A/N: Irving was the one character I didn't find room for anywhere at all
But somehow I could stick in the Vortisaurs
Ushas doesn't knock, opening the door on Theta halfway through uploading a caterpillar.
"Theta."
He tries to disguise the lack of a wall very poorly. "You're supposed to knock!"
Ushas rolls her eyes, slamming the door shut in front of her. She knocks once, walking in before Theta can actually activate the cloaking device. "We all know you don't have a wall, Theta."
He clears his throat, letting the hole present the hypothetically less messy side of the room. "Oh."
"Have you talked to Magnus recently?"
Theta shakes his head. "He makes a habit of not talking to me, actually. He's trying to remember me for the person who didn't sell him out to authority."
"Fantastic. We think he talks to Drax and nobody else."
Theta pauses uploading the caterpillar. "Who's 'we'?"
Ushas shakes her head abruptly. "Millennia, Rallon, Mort, actual Drax. Essentially, Magnus wasn't seen in three days, so Drax tried breaking into his room. Door's locked from the inside, but Magnus is definitely in there, along with something mechanical-sounding."
"So why are you telling me this?"
"Because Koschei informed me you have a device that can dissociate walls at the molecular level, and would probably work on a door."
Theta rounds the table. "How did I not know about this?"
"That caterpillar must be absolutely fascinating." Theta demands the pink tint in his cheeks stay down, thank you. Ushas smirks. "Don't worry. He only brought it up today."
Theta begins pulling out drawers and opening makeshift cupboards in search of their likely illegal project number one.
"He probably hasn't eaten anything in the past three days, so we're getting him food and water."
"Magnus? He's not the kind of person who'd starve himself over a project."
"That's the thing. He's gone a bit downhill since he left."
"Beyond pissed off?"
Ushas nods, striding into the hall with Theta left to close the door.
"Any idea what it could be?" Theta whispers as low as he can muster, ear once pressed to the door to hear the muttering and clanking and occasional whirring of parts.
"I'd say something to get him off the planet, but the only noteworthy places he can get with anything inside a dormitory are the prison moons." They wait for the patter of feet from the other end of the commons, hopefully their basket of existential nourishment.
Drax is the first to round the corner, followed by Millennia and Rallon, and Koschei. A slightly large group to be assigned the sole task of getting food and water. Drax raps on the door four times with his knuckles, squaring his shoulders as if Magnus can see him. "Magnus, you gotta open the door."
There is no reply but a kick to the bottom of the door.
"We can break up the molecules in your door if ya let us in." Drax nods Theta to where he stood, who sincerely hopes the thing still works properly.
"I'm fine!" Magnus shouts from within.
"Go ahead," Ushas says.
Theta flicks its sole switch, a wonderfully designed 'on' versus 'off'. "We pawning off 'destruction of school property' to Magnus, then?"
Ushas nods. "We gave him the option to open it instead."
The molecular dust falls unceremoniously to the floor, some left to float around in light specks. What's behind the door is more frightening than what Koschei found behind their wall. A pale, baggy-eyed, twitching Magnus screeches at his lost door, standing in a mess of scrap parts and wires and an entirely deconstructed bed. The mattress leans against the wall, some of the stuffing ripped out and metallic wiring extracted for the greater good.
"You been pissing out the window, then?" Drax asks him, and Magnus would slam the door in his face if it were still there. In a starved craze, he focuses on Theta. "Of course it's you with the door thing."
His head twitches to the box of food, and to the water bottle. He fumes at Drax. "I have not been pissing out the window."
"You been eatin', then?"
His head twitches back to the box. He scoops it up in frantic haste, scared the floor outside his room might burn him. "Thought I was closer to done," he mumbles, backing into his hovel.
"Done what, may I ask?"
The work of engineering is the focal point of his meticulous interior decorating, rugged platform and metal arcs interlaced with wires and a gaping bulb at the top, waiting to be filled.
"What goes in the top?" Koschei asks.
"Nothing. Are you giving me my door back?"
"No, 'cause now you gotta 'fess up to admin ya need a new door."
"How am I supposed to explain that?"
"Don' ask me!"
Magnus stares them all down for good measure, plunking himself in the furthest corner of the room with his box. "If you could all leave, that would be great."
Drax turns to his little squad. "I think we're done here."
Millennia nods, giving Magnus some undue smile, turning to walk back wherever with Rallon.
It is only when Drax departs, all of them outside earshot of Magnus's severely ajar door, that Koschei whispers "did you see the wires?"
Ushas pretends he did. "He specifically bought them, too. It's very intentional."
Theta coughs once. "I was too focused on Magnus himself to notice the wires, sorry."
