A/N: your friendly reminder it's pronounced "ko-SHAY" not "kos-CHEE" if anyone wants to fight I'm open
*copies in text* oH NO IT'S THIS CHAPTER

After fits of sleeping and waking and a mess of being too far receded into his mind, Koschei notices at some point Theta has left, and would wonder why on a more narcissistic day. The mixed concoction has been downed multiple times, highly implicit of a sleeping drink that helps with illness or whatever it is, pushing him back into memories of memories that didn't happen.

He paces to the window without making a sound, curtains drawn and letting in far too much piercing sunlight. He's become uncomfortably hot, consequence of whatever trauma-induced illness his body is trying to fight off. The leaves lining the windows are colourful as ever, almost mocking the forest from which Koschei once emerged. He can see one outside the window ringing the Academy he's begun to call home.

The last time he got to sleep, it was completely void of dreams, most likely the effects of Theta knowing How To Do The Thing Properly and apparently trusting his own judgement enough to have himself in Koschei's head again. He's too worn to protest. At any rate, its stability is questionable as is, most likely never to be repaired over again. People run around outside.

This is one of those times Koschei's wishing for the roof of Oakdown, if only to flirt with death. Maybe hang on by his hands and see if he can make it back up again. He could always jump out the window, but that would be rather uncalled for and in many ways would be a greater win for Vansell.

Vansell is, frankly, going to haunt him for a long while now.

Theta doesn't knock, but comes in the lab door, closing it less than gently behind him. There are no classes on, then.

"Did you care?" The words that spill out of his mouth don't sound like his. They taste like white glue.

"Did I care when?" He stands beside Koschei without touching him, looking out the window alongside. The vigour of his usual self is gone form the question.

"When you were going to kill yourself." The usual sting that befalls his brain when saying things like that has disappeared completely, replaced by the fuzzy utter void. He almost misses it.

"You know, one typically doesn't care before ending the life of oneself."

Koschei tilts his head to the side, seeing Theta but also seeing the well-repeated and possibly distorted image of Theta glaring at him from across a dark plane of snow. His face has changed from then until now, no longer sinking and white, eyes no longer looking without seeing. His lips are soft pink, a tiny powdering of colour blossoming on his cheeks, eyes still crystalline stormy grey but blue at the same time. His hair's getting too long again, a feature he's infuriatingly never payed much attention to. But infuriating in a good way, a sort of progression of Time Lord aesthetic that few can appreciate.

It has been fourteen years, after all.

He still needs to stretch out a hand and smear his invisible imprint all over the miraculous face, just to be sure he's not hallucinating. "You told me to go away." Koschei doesn't retract his fingers, letting them awkwardly trip around Theta's nose, his mouth, his hair.

Theta sighs through his nose, a barely audible lull. "I think because I cared too much." Theta looks back out the window, biting slightly on the corner of one lip as he does when he's agitated and needs to say something. They never talk about it. Not about how either of them got there, not about the words they said, not about the question that always itched in Koschei's head. Did he care.

"I wanted you to go away so you'd never find my body, or whatever."

It's almost an accusation. "You were going to shoot me." He supposes it's allowed to be.

"So we'd both be dead!"

"Why?"

Theta's head meets the window with a small thunk, resonating through the rest of the glass and inaudibly into the walls. Now is normally the time Theta's face glows with his calculated kind of grin, the one with a plan, the one that doesn't care. The grin doesn't come. "Our twisted logic, Koschei. I hated life, and I wanted to die. But you cared, which means I cared, and figured if I shot you, I'd die from the guilt anyways and so both our life-hating would end."

It makes sense in their twisted sort of way, which Koschei supposes he was looking for.

They watch the people outside for a measurement of time that has lost its meaning in Koschei's head, the dull void gradually flooding with broken words and fragmented sentences that retreat. He doesn't want to explain. He doesn't want Theta in his head, he doesn't want to touch his head, he wants to terminate his head or flush it out for a new one. It only takes one perfectly unorchestrated movement of Theta's face to force out the whimper, completely counterintuitive of the desire to keep it so wonderfully untarnished.

