A/N: It's that time of day again
Spending upwards of half an hour looking for words to re-italicize and put on the internet
The wind is only strong enough to tousle Theta's hair, but it gets in his face anyways. He's heard the whole jumbled story from Owis in lost shards of narrative, every fraction ending with hyperventilating or distant silence. Owis has refined himself to a compact ball, chin propped on his folded knees. Half an hour ago, Theta was concerned about the spastic breathing, but it has since morphed into a reliable indicator of Owis's continued presence on the roof. Listening to the operations immediately below them has become the top priority.
Quences is showing unfathomable mercy in letting them stay on the roof for so long without testimony of the mind probe. Theta's been trying to imagine some ulterior motive of his, all of them ending up stranger than their reality. Compassion? Empathy? Prophecy? Forgetfulness?
Glospin's screaming voice breaks through the damp muffling of roof like a drop of soap in murky water, a longwinded testimony Theta isn't surprised to hear the half of. Then again, he isn't surprised about much.
"I DIDN'T WANT ARKHEW TO DIE. SHE WAS NOT TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS EVENT IN ANY CAPACITY, OKAY?"
"We are aware of this fact, Glospinninymortheras. I am asking you to describe the intended events in anticipated chronological order, or I will have to use the mind probe."
"AND WHY ISN'T OWIS DOWN HERE?"
"I already told you. You have five seconds to start talking."
Theta waits with bated breath as he and at least ten other cousins all start counting down from five. But the testimony doesn't come.
"WHERE D'YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?" Quences shouts after him, a second before Owis starts screaming in his head. They are a second long and half a second in between, constantly transmitting the words he's coming.
Theta runs over to him, firmly clamping hands to shoulders and Owis covers his ears to quiet the screaming. A hundred useless angles and velocities fly into Theta's head, displaying painfully irreversible routes off the roof and into futile hiding. The only way out is down, but that would only kill them quicker.
Glospin runs up the stairs in wild adrenaline, followed alarmingly close by Quences. The spiked hair flies in the wind, innocent pyjama shorts whipping about his legs. He holds out his arms as he lunges towards them, radiating anger beyond belief at their existence alone. Quences throws his old arms around Glospin's middle, peeling the boy off-course as if he were a small child. That, above all, is his least expected trait.
"FORTY-SIX COUSINS, QUENCES. I COUNTED THEM ONE BY ONE. FORTY-SIX LIVING BODIES TIED TO THIS HOUSE WHEN WE," he tries jabbing Quences with an elbow, failing wonderfully, "ARE ONLY ALLOWED FORTY-FIVE." He eventually wrestles himself out of the decaying arms, trapped in one place with a threateningly pointed weapon. "We all know one of us is invalid. You let him live under this roof for decades as an extra body. He didn't even show up in the looming records if you somehow got a count of forty-five." He points one quivering finger at Theta and the now-silent Owis. "He deserves to die."
Quences sighs with all the passion of overseeing adolescent drama of jealousy, meandering to stand between the two parties. "It's a shame you killed Arkhew instead." Quences returns to his withering, wrinkled self in an instant, coughing a couple times for good measure.
Owis shivers under Theta's hands.
"It's also a shame I'm not dirt-stupid and had an idea of what you were up to." Quences looks to Owis, eyes drifting slightly to the right.
"I obviously failed," he spits, itching to but a bullet through Theta's head if his eyes communicate anything.
Quences chuckles. "Forty-six. You loomed number forty-six, now don't you start lying to me."
"Prove it."
"It's true." Everyone's head turns to Owis simultaneously, the small boy shying away from all the harsh gazes. His eyes are an angry red, fingertips weathered in stress. "He made me."
Glospin scoffs. "Oh how would you know?"
"You told me. And said you'd never leave my head."
Quences's sagging lips curl into a worried frown. "Are you implying this one had you under telepathic suggestion for your entire life?"
Owis bites his bottom lip, hyperventilation or tears threatening to make a reappearance. Theta directs all the calm he can through the hands on his shoulders, taking care to not let any reach Glospin. "He made me. And he dressed up like God and told me I was in some grand prophecy and had to…" he glances at Theta, barely, raw in apology. "kill Theta. Some day. And I'd save the planet from burning." He squeezes his eyes shut. "He'd tell me about that sometimes and dig up my memories."
"And you believed him?"
Owis taps the side of his head with two fingers. "He said God was always in me because I was integral to the prophecy, but it was just Glospin." He opens his eyes again, taking calculated, deep breaths.
