It was like competing in a 100-metre sprint. Standing in the lane, waiting for everyone to show up. Staring at the guy with the air horn, staring at the guy in the tent taking down the times of the previous heat. Forgetting which foot to start on and, in a moment of panic, trying to inconspicuously assume the starting position without really doing so. Seeing the guy with the air horn turn and feel your heart rate increase, only to stand there still waiting for a gruelling ten seconds longer than you thought. Bending down on the (hopefully) correct foot and planting your fingers in the grass, for a moment appreciating the current atmospheric temperature and panicking you might miss the air horn. Waiting for the air horn. And sprinting like mad when you hear it, running for what seems like so long and your legs start complaining and you don't think you're going to make it in any decent time, and two people pass you. Telling your legs to move faster, damn it, seeing the finish line and anticipating crossing over it and finally doing so. Then replaying what you just did over in your head as sixty seconds finally passes since you first stepped up to lane three. That was the last year.
He is very deliberate and a touch hyper-regulatory in his last week of mandatory waiting, a day dedicated to one of seven parts of his history. "Nostalgia, Koschei," he argued amid minute timing and abstract categorisation. "I can't cram ninety years into only one day." It was then he handed Koschei a leaf so close to death it was curling and wilted and grey, but still technically living. "The last one."
Koschei runs into some unfortunate twelve-year-old, throwing her to the ground on reckless accident. Knowing Theta, he can't be running so far behind. Chances are he's barrelled into his own share of clueless younger students. Koschei has to do a complete u-turn to slow down.
"Sorry." He holds out a hand, waiting in slight impatience for her to come to her senses and crawl to her feet by her own power. "You alright?" Instead of running off halfway to tears or sheepishly inspecting her toes as most of the kids do, she stares back up at him, arms folded, whip of a braid menacingly positioned in front of a shoulder.
"Just what do you think you're doing!?"
Koschei, in his shock, takes a step back from the menace. "I'm racing across the grounds, actually. Trying to beat my friend."
"Why?" She sticks her chin up in demand of an answer, fragile body reaching around his waist maybe.
"He wants to see the whole place before he leaves, and decided this was the best way."
"Why are you running it if you're not leaving?"
Koschei shakes his head, departing the child's metaphysical grasp and running with newfound purpose. "Priorities."
The running doesn't cease for another ten-odd minutes, the ultimate test of dodging moving targets and taking evasive action when spotted. By the time Koschei reaches the banks of Lethe, legs starting to complain under their abuse, hands uniting with his knees for more breath, Theta isn't there. As instructed, Koschei kicks off his shoes and wrestles off his socks, taking two tentative steps into the counterintuitively cold river. He sits by a tree to wait, attempting to dry his feet on the grass to reutilise his footwear.
Theta arrives after a minute, not slowing to avoid crashing into the trees, which he miraculously doesn't accomplish. He doesn't slow down when he sees Koschei, or when he reaches the edge of the river, launching himself as far as his legs will muster and plummeting into the water.
His head reappears four seconds later, flanked by moving arms. "So I win?"
Koschei raises his eyebrows. "I got here over a minute ago."
Theta swims back to dry land, just a touch of shivering gracing his teeth. "I said you needed to jump in the river, not look at the river. So you never crossed the finish line." Rivulets of water run everywhere off him, making their way closer to Koschei's wet feet. He sits in the grass.
"I did put my feet in."
Theta claps a hand to his shoulder. "Jump in!" The hand leaves a dark, undefined oval on him.
Koschei sighs for an unnecessarily long time. "Fine."
"And every two years, alternating between two seasons every four and the country every event, people from the entire planet all come and play sports!" Theta takes an enthusiastic and partly subconscious sip of his third cup of coffee in an hour and a half. "We need to see one of those, 22nd century. But a winter one, the summer's really hot for Time Lords."
They went outside again on his day dedicated to "remember the huge whale?", to the clearing where Torvic burned for the express purpose of being able to see the stars and not get caught out past curfew. Theta is barley able to stay still cross-legged, even at this dead hour of the night (or, likely, tomorrow morning), hands always waving patterns in the air or clutching a tin cup.
"We also have to find the Medusa Cascade. The rift has enough sort of… not gravity but space-time distortion, you know, that a bunch of stuff orbits it but because it's a rift all the bodies have some problem with them. The Fifteen Broken Moons, or something." Theta thrusts the tin cup out to Koschei, who takes it from his jittery hand. It snaps back to the matching one, pale skin strikingly visible against his sleeves. Koschei takes a sip, if only to stay better awake. Coffee is a drink he can tolerate for its benefits, but never tastefully enjoy.
With nothing to bind them together, Theta's hands shake almost without end, twitches moving to his arms and torso and neck and legs, on occasion. He says it's not from the cold, and it can't be all from the caffeine. He wants to run.
"Akhaten, though, we're going there. A sentient planet that eats memory, and all the asteroids with little shops and every kind of people and the scenery is all bright red and orange and yellow up against space, Koschei the planet eats an intangible concept I mean come on!" His enthusiasm almost echoes. It's the last noise before silence, the only works for the brain to follow after a long string of information it doesn't continue receiving.
Koschei tries smiling. "You should write all these down."
"I don't have paper." Theta throws himself to the ground, lying parallel to Koschei under a blanket of stars. Koschei watches his face and his chest, waiting for some abnormal explosion of breath or another Matrix entry on a cosmological system. Theta lets his brain breathe out disconnected places and colours and stars for him, bursting into Koschei's vision in front of the sky. Almost.
Theta grabs his hand with much more force than Koschei thought the twitches were, random movement still jumping to his fingers and wrist. Koschei tries keeping his arm planted in the ground in the hopes it's all a placebo effect.
