficult enough to understand when they had bodies and at least a vague notion of the concept of linear time.

"Who picks their kid up from daycare in a time machine, Culsu?"

"Us, apparently," said Culsu vacantly, polishing the zig-zag plotter's knob with a cleaning rag.

"You couldn't wait a few hours?"

"We need to talk to her teachers and get her assignments from later in the year, Lotivver. She can't just stop learning because we're off to see the universe."

"I still don't see what that has to do with taking the timeship, " said Lotivver, idly twisting an interesting-looking dial on the console.

Culsu casually snapped her hand away with the cleaning rag, ducking Lotivver's halfhearted shove in response.

"If you're not careful," she chided, "you'll send us to Clom or the middle of a black hole, and that would be a miserable first trip. Don't touch anything," she clarified.

Sometimes, Lotivver would look at their lives, and the early days of their really terribly awkward Academy courtship would feel like a lifetime ago. And sometimes she had trouble believing that Culsu hadn't just corrected the professor's grammar for the fifteenth time while diagramming physically impossible floor plans on a tissue.

There were things that would never change. Culsu Oakdown existed solely to make other people look like idiots, and Lotivver loved her anyway.

Lotivver dropped the stack of textbooks with a slam.

Sorry, she thought at Granny.

Here was the scariest thing, Lotivver was rather sure, about Gallifrey. Her three-year-old daughter, who couldn't put more than four words together in a sentence (in the Vinvocci tongue—she could only do single words in Gallifreyan, but Gallifreyan was so exact in everything there wasn't much need for more than one word to get across what she meant), was studying multivariable calculus, particle physics, and modern Gallifreyan history (10 000-year timespan) as well as the complete history of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, as the history of an entire species was apparently not vast enough to merit splitting into its own year-level.

Lotivver's parents were particle physicists. They had spent their entire academic careers studying what her daughter was now learning in a brightly-coloured room with a special reading circle rug and alphabet cards on the walls.

Loki could hardly even walk on her own. What sort of culture gave its toddlers three-inch-thick textbooks?

Ow. Lotivver rolled her shoulders. She'd forgotten how heavy textbooks could be.

"Lotivver?" Culsu, in keeping with a time-honored tradition, could not be seen behind the teetering pile of grammar workbooks she was just barely managing to cling to with her fingertips. "Please help me."

"This was your idea," Lotivver said pettily.

"I don't know where the door is," Culsu pleaded.

"I don't know where your brain is."

"I can't feel my fingers, Lotivver!"

Lotivver sighed and took the top half of the workbook pile, to Culsu's visible relief. "I still say it's ridiculous that Granny had to create an entire room just to hold Loki's primary-school books." Admittedly, room was a bit of a stretch; it was barely more than a closet, and the books it held included all seven volumes of the commonly-accepted Gallifreyan dictionary and a massive leather-bound set of encyclopædias. Culsu had laughed when she saw them, in the nostalgic fashion of someone rediscovering alphabet blocks. Apparently, the notion of encyclopædias simplified enough to be contained in books was something reserved for exceptionally young children.

"We need to get her a proper set of the Encyclopædia Gallifrey, when she's older," said Culsu, smiling. "I got mine when I was admitted to the Academy. It's something of a tradition in Oakdown."

It took almost a full second for it to register on Culsu's face what she'd just said, and less than a moment for Lotivver's heart to break.

A polite knock on the door spared her being forced to say anything. (As if there was anything to say, it wasn't fair, they were supposed to have so much more time, you didn't have to be Gallifreyan to know that...)

"Am I interrupting?" Loki's teacher asked teasingly, and Lotivver realized belatedly that she had wrapped a protective arm around Culsu without realizing it. Culsu jumped slightly at the interruption and was quick to move away from her wife, placing a respectable amount of space between them.

"No," she said hurriedly. "We were just... talking. Come in, Asedifeghejekal. Is there anything else we need to know?"

Asedifeghejekal, by her own admission, had simply never belonged at the Academy. Her struggles with her own teachers, however, had awakened an unforeseen passion for the idea of teaching herself; Culsu happily took credit for her roommate's success, citing the occasion she had snapped at the girl that she had no right to criticise her professors, as she had never tried their job. Asedifeghejekal had just as cheerfully told Culsu where she could stick her Academy diploma, and Lotivver, who had been three galaxies away at the time and fielding a three-way mental conference call at 0400, had recognized a lost cause when she saw one and gone to bed, missing the rest of the argument.

Whatever had happened the two had apparently worked out their differences; Culsu had been very firm about who she wanted teaching her daughter, and Loki was by all accounts a favorite, however much Asedifeghejekal denied she had such a thing.

"No, I think that's everything," she said. Lowering her voice with a conspirational smile as the child in question set about 'organizing' her textbooks using a system that made sense to nobody but a two-year-old, she added "I told Loki it was a regular school curriculum but I only gave her the basic maths and science package. Most of it's history, she'll get more out of that than she will learning particle physics. She's a lot like you."

"God, I hope not," Lotivver deadpanned. Culsu shot her a filthy look, and she stuck her tongue out at her.