"What was tonight's plan?" Quences asks in the kindest voice Theta has ever heard him use.
Theta rubs his right thumb along the top of Owis's shoulder blade, a primitive display of affectionate alliance.
"Tonight the prophecy was supposed to be fulfilled. Only I could kill Theta, purify Time Lord genetic code, maintain my rank in the Household, and save Gallifrey."
"You hated me that bad?" Theta demands. "You loomed and brainwashed a child to come murder me?"
Glospin shrugs. "You suffered in the process. It was kind of fun, because I know you're going to be caught eventually." He rolls his head to Quences. "By the way, Theta here—"
"Was initially born biologically. Any more brilliant insights, Glospin, or can I call the authorities now?"
Glospin needs to take a step back, the egotistical psychopath.
"You knew."
Quences rolls his eyes, even offering a hand to Theta. He doesn't take it. "Of course I ruddy knew. He didn't pop out the looms with a shirt on."
"Then you're responsible. For not dumping him out the fucking window when you had the chance."
Quences takes the hand he held out to Theta and uses it to strike Glospin across the face so hard he staggers back. "You are not to use vulgarity with me." Quences jerks his chin at Owis and Theta, who immediately scrambles to his feet. Owis follows. "Now go to your room, Glospinninymortheras. You're under arrest for a few things."
"And the thing's not?"
Quences takes a threatening step towards Glospin. "He hasn't broken the law. In fact, he prevented his own death without knowing its imminence."
"HIS EXISTENCE BREAKS THE LAW, YOU FOOL, ACCORDING TO RASSILON HIMSELF."
Quences grins, in a sense. "Go ahead, tell the law. But you'll have to get through me."
"I knew your mother." Theta doesn't know how how formal he is supposed to act around Quences. He might assume casual by the mug of coffee and oversized easychair, or very proper from his presence in the Housekeeper's quarters at all. Owis has a coffee, too, and eagerly sips away while stuck next to Theta in the chair. "Brilliant little Prydonian. I taught her, once upon a time."
Theta's toes curl into the burgundy carpet, sinking into the soft material springing out of the ground like grass. "Is that why you're helping me?"
Quences snorts, a sound easier matched by a bull than another Time Lord. "How much time do you have?" He takes an almighty swig of his coffee, just shy of slamming it on the end table. "It's a bit of a story."
He shrugs, perhaps tiredly. "I've got until I pass out from fatigue."
Raised eyebrows. "Better get going, then." Quences leans back in his chair, the poster boy of reminiscence. "Your mother came from a moon prison. One of the ones they've ignored for centuries, except for the biologists popping back every once in a while to check on them. She came from a district of psychopaths incarcerated under the second to last Pythia."
"So they weren't sterile."
Quences nods. "Exactly. Mixing in the psychopaths with the impulsive killers eventually cycled out the symptoms quite successfully, and by your mother's time, nobody knew any sort of life off the moon for centuries. Now, a few of them still had the common sense to try and find a way to Gallifrey, their proper home, but anyone who did was either sent back or shot."
"Then why did you say it's common sense?"
Quences silences Theta by the reappearance of his signature threatening stare.
"A few people were on to something, where the rest demanded immediate evacuation. Your grandmother started tinkering away at a neuro-implant the second she felt your mother kick, filling it with all she'd need to know in time to come back and get them all out one day. She was stuck in a pod at four years old with a supposedly 'faulty' implant on a timer, a red blanket, and the driver her mother managed to win over. A satellite house of Blyledge took her in. Sent her to school. She didn't know any better until the eighth year in my gerontology class.
"She started figuring out how to reverse ageing and contain regenerative energy with obsessive passion, day in, day out. She'd never explain why, even after proposing it for her final project. Took her months and the threat of failing the assignment under lack of approval, but I'll be damned she decided to trust me. 'My family's on a moon,' she said. 'I need to go save them 'cause they only have one life in there'." Quences sighs, downing the rest of his coffee in one go.
"She figured it out, presented it to the class, and I had to report it to the higher-ups."
"Why?" Owis asks, rapt.
"It's illegal," Quences snaps, as if hitting Owis with a rubber band. "Can you imagine what would happen if we could give away whole lives in bottles?"
"Sorry," he squeaks.
"Sisterhood of Karn is bad enough. Anyways. I called the Academy's administration, they tried summoning her to the main office, but being herself, she ran off after punching me in the face. I could have stopped her if I tried. I thought she would so easily be caught, running off with a bottle of gold. She evidently had a very effective escape plan.
