he first thing he can see that isn't shrouded in darkness is a glossy, sleek, black, and full of tiny, fluffy threads at the same time. It is being smoothed over and over again between a graphite-coloured beak, layers of the feathers spread out impressively.
The shriek that follows just about drills a hole through the blurry air, forcing Koschei's eyelids open all the way. Where his vision barely reaches is a deep, metallic blue dressed in a sheer grey cloud. This bird has decided if the sun is up, the rest of Gallifrey must also be up. Or maybe just Koschei.
He unglues his face from the ground first, tiny sticks and bits of dirt falling off as his flesh cries for their return by being in sore pain. He draws his limbs together, letting them lift his body off the ground like a spider might, old denim and synthetic cotton smudged in dirt and plant matter. It's a good morning in an alternate universe where he sits in his window, watching the suns rise, holding a mug of something warm in a clean sweater. It's not a good morning from down here.
The shiny black messenger of the first sun persists in its racket, cramming more air inside Koschei's head until it might burst from the pressure and deafen him from the headache. His ankle cries at him from being dragged, a quick jerk telling him it's only whining and not completely destroyed inside. It's then he remembers how he got there.
His demise was flora, the dangerous construction of the planet overruling the nonexistent carnivorous beast in a quest to obliterate Koschei. The flora hasn't won quite yet, although it is only now the river decides to speak up. The number of cousins he asked with urgency ages ago what lives in here ignored him as if he already knew. They'll have cleared this place because it's so close to a Great House. Just for show, a clump of trees producing much needed oxygen, wild animals driven out and stored nicely in an artificial habitat. Ushas has described quite well how appetising Time Lords are to hungry beasts.
He creaks and unfolds like a rusty lawn chair that hasn't been used in twenty years, pulling and forcing his body into a standing position favouring the right ankle. The bird pretends to not notice Koschei standing there, cawing away at nothing ninety degrees from him, but both of them know it's really a biological alarm clock.
In the (near) daylight, it takes an uneventful two minutes to find the river, the alarm clock bird making the wise decision in not following Koschei around. It isn't even a river. The title of "river" has been passed down through generations, likely stemmed from some kind of dramatic impulse akin to running around shirtless with a flaming stick. Ironically, this practice sounds fittingly Prydonian of them. The creek is trying to be five metres across, water not deep enough to give itself any sort of hue other than 'mildly disgruntled cloud'. Someone built a bridge somewhere centuries ago and everyone's repairing it constantly. Koschei is too lazy at this point to go looking.
The first step into the water was cold.
The second gave him a small, generally bad feeling about the operation.
The third was less of a step and more of a flailing spiral onto his backside into the fervently unimpressed running water, too many body parts colliding with the eroded and very slippery rock bottom. It feels like being slapped in the face, but with an added soaked pair of legs and half a torso to boot. Maybe if he yells for help, the alarm clock bird will pick him up.
At least he doesn't need to bathe now.
Oakdown looks almost majestic from the outside, a micromanaged mess of wooden twists that look like bundled yarn spiralling up and out. It said to be a defect of House growth, but many of its natives believe it to be superior to the rest. Flanked by the second sun finally making its way past the horizon, it is almost shining.
"Ain't it a bit early for a swim?" Somehow the multitude of cousins burrowing inside and around Oakdown makes it less glorious. Especially since Koschei recognises this kid from the bonfire: the one with the self-altered pointed ears. She clearly does not remember him. In ignoring her, the game of catch she plays is not interrupted.
Three more outside have a good morning stare at him without saying anything out loud, but communicating clearly enough their amusement and slight confusion at his being soaking wet and favouring one foot at this hour of the morning. Whatever hour it is.
Koschei opts to opening the back door instead of having everyone from here to the front asking him why he was swimming, taking a few cold seconds to find the door "aesthetically carved" into the House. The promised warmth doesn't hit him immediately, beat up back corridor not a priority for heating on a beautiful day such as this.
The One With the Seemingly Eternal Stubble gives him a signature 'friendly look' after a once-over jogging down the stairs, giving him as wide a berth as he can get on the way into the kitchen. Koschei feels like punching him, but isn't going to, because his brain can rationalise enough at this point to understand it's not his fault Koschei is freezing cold and still dripping from the chest down. He coughs a couple times to feel like he isn't actually a piece of useless furniture.
The stairs are no exception to the winding, this particular set of stairs swooping through the room with all the books in it. One foot yells at him every other step, the other foot telling it to shut up or be cut off.