Ushas snorts. "You're the one uploading a caterpillar."
"I'm doing it the old-fashioned way! Manual input of all the synapses."
"Well, if you were doing it the logical way, you'd get a caterpillar and wire it up to a computer. But standard wires don't work; you need specific biochemical compounds to interact with the brain tissue and the synapses."
"So he's uploading a cat, maybe a large fish?"
Theta hopes Ushas finds the kind of people that will mellow her facial expressions one day. "No, Magnus's wires are temporally inclined."
"He could hook up a vortisaur," Koschei says.
Ushas shakes her head. "You two are both impossibly illogical. He can't fit a vortisaur in that thing, but yes he's going to stick a living being in the sphere and suck out its temporal energy."
"Okay, but what can he achieve with that? There's no mobility involved."
Ushas shrugs. "He had a lot of wires."
###
Koschei finds himself walking alone, which wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, if the events of the past two years were not put into consideration. He felt completely helpless for a while, and then just paranoid, but the sense of expecting Vansell to jump out from behind any given wall is still present after such a long time (or, to Time Lords, such a short time). Vansell was, all contexts considered, suspended for one year of homeschooling.
He's back now.
Koschei nearly makes to the commons, constantly checking over his shoulder and skittering away from every physicality that looks like Vansell for more than 0.5 seconds. He is about to turn the last corner, mind fading into the potential of what could happen rather than what is directly in front of him. Reality pulls him by the arm the meter and a half into a maintenance closet. Everything happens slightly too fast for him to catch on before the door slams behind him and block him from trying to run out.
Koschei, in the face of Vansell looking ever so furious, randomly recalls the onslaught of people telling him to talk it through instead and blurts out "Is this about that time on Obraeon?"
Vansell lazily pulls back an arm and slams his fist into Koschei's right cheek, teeth cutting into his flesh and sending a burst of metallic blood into his throat.
Koschei brings a hand to his face, feeling it run down his fingers, down his wrist, onto the floor.
"Oh look. You caught me."
"I'm sorry," Koschei croaks, somehow pulling up the courage to look him in the eye for a second before shutting it again, not bracing for impact quick enough.
He has to part his lips to keep from choking on blood, tongue now gouged where he couldn't pull it back quick enough, saliva mixing with it to create a sorry, vaguely pink solution that drips onto his robes. He takes in three ragged breaths, the oh-so-wonderful memories of having his brain picked at coming back in bursts of pain shooting up the right side of his gum, his cheeks, his nose, his eye.
Then the survival instinct returns, and any notion of talking it out like a civilised being as he's been told is tossed out the window. He swings one glorious leg out in front of him and nails Vansell in the stomach.
Breathing out his mouth and therefore spitting in little bursts, he takes two fistfuls of robe on Vansell's front and slams him against the wall as hard as he can, hearing a crack as his head hits the wall and feeling subconsciously satisfied with the noise.
"Do yourself a favour and let go of me."
Koschei instead slams his forehead into Vansell's nose, again hearing a somewhat satisfying noise that was much louder than the first one. Vansell has started yelling, but not for help, which only has Koschei lean in close enough to kiss him if he very well wanted to. He balls his fists tighter and tighter around the flimsy fabric of his robes, pressing him harder against the wall and nailing him in between the legs with a knee.
Vansell attempts to curl up into a ball as would be only natural, but is hindered by Koschei, who still breathes directly in his face and will not stop until his own brain tells him to. Vansell tries to fight back with his hands, pounding them into Koschei's sides. Instead Koschei strikes him again, Vansell's arms going limp at his sides as he is raised up to just a little bit taller than Koschei is.
"Good." Koschei uses one arm to cover Vansell's neck, keeping his jaw at exactly the right angle to look directly into his eyes, "Now don't yell for help." He knows Vansell can resist hypnosis, making it all the more elating when it takes only a little bit more force to break his efforts. "Don't yell at all. You don't know who attacked you. It was a random student, bigger than you. Stronger than you. You picked a fight with him and he retaliated. Do you understand?"
Vansell nods as much as he can, Koschei not feeling the pressure that was put on his arm in doing so, not feeling the blood still dripping out of his mouth, running down his nose.
Koschei tilts his head to the side, smiling a twisted sort of way with his mouth still open to breathe through. "What to do, then?" He takes three heavy breaths, feeling Vansell squirm underneath him, only enough to take in oxygen. "I never much liked your brain, did I?" He laughs a little at the horror of seeing Vansell's brain in turn, feeling his breathing slow down and Vansell kick weakly under him.