It's not.
For once, Theta is not the one most enthused about one of his Last Days. Mortimus is quiet about it, and very controlled, but it's obvious from the way his arm moves in acute concentration he's overly excited about painting the wall. Against the rules. Theta promised to take all the punishment for vandalism if (and probably when) they are caught, because he's leaving anyways. In an ideal world, the whole Deca would be painting tasteful graffiti on the wall outside the qualified Juniors' dormitories, but that number has boiled down to five. Jelpax and Vansell were not invited.
Ushas is trying to discretely paint plant cells in an abstract way and failing terribly, all but labelling the diagram and calling it art. "It's supposed to be a building," she mutters when Koschei asks, providing no context for the idea.
Theta tells them to try painting things that all somehow tied together or fell under the same theme, but after five minutes a photo-realistic sparrow appeared right next to a cockeyed war-related defence mechanism and the point was lost. Theta doesn't seem to care.
He paints one of his hands at least three colours from deep purple to orange, smearing it across some designated rectangle, and repeating the process systematically. Koschei doesn't ask. It's probably the sky.
He stands next to Theta, as has been unintentional habit since day one, painting abstract red and black squares in a simple pattern. Theta never said what the actual point of painting the wall was, and halfway decided to start illustrating their designated subjects that would be discussed at length on a Smart board after classes.
He notices the checker board one smear of the hand away from finishing the sunset. He has to touch Koschei's hand, colouring it red and yellow and lilac. I'll miss them, too. He studies the irises of Koschei's eyes longer than normal, withdrawing his hand as if nothing happened. Koschei paints two odd checkers on the board. It could have been them.
"Think yeh can visit us?" Drax asks, around Mort and Ushas and Koschei.
Theta smiles at the wall. "You lot should visit me."
Theta is hesitating, as long as he wants, surrounded by a ring of all the leaves they ever fabricated. Koschei guesses he's saying a few words in his head, a preemptive funeral for their first real project. It took little more than an hour to lay them on a circle of rocks and drench them all in elements and methanol.
"Are you ready, then?" Theta asks with his back still turned. Koschei's been ready for five minutes.
"Sure."
Theta throws him a handheld blowtorch, and steps outside the circle. Koschei stands at more or less the leaf opposite, wielding the blowtorch in two hands. "On three?"
Despite his waiting about of funeral qualities, Theta smiles like he can't possibly wait three whole seconds. "One."
"Two."
"Three." They run around the circle clockwise, standing a bit too close to the erupting flames, jusr to ensure a hundred-odd leaves are burned properly.
They stand on opposite sides of the circle still, taking a couple steps back to see them all. The flames all bleed into each other, a choppy gradient through the spectrum of visible light. The leaves barely have time to react to their newfound interaction with the first time dimension before being engulfed in burning colour.
"You better burn me like this when I die," Theta says. The steam floating off their pyre is more brilliant than the fire itself. An entire rainbow of smoke suffocates the sky.
"I don't know if I could get away with that."
"Sure you can. Just show up with a portable lab and dump it on me."
Koschei idly rubs his hands together, a repetitive futile attempt to get the odd stains out. He's been doing weird science experiments all day. Theta sits on the untarnished grass, watching one green flame in particular. Koschei thinks it's boron.
"What would happen if you mixed it all together?" he asks either the fire or Koschei. "Would it be black?"
"I think so," Koschei says.
He thinks to knock on Ushas's door once he's inside, but doing so might be a little sarcastic.
"Do you know where Theta went?"
Ushas ties back her hair. "It is 07:00 on a day I am not required to wake up in the morning, and you expect me to be awake?"
Koschei blinks. "Well, you are, so—"
She rolls her eyes. "He walked in at five in the bloody morning to tell me specifically to tell you I do not know where he is, despite the fact I actually do."
"So he just ran off?"
Ushas shrugs. "It must be hide-and-seek day."
"Why would he have a hide-and-seek day?"
"To be perfectly honest, why would he have a 'let's all paint the wall' day? Mort is the only artistic one out of all of us."
Koschei shakes his head. "I don't know why he's doing most of this, but he is. You hear about the leaves?"
"He was in here for half an hour. Didn't even bother asking about the conspicuous rat." It sits on her desk, asleep, probably very conspicuous, but Koschei isn't paying attention.
He takes a deep breath. "Where is he? I don't want to run around the campus trying to find him for hours on end, that's stupid."
"He's under the bed."
"What?" Koschei bends over, trying to find evidence of any body parts under Ushas's bed.
"Not mine," she says, in a voice that would normally be irritated, but today has decided to give up a little. "Yours."
"And he's been there since 05:30?"
"He's probably asleep. I don't think he got any." Koschei makes for the door, stopped by Ushas's voice with one hand on the doorframe. "Don't wake him up yet. He probably needs it."
Koschei pauses. He turns back into Ushas's room. "Probably." He sits on the end of her bed.
Ushas sits next to him. "What was today supposed to be?"
Koschei shrugs. "He never says until the morning." The noise in his head squirms its way out of his subconscious, parading its small pattern. "It might actually be 'hiding under the bed day'."
"Is there some profound aspect of his past relating to the undersides of beds?"
He nods, slowly. "Surprisingly, yes." He springs off Ushas's bed, taking to the hallway. He almost goes back to his room, crawls under the bed, and lies there debating whether or not to wake Theta up.
He lets Theta sleep through breakfast, instead.
"You said today was about Hamlet!" Koschei watches the entire town rush past as Theta refuses to stop Drax's skimmer. All shiny new buildings with a better layout and nicer roads. The fire was