A/N: The sequel to "A Long History". This story has many parts, every one related to every other one, even if they may seem disjointed at first glance. Bring your thinking caps and don't forget to let me know if you have questions. For those just tuning in: I do not support the "Lungbarrow" hypothesis. My thanks and heart-felt adoration to Olfactory_Ventriloquism for beta-reading.

Relics of Eternity

Chapter 2: Foundling

Borusa was in the process of escorting the senior postulants out on their required learning exercise, when Flavia, one of his most promising young students, alerted him to a distress call. He entered the wooden and brass, affectatious old console room at a dead run because whatever it was that was making the call, it had distressed this old Type-40 enough that it had deigned to actually 'speak' to him.

It didn't exactly like him, this ship, but it was his usual preference for these learning exercises, because it had enormous memory and data storage capacity, very nearly as much as the Panatropic net itself. Even now, when the newest capsules of all were Type-53s, the Type-40 was probably the oldest time capsule on Gallifrey. At least one of its pilots had been utterly insane, if any of its interior dimensional behavior was anything to go by, and it also possessed the closest thing to a mind of its own that Borusa had ever seen evidenced by a capsule.

Right at that moment, the 'mind' of the machine was doing something very nearly like panicking inside his head. Even before he reached to initiate scans, it was already searching.

What it found made his hearts clench in his chest. There, drifting aimlessly at the edge of the Medusa system, was what looked very much like a shattered time capsule. Borusa instated quarantine protocols, found an area of the ship big enough to hold it without causing a recursive paradox, and materialized the Type 40 around the smaller, dead-looking little capsule.

They scanned it for life and found the most astonishing thing. Not only was the young capsule clinging desperately to its scattered existence, it was fighting to preserve the battered and fading life of a single, half-destroyed occupant.

That was all it took. Borusa cleared the quarantine fields, cleared the decks, and let the Type-40 sing soft encouragement to the younger, damaged ship. Meanwhile, he removed the survivor, a very young man of perhaps fifty Rassilon standard years, to the Med Bay.

This ship had been stocked with such equipment as would make the most highly trained and advanced healers weep. It was a thing of pure beauty, obviously one of the pilots' pride and joy. Someone had loved healing - a physician, a doctor? Who could know - the capsule was so old, its history was long since lost.

The boy - he was no more than a boy - had been horribly damaged by something. If Borusa had to guess, he would say the child had been forced, at such a young age, to regenerate. With his processes not complete, with his training so young and so new, it was a wonder the boy had survived at all, even as the shattered wreck of Gallifreyan and other physiology that lay, gasping, on the diagnostic bed before him.

He knew what he had to do - the child, whoever he was - had to take all precedence. He activated a stasis field, suspending the boy in time, and brought the ship on a line to return directly to Gallifrey.

The healers worked on him for two days, often despairing and surrendering, only to have the child drag himself back from the brink, almost as if to spite them. They rebuilt his body from the genetic level. He would never be as hearty and healthy as a Time Lord ought to be. He would be easier to damage, any body that he regenerated into somewhat more vulnerable to the things that a Time Lord should survive.

He was obviously a Time Lord, though. The mind, the neural connections in the brain, they were all well established, as if he'd crossed the third paradigm much younger than others. Aging him, though, had to be done by temporal wave. He was hardly more than thirty.

All in all, he was a miracle.

All attempts to find the boy's House were thwarted almost immediately, however. A simple scan revealed that he had no living relatives in any of the listings. It was rare but possible for Time Lords to have renouncers, who lived outside the system, as family, so that was one of two likely explanations. The other, that the boy had been utterly orphaned before being removed from Gallifrey, seemed somewhat preposterous.

Borusa watched from the sidelines, curiosity and a certain sense of responsibility compelling him to remain near to hand at least until the boy awoke, if he ever did. A colleague of his, an old rival from his own Academy days, also showed and took interest.

Cardinal Goth found the boy's persistent survival and lack of any known history to be utterly fascinating. It was the Cardinal, in fact, who gave the boy the name the whole healing staff used when referring to their amazing patient. Apparently, it was a legend from some backwater world in Mutter's spiral, which had amused the Cardinal enough to research it. The character in the legend was known as "the Deathless," and really, even Borusa had to admit that the name seemed apropos under the circumstances.

So they called him Koschei, until they had something better.

The first time he regained consciousness, the scene that occurred was something Borusa would never forget.

Flavia had come by with papers for Borusa to sign, and the Head of the Academy bent over his work while the girl went to visit with the unconscious child. It seemed she, too, felt some sense of responsibility for the boy, since she had discovered the initial signal. Borusa could never fault her gentle manner nor her firm sense of purpose and responsibility. He was almost absurdly proud of Flavia, if the truth were to be told.