Koschei lets him slide to the floor, body collapsing faster than he expected it to, left in an heap immobile by force of hypnosis. He expected Vansell to be a lot better at resisting mind control.
"I might just leave you there." He actually considers it, in the delay required to convert a weak argument about chivalry into a logical action. "Nah."
Despite all the rambling adults preaching on about how revenge is actually very unfulfilling, Koschei finds kicking Vansell in the side very enjoyable, thank you very much. His brain relentlessly eggs him on, chanting its appraisal with every possibly cracked rib and bruised chunk of flesh, screaming louder until everything else is overpowered with the noise.
In the sweet seconds between muffled cries beat out of Vansell's mouth, he can't hear the incessant rhythm of four.
There's something about seeing blood in places that makes it all the more thrilling, a portal to some primeval instinct of survival not permitted in civilised society. It's glorious.
Koschei doesn't know why he stops. Perhaps revenge answers primarily to objective morality, or dogging around Theta's reeking sense of Doing The Right Thing installed brakes. His obstreperous brain demands in its passion to know if he's dead, if the problem is finally solved.
Vansell inhales. Koschei exhales, feeling the red ebb away from his vision, but certainly not enough for guilt to even think of showing up.
It isn't hard to bury the memory completely in Vansell's head, piled under a nondescript clutter of things the faculty will never agree to digging through.
His nose is still bleeding. He stands immortally triumphant over Vansell for one more second of silence before turning around.
He cracks open the closet door, watching two students he doesn't recognise walk by in the opposite direction. Most people have gone to lunch by now.
He runs out the door, kicking it closed behind him, hands covering his nose and mouth to disguise most of the damage, only bringing one away to pull open the commons door and run up the stairs to his room.
He won. He finally won. And for a moment, it was the greatest achievement of his life.
He runs past three students coming down the stairs, not looking to check faces or respond to words that blow over his head, turning the doorknob and slamming the door behind him.
Theta pokes at some possibly biotic thing Koschei doesn't care about on the lab table. "Koschei, did you get me a—" he turns to see Koschei gingerly tapping his nose, verifying the brokenness. "What the hell happened to you?"
Koschei immediately wipes any kind of victorious smirk off his face in favour of the most comfortable configuration of ripped flesh, trying to clog the now-slowed bleeding with a sleeve. "Vansell happened to me. Although I did try and get him back, which means I just got wailed on." He lies all too casually, maybe the biggest lie he's ever told to Theta. Vansell has made him a liar. But for the better, in this case, he thinks.
"Well how the—" Theta is already right in front of him, moving his sleeve away and trying to assess the damage, not caring his fingers are turning red in the process. Maybe caring a little bit. "No, what exactly happened?" Koschei is starting to properly feel it now, as his adrenaline wears off.
He does tell, up until the part he slammed Vansell against the wall. That was replaced with a sketchy-sounding punch in the jaw, and a couple other things he will not be able to repeat backwards, after which he ran outside with his hands over his nose and some other kid showed up. He thinks Vansell tried to run away, but couldn't really tell.
Theta runs a hand through his hair, getting faint red streaks in it that Koschei finds oddly endearing.
The bloodlust has worn off in favour of a really freaking painful broken nose and ragged cheeks. "Well you'd think he's stopped by now. Fucking hell."
"No need to swear." Koschei feels like swearing, but it seems he would rather make a joke out of everything. "Can you make me a painkiller?"
"Why don't you just get one from the nurse?"
"Yours are stronger, Thete."
Theta walks off to the lab table without much protest, taking out a list of ingredients just in case he kills somebody by accident. Koschei pulls off his robe, very intentionally not getting it anywhere near his nose, tossing it into a laundry pile. Lying onto the bed, he balls up his undershirt in one hand and uses that to temporarily stop the blood from getting down his chest. He wipes the dealing with Vansell out of the way in favour of taking a brief medical analysis of his face, waiting to properly revel in it or regret it later.
###
Koschei is only truly afraid when Theta claims he needs added limb space to sleep, two days later. The mattress was pulled, extra blanket dug out from under the bed, mental walls constructed amazingly well. Then again, they're not forty anymore.
Koschei recounts all the times they've used that line, most often with some ulterior motive, but it's always been petty. Even under the hyper-analysis of a guilty brain, they are all so very insignificant. They used to be so important, the little arguments, so justifiable.
None of them made him afraid before. Theta knows.
He spends xenosociology in fatigued denial: like trying to weave bits of ragged thread into a fish, but no matter how hard he tries, always coming up with a cumulonimbus cloud. He has space to discard a few, because apparently "we sit together too much" and "Mort is also a friend".
He needs to get more sleep.