Asedifeghejekal rolled her eyes, bringing back vivid memories of the Academy, but her voice was subdued enough that Lotivver took notice.

"Don't waste your time together making her study," she told Culsu, quiet and intent. "She's bright, she'll pick up what she needs, but you only..." She cut herself off abruptly, eyes flicking to Lotivver and back.

"Lotivver knows everything," Culsu said in response to a mental question Lotivver had not been privy to. "We don't keep secrets."

A sense of vague amusement from Granny disagreed with the statement.

"Shut up," Culsu muttered at the ceiling.

"I'm going to kill you, Culsu!"

"I know she's here somewhere," Culsu insisted. "She was disguised as an aqueduct support column, remember?"

Lotivver leaned out from behind a pile of woven baskets to peer down the miles upon miles of intricate aqueducts winding through the countryside.

"Yes," she hissed. "That's very helpful."

"Well, if someone hadn't brought the entire Imperial Guard down on our heads, maybe we would have more time to look for her!"

Lotivver would have argued the point, except that she had sort of brought the entire Imperial Guard down on them (how was she meant to know that rubbing her nose was a deadly insult, much less that she'd been talking to the High Emperor of Whereverthehelltheywere?) and a large squadron of what appeared to be deformed purple snake-dog people had just come around the corner.

"Mama," Loki whispered. "My nose itches."

"Shhh," Lotivver breathed. "Culsu, see if you can set off one of Granny's alarms, maybe we can hear it." Culsu nodded tersely as the Guard fanned out across the marketplace.

"Mama." Loki poked Lotivver in the back. "My nose itches."

Culsu hushed her quickly. "Scratch it, Loki. I can set off a proximity alarm but that's interior, we might not be able to hear it..."

"All the technology in all of space and time and you haven't invented panic buttons?" Lotivver hissed.

"I could set off a distress signal but that would call in reinforcements and I don't really feel like being arrested for misuse of Time Lord resources..." The remote gave a helpful beeping sound as Culsu clicked through a complicated-looking menu, and she shook it frantically in an attempt to shut it up. "Fire alarm, forced-entry whistle—Judoon mating call, who would install that?!—um, emergency dematerialisation..."

"Mama!" Loki sounded extremely urgent.

"Not now, sweetheart-"

Loki sneezed.

Loudly.

Culsu and Lotivver looked at each other for a moment before the Time Lord swept her thumb over every possible button on the remote-alarm system and bolted after her wife.

Lotivver winced.

"Culsu," she groaned, feeling gingerly along the back of her head. "I think I snapped one of my spines—ow!" She ran a finger carefully along a rough edge, bracing herself and twisting off the dangling point. "Yeah," she said. "Definitely snapped. Ow..."

"Serves you right," Culsu muttered. She glared at the dust and pebbles strewn across the living room carpet as if they had personally offended her.

"Culsu, I'm—ow ow ow shit—I'm serious, I think there's more than one, these things have nerve endings, ow, god..."

Culsu sighed. "Let me see," she relented, leaning on the back of the sofa to get a proper look at her wife's spines. Lotivver resisted the urge to stab her in the face with them mostly because she thought it would probably hurt too much.

"I still blame you for this," Lotivver informed her, but there was suddenly very little heat behind it because Culsu's gentle prodding was doing wonders for her headache.

"Despite the fact that it was entirely your fault?" Culsu asked lightly. Lotivver could just feel her smirking. She could also feel her running cool fingers along her spikes, though; easing the bruises and hairline fractures that tended to occur when a Vinvocci was kicked backwards through the doors of a time capsule by a snake-dog-person and cracked her spines on the floor, and it felt really good, so she didn't much care.

"My fault? How is any of this my fault?" Right there, she thought with an inward sigh of relief, melting into the sofa.

Culsu obligingly pressed a careful thumb to the base of Lotivver's snapped-off spike. "You're the one who rubbed your nose at the emperor," she pointed out.

Lotivver hummed happily as the last of the sharp pain retreated. "Shut up, Cthulhu," she mumbled before leaning back to kiss her. Culsu rolled her eyes, but the warmth Lotivver was projecting took any sting out of the old nickname.

"Ew," Loki commented. She was sitting at the table in the kitchen, sucking the last dregs of frozen vanilla from the string of the Ice Planet her mothers had given her as compensation for nearly being arrested and executed. After several moments of profound reflection, the young Gallifreyan had solemnly decided that such a trade was fair.

You might change your mind when you're older, Lotivver almost told her. The knife in her gut twisted even further.

She'd thought she'd cut the thought off before it could do any damage. She should have known better than to hope a sudden flash of anguish would go unnoticed by the touch-telepath giving her a scalp massage.

Culsu stiffened for a moment, but gave no other obvious sign of having heard anything. She gave Lotivver's shoulder a tiny squeeze, and the soft brush of a kiss on her forehead lingered for perhaps a few moments longer than usual, but when she turned to Loki her voice was even and cheerful. "Now that your mama's reminded me of it… You know that book we gave you on your last Loom-day? How would you like to meet the author?"

Loki broke into a wide grin, and Lotivver was suddenly reminded of a photograph on an ancient slide projector.