A/N: I was in a land without laptop for Saturday, hence the lack of chapter.
Fear not, I have returned. With a 4,600-word chapter because I have issues.
Vansell got them to ignore him for forty-eight hours. Ushas made herself disappear as she is so good at it, and he got only a few distracted words out of Magnus that didn't reveal much. He wasn't even subject to Vansell's usual bout of sideways looks and sneers that would pass with little to no clear motive in the halls. He pretended not to mind, but he has discovered anew he does.
There's a very loud Otherstide party going on in the commons. He has taken to sending Theta text messages, knowing he'd bring the slate with him for something to do in that dreary old House. They've managed to smuggle alcohol from Hamlet. He's actually restrained himself from sending a rambling commentary on the entire proceedings of the past few days, heeding the wish to "keep him updated" and at the same time not looking like he has no other friends. I've had my door slammed into twice. Although by now, it seems he doesn't.
He thought the walls and door might be a bit thicker than they are and block out the racket coming from a floor down, but no such silence came for his studying. He only justifies the profuse research of speculative mythology because he's in the class and has an exam coming up. In a couple months. And you never know when there might be a pop quiz.
Someone slams into his door again, either trying to return to a bed or drag some unfortunate sane friend out to join in the overly loud music and ridiculous displays of substance consumption they can only imagine. Three times. It's getting very loud.
He hasn't actually absorbed a word in over an hour, nothing to be done but stare blankly at the slate or, Purely Mythological Historical Occasionally Psychologically Justified God forbid, go downstairs. Sleeping is a joke. He doesn't sleep much anyways.
His own noise came back. The definite one-two-three-four with no usual context to bring it on, just the rambling noise and frustration itself. His head feels like it's being hammered from inside with every beat, resigning his position to lying faceup in bed with hands clamped forcefully over his ears.
Removed, of course, to update Theta unnecessarily. Where the hell are you? I can't THINK. He figures if he spams Theta's slate with useless information enough, he might actually appear and provide intelligent conversation.
Or just a friend who won't fucking ignore him on the whim of Vansellostophossius.
Somewhere along the line of his overstimulated, irked traipsing about the room, he found a scalpel shoved under the mattress from last year's surreptitious trunkike dissection with Ushas. Theta decided he was too squeamish to watch, but wouldn't report them for maintaining a mostly full biology lab in Koschei's bedroom for two hours. They were tidy about it anyways.
He swings it by the handle above his stomach now, making many internal threats to the people outside yelling in conversation. The likelihood of him actually carving out their eyes and giving them as an Otherstide gift to Ushas is actually rather low.
Someone begins pounding on the door. Koschei resolutely ignores them. I am going to knife the next person trying to enter my room.
"Come on, you Omega Xi. Pretentious name, by the way. Omega." Koschei raises his eyebrows, deciding he's too good for the eight that have been ignoring him defiantly for the past two days, for all of five seconds.
Did not knife Magnus. He had alcohol. He also made no comment on the scalpel, being a bit too intoxicated for any form of logical observations or sophisticated conversation. He tried to wheedle as much as he could about whatever The Thing With Vansell was supposed to be about, but all he got was a number of profuse apologies and "of course you wouldn't do that" and a mildly concerning amount of discussion on the multi-purpose tactics of having unlimited access to Omega(not you Omega I mean the proper Omega)'s domain.
He is trying to ration the whatever in hell Magnus put in his cup, taking tentative sips of the first proper alcohol he's consumed. Small bits at Oakdown don't count. Theta hasn't bothered checking his slate at all in the past over a day, everyone happily occupied with something worthwhile to suit their fancy. The looms just couldn't manufacture a super defence against alcohol, could they?
He is one hundred percent confident Magnus has put something in his drink with a much higher alcohol content than whatever it's supposed to be. Which is exactly why he downs it all in one go, scalpel still in his left fingers. He needs to stop for air only once, ignoring the burning of his mouth and oesophagus so intently it sounds like screaming in his head. It surely can't kill him. This is what happens when you're not here to make intelligent decisions for me. Maybe Theta will be curious enough to actually respond to his rambling messaging.
He waits for the alcohol to hit his system.
Seven minutes, forty-eight seconds, although there wasn't really a defining line that told him when to stop staring at the clock. He can see why people do it. It's warm, in a sense, internally, and the music maybe isn't all that loud, and his brain is being so incredibly honest with itself he kind of wants Magnus back in here to talk with. Or Theta maybe, if he showed up at all.