"It was Vansell. He… fucked my brain." It sounds bitter out loud, unheroic, shameful. Messy, unorthodox, not entirely true. "He wanted to know why I shot him. He thought I was trying to kill him but I wasn't, and I didn't say why because…" He's said too many words. They're all vile and humiliating. It might be better to sleep for days. "He found out anyways."

Theta reaches out and lets two fingers slide down Koschei's forearm, resting in his palm again. Koschei instinctively pulls it away, trying to hide from the time Vansell stood there laughing at them like they're idiots. "How much did he see, Kosch?"

Vansell didn't see that stupid nickname, giving some kind of motive to keep talking, even after it's all laid out in the open. Keep carrying on until there's something to be done about it. He dictates everything with his eyes trained on the people meandering outside, distorted in slight by the pane of glass and completely inaudible. "Holding hands." He pretends Theta isn't there. "Talking." Even that lowly verb has been tarnished. "Kissing." He pretends he's repeating these things to himself, organising. "The zero room." Like he's trying to maintain a scrap of his sanity. "Just me at Oakdown." Useless thing, sanity. "Magnus." He failed. "You going to commit suicide." He was even weak enough to let Vansell completely thrash him like that. "You going to commit suicide again." He always fails. "Then he made me jump off the cliff and it made me unconscious." Always. "Then you found me."

"Did he just smash through the trees?"

He can feel Theta's eyes trained on him but wishes the sensation away, wishes everything away so he can just sleep. "Yeah." He's not even tired, really. "Some little things would blip out." He just wants to sleep. "But he's still sitting in memories, laughing."

A silence hangs in the air of no contact and no thinking and wondering what the other person is going to say. There are classes scheduled today Koschei doesn't care all too much about. They might be over already.

"He said you didn't care." Words of his own accord. "That one day." Stupid idea. "And he said… before…." Stupid Koschei. "Whatever."

"What did he say?"

Koschei shrugs. "I don't know. Something like 'it's not me, it's my position'. I dunno."

Two measures of one two three fours, which are getting very obstructive. They show up at the worst times.

"Do you trust me?"

"I feel obliged to say yes."

"Really, though."

Koschei turns to Very Insistent Theta almost painfully, his gaze met with a more-intense-than-he-thought scanning stare just about the strength of hypnotism. But more so. But it's not taking him over. "Yes." But it's still uncomfortable.

"Can I do… science?"

"What kind of science?"

"Very calculated, thought-through science. But you have to trust me, okay?"

Koschei nods as Theta finishes talking, wondering what the hell kind of science could be in any way relevant, until he's being backed into the room with Theta incessantly pushing his lips on his, starting to poke his tongue in as Koschei's heels come up against the mattress and nearly trips him. He can feel himself blushing furiously, scrambling for something to do with his hands and the rest of his arms for that matter, trying to stand up properly and failing with nothing to hold onto but Theta himself as he's pulled somewhat dangerously onto the bed with Theta over top again. Only this time, Koschei's got little to no resistance or acute feeling of weight distribution as it all starts going kind of fuzzy outside and very immediate inside.

It takes a fair amount of evading and pushing to get Theta back to off a few centimetres, only slightly consoled in the fact Theta's about as red as he is. "What kind of science is this?" He sputters.

"Endocrine."

"That's… how does that…"

"Shh. Trust me."

Koschei is distantly aware of Theta physically hovering over top of him, every point of contact barely transferring any of his weight. He is too far asleep to reconcile this position with any sort of motive, feeling another wave of fatigue wash through his veins and pull him back down to sleep within thirty seconds of waking.

Innocet taught Theta how to do that. She didn't mention how beautifully innocent people look on the outside when they sleep. He has complete jurisdiction of the body underneath him, mind so fragile and completely defenceless. But the mind never stops working, still a panicked mess of a demolished forest.

The sky above the foliage Theta walks beneath is black and clouded, stars not poking through. No colour is lost on the trees, however, quantised cubes scattered across the ground in patterns matching the chunks missing from once whole plants. Some cubes are purpling, a sick shade somewhere off black, tendrils of it cutting through the proper yellow-orange.