"I didn't hear from her until I was two years retired to Housekeeper. She sent me a note and the untouched bottle, talking this and that about finding a 'natural' tribe, running off with a man, having a baby. Problem was, the authorities had to do their homework on her after she ran off, criminal records and all that. Didn't take them long. Now, in the grand scheme of things, because I turned her in, she had to start running for her life instead of living it properly. Said I therefore owe her a favour of equal proportion, and that I'll know when the time comes and that her baby already sentenced to execution will probably be involved because I couldn't keep my mouth shut."
"Do you regret it?" Theta blurts, not knowing which answer he'd prefer: the compassionate legacy or the predictable spite.
It takes him a few seconds to contemplate the answer. "Do I regret the fact she had to do what she did instead of live like she should have? I'd be cruel if I didn't. I do not, however, regret preventing global discord by having a moon's worth of a different species flooding the planet and flipping order upside down."
"Then what was your deal with 'You'll have to get through me' business?"
Owis winces in Theta's peripheral vision from the almost-shouting, but he doesn't care.
"Theta Sigma, you're hardly fifty years old, blood still pumping unbridled passion. One day you'll understand."
"Understand what?! Thats it's correct to make a distinction between us on the scale of an entire species? That keeping rightful Time Lords on a moon stripped down to a fraction of their life is right?"
"I am not an advocate of unnecessary murder." Quences barks over Theta. "And I believe your mother was right in asking me this favour, so I have obliged. So just for one second think of the implications of a million outlaws crashing down to Gallifrey in demand of racial equality."
Theta swallows, slouching back in the chair. "There would be death."
"I am risking your life, sending you to that Academy. I am risking incarceration for keeping a fugitive of the law, the fact alone you are Prydonian puts this House on a list I was removed from once I resigned my teaching post. Your mother asked me to keep you alive but still send you to that school. Be grateful I didn't throw you to the wolves when you were loomed."
Theta's lips have been threaded shut, the righteous wisdom of Quences providing no gaps to unravel his argument with.
"Is she still alive?" Owis whispers, knuckles tensed against the mug he seemed to hold so gently. "Theta's mother."
Quences shrugs. "She could be anyone, if she got away in time. It doesn't take much on a planet so large." He reaches to the drawer of the end table without looking, creaking the ancient urn apart.
Theta shouldn't be surprised Quences holds a dusty jar swimming with golden light. "The third term of my favour." He tosses it to Theta, who would have dropped it if Owis didn't clamp his hands around Theta's. "You get your full regenerative cycle as a product of the looms. I'm giving you 250 millilitres of illegal fluid, now please use it for something useful."
"What's her name?" Theta whispers, as not to disrupt the swimming gold.
"Which one? You're Prydonian. You know a thing or two."
"Her real name."
Quences unsettles himself from his chair, by act alone pulling Theta and Owis from theirs. He doesn't speak for long enough, and Theta wonders if he ever will. "Hope."
###
"Did you get that sonic thingy?" Koschei just about pounces on Theta when his feet drag into the room, frightening Arkhew out of his head for a terrified second.
"The… what?" Koschei pulls him into the bedroom that is clearly marked Theta Sigma, hardly giving him time to walk past the door frame before smothering him in an irrationally colossal hug.
"Device to molecularly dissociate CaSO4 and some odd sort of wood maybe, about the size of a wall." Theta is trying to make sense of being affectionately suffocated, told to obliterate a wall, and where he put the sonic thingy all at once, producing what Koschei can perceive as scattered tadpoles.
"Well I haven't exactly finished it," Theta mumbles, trying to peel Koschei off of him to no avail. "And I can't breathe."
"If you can complain about it, you're breathing." Theta physically gives up trying, communicating simultaneous contempt and the current state of his just past prototypical sonic molecular dissociation thingy. He finds the ridiculously long hug actually okay.
Now we have something to do when we're bored. The thought goes straight into his head now, both of them rehearsed well enough to escape the awkward misdirected strands of thought.
It took off my roommate's finger. The day he killed my cousin.
Koschei slips into his head without the same fervour as he pounced on Theta, expertly shifting around the TARDIS and looking for the right cube. Theta pushes him off as nicely as he can muster.
"I do not want to watch that again." Koschei has adopted some intermittent grin at Theta's general presence in the room, now coupled with a bashful nod. Theta doesn't know quite what to do with his newfound lack of physical barricades. "We could just break it down with a hammer."