Magnus wouldn't be great. He'd probably tell everyone else. Why is everyone else suddenly not on his side? They're supposed to be his friends. Not Vansell's friends. Vansell stole them. But you can't really steal people if they don't have any resistance to going, so Vansell was really just better than Koschei. Well he's smarter, and talks better, and actually has life goals that aren't all that stupid, and is probably not crazy. Death herself didn't come visit him as a kid. He doesn't have noise running through his head.
The noise. It has morphed into something symphonic, fake instruments added in to make a complete mess of a composition in his head, trying to drown out the music from below in a terrible waltz. Music was always a profession for the unchaptered, an unnecessary art form that surely anyone can mimic. But you have to be talented to get it right. Koschei can't throw music together and call it art.
I cannot compose good music. His brain does not relent. He can't erase all the layers of noise and it's getting too loud but if he were better it could be amazingly amazing art and people would remember it and he's just not that very great at all. I can't hear myself think. Am intoxicated.
He's not that great. His brain is impaired by alcohol and he can recognise that, but it doesn't change the fact he feels like wrapping himself in a million blankets and crying about his life. None of his friends even want him. Come back. Not even Theta really cares. Please. And why would he? Pleeeease. Koschei's not that really great. Pretty please?
Koschei looks at his half-forgotten scalpel, getting a good idea that's probably a bad idea, but he thinks is a good idea. I'm going to try drawing. He holds the scalpel against his arm, feeling his hearts jump a little in the background. And he looks at it for a couple minutes, brain deciding now is the time to think up as many arguments in favour of drawing, many tiny things he'd forgotten dragging themselves to the surface again in anticipation. It's really not that hard.
He gently presses it against his skin about an index finger down from his wrist, watching the whole thing dip into where he's still too chicken to do anything. He pauses, listening to his trash mental noise and everyone else's glorious composition and his brain chanting do it, do it until he sucks in a breath, telling himself he will not breathe until there is blood.
He does it a little too quick, if there is an appropriate measure for such an activity, watching red seep out of the break in his skin that stings. Stings it STINGS he tells himself to shut up because he deserves it, finding some twisted gratification in rightful justice.
He did not think this through.
Blood falls down the side of his arm onto the sheets that have already stained, a brilliant deep red rivalled only by the right wine and the right paint. The dull mentality currently not thinking about stinging and look blood decide to not worry if it's going in the laundry anyways. He can even use the sheet as a bandage.
Ouch. Koschei wonders vaguely if Theta cares, listening greater to the voices in his head chanting again, again, again…
Scalpels are not good drawing tools, Thete.
###
"Innocet." Theta hisses, mind made up in its ventures as the time on the wall reads 00:00. "Are you awake?"
"Yes," she responds in a plain voice, if a little subdued, turning over to face him and revealing a slate already on. "What's up?"
Theta squints through the dark, wondering how he didn't notice. "Can you teach me telepathy?" he chews the inside of his bottom lip, mind still rolling in circles with the probability of his brain being dysfunctional because of the looms and will it damage his brain and will he be in trouble at school and will it be painful if he messes up and what if he can't then how will he
She places the slate beside her, turning up the brightness to cast a sort of glow on her face. Her hair is loosely tied back, but it still falls everywhere, strands wrapping around her arms and middle. It's usually braided. "What, now?"
Theta was too busy thinking to rationalise that point. "Well, not now but… before I go back to school in a couple days… I mean only if it works for you but you're really good at it so…" he trails off, not entirely sincere in that last part, but observing some unspoken convention in adding it on.
"Why now?"
Theta draws in a breath, perhaps looking for a white lie or arguing the benefits of pretending he doesn't have a reason, silence stretching on a bit too uncomfortably. Convention strikes again. "Well it's…"
"It's Koschei." She smiles across the room, the only warm smile he's known that fits the description of warm. "You've already told me." She fills her lungs, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. "Of all the things you mentally yell across the room at night, that one yells the loudest."
Theta tugs the covers higher up his face, willing them to shield his brain from further transmission. Innocet only chuckles, which means blankets can't have worked all that effectively.
"And rightly so. It's a kind of disfiguring of mentality one does not associate with a meticulously engineered breed of humanoid." Theta blinks twice, resolving to wriggle out of the now diagonally placed blanket on top of him. This is why he doesn't make the bed in the morning. "You seem set right now."
Theta nods, simultaneously blipping back to speculation of what state Koschei is possibly in and trying to block all his thoughts from Innocet.
"If you don't mind my saying, I already knew that."
"Isn't that kind of… invasive?" Theta asks, being gestured to the floor. "Reading someone's mind without consent or something?"
