A/N: Welcome to the chapter of I Made All This Up, I don't think anything here is Actual Canon because there are like 4 accounts of actual canon I tried to smack together with a shovel.
It's also 5000 words I know it's ridiculous I have problems cutting them up nicely.
Theta sits next to Ushas at the back table of the student lab, intending to flick through the multiple homework assignments he now has to catch up on. "Welcome back, then," she says, typing down observations of one funky chemical reaction or another.
"Yup. Quences was pretty pissed."
She smiles at the beaker in front of her. "Koschei's told me alllll about it." She turns to him, looking rather disgruntled for a moment. "Well more like a fraction of it, after I asked, and not very loud."
"What did he say?"
"You two are so cute I might gag."
Theta pauses, noticing he has his mouth open, and promptly shutting it. "So he told you about the…"
"Yeah. Make it brief, if you must." She glaces at him once more, snorting a bit too loud to be discreet. "If you could see your face…"
"Isn't my fault I was born so pink," he grumbles, his hearts skipping a beat immediately after.
"Born?" she almost laughs at his word choice, before registering the look on his face. Her eyedropper remains suspended above an acid or a base, yet unknown. "'Born' as in…"
Theta vigorously shakes his head, looking around the room to see if anyone else saw, shutting his eyes too tight in an attempt to erase the past ten seconds. An entire species built entirely on the secret of time and space travel, and he can't undo ten seconds.
"…not loomed?"
"Shh." He hisses, scanning everyone's back in a panicked cycle. Nobody turns, probably because the word was muttered barely loud enough for either of them to hear. But one never knows with students. Discarding the eyedropper for something much more enthralling, Ushas taps out a message on her slate.
ΔΨ: But you're actually biological?
He regards the words with a bitter expression, taught to see them with an upturned nose and superior demeanour that only causes him to look at the ground.
ΘΣ: Yes. Sort of. I think.
He slides it back, flicking through notes without seeing on his own slate, one cheek on his fist. His legs don't feel very sturdy.
ΔΨ: Everyone thinks it's impossible, but it's not.
ΘΣ: I figured.
She almost gives him the slate, but wrenches it back before he can read it to write something else. Her face isn't giving away anything. His hearts try running out the front of his chest, smacking against his ribcage every half a second.
ΔΨ: No, I meant it makes sense. And you're still a proper Time Lord.
His legs, in relief, barely hold him up. His hearts are not getting the memo it's alright to calm down.
ΘΣ: Thank you.
ΔΨ: No problem?
ΘΣ: Just don't start telling everyone.
ΔΨ: I won't. In fact, I'd rather run tests on you.
He laughs a breathy, nervous laugh.
ΘΣ: How about no.
ΔΨ: But you're so interesting now! Original physiology determined by gene pool, unaltered chemical balance, there's a few conspiracies about stuff. Any number of defects. Unfortunately, it's probably illegal.
There is a surprising amount of consolation in hearing someone would rather run a series of illegal biological tests on him instead of shying away and occasionally throwing phrases like "not a real Time Lord" or "ew what uterus" at him.
ΘΣ: I think there's a good reason. And uh… thanks.
ΔΨ: Any time.
###
Koschei sits on a constant see-saw, despite how very stuck to Millennia's "picnic blanket" he is. Right now, he's up in the air, the high chair of rigorously trying to refuse being paid any special attention to because it's uncomfortable and a waste of time. Anticipation of smacking the ground a bit too hard in a few seconds is inherently obvious from his position. All his grand insistences of "it's fine" and "I really don't want to" crash into the smooth, dusty gravel in the attempt to say any of it out loud. Vocalising his own thoughts relating directly to himself have become just as off-putting.
Theta is ever completely oblivious to the nauseating oscillation. It is common knowledge at this point he is entirely preoccupied by the stars teasing him from the heavens, the fuel of a hundred rambling hopes. Koschei only sees them as painfully distant, possibly diffused, balls of plasma.