"Where'd you run off to last night?" The Marshmallow Distributor asks in all good superior favour. She is occupied too much with a game of three dimensional chess against Don't Dance With the Flaming Stick to bother with eye contact.
Koschei doesn't stop walking, paying more attention to the light fixture he's observed every walk up through the roof than the people below. "I lost your bucket." He only imagines the look on their faces, too tired to tempt the headache's return to full power.
"Why are you so wet?" The cousin in front of him has no distinction to help identify themself, Koschei reduced to a grunt He ritually ignores the portrait of the first Housekeeper next to room 303, slamming the door on his way in. His long awaited opportunity to dump all his wet clothes on the floor and kick them across the room is disrupted by his slate, of all things. The device tossed on the bed one dull morning ago lights up far too excitedly for Koschei's tired brain, displaying failproof two-dimensional Gallifreyan scribblings of a familiar sort.
ΘΣ: I just learnt 3 types of waltz. It makes hardly any practical sense, but is a surprising lot of fun for all its foot aerobics. I might teach you.
Despite the cold and the headache and the ankle and the cousins and the bucket and the fire and the hours of unconsciousness, Koschei cracks a smile.
###
"Okay you have to get to sleep right now."
2 hours ago, Theta fell asleep on a faded scarlet couch in the commons while trying to re-teach Koschei half the day's classes. Ushas has not been told about her friend's internal noise problem, a concept difficult to pass off as nothing on days where it gets too loud to focus. Ushas retired to her room in a huff four hours before Theta fell asleep, spiting the pair of them for not explaining why exactly Koschei needs to be entirely re-taught something he was present for.
"Final exams are in a month and I," he yawns, "have to finish taking notes."
"You really don't, Koschei."
"But I need to be caught up for tomorrow."
Despite everything screaming for him to go back to sleep, Theta drags himself off the couch. "You don't have any of these classes until next week, and if you don't sleep now you'll miss all of tomorrow."
"It is tomorrow." 0430 hours, in fact.
"All the more reason, then." Theta leans against the table, taking Koschei's slate out of his hand with little effort.
Koschei leans his head against his hands lying on the desk, giving Theta a mad look that would be a lot angrier were it not falling asleep. "Give it back," he says, caught between a whine and a scowl.
"Not for another five and a half hours."
"Please?"
A slightly apologetic shake of the head, followed by an arm offering help. "You're going to sleep."
No response.
"Get up, you."
Hesitantly, the boy grabs Theta's arm, dragging himself off the chair and getting unceremoniously dumped onto a couch. "Mmf." He hasn't bothered to change out of uncomfortable pants and a rumpled white t-shirt, fringe of his hastily chopped-off black hair not quite touching the collar.
"Nighty night."
"Theta?" He turns around.
"Hmm?"
"Listen."
Silence.
"For what?
Koschei shakes his head, letting it fall onto the couch that has hosted generations of behinds but is still suitable as a bed. "Nothing."
Theta sighs, arms becoming heavy with fatigue and brain demanding they continue to work for Koschei's benefit. He knows it's nothing and he most certainly can't hear it. "Think about the universe, then. Akhatan. The Medusa Cascade."
"Don't leave." His voice has been reduced to a whine as his mind goes into its own world as it does too often, so people say.
"Only going to the neighbouring couch."
###
"We can't be called 'The Deca' with only nine people, Mortimus." Ushas lingers slightly on the 's' as she reclines haphazardly on the arm of a chair. Thirty-three years and her black hair has become just about permanently tied back with a wire. It's always Ushas don't-you-dare-call-me-Delta-Psi, the biologist.
The nine in question are all situated in their usual circle in the corner of the twenty-one-to-thirty commons. What was once a casual weekly study meeting has now escalated into specific roles and the name debate. A total of three weathered chairs and a chipped coffee table next to the portrait of Rassilon in the fifth body nobody likes are often in use between the end of classes and night. Various hand-drawn academic posters have taken up permanent residence there for the number of times their figures have been repeated.
"We can always find someone else to make ten, Ushas. It can't be that difficult," Jelpax says. Coal black skin, platinum blond hair, any hint of a gender binary on the other side of Kasterborous. Obviously from the House of Paradox.
"Ought we to host auditions?"
Ushas none too gently rests her forehead on a fist like she usually does at Rallon's ideas. The awkward mix of old high linguist and atrocious scientist doesn't sit well with the three-years-younger Ushas.