Innocet shrugs apologetically, gathering her wild hair up and starting to braid it. It occurs to Thet he has never seen her cut it once in her life, and knowing her, it will probably keep on growing until it's burned off for the next body. "There's a whole tirade of scenarios in which it is legal to 'read someone's mind', as you say, without their knowledge or consent. You already know and you indirectly fall under one of those scenarios. Kind of." She ties off her braid in record timing, swinging the mass of hair over her shoulder. It doesn't yet weigh her neck down or visibly give her some kind of pain, but it will one day. She might cut it then. "I didn't think you'd mind."
Theta shakes his head, trying to determine if he should be sitting somewhere specific and deciding to not worry about it. Which brings him back to Koschei.
"So." She claps her hands on her knees, elegantly sinking down to the floor with crossed legs. "The untempered schism is the reason we're all touch telepaths, so don't worry about that. Some people are able to perform telepathy without touching the target in varying degrees, like me. People without developed mental barriers in a state of distress or high emotion can end up sending out telepathic signals very loudly, especially children.
"If you want to keep your life, don't try anything on adults. You can't hear Quences even a little bit without touching him, I've tried. And unless you want to get your ass kicked, don't use the governmental list of exceptional scenarios on someone unless it's really necessary, because a couple of them are a bit misplaced."
Innocet positions herself directly in front of Theta, that face and that dark patch not changing in the least since he first saw her. "It's easiest head to head because of proximity to the brain. Toe to toe could work." She considers the statement for a moment, leaving Theta to evaluate her face from much closer than usual. "Haven't tried. Continuing, there are two general forms: complete and partial. Partial is something of a… transcendental dialogue. Complete means you're more or less in tune with brain signals and…" she shakes her head at Theta, or perhaps complication itself. "I'll show you, yeah?"
Theta nods, feeling like he's hanging from the end of a tree branch about to let go, Innocet planting her forehead on his. "If there's something you don't want me to see, close a door on it, lock it up, bury it, put a sign in front of it." Innocet must be able to read his confusion like a string of scrambled circles and lines. "You'll understand in a second."
Theta closes his eyes as Innocet does, feeling a gentle tug in the middle of his brain, all at once pulled through to… a TARDIS?
Innocet stands across from him, looking around the room with far less intrigue than Theta does. The control room is scattered with containers: cardboard boxes, wooden crates, oversized bags, fish tanks. They are all partially filled with glossy blue cubes the size of his palm, a few spilt onto the floor. Stairwells and ramps spiral upwards to opened and closed doors, a couple swinging shut as Theta looks at them.
"This is nice." Innocet says, Theta mildly unsure if she's being sarcastic. "So here I am. Hello." She waves, smiling, carefully walking to an open crate and peering inside. "#005B9F?" Using barely any movement outside the wrist, she picks up a cube on the top, staring at it intently. "No, #003B6F. Everyone has a different colour."
"How can you tell?" Theta has now attempted walking as Innocet does, only managing a sort of unnatural slide mixed with vertical drop to the selected position.
She holds the cube delicately between her fingers, studying Theta with some bemusement. "A bit of studying, a bit of practice, and a helpful implant required for my apprenticeship." She crushes the cube between her palms.
The Deca sit around their normal spot, except for Ushas. She is the first to stand at the unused Smart board they scavenged, writing down a number of noble gas reactions as everyone else takes notes. Innocet doesn't, of course.
Rallon and Millennia sit in the same chair at the same time, only their legs touching. "Just friends" they say. As if we were all born yesterday.
"Xenon tetroxide is very prone to explosion and decomposition into plain xenon and O2, but only above 237.25 degrees."
"Sorry, wot?" Drax tosses his slate to the floor, arms up in surrender. "Why're we even learning this?"
"Just you wait," Vansell grins, which Theta has always viewed as more of an inverted sneer. "One of these days you'll have a gun at your head with only knowledge of the reactivity of xenon to get you out."
And then the déjà vu hits. Wait a minute.
"That's what going through a specific memory is like." Innocet informs Theta, back on the carpet, forehead no longer occupied. "Except you couldn't distinguish it from any other reality, which is normal for the first go."
Theta looks bewildered at his own bedroom, clock now reading 00:15. "Am I going to have to do that in your head, too? He feels the breath of a thought at the edge of his mind, a wisp of smoke he cant quite grab before it drifts away. He feels too young for this.
"Not yet, you're not." Innocet continues her likable, nearly professional banter, placing her hands on Theta's head. "Now you know what I sound like in your head," she says 'more or less' with her entire body. "We'll only practice the partial version for now."