Theta has the constant feeling of something staring at him from behind the trees or lurking in the shadows, but every time he turns around there's nothing but an unusually still landscape. He picks up an untarnished looking cube as if it were a plucked flower, trying to stem the leak of memory to dreams. He lets the memory begin playing itself, but only bits and pieces. Enough to tell what it is and find a nook in a broken tree to place it back in.

Nitrogen atom, particle accelerator, Magnus, Ushas, No slate. Particle physics exam.

Theta places the cube where it might have once gone, wishing he could simply will them all back into place.

###

Koschei knocks, but opens the door immediately afterwards, which completely defeats the purpose of knocking in the first place. He used to do that all the time, but had rather improved in the past while. Figures. "Ushas."

"No, it's the Hand of Omega playing cards with your mother."

He grins at Ushas with her hair still down, immediately beginning to tie it back anyways. "Can I borrow a comb?"

"A comb?" She pulls her properly-handled robe on over her head, finding the state of Koschei's hair very worthy of needing a comb, but "How do you not have a comb?"

"I… lost it."

Ushas picks a comb off her desk, keeping it in one hand. "Firs you need to tell me how on Gallifrey you managed to lose a comb."

"Well uh," he hears footsteps down the hall somewhere, making him look backwards briefly and turn around blushing more than necessary for his petition. "I think it was in my pocket yesterday and it's not there anymore, I think maybe—"

"HEY USHAS!"

"Oh Rassilon — Theta you're going to wake up the whole floor!"

Theta suddenly appears in the doorway, hair combed impeccably. "GUESS WHAT."

Koschei's face has gone completely red at Theta even standing there as he sputters out "So you did steal my comb…"

"Do you still need my comb?"

"Uh…" Koschei scrambles to close the door as Theta walks in the rest of the way, leaning against Ushas's desk like he suddenly has a right to everything in the room. "Yes?"

"Right answer. I stole it."

Ushas throws her arms in the air. "You two never cease to confuse me."

"You still need to gue-ess," he sings.

"You really don't need to."

Theta grins back at Koschei with reckless abandon, brain still blanked of what it would normally be relentlessly dwelling on in favour of other things. "One guess."

Ushas stands in an awkward triangulate position between Koschei and Theta, trying very hard to piece together what is going on in regards to borrowing a comb and stealing a comb for fun or "Was this about you being absent basically all of yesterday?"

Theta nods for Koschei. "Hell yes."

"My guess is you played Scrabble for eight hours."

"We had tea."

Koschei goes even redder, if it were possible, Theta smiling stupidly at him while Ushas literally walks into the wall. "What DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH A COMB?"

"He looks cuter with messy hair."

Ushas resists the temptation to slam her head against the wall again, instead folding her arms and looking up to the sky, mentally demanding why me as Theta keeps prattling on. "And it's established tradition to annoy you with our love lives so I decided to let him try and find a comb because it's hilarious."

"You are evil." Koschei retorts, Ushas mentally kicking herself in the head because she is going to have to endure a good two weeks of this.

"Would it do anything to say 'I don't want to know'?"

"Ye—"

"No."

"I am rapidly losing my appetite."

Koschei sinks down slightly against the wall. "It was Theta's idea!"

"And you thought it was a good one after two minutes."

"Two minutes out of like, an hour."

Ushas chokes. "How do you even last for an hour!?"

"We had tea after," Koschei supplies, face not getting any whiter, but apparently trying to pretend he's not staring directly at Theta.

"You had tea after— how long does it take to drink tea? Know what I take that back, I don't want to know…"

"Well not that long but Theta had to make it first and spilt a bunch of water because he didn't want to turn the light on properly for some reason and it was really hot tea and it kinda got forgotten when we were waiting for it to cool off a bit and then we got hungry."

"Actually you got hungry, I was just told to get the food."

"Then you tried to get me to do it but—"

Ushas stomps out of the room, leaving Theta and Koschei to argue about what really happened last night without her.

###

"My favourite part is the fact there is absolutely no point to this tower, but it still exists." Theta drops an excessively large bag of dirt on the tile floor. His arms spring past where they should be with their sudden lack of weight.

"Do you think they'll get enough light up here?" Koschei stands in the doorway of the Mostly Useless Astronomy Tower with a large box of plants in pods. Weeds, mostly.