Abnormal chemistry brought upon the existential crisis, the dawn of how little remorse he feels combated with the justification in light of Vansell's sole existence. Is he a sociopath? Is he entitled to feel no remorse for pummelling Vansell? Does well-justified revenge qualify in the collectively decided pool of Objectively Amoral Deeds? Would he even be bothered if it weren't for Theta? What is he even scared of?
Koschei runs from most things at lunch, taking a chicken sandwich from somewhere in his quest to find a suitable point of camouflage. This has always been in plain view next to the river Lethe. Site of his first victim. He felt guilt then, the crippling remorse of wholly justified deeds bestowed on his tiny self. He wouldn't change any part of that for fear of winding up possibly dead.
Does this mean he could possibly be dead here?
Cumulonimbus clouds.
Theta doesn't go looking for him.
Between temporal physics, Gallifreyan history, primordial biology, and dinner, Theta doesn't speak a word to him.
For hours after, Theta throws frustratedness in tiny quantum bits at him like javelins, which Koschei pretends is better than nothing.
Nothing is less startling. And doesn't sporadically remind him of things best forgotten.
On the plus side, he hasn't seen Vansell since.
The seventh time Theta pokes him with a javelin, he actually walks in the room. Koschei has watched two leaves die before him, their botanical gradient of life getting very hard to add on now. Koschei refused Theta's idea of putting seeds on. Theta didn't let Koschei make tie dye leaves.
Harmonic balance.
Theta crosses his legs in elegance on their bed, mattress still resting on the floor below. He expects Koschei to come running over or something.
Koschei lets him wait. He sets up the next leaf template. He locates, double checks, and adds in the right amount of varied chemicals to their homemade chamber. He might watch the first few minutes of accelerated mitosis if it weren't really, really boring, and if Theta did not know how to telepathically get him to turn around.
"I know you know," Koschei announces, completely flat, thankful for the long-in-coming break in silence.
He half-expects Theta to continue to be a drama queen and use physical gestures and telepathy alone for the next half hour. "Come over here for a minute." Times have changed.
"Want a bit less limb space?"
"Correct."
Again, not the anticipated course of dialogue. Koschei was only killing time with the leaves. He picks his way around the less-than-optimally-cleaned room, as if not to disturb a sleeping tiger. Theta tries peering into his head without touching, probably rightfully so, but Koschei swats the invasive needles away nonetheless.
Theta lifts his arm to the height of his chest, palm up, fingers loose. If it were anyone else, he'd wince. Three fingers and a thumb curl around themselves, letting the index finger fall down the left of Koschei's chest. "Five fractured ribs." Disappointment. "Three broke entirely. You punctured a heart." His finger moves to find precisely where Koschei's left heart is, pressing into the skin to feel it beating. "He survived. Easy."
The nagging to penetrate the defences of Koschei's head speeds up and multiplies, adding background static to the ritual tapping in his head. There's no point in asking because they both know they both know, and Koschei tries sitting as precisely still as Theta, but he can't help but squirm under the tiny attacks on his head.
"Don't."
"You know I have to."
And he probably should.
Theta takes this fleeting thought as consent, precisely placing all his fingers on Koschei's head in under a second. The cube is found and crushed and exploded, speeding by in disgustingly accurate detail for all its decreased time. He hates every second of it.
And then, it's over.
"Do you remember Torvic?"
Koschei is trying not to vomit, having the contents of his head sped up and then slammed back to relativity, all without his control. Not really.
"But enough." He takes a deep breath, as if this is all so hard to manage. Of all things, Theta starts laughing at him. It starts as a chuckle sort of, a forced upheaval of breath, and Koschei is sitting a few inches away from borderline maniacal chortling.
"What?"
Theta beams impossibly at him. "We're such a mess." His laughing stops in one fell swoop. "I nearly tried to commit suicide and homicide at the same time and violate the law by breathing, and you killed a boy, chatted with Death incarnate, smuggled a student out of the building, and rightfully attacked somebody."
Koschei cracks an ironic smile, for all it's worth. "I killed a boy and chatted with Death and you thought it was a good idea to stick around?"
"Did a bit more than 'stick around'."
"I guess it boils down to neither of us would be here if it weren't for both of us making an absolute mess."
Theta stretches his arms up unnecessarily high, as if they might dislocate and fly away. "You have to admit, it's more fun than slumping about life normally."
Koschei gnaws on the inside of his cheek, still barely held together, for a second or five. "So where are we, then?"
In all required response, Theta slides effortlessly onto Koschei's lap to straddle his hips, performing the gentle assault of timeless instinct, a bit harsher than before. All hair in fists and occasional teeth and enough force to imbalance them, but not tip them over.