Before she can impatiently respond, Millennia jumps in. "I think what we should do is find a tenth person before calling ourselves 'The Deca'." Temporal physicist and compromiser extraordinaire. She occasionally makes jokes on this peacemaking ability deriving from a ground desire to compromise her ocular heterochromia. Rallon always tells her it looks 'ravishing against her stained ivory hue'. Nobody can tell if he's exaggerating or not.
"Yes, but honestly, we need to have a name!" Mortimus retaliates. He has the least decided of positions amongst them, something of a dabbler in visual art, bionics, and random bits of history. His lavishly decorated bionic legs combine all three of these aspects. Everyone but Drax vaguely questions how he's even arrived here in the first place. Drax is usually the one to wave off their questions. They both refuse to reveal how Mortimus ended up with mostly no legs.
"Can't we just like, pick up some random?" Drax nearly shouts in his somehow uneducated dialect, scanning the room for anyone potentially smart enough to hold any position. Rallon habitually clenches his teeth at Drax's mere voice, routinely calmed by Millennia and ignored by Drax himself.
Theta speaks for the first time in this conversation, back turned to the commons on his coffee table of a seat. "What other subject to we even need filled?"
"Politics." Ushas replies, ever on top of things. Including Mortimus's chair.
"I hate politics." Koschei mumbles to Magnus, who smirks in return, the pair of them separated on the floor by Theta's legs, who famously agree.
"Ya also hate curfew, get over it."
Koschei rolls his eyes from across the circle. "That kid hears everything," is said below a whisper, successfully not reaching the ears of Drax. Or anyone else.
Jelpax sighs. "In that case, I know a kid. He's in my historical sociology class." Nobody protests to them getting off the arm of Ushas's chair and walking up to the nearest student immersed in their studies, cross-legged on a wooden chair with a slate.
The boy in question has overheard half of the conversation and stands up to face Jelpax while they still remain silent a metre away from him.
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
Instead of replying, the well-groomed short boy with an eerily chromatically homogenised physical appearance holds out his thin hand.
"Rho Lambda. Your politics expert. You're not very quiet over there."
Jelpax grins, turning around to the group with a wasn't that easy look before shaking his hand.
"Nice to meet you."
"How about no?" Magnus half-shouts to Jelpax.
Simultaneously Millennia retaliates with "That was rude", and Theta kicks him in the knee.
"What's your full name, then, Rho Lambda?"
"Vansellostophossius."
Time Lords, they all decided long ago, need to cut back a bit on the syllables. "I'll call you Vansell. Vansell the politician."
"You're Jelpax the mathematician."
Koschei gives them both a look, Ushas appears mildly impressed, and Jelpax nods. "That is correct."
"I don't like him," Mortimus sighs.
"I don't think he cares," Ushas returns, all of them watching Jelpax and their new politics expert approach, the latter of which bringing his wooden chair along. He looks them all in the face one by one, smiling triumphantly, coming to place the chair in front of Rassilon's portrait, possibly inadvertently. "
"Not very full of himself, then." Theta says to Koschei, both of them biting back a mocking grin at the boy at least an inch shorter than the rest of them. Nobody speaks, every head turned to Rho Lambda's giddy expression covering most of Rassilon's fatigued one. Only three of them try formulating some words of welcome.
Vansellostophossius creates them on his own. "You're all sort of famous, actually. Just around the commons and stuff. It's pretty cool. Good you have a name." He finally sits down. "I'm ten. So you've got your Deca."
A few of them nod, Koschei, Theta, and Magnus still pointedly sceptical.
"I suppose you are," Ushas declares, gesturing to the digital white board they have stuck to the wall. "Care to teach us something?"
He stands up and straightens himself, adjusting the robes he technically doesn't need to wear past 16:00. "I'd be honoured."
###
Theta gets hit in the forehead with a pencil. Literally, a pencil. There are maybe ten rooms in the entire complex with these things, and the empirical particle physics room is definitely not one.
Half the class is currently transfixed on a carbon atom, with the exception of Theta. The other half is sitting in benches behind tables, slaving away at select data inputs on the form they all need submitted in an hour, with the exception of Vansell.
Theta picks up the pencil and holds it out, checking once to see if Professor Samax is actually looking at anybody. Vansell holds up a perfectly rectangular, orange piece of paper definitely stolen from the art room. The words 'I need some help' are written across the front, backed by a being who doesn't look in need of very urgent help.