"One of these days, you and I are visiting all of them." Theta could be knocked over extremely easily, elbows locked with palms planted in the thin sheet, legs crossed at the knee. His head rolls to increase Koschei's see-saw entropy.
"I thought you were more keen on inhabited planets, and not… mostly hydrogen."
"You know what I mean." He finds greater favour in the sky instead of Koschei once again.
It is according to Mortimus Theta learnt how to traverse the roof without falling off, but Koschei can't help but wondering how many times Theta has run around gawking at stars all night. Koschei chances a look or two to the sky, but without a point of reference, it feels like he's about to fall off the ledge he's nowhere near. Well, nearer than he should be.
"Okay I'll tell you," Theta blurts all of a sudden, appearing cross-legged in front of Koschei within a Planck unit.
Koschei feels like arguing he is too tired for this, but even trying to look half-asleep at this height is as possible as Theta's speed of movement. "Tell me what?"
Instead of replying verbally, Theta slowly lifts his hands to the sides of Koschei's head. He wouldn't be surprised if Theta's version of sentimental speech devolved entirely to kissing.
Can you hear me?
"Yes"
Theta raises his eyebrows, feeling a telepathic blush run through Koschei's head to his hands after a satisfying pause.
So you can hear my thoughts now?
Theta's forehead scrunches a fraction in the middle. Only if I try, because you're not transmitting anything.
And if your hands are there.
Yeah.
Can you walk around inside my head?
Only if I teach you how to transmit. And probably practice.
"Wait," Koschei rustles the hands off his head. "So you dragged me up here at 23:30 to propose telepathy lessons?"
Theta swallows. "Well, yes."
With his eyes alone, Koschei asks the stars why he ever befriended Theta. They, in turn, threaten to shove him off the side of the roof for asking such a question. "Any particular reason?"
"Inspiring scenery."
"I meant any reason you were suddenly inspired to gain telepathy skills from your cousin and give me lessons."
Theta shrugs, again within a Planck unit. "Effortlessly passing notes in class."
The stars tell him there's something glaringly off about this, but Koschei never had much time for astrology.
###
If Quences had his way, Theta would probably never be picked up from the Academy, and simply left there between years. Theta would agree to that idea in a heartbeat, but the practice is, unfortunately, against the law. It's often a dull, downtrodden affair, leaving what he's now calling home for a stuffy House full of people who don't like him, but this year is harder. Leaving home is difficult on its own, but plain old leaving Koschei... That gets more irksome every year.
Not only that, it's Satthaltrope he walks away from one jerky TARDIS flight later, doors opening to an irrationally bright orange sky and cheery grass. Family meetings are stereotypically fraught with friendly exchanges and loud tales of days gone by, not a paranoid silence and half the gathering a step and a half from cowering in the corner.
He drags a suitcase along the stint of a brick path to the pretentious front doors, nudging them open with his shoulder and awaiting some scolding or another. Thank goodness he has Innocet.
Theta might have combed his hair if someone decided to inform him what's on the other side of the door. Glospin has somehow summoned thirty one other cousins to gather around him in the front room, all of them sitting on the ground or standing in a relaxed way to take in his prophetic words. All of them stare at Theta. Satthaltrope takes the opportunity to swagger inside and stand next to Glospin, giving him a highly unnecessary pat on the back. The dark eyes fix him in place, grip starting to slip a little on the suitcase's handle. Glospin gives Theta a grin that must taste like sour milk plastered on that face, letting the flavour last as long as possible before returning to his sheep. Theta is the hay in a needle stack and everyone in the room is very aware of it.
"Another way loomlings differ from biologically conceived Gallifreyans is a number of neurological alterations. While for a period, much of the decision-making processes are controlled by the amygdala, looms craft the brain to not need repair of the prefrontal cortex, which retains its ability."
He really knows. This isn't a lecture hall, it's Rassilonian propaganda.
Theta pretends unconvincingly to have no idea what he's talking about, mechanically avoiding the edge of an intricately designed rug with a pattern nobody understands on the way to the stairs. Innocet should be here, tearing up Glospin's arguments with a douse of logic. Or probably studying for some exam or learning math for the fun of it. Mathematic psychologist.