Theta knows Koschei knows Theta knows there is probably something a little bit skewed in their methods of solving arguments. Koschei also know neither of them care.
###
"Okay, so how long have you had this thing?" Ushas pokes around their lab table, inspecting bottles and no doubt judging their organisational skills. Theta and Koschei stand to the side, where the wall would be, ritually trained to not interfere with her science. Even if it's actually their science.
"I dunno," Theta twirls an extra leaf between his fingers, "few years?"
"And you never told me?" she pulls the trash can out from under the edge of the 'table'. "That is the craziest bin I've ever seen."
"We used to dump it out the window," Koschei says. "Then somebody noticed the permanganate."
As Ushas replaces the multi-coloured trash bin to its rightful location, the lights go down. The suns are the only source of light for seven seconds, before the power returns to its normal self.
Nobody asks what it was, but the question is almost tangible.
"The whole school can't go out like that. It has to be just our bit," Theta says, placing his leaf on the table.
"It's Magnus." Ushas walks and opens their door, waiting. "Well who else has some sketchy work of machinery wired up to the school?"
By the time they run down the stairs to find him, the power has surged again twice, and Mortimus and Drax have already started down the hallway. Magnus's door has been replaced with his gradually deteriorating mattress, leaning on the outside of the door, which Drax does not hesitate in throwing down. The massive Thing inside his room belches heat at them, all the while making the sound of a tortured android cat, sparking in the places he could not provide ample insulation.
Magnus sits below a writhing body crammed into a ball wired into the machine, doing nothing to protect himself from the infernal thing aside from covering his head with his hands.
"WHAT THE HELL'RE YOU DOIN'?" Drax yells into the room, which is starting to gather an ample audience from behind.
"One of you get somebody professional!" Koschei shouts to the masses.
"YOU CAN'T STOP ME!" Magnus yells above the noise.
"He's got an actual creature wired up," Ushas says, "and he's killing it."
Theta gently pushes Mort to the side. "I'M BREAKING IT DOWN, MAGNUS!"
"THEN YOU'LL KILL US ALL!"
Theta looks to Drax. "By the state o' that thing, he prob'ly ain't lying."
The screaming sphere stuck in the wires tries to uncurl itself, but can only squirm in its confines. Magnus eerily mirrors his captive creature in trying to hide from the energy it gives off. He starts smudging around the edges.
"Can I just pull it out?"
"Thete," Drax holds out an arm to block the door. "Don' even try touchin' that."
Koschei grabs his shoulder from behind. "That's a vortisaur."
"What?!" The smudge has turned into a blur, engulfing Magnus's forearms and shins and most of his head. It hasn't yet dissolved his body, or overloaded the synapses of his brain.
"Just hatched, by the looks of it."
"And we can't stop Magnus?"
A booming voice appears behind them. "What on Gallifrey is going on in here?"
By now, Magnus is hardly visible. "Don't touch it, professor."
"Certainly not."
"Zeta Omicron's escaped again," Theta says, stepping aside to give her an ample view. "We can't track him this time."
"And in no way could all of you dissuade him from this?"
"With all due respect, professor," Ushas pipes up. "It would have blown us to bits."
Magnus disappears, but the machine keeps working, designed for a single use and no return.
"I believe it is still capable of blowing us all to bits," the professor decides. "EVERYBODY CLEAR THE AREA!" Her voice blasts through the crowd, students closest to the sound and the heat starting to push each other down the hall and out the commons for dear life.
Those waiting with bated breath for some devastating explosion of lights wait for nothing. The baby vortisaur screeches one last time, falling limp in its cage. The last of its temporal energy is sucked out to power the machine doing no work, whirring and heating fading to a stop.
"Well." The professor holds her arms, examining the wreckage before her. "Does anyone need extra credit in… something?" Drax and Ushas shoot a hand up immediately, followed by a contemplative Mortimus. "If you might be so kind as to clean this place up?"
The professor smiles, parting the crowd to find someone more qualified and better at paperwork.
Theta Sigma is the first to enter ground zero, ducking under the metallic net the vortisaur carcass lies in and ripping wires out of the body.
"You sure that thing won't go off again?" Mortimus touches the side of the machine like it might sting him.
Theta nods. "This was born in the time vortex. Vortisaurs survive purely off temporal energy at this point in life, and if they're out, they're dead. The machine ran solely on temporal energy from this source." Theta manages to break one of the weak metallic bars on the bottom of its cage. The uncurled creature falls through, into his hands. And the source is dead."
A/N: I hope my made-up science makes more sense than disco-era Classic Who