With what? Theta mouths across the gap in the room.
It takes Vansell ten seconds to write out 'studying' below.
Theta rolls his eyes and almost returns to the bajillion-times-magnified carbon atom vibrating in the glass confines before him. Vansell shows him the other side of the paper too quick.
'Today after block six?'
A handful of people notice their odd exchange, trying to make sense of the sign's context and why Vansell has decided it's a good idea to communicate in this way.
The professor looks up from her desk, for once. "Rho Lambda?"
Vansell puts down the sign, but still watches Theta like a hawk. To be completely honest, the kid talks way too much for his own good, and might need a lesson down the road on keeping his nose at a lower elevation. That and he's the politician.
Despite this downfall, Theta shrugs, nods, and if that wasn't clear enough, mouths "sure" at him. Not that he knows what he's signed up to tutor.
###
Omega Xi lies on his dormitory bed, room shared with nobody, staring up at the blank ceiling. He idly throws a ball in the air and catches it repeatedly, left alone to mull over the definition of words, listening to music he doesn't much care for anyways. Vibrations crashing through the air into ear canals, into the brain, processed as good, bad, or in between. The curse of boredom and the dawning realisation he doesn't have that many friends.
Four knocks on the door: an automatic 'damn you'. Supposed to be studying but never really, he picks up the slate abandoned an hour ago in frustration at multi-dimensional physics calculations.
"Who's there?"
The door opens and Magnus steps in without permission. Not that either of them care. "Magnus."
His breath shudders on the way out. "Well I can see that now."
"Can I come in?"
"You're already in."
Taking that as a 'yes', Magnus plunks himself on the foot of Koschei's bed.
He tells himself to have a little patience. maybe. "Yes?"
"What's the deal with Trenzalore?"
Koschei blinks once. "Why?"
"Apparently it's going to be on the cosmic geography test."
Omega shrugs, shuts off the music, and tries to navigate his mess of a brain to find Trenzalore.
"It'll start out as another human colony, level two planet. Well, human-ish colony. Life span of around a hundred twenty human years. Like the rest of them, it became some sort of an unspecific hotspot of blended humanoids, the Sol III physique was the most dominant. After a century or so, they'll develop a truth field. For the next few centuries, a third of the universe's collection of species with spaceships decide to invade the place, and consistently fail. Then there's this huge siege, and Trenzalore loses, no survivors. Eventually the entire planet becomes a graveyard including one Time Lord."
"What, that far out?"
"Yup."
Magnus leans back, not much longer concerned with Trenzalore's general 'deal'. "Which one?"
Koschei drags a hand down his face. "Even our species have enough brains to not find that out. The name is somehow significant."
"How?"
He halfheartedly rolls his eyes at Magnus. "Do you think I know?"
"Well, you are brilliant at this."
Koschei's internal cyclical complaints of Magnus's interrupting his lack of activity stops for a moment. "You should see me try to do calculus."
Magnus laughs in a sort of forced way with the same percentage of sincerity as the ratio of feet to an entire duck. "You're better than I am." Magnus pats him on the back with a healthy dose of awkwardness, leaning over a gap of blankets. His smile is likely intended to be reassuring, but of what, Koschei doesn't quite know.
He is almost at the door, leaving Koschei alone to the same dull music and boredom before inflicting his vocal patterns on the world once more. "Do you know where Theta is, by the way?"
Koschei internally curses Magnus's unwillingness to leave the room with every exhale. "Vansell's been needing an irrational amount of intensive xenobio help for the past week." He phrases it almost as a question, wishing nonexistence on the pointy politician. "Apparently he'll fail the class if he doesn't pass the exam."
Magnus nods. "Ah." The awkward has not left him, or perhaps it is inflicted by Koschei's lack of personality at the moment.
"Why, in particular?"
Magnus shrugs, looking deliberately above Koschei's head and not right at him. "He owes me a few spare parts from a temporal physics exam." He walks out of the room, hunting after the elusive Theta Sigma, leaving Koschei with an annoyingly open door.
A/N: The scene with the pencil throwing is so recent I didn't even remember it exists until going through and italicizing it
The Trenzalore one is so old it predates NaNoWriMo 2014 that's crazy
Is anyone here even from the EU? Does the EU fandom even read fanfiction or just feast eternally off Big Finish and all the novels? Who knows
Thanks for reading, folks.