"Hey Innocet, have you heard what Glospin's..." Instead of Innocet, what looks like an anthropomorphised skinned raccoon stares back at Theta on the other side of the door. The wide eyes are either a result of Theta's presence or unfortunate complexion. The skinned raccoon does not explain themself. "Who the hell are you?"
The raccoon swallows sheepishly. "Owis. And you're the Prydonian?"
"Where's Innocet?"
This kid hasn't blinked since Theta got here. "Your old roommate? She's gone."
"Gone where?" Theta scoffs, looking to the closet door in the corner like she might pop out at any second.
"Glospin says she got a job somewhere over the break."
Theta closes the door, shoving the suitcase at his bed with one foot. He is suddenly very conscious of the thirty-seven pictures on his end of the wall, although the raccoon kid has probably seen them all. "Here's some advice: don't listen to Glospin, Owis."
"But she did leave! I saw her go."
Theta whips around, finger trailing along the wall stopped randomly on the picture of the blue whale.
"When? How!?"
"Well last week she was talking to a few people about how she got an apprenticeship out by her Academy, but just between school—"
"I know I know but how did you know all that? You're old enough to be in school!"
Owis looks at him with a blank stare, eyes still uncomfortably wide. "I'm not in an Academy... so I stay home..."
"Isn't there a school in the city?"
"That I can take a skimmer to… because it's so close…"
Theta sits on his bed, probably acting like he's overdosed on confusion, not helping his irredeemable Prydonian image. "And she didn't tell me?"
"No, you were at school." Owis's eyes return to some kind of normal size, arms that are just a bit too short folding in on themselves. "Prydonians are kinda dumb," he remarks to himself.
"Glospin tell you that?" Theta is a bit shocked to find himself marching out of his room to have Quences give him a reliable account of events, but he'd pick the Housekeeper over Glospin's minion any day. He pauses at the door frame. "Why is he subjugating you? I thought Satthaltrope's hierarchy worked in Arcalians."
"He's not...?"
"Whatever," he grumbles.
###
Theta knew it was the beginning of the end three seconds after he decided on grape jelly instead of raspberry. Normally at Lungbarrow, people eat meals in their little pods at their tables, the handful not belonging to a group subject to occasional wandering and change of scenery nobody else gets. He knows he isn't going to get grape jelly very easily upon seeing not the usual layout of breakfast in a dining hall, but all forty-three other cousins talking. To everyone. And walking around. And looking slightly panicked. And very serious at the same time. And they're all here. Except Innocet, of course.
Someone notices the second he walks in. By his fifth step into the room, everyone falls dead silent, a momentous event for such a Household. Theta continues walking forward, pretending he is not the subject of attention of all his cousins. They begin talking again in a hush, uselessly pointing at him and discussing predictable topics such as his hair. And his skin. And his eyes.
Alright, what has Glospin done this time?
"Excuse me, please." Three girls all stop their chatter to look at him all over the place, eyes widened rather dramatically, feet planted. "I said excuse me, please? I'd like breakfast." The girl in the middle, looking perhaps the most horrified, takes a step back.
"You stay away from me!"
"Ah, Theta Sigma!" Theta rolls his eyes at Glospin's clearly rehearsed voice, becoming less casually uninvolved when the remaining mass of people part in a wave to let him pass. Glospin is sitting on one of the tables, scarlet and orange robes fanned out flawlessly around his frame despite their size. His hair's parted right down the middle, reddish black conforming to the curve of his face instead of sticking up dangerously.
Theta tries to look as sarcastic as possible through this whole affair, which can be either very easy or extremely difficult when your least favourite cousin possibly out to kill you shows up on a table wearing your school uniform denying you breakfast with an army of relatives. "Was there a meeting I was unaware of?"
Glospin grins, the contour of his lips invisibly joining to the tips of his ears to form a point. "We've already had it." Theta can't see Satthaltrope or Owis anywhere, which must mean this was orchestrated without anyone else's help. Which he might find impressive if it weren't for the stack of mismatched papers in his hand.