He feels something of a child with a pair of hands weighing on his head.
It's more comfortable than head to head because we're still 80 percent cognitively present in physical reality. Theta doesn't understand her raised eyebrows and crooked smile until he realises…
"Oh!" Innocet flinches at the two-dimensional volume. "Or uh…" Oh!
That was more feedback than language. Try concentrating a little more.
On the eighth try, Theta actually finds something. Which is apparently impressive for someone thrice advised to not attempt something like that with barely any experience, but can if he wants to. The whole premise of trying to find a floor in an intangible, entirely figurative location was the largest hurdle to get around. Not to mention he had no idea what the floor was supposed to look like, else it would be "too easy".
Innocet's floor is covered entirely in snow, or is probably more accurately just snow. It looks like a furniture delivery aircraft exploded overhead, leaving antique cabinets scattered across the foggy white. Theta tries looking to the left to locate Innocet, but everything is engulfed in snow as he tries.
"#6ED600." It takes him a second to comprehend why the voice is all clunky and surround-sound, his eyes taking their sweet time opening. "That's what mine are."
Theta locates the time on the wall, surprised it's only 02:08. He should not be this tired.
"But you're learning telepathy, which is actually more tiring than cramming for exams."
Theta leans backwards, body uncomfortably resting against his bedframe at a thirty-degree angle. "The string physics exam was the most tiring ordeal of my life, thank you."
"And did you pass?" Innocet leaps into bed full of energy, which Theta thinks is ludicrous for any event transpiring past 02:00.
"A ravishing 64 percent." Theta crawls into bed, which involves a lot of arm gymnastics and the rare motivation to make a habit of actually making the bed in the morning. He feels confident in his ability to forget the idea ever happened upon him.
"What did Koschei get?" Innocet smirks like she already knows the answer, which she actually doesn't because Theta successfully threw up a ludicrous number of mental walls to prevent her from getting in.
"65."
###
The last time they slept in the same bed was the better part of two decades ago, the arbitrary age of twelve determined by vague authority to be 'old enough to have your own room'. Theta, being shaken awake by Koschei, hasn't given a shit for two hours. Damn time zones.
"Theta…"
"You have summoned the wild Time Lord," he answers groggily, internally congratulating himself on remembering his well-rehearsed salutation and scolding himself for having one.
The two decades is displayed very effectively by their increase in size, more so with them fidgeting about and properly conscious of their limbs. Trapped in a painfully long adolescence manufacturing regenerative properties and time energy and symbiotic bonding regulations and telepathic structure and who knows what else that for some reason could not be accomplished in the bloody looms.
"When did you get back?"
Theta groggily smacks his hand against the wall and successfully turns on the embedded light.
"02:00. What time is it now?"
"Four." Koschei awkwardly lies down again, not entirely sure what to do with a wild Time Lord lying next to him at four in the morning. "And what's wrong with your own bed?"
Theta holds out the hand not stuck under his body. "Your arm."
Koschei only moves his eyes in the following five seconds, so Theta pulls the arm off his stomach by the wrist himself. Koschei stares up at the ceiling, his stubborn refusal of regret. There are four red, clean lines in a neat row on his upper forearm, by knowledge two days old. His old sheets have already been thrown in the laundry, smart enough as he is to remove all the evidence except the obvious.
"It makes the noise a bit quieter," Koschei says in such a low voice nobody but Theta could hear if they tried. "Physical pain overrides psycho-emotional preoccupation regardless of whether or not it hurts."
"I know," Theta replies, tracing the out-of-place lines with his thumb, pretending to remove the contrast between them and the surrounding near-white skin. "Did you even clean it out, Koschei?"
This alone is somehow enough to have his head turn to Theta instead of the ceiling. He resolutely ignores the offending arm. "I'm not that stupid."
Theta takes to tracing the lines of Koschei's open palm instead of cuts. It's rougher and, in a logical sense, much more important than the skin on his arm. As a result should be much more violated. "In an alternate universe somewhere, you and I don't even exist. Have you ever thought about that?"
Theta's hair isn't just blond – it's a layered gradient of near-whites to dark gold all muddled together in just a tiny bit of order. Theta can't see him looking. "I might like this one better."
"That's good." Theta closes Koschei's fingers around nothing.
"How about you?"
Theta drowsily turns his head up to face Koschei again, giving him a weak smile from fifteen centimetres, shrugging. "Who knows?"
Koschei smirks half-heartedly. "Death is conceptually a bit terrifying."