Koschei pulls Theta by the arm to the window, throwing it open to let the grey sky liven things up a little. "We'd make enough noise to wake Rassilon from his grave." Koschei is to his immediate left for but a second, moving on to the strewn about mess on his bed. Despite his dignified petulance, Theta sort of just wants a hug and someone to tell him something irrelevant and stupid to bring his mind back to the mostly sane world.
"Besides." Koschei grins at Theta, somewhere between sly mischief and an overwhelming giddiness at his stark existence. "I've had a great idea."
Theta's brain is annoyed with him and his weirdly nonsensical ideas but lets his body do them anyways, a clumsily orchestrated envelopment of tissues and fabric following suit. The one thing Koschei never does is hold Theta in the palm of his hand like a hollowed wasp's nest about to fall apart, the opposing sour extreme of being a self-confirmed heathen. For all the internal noise and external oddities, he got that part right. The combination of offset heartbeats walks the border between symphony and cacophony, and it really just wouldn't be worth it any other way.
###
Theta and Koschei are crammed under a bed, pillows and blankets barricading everything but an arm hole. There was always the slight chance something might backfire and blow the school to kingdom come, but after two weeks of trial runs and mostly good ideas, the blankets and pillows seemed to suffice.
Theta's continued existence is empirical proof of kingdom come deciding to spare them for now, any kind of result still hidden in his cramped quarters. Koschei, however, got sole claim of the arm hole.
The phosphorescence in his voice speaks enough. "We could rule a galaxy, Thete."
Koschei knocks over their barricade, a dim glow from the shut window the only source of illumination. The wall is reduced to two wooden beams and a smattering of dust in a symmetrical arrangement on the floor. Theta nearly bangs his head on the bed frame as Koschei pulls him out by both arms, excitedly sweeping together a handful of their dust, destroying the perfect image. "You and me, give it a couple hundred years. The Sol system."
Theta raises his eyebrows sceptically.
"I'm serious!"
"Good luck with getting off the planet in the first place." Theta works himself to his feet.
Koschei's bed rests innocently past the wooden beams, gutted and inverted and slapped together into a lab table of sorts. They have a vision of papering the walls in scientific things, but thus far have only achieved the periodic table of elements and standard model of elementary particles. It might help if either of them could think of something else to plaster on.
"When you think about it," Koschei blows their dust into the air, thankfully not at Theta's face, watching it disperse before him. "Any Time Lord could rule a planet if they wanted to."
"We're going to be breathing all that, you know." Light falls on the side of Koschei's nose and bottom lip and a touch of his forehead, and the faintest of white scars that always shone in the dark.
"Can't hurt much." All the light shifts on his face, or his face merely shifts. "We've got a bit of shopping to do."
Theta paces to the window, retracting the shade to let sunlight back in. It blinds him in white for a second, but soon gives way to the sporting field and scattered trees and river beyond. He can feel Koschei somewhere near behind him, his thoughts sanctioned to let their way idly into Theta's. He is conceptualising a massive number of possibilities to all fit in the next few years, the quantum state of time. Theta almost shivers. "Where d'you want to start then?"
Fingers ever so gently find their way to the base of his neck. The tiny lab experiments turn into rocketing celestial bodies and shining planets and alien landscapes they only dream of seeing, laced with regenerative gold and the silver of distant stars. A monumentally simple tale of running away and speeding through the cosmos without knowing precisely how to fly a TARDIS, but good enough to ramble about the universe. Where d'you want to start, then?
He accidentally just barely lets the inkling of his tiny plan through, anticipating the ends to his means within the next seven seconds. Somebody normal wouldn't catch it, and Theta might ignore it if it weren't much more fun to thwart his plans.
Theta turns around with a teaspoon of a leer. "You'll have to do better than that."
"Oh, piss off." Koschei keeps him trapped against the wall in well-rehearsed osculation. No matter how much theoretical biological research they did trying to explain it, neither of them could quite grasp the true function of kissing. Often randomly initiated, in early days deliberated, and in the best of times, reiterated.
Theta covers Koschei's mouth with one hand to get words out properly, knowing very well he could just think them, but knowing doubly well they'd be forgotten in under thirty seconds. "Artificial botanical biology." He lets his head rest against the wall, grinning. "Let's make a bunch of leaves."
A/N: wow ok that only took like 10 minutes I'm impressed
Less impressive, is this SERIOUSLY the first time the leaves are mentioned
Seriously
Now's a good time to get up and get a snack
Or five
HEY GUESS WHAT I FOUND THE HORIZONTAL LINE BUTTON HALLELUJAH