The room has gone silent again, facing Glospin as if he were a prophet of some god, obviously taking his words as gospel. Theta knows. Of course he knows. "Over-exaggerated autobiography?" The best battles were won with entertainment quality.
Nobody laughs. It was a bad joke. "You can do better than that." Glospin stands up now, very much taller than Theta, reaching the end of the table with dramatic flair. Theta cranes his neck to look at his face, pretending he can't feel the stares of his entire family and the vibrations in his legs that don't show outward, but feel primed to explode.
"A list of cousins suspected to have stolen your laundry?"
Glospin asks the congregation a nonverbal, hopeless why with but a gesture of his arm. "I needed something formal. I'm holding a legal document."
Theta remains silent, listening to the whispers of people behind him and trying to pick up any telepathic signals Glospin might be sending out. He isn't. More likely, Theta isn't good enough to tell. The tension in his entire body is enough to be converted to mild nausea, fingertips being sent into a panic for all the physical movements he cannot do for fear of appearing scared. "Can I eat breakfast now?"
"No. No you have had far too many breakfasts under this roof, if I do say so myself." He's been waiting for this moment since they were both time tots, subject to malfunctioning heating many winters ago. He brandishes the papers in one hand, stooping in a mock sort of bow to hand them to him. "I think you'll find the House agrees with me," he sneers, bringing himself to his full height and control of the audience. "You can read that for breakfast. If you disagree with the contents, by all means, bring it up to any of us."
Theta looks at the gullible family he didn't know once cared for him, now all turned against him for possibly good reason, every bit his body setting him apart. Innocet isn't here to pull him away and mesmerise him with fire in a jar. He's on his own.
Locked in his room, having run from the dining hall without any need for breakfast, it appears Glospin has taken everything but his slate. His side of the room has been stripped bare, the wall once covered in his own drawings now decimated into nothing. Innocet always told him it was useless keeping that sort of thing up, that the wall will only get crowded, and it'll be a hassle to pack them up or throw them out once he's graduated. Now all that's left is a scrap of paper, torn, colour staining the front now meaningless without context. He had a progression, a continuum, a steady gradient of cognitive development on his wall in pictures just to remind him of home, and it was deemed too good for his deviant self. Everything about Innocet is gone from the room now, along with Theta's emotional stability. He didn't even need to read the first page to know exactly the nature of the entire document. But they'll make him read it anyhow.
He plants himself on his bed, if only to face away from the nothingness and into normalcy, feeling smaller than he should be, but perhaps has been this whole time. The second he sits down, he knows the willpower is not within him to get up again.
The first page is only cold hard fact. Something Ushas might read.
His parents are on the next page. It's like blowing the last layer of dust off a long-buried artifact, remembering that day. His life has chipped and scraped and brushed the rock around it away, but it took one last deep breath to see the complete picture.
At the end of the beginning, he was running. He could see the hell on the other side of the door on his father's face, didn't need to hear him say the word as he's already run this drill in times gone by. He was only ten, a fledgling of a should-be Prydonian if his life wasn't constant running. He ran so, so fast out the back door of his makeshift home, screaming for his mother to come follow him and the father he didn't know wasn't right behind him as rehearsed. She'll run with him for a while, then smile and say "good job" as they all walk back home. It's just pretend. It'll be okay, so his mother will say.
Silent as the night is black she scoops up her screaming son, pouring every force of telepathic ability into peace and quiet and it's okay that stream into his brain. But even he could feel how fake it is, how panicked and how sad, chest pressed to her collarbone. His father wasn't there, running with them like he was supposed to, and there is yelling from inside their little shack of a home.
"Daddy's not here!" he yells into the air, but his mother doesn't speak. People said she was weak, skin just beginning to wrinkle, auburn hair silvering in its bob, face always coming to rest in a weathered frown. But she was the best.