"I've heard it romanticised as sleeping."
"There's nobody to wake you up at four in the freaking morning when you're dead." Koschei feels something almost poke at the back of his mind. Almost like groping around in the dark for a doorknob and running into the wall. Theta's face twitches.
"Who taught you to do that?"
Theta runs into the wall again.
"You missed." Koschei sits up, grinning smugly at Theta.
"Only because I'm not doing it properly," he grumbles, sitting on top of the blankets he didn't try crawling under.
Koschei pulls him forward so their foreheads touch just a bit too forcefully. "Like this, yeah?"
Theta would agree. He probably should in some form or another, which is incredibly easy to do with a functional voice box and easy access to basic telepathy. He could, were it not for the sudden hypersensitivity of his lower legs and forehead, noticeably increased heartrates, and some enigmatic malfunction of neurological decision-making.
He kisses Koschei.
It's a lot stranger than he thought it might be, but then Koschei isn't exactly trying at the moment and he underestimated saliva content by a fair portion. Worse, Koschei isn't telepathically screaming any kind of response to let Theta know what on Gallifrey he's supposed to do next.
The most over-analysed second of his life.
Koschei is baffled for one, two, three seconds, Theta's prefrontal cortex showing up late and deciding it would have probably been a better course of action to ask permission before invading somebody's face.
"What was that?"
"I uh, sorry, that was—"
"Do it again."
Theta draws a quick breath, shifting to the side a little, before blurting "My cousin did." His prefrontal cortex rolls its eyes in forlorn contemplation of what it did to deserve residence inside such a skull. "Taught me that."
Koschei raises his eyebrows.
"Telepathy, not… not that."
Koschei grabs him by both sides of the head, pulling the idiot in at an angle none too functional for telepathy.
###
"For crying out loud, Thete, how many detentions is this?"
Theta folds his arms, dragging his feet as much as possible down the hall. "Five. It's just so… boring!"
Koschei coughs. "Political science. It's got science in the title!"
Theta rolls his eyes. "I've no idea how you survive." He is forced to shove this particular chunk of hair that refuses to stay in place out of his left eye.
"By not handing in a conspiracy theory on the Other being Zagreus and Grandfather Paradox's lovechild!"
"Can't give me detention for creativity," he grumbles, eyeing a suspicious-looking potted plant. "Is that a carnivore?"
"Don't change the topic."
"Mee myeh muh myee."
Koschei smacks him in the shoulder.
"Ouch!"
"I want to read that thing, by the way."
Theta scoffs. "I thought you were annoyed."
"At the fact you're going to fail political science with the least relevant essay collection known to Gallifrey." Theta takes a breath to say something, but Koschei cuts him off, "Which is not creativity, by the way. 'Creativity' implies you're doing something relevant, but better."
"Alright this is coming from you, who decided sticking your botanical science project in a time loop inside the head office was a good idea."
"I had logical grounds for that!"
Ushas finds them walking the other way, practically announcing her lack of enthusiasm in doing so to the entire world. She almost turns back around.
"Hey, Ushas!" Theta starts running closer to where detention is supposed to happen, which is probably counterintuitive.
"Whatever it is, I don't want to know."
"Yes you do. Okay are they allowed to give me detention solely for handing in a report — with no evidence of plagiarism, mind you — just because it's more or less irrelevant to the subject and has no factual evidence?"
Ushas counts to five in her head. "Depends what you stuck in the report."
Koschei sweeps to the other side of Ushas. "He thinks Grandfather Paradox and Zagreus got together and had the Other. It's for political science."
Ushas takes a long, deep, breath. "Yes, they're allowed to give you detention for lunacy."
Koschei smirks. "You heard her."
Ushas practically runs away once Koschei grabs Theta's arm and starts tugging him where detention's supposed to be.
"There are just so many better things to do than write essays for political science," Theta whines.
"If nobody took political science, we'd have a state of global anarchy with a population of twenty billion."
"The Scendles don't take it," he grumbles.
"Yeah, well the Scendles went bankrupt building a statue in the Panopticon. Nobody's going to let them run the planet."
"And nobody's going to let me, either!"
Borusa glares at them from down the hall a bit, one of the few people who can actually pull off the ridiculous headpiece of formal robes.
Koschei pats Theta on the back, then wonders a moment why he'd do that. "Clearly."
A/N: If anyone wants to fight about canon, I'm your go-to-guy, as I have spent hours of my life researching canon for the sole purpose of confirming most of this does not savagely desecrate canon, do not expect source citations other than "probably Lungbarrow" and "that one NuWho novel".