A/N: Welcome to the chapter of Thinking A Lot
Ushas slams the door of her room a little louder than she anticipated, some part of her wanting to go back out and clarify it was not, in fact, a cry for attention and no, she doesn't want someone to come in asking. She throws herself into the desk chair, shoving anything on top of it aside in favour of the blank wooden canvas below. Unmarked, innocent, no ingrained pattern as might be present in a natural tree. She wields a stick of graphite in one hand, less favoured than ink but far less harmful. On another day, she might try and control her breathing and calm down first, but the thought has not occurred to her yet.
The tip of the pencil almost digs into the surface, crafting shaky circles within circles. 79. The great and wretched 79, the good but not great that is therefore bad, bringer of chaos and teller of mediocrity that rubs elbows with 75 and the demon that is 70.
Her stomach has been hurting for five minutes and she knows it will not go away.
She drags her slate on top of the desk, pulling paper in to surround it for writing notes to be immortalised and never once forgotten. She condemns all her screaming emotions to the same plane of existence as the grade starting with 7, pulling the wire from her hair and pitching it across the room, willing the slate to telepathically bring up as much faintly related information it can sustain. It doesn't.
"Cobalt sulfide heptahydrate. Co SO4 7H2O. Tetraquocobalt difluoride. Co F2 4H2O. Cobalt nitrate hexahydrate. Co NO3 2 6H2O."
She is minutely aware of someone knocking on her door, but doesn't pay them any attention. They'll leave.
"Eukarya, Animalia, Cnidaria, Scyphozoa, Semaestomeae, Ulmaridae-"
The knocking continues. But she's too focused to bother leaving her desk. Too important.
"Ushas, I know you're in there. I can hear you muttering." The voice that's probably Theta pauses. Hopefully he left.
N equals N sub zero e exponent negative la-" The voice that was obviously Theta throws the door open, grabbing the slate off Ushas's desk and turning her chair around before she can utter radioactive decay.
He stands before her all uppity with his arms folded and some scowl and he's much taller from this angle an he has the slate on his hand but she's not going to try and take it from him because she'll fail. He's always easy to yell at and get a result, though.
"THETA SIGMA." She stands up defiantly as she can before him, trying to put as murderous a look as possible in her eyes.
"DELTA PSI." He shouts back, not even with the door closed, tossing the slate on her bed. She can't get it without trying to shove past him, which she knows isn't going to work and someone's probably heard so they'll come in and see them fighting and
"Give it back," she squeaks, feeling the murder leak from her eyes and legs just want to run away from the taller scary Theta Sigma.
"We're going on a trip."
"No you don't understand I need to study more so I know everything properly and won't get lost next term because then I'll be behind and I'll fail and and-" the taller scary Theta Sigma pulls her into a hug, letting her head fall against his neck as hands ever so softly wrap around her back. The murder has washed away completely to salt water, a terrifying timeline of a 79% morphing into failing to never receiving Time Lord credentials to being homeless and jobless and starving to death. There is a broken mathematical constant in her head, an algorithmic measure of appropriate panic that is meant to be an addition sign.
"I've already gotten permission from Professor Traesys to go on a two-day study trip to the library out past Hamlet. We're taking Koschei whether he likes it or not."
"I thought you were against me studying." She holds onto Theta for an uncharacteristic length of time, claiming to never want a hug but sometimes definitely wanting a hug. She decides, very logically, it's perfectly alright in moderation.
"I'm not against lying. We all need a vacation anyways." Theta steps back to pat Ushas on the shoulder, smile completely against the yelling and the throwing of objects.
"Now, I'm taking this," he holds up the slate Ushas is painfully resisting the urge to snatch away, "and you won't be seeing it until classes resume."
Her stomach has, for the most part, settled itself down. In record time, no less. "Why?"
He smiles, and looks very tired. "We don't hang around enough anymore. I miss those days."
She doesn't hang around anyone, much. She sighs. "So do I."