Theta of the Past's arms flailed in the air, sometimes coming to rest on her back, legs squeezing her torso and trying frantically to escape the bond of her arms but she didn't let him go. The yelling stopped and he screamed, demanding his throat even to tear itself to be louder. So he could bring his father back home. He couldn't be dead, though. He'd regenerate.
They lived in a forest then, once his favourite jungle gym, every brave landmark and discovery and hiding spot blurring past in liquid panic and fear, his brave mother slaloming around trees as well as any soldier. Uniformed black-and-purple men break down their wooden back door, carrying metallic tubes he'd never seen before. Is that what they used on his father? He screams louder now, at them and at the force dragging him away from home.
He eventually needed to succumb to the terror and the tears, refusing to remain silent as his mother mentally demanded of him. They were yelling orders, holding up their metallic devices and running after them, but they were slow compared to his mother.
He was suddenly dropped, or so it felt, engulfed in darkness and still holding on to his mother for dear life. She could not land on her feet, fallen to her knees but not letting go of her child, and him not letting go either...
The ground above looked solid, the perfect secret door, but Theta didn't notice because he was screaming, calling for his father to come back, to breathe again. His mother knelt on the ground, catching her breath with a bowed head, hands on her knees. She let him scream and cry and pound the dirt and curl into a ball, a selfish desire to hear her true son for as many seconds as she could scramble together. She loved him in the same way she loved the universe: an ecstatic embrace of every odd corner and fold.
She spoke an outdated word, obsolete because of the looms. The strongest sort of love; a mother and the young child she was meant to have. Theta was reduced to sobbing then, curled on the dirt in the weird torch-lit tunnel nobody will explain. "You need to hear me, now."
He looked at her then, determined to fight down the noise of it was the last thing he did, if only to hear his mother speak in that moment.
She held out a hand, running fingers through the white hair sprouting above those pink eyes. "We knew we couldn't hide you forever. We couldn't give you a proper life because they would know with one look." She smiled at him, the force of it just crinkling her forehead as it always does. She always smiled at his complexion. The days they would spend colouring his hair with anything that might stain it, dressing him as a woodland fairy for only special humanoids get beautiful pink eyes and canvas for hair. "I love you so much." She had to swallow back tears but Theta didn't bother trying, letting them flow out of his eyes. She made sure he only knew love even if they did need to hide him forever. They were all three of them happy that way. And they could have even been four. "Come on, we need to go further."
He didn't get much of an education, but he knew then asking about Father would only give the answer he already knew. It was only them two now.
The tunnels were tall enough to be walked in, and there they walked in silence. On and on until they stood before the gaping end of the tunnel. Before them stretched a maw of layers and layers of organic wires running across the pit, unmoving but nearly humming almost a song for them. The wires go down further then he can see and rise in the centre like a pillar to the surface, entwining but never tangled.
"The world will never let you have the life you deserve in that beautiful body of yours." She told him, coming to stand behind him and holding him from behind. "But that will."
The almost song almost being hummed has turned sour, pouting at their imperfect raw version of life.
"I don't want to." Is what he said, trying to turn around and get a real hug, to which his mother obliged. She sank to her knees, and wrapped her strong arms around her woodland fairy. She didn't want to let go, either.
"I love you. Don't you forget me." She hesitated. She spent an entire second of silence just holding him for the last time before letting go.
He fell. And didn't feel the landing, and it was dark.
He read the whole document. All of it. He went without breakfast and lunch and didn't leave the room before it was finished, every bitter word condemning him to so many kinds of deaths. How his very existence was mutation and evolutionary error and having reached the optimal physical manifestation it is to be preserved and not further altered by the course of nature. He was not loomed. He was thrown into a loom to be subject to five months of darkness as his body fractured and in the confusion pieced back together again perfectly. Except. Except for the bottle of biological ink his mother threw in after, working its way in as it should. Just not enough.
He is a failed attempt at correcting a mutation, living testimony to how much he should not be living. And he is the last one to realise it. They are going to kill him.
The last page was an ever so sweet personal note from Glospin, hinting in obstreperous stealth how he thereby loomed Owis as the rightful forty fifth cousin.