She leaned over the boy's bed, to take a closer look at his pale, attractive face, when she suddenly gasped. Borusa looked up and watched them through the observation glass, realizing that the boy had taken her hand as she leaned over him.

For the first time, his eyes snapped open. They were grey, intense, frightened. The Rassilon Imprinitur was so utterly obvious that no one would have to question again if the boy really was a Time Lord - you just couldn't miss that. Flavia looked into those eyes, and the boy spoke, a gentle tone, slightly thready from disuse. "Who are you?" he asked.

"I'm called Flavia," she answered, her voice a little shaky from the surprise. No one but immediate family touched Time children his age - ever - and although she was a senior postulant herself, this was probably the first time anyone outside her House had ever laid a hand on her, either. "They're calling you Koschei, because we don't know your name," she continued, getting stronger now. Borusa noticed her grip on the boy's hand tightened, rather than loosening. "Can you tell me your name?"

The boy shook his head, looked confused, looked terrified. "I... Koschei. I... I like Koschei."

Flavia nodded, managed not to let anything she might be thinking about that show in her face. "Do you know where you are, Koschei?"

"Gallifrey," he said, softly. His voice turned the word to beauty incarnate, a song or a poem in the way he pronounced the common syllables. He smiled up at Flavia, a lovely, unrestrained smile. She smiled back, Borusa saw quite clearly, and then he reached up with a pale, trembling hand, and shifted one of her long curls back behind her ear. "Lady Golden Hair," he murmured. Then his hand dropped, bonelessly, back to the bed.

He was unconscious again. Borusa started toward the room, just as Flavia came out. She leaned against the door, just doing breathing exercises.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"I..." she stopped, thought about it, smiled. "His barriers are as strong as yours, Lord Borusa. He didn't even try to touch my mind. I've never seen anything like it in one so young. His disciplines are completed in that regard. I was more concerned that he appears to have forgotten his own name, and yet he knew the meaning of mine."

"That is a mystery. We will have a memory scan performed, but will have to wait until he wakes completely before a full assessment can be done." He smiled at his prized pupil. "You did very well, my dear. Ten of ten."

Flavia smiled softly, a tiny pink blush staining her cheeks. "Thank you sir. But he is no trouble."

When the boy at last woke fully, the neurological testing began in earnest. It was discovered almost immediately that he didn't remember anything personal. A scan revealed that his memory engrams had been wiped almost completely clear. Experience and testing narrowed that assessment. He knew as much as any Prydonian student his approximate age and, occasionally, he had moments of sheer, unadulterated brilliance.

He was gifted, exquisitely so, and because he was young and orphaned, the Colleges all wanted him. However, Prydon Academy had first call on him, simply because Borusa and Goth, between them, had more clout than any of the other Colleges could muster in this instance.

Borusa felt, even years later, looking back on it, that he should have seen it coming. Sometimes, he even wondered how the world could have been changed if he acted to prevent it. However, when Goth arrived with Chancellory approval to adopt the boy into his own House, as an own child besides, Borusa fought down his instinctive response to worry, and elected to go with the more social-minded response: that an orphaned child, who had been so badly injured, deserved a good family.

Borusa himself placed the boy with Class Ninety-Two, feeling that the students there, in the most gifted class he had ever managed to organize, would become a comfortable home for the promising young Koschei. That left him only two more seats to fill in that group, and only time would tell him who else to place in the group that was quickly becoming his masterpiece.

Zedric, witty, open, irresponsible Zedric, immediately set out to win the friendship of the young stranger, and he succeeded to a great extent. Koschei's personal charisma was friendly and attractive, and he soon had several of the others admiring him quite a bit for his talented way with people. In quiet moments, he would seek Zedric out and the two boys soon reduced the calm to chaos.

Despite the general mischief and random hyperactivity of the boy, which Borusa was sure he would grow out of, he was pleased and proud of Koschei's progress. He drew out young Hedin, encouraging the quiet boy's interests in law and history. He took an almost paternal pride in Damon's accomplishments in learning the ways of the Panatropic Net. He even, occasionally, curbed Zedric's more insane behaviors, and they forged a strong friendship between them that Borusa thought could only benefit both boys.

He remained friends with Flavia, which rather impressed Borusa. The woman was a hundred and fifty years his senior, but Koschei managed to find enough common ground between them that she still considered him a friend even after she graduated the Academy and began her career. Having not-so-inadvertantly overheard one of their private conversations, he learned that Koschei still referred to her as "Lady Golden Hair" as often as "Flavia".

Class Ninety-Two were raised to postulants, and Borusa continued to be delighted with their work. The children, even hyperactive Zedric and brilliant Koschei, had settled down a bit, restricting their pranks to special occasions. His life was calm and peaceful, as befitted a Time Lord of his training and stage of life.

And then, an old friend who resided in the Mountain of Solitude brought him a foundling child, and Borusa's life was never peaceful again.