"Oh, yes." The room obviously doesn't have telescopes in it anymore, because why would you use one of those with data banks full of 3D models to immerse yourself in whenever you might need them? "Those things will spread ridiculously fast without much help."

Koschei sets down his box of plants with a lot more care than Theta's dirt. "Do they even use this place?"

Theta nods. "Storage, yeah. Just not often enough to notice we're creating a plant infestation yet." Theta starts walking around the circular room, throwing open all the windows. For some reason unbeknownst to Koschei, a lot of professors don't like plants. To the point where they don't know a useful thing about them, refuse to touch them, and will even start telling children just learning to spell "epidermis" that plants will, in fact, eat them alive.

Koschei is starting to suspect Theta was exaggerating on that last point.

Theta smiles. His hair is finally short enough to not be blown into his face by the wind through the window. "Come help me put dirt in places."

"You know, I don't think we're gardening correctly." Only took them five minutes to get all the dirt absolutely everywhere obnoxious.

Theta has done a lot of unnecessary smiling at him over the past couple of days. "We're planting weeds. Of course it's not 'gardening'." He picks up a sphere with a weed of some kind suspended in it, roots and all. "I honestly don't know why the Ceruleans are so hyped about these things."

Instead of gawking at one, Koschei does something useful and starts actually planting a weed. In a storage room. That's technically out of bounds. All over someone's stuff. Who is likely uncomfortable around plants. "Plants make food, Thete." He doesn't feel much remorse for the box of spare slates now being infested with a dandelion.

"Well, not anymore. We make plants specifically to make food, but this is just a glorified fuzzy leaf."

Only seventy-four to go. "You said this was a good idea."

Theta smiles, again. "I did."

After fifty-six plants, the whole thing is starting to get just a bit ridiculous.

"People used to wear this stuff, you know." Koschei shoves a Rassilon Knows What next to a Wilted Looking Thing, wishing there was more dirt available to wreak havoc with.

"I did sometimes when I was a kid."

Koschei gasps. "No!"

Theta nods, scooping dirt from the tile floor in his filthy hands. "I lived in the bush for years. My mom taught me how to string a bunch together."

"Doesn't that just kill a bunch of plants for the sake of a couple hours' aesthetic?"

"You let the very life of a beautiful thing violently fade away to make yourself more beautiful for only a little while."

Koschei snorts, counting how many plants they have left, just for the record. "Don't get philosophical on me, now."

Theta puts a plant on the highest shelf he can reach on the old curved storage compartments. "I am the embodiment of unnecessary philosophical ventures."

Koschei would suggest putting a couple right in front of the door, which forces people to touch the plants, but he has somehow gotten attached to the seventy-five weeds they stole from botanical biology, and doesn't want them to get stepped on. "So tell me something philosophical."

"I just did."

The problem with the open windows is they sometimes threaten to blow all the loosely-planted weeds all over the room. "Something unrelated to plants."

Theta only has to think for a second before breathing in as if to start speaking. He does this a few times.

"You sound like a suffocating fish, Thete."

Theta huffs. "Yeah okay it's another observation of Sol III."

Koschei smirks. "Nerd."

"Well you asked." To speak philosophically, he somehow finds it necessary to stop planting and lean against the edge of a window. "So there's this song I found last week called 'Hallelujah'. In English, the word is defined in solely positive, joyous, or praising terms, and is never used sarcastically in this song. But lyrically and melodically, the song itself is completely contradictory to the number of 'hallelujah's that show up, which is something like thirty. It's depressing and sort of hopeless and melancholy, especially when the surrounding mythology is taken into account. There is no way to interpret this song as joyful, and the last verse goes 'Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah'. So this clear contradiction ends up opening up a thousand different interpretations of what the song's supposed to be about, which cannot happen with something like 'Even though it all went right, I'll stand before the Lord of Light with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah'. To have deeper, thought-provoking interpretation, the song requires blatant contradiction."

Koschei stops for a moment, looking at the nearest plant. It seems unaffected by this train of thought, which it should be, as it is a plant. "I'm impressed."

"Wanna know how it all ties in to planting weeds all over the storage tower?"

"Yes."

"It doesn't."

A/N: here have Ceruleans
(dig my grave)