The list of people in his head he can cry for help from is very small, handing one simple answer on a barbed wire platter.
He grabs the slate off the floor, forcing his famine-shaken hands to move as an artist's, seeing the lightly dyed peach face of his in the glossy black screen.
They all know. They're going to kill me. Get me out of here.
That's all Koschei needs. For now, he waits. Face up on the military-straight bedding that is everything but him, looking at a ceiling that was supposed to host pictures of years of the future but now never will. He only wants to sink into his bed and be swallowed up, allowed to sleep for as long as he wants without someone breaking down the door and demanding he tear apart his flesh to have it melted down and painted and drained and refilled and manufactured and sewn back together in shining form so the planet can keep turning on its axis. He is a step too far, an unknown product of evolution, a generation closer to the final destination of Time Lords. And that scares them.
###
Koschei has a room all to his own, something like the Academy but almost more sterile-looking. No life, no personality, just a wonky hole in a strange House. The only thing in the room to identify it as Koschei's is a stuffed tiger sitting on the bed, haphazardly stitched together from an outgrown robe. He acknowledged it upon leaving Theta in his room.
One of those unnecessarily tall mirrors is embedded in the wall, impossible to miss from any spot in the room. Although Theta isn't exactly trying very hard. He stands directly in front of the mirror in the same clothes he didn't eat breakfast in, inspecting every bit of the pale and drooping body before him. He looks more like Koschei's cousins than his own. Maybe his mother got the wrong House. Maybe they should have just kept running together until they were both wiped out for the better.
Every bit of him now looks a despicable error he can't be bothered to try denying anymore, wilting lips and melting posture making it all look so much more... repugnant.
In the silence of forgetting where everyone's gone, he brushes apart hair between a finger and thumb, the white gone for an arbitrary shade of yellow the most fabricated, the least permanent. He used to have a head sprouting all the colours of the rainbow, and now it's not even worth that. With a sharp tug the unfortunate selected strand is torn from his scalp, held above the ground for longer than it need be with tired fingers. It doesn't hurt, not really, and nothing about that dead scaly thing will be missed. He lets it fall, watching the single turn to balance it before it drifts to the ground. Boring. He pulls out another one, tossing it to the ground in the other direction before pulling one from the back of his neck. That one hurt a little more.
He goes through seven more, seven pointless invisible bits of his hair on the floor nobody will notice, watching his face and waiting for it to change its expression into something more familiar. It doesn't.
Koschei opens the door but Theta doesn't see it in the mirror. He knows. And Koschei knows so he doesn't speak, doesn't ask why Theta is pulling out a hair on his head an watching it fall in front of a mirror.
He can feel Koschei's toes lightly touch his heels more than he can see it all transpiring, even if he is standing in front of a mirror spanning from head to toe. He can feel the five centimetres Koschei has on him, feel the nerve endings on his scalp light up when gentle fingers touch them. They wander around his scalp, combing random sections out so the yellowish fans into the air and falls in some untold pattern around his head. It's too short to tie or plait or arrange in some fascination but Koschei finds something to do with it Theta can't see the point of. But he can feel it.
He closes his eyes, holding his spine upright to concentrate, to find pictures of the barefoot boy with the colourful hair twirling around his domain. It is his highest evolution, the purest version of himself that will ever be, the one that didn't know what a gun was.
Koschei smiles, but Theta can't decipher why within three words of an exact definition, a skill once ever present and now sorely missing. Maybe if he looked, if he scoured the lonely hole in is head where life used to be, he might find it.
"#003B6F."
His voice croaks "Blue."
"No, that's your blue."
Theta shrugs.
"Your mother's not the only one who can dye hair."
Theta can feel Koschei tricking his brain into forcing out a tiny bit of a smile, but takes it as more of a suggestion than a command.
A/N: I get dramatic a lot. Y'all should definitely not have seen draft 1, that thing was quite... yikes
(Also if there was confusion on this, the dead boy is actually Torvic... that was his name. Also Actual Canon I didn't make that up.)