"Too much school is a bad thing. Now get packing."
###
Ushas can tell there's something off about them. But then, there usually always is.
Koschei has been ravaging the pond for half an hour now in complete silence, soaked to the bone three times over at least. He looks stuck between a spellbound child and a tortured animal, flailing around Theta's knighted Prime Camping Ground without much notice for the two of them. Theta watches him from a giant fallen tree just off to the side of the water, hugging his knees. He practically radiates interrupted peace, some kind of paranoid serenity that will not settle in any given point in time. It hangs around him like a cloud, not being directed at anything, but conscious nonetheless.
The surprise study-trip-turned-hooky-turned-camping-expedition is still the most confusing part. That and the fact neither of them have spoken a word in the full half hour.
Being a biologist of the dead sort, Ushas never found a need to learn much telepathy. If it's important enough, someone's going to shout it across the room at her and be plenty clear enough. Theta, on the other hand, has simply ignored mental walls as a whole. His haze of tentative calm has been assigned an aesthetic, swirling lilac and deep yellow and turquoise beginning to move in jerky patterns.
Knowing Theta, it's probably trying to mimic Koschei. Ushas shifts to his vantage point, probably small enough to fit between him and the edge of the log. She swings her legs over the edge anyways. His eyes so betray his little cloud, locked on Koschei but calculating, not the soft and vacant gaze of a romantic.
"You can't fix everything, you know." Ushas barely speaks, not wanting to disrupt Koschei's interpretive explosion of a dance. Theta's lilac haze is punctured from the inside, turning itself dark blue before being sucked back inside his head. He's found the walls again. Theta doesn't tear his eyes off Koschei for Ushas's sake, bare toes curling on top of the bark. He isn't smiling.
Koschei has taken to holding his breath in enormous gasps, curling into a ball and plunging underwater. A multitude of bubbles break at the surface, agonising seconds stretching between them and a gasping Time Lord popping out of the pond. The stress leaks through the cracks in Theta's head, pressure not high enough yet for his skull to break completely. It might, if Koschei doesn't come back up. Maybe then…
"I don't fix much." Theta waited for him to come back up to speak. And only a mumble, only to Ushas.
She shakes her head, watching her bare feet hang three metres from the ground. "You tried to fix a TARDIS at the age of ten."
"I was ten."
She sighs in all their misadventures. Most of them involve Ushas in a panic as Theta and Koschei get up to no good, the former always trying to save the day in some form or another. Whether he knows it or not. "You'd fix the Medusa Cascade with a needle and thread if someone let you."
Ushas leans her head on Theta's shoulder, a rare occurrence of the scientist displaying sentiment. "I'm not letting you try and fix people."
He shifts as if trying to melt into himself. "You'd think, being myself, I'd be the last person wanting to fix people."
"You'd think."
Koschei emerges from the water, gasping for air and choking on lungs. Perhaps the only thing Ushas has done is given Koschei more time to practice drowning.
###
Koschei was not up for talking, forget cooking marshmallows over a fire in a jar in a tent at midnight after being ordered twice to put dry clothes on. Theta probably put something in the marshmallows to make him all giggly and stupid, but then Theta's taken his own medicine and what harm can be done? Likely keeping Ushas awake with their mindless chatter and fire hazard, but she's somehow slipped to the back of his mind in favour of romantic conspiracies involving Omega and Rassilon.
There's a very rational, very depressed section of Koschei's head that refuses to be shut up in a fit of giggles and sugar, kicking and screaming against the shimmering mindlessness of his present state. It knows something's off. Theta probably knows it knows. But Koschei really doesn't want to know, wants to go on eating marshmallows and hold off the lecture from Ushas and be prepared to jump into the lake on fire if someone knocks over the jar. Theta probably knows that, too. He's probably worked his way into hidden cracks of his head and started beating them into giddiness, determined to completely eradicate the protesting.
Koschei keeps adding unnecessary plot to the Unspoken Affairs of the Triumvirate, consuming another mildly burnt cylinder he hasn't bothered counting. Theta can crawl in his brain all he likes, if the world could be turned into a tent and marshmallows all the time.
He pretends everything in his head isn't screaming at him it really can't and contemplates Theta's equally deranged self going on about the Other trying to function a loom. Because it's great fun, being normal for once. Maybe Ushas will mind less if they're being normal.
###
As nobody seems to tell him anything, Theta is alone with an actual hard copy book from Hamlet, cross-legged on the coffee table. Two chairs are wide open on both sides, but they're just not his spot, and taking them over would disrupt the balance of the cosmos even without someone to kick him off.
The book's been in existence for maybe only twice his lifetime, a generous twentieth of his expected lifespan, and it's already coming apart. The pages are yellow, the corners are scrubbed to a curve, the backing is all but disintegrated. It used to display the words "The Life and Death of Omega", but it has all been reduced to inference from the text itself.
He's just getting to the end bit, and finds it quite amusing. It's always amusing when the government's having a crisis.
"Thete." He doesn't bother closing the book.
"It's always paint, Drax. Blood dries brown, not red."
"Thete. It's Magnus." Theta closes the book, but keeps a fingertip in to not lose the page. "He's lookin' for ya. 3-2-4." Drax stands closer behind him than he thought.
Theta pretends not to be concerned, which in itself is conspicuous in its lack of unprecedence in learning Magnus is suddenly returned. He passes Drax in poorly executed indifference.
"You know where he was."
"That I don't." He hears Drax jump into one of the chairs. He's going to break something one of these days.
"Then wot does 'e want with you?"
"A warm welcome, I expect."
He doesn't need to hear Drax grumbling about bullshit behind him.
It takes less than a minute to find Magnus's room.
"I didn't get a trial," Magnus declares, back turned. Theta has been oblivious to the number of people capable of telepathy at this age.
"That's unfortunate." Theta keeps the door open, a gaping hole in the wall propped by his foot.
Magnus turns on one heel, leaning against the window opposite Theta. His skin has been drained of all colour barely three shades below stark white, eyes angled more on their axis. The only part of his entire body that stayed is the short black hair.
"You regenerated."
Magnus smacks one palm to his new forehead. "Really? I hadn't noticed!"
"But they can't do that at your age!"
Magnus's lips turn sour. "And who's going to tell them that? Leaving the planet's a grand enough crime to get a heart out of commission. No thanks to you."
"What did I do?"
"Koschei very smartly turned up ten minutes after I got in to say 'it wasn't me'. I believed that, but he wouldn't say who turned me in."
Theta sloppily breaks off all telepathic communication in an instant, a method that usually works. Magnus notices. He grins.
"See what I mean?"
Theta takes a deep breath for all the lost hours of petty War Games and stolen test answers few and far between. "I had to," he falters on the name, "Magnus, believe me."
"You literally got me killed."
"I didn't know that would happen!" Theta's foot shifts to the left, reminding him to keep it on the open door.
"Let's say you knew. Would you still turn me in?"
He pauses. Theta wants to say 'no', swallows down a 'yes', and settles for a 'maybe' he can't very well speak as a satisfactory response. He hates dichotomies.
"In my experience," Magnus shuffles his feet and crosses his legs to emphasise his trials of a new body, "There's always a way around."
Theta takes a breath to argue that this unreliable situation was so dire it was an anomaly, an exception to his rule. He closes the mouth and swallows the inhaled breath in knowing with a bit less dramatics and less angsty black and white, he could have found a way out.
"I'll always remember you as a friend, Theta Sigma." He steps closer to Theta, shooing him out purely with in tone of voice. "If I'm out again quick enough, I won't even remember this little hiccough."
Theta takes one step back, but keeps his foot on the door. "How are you going to manage all that now?"
"Wouldn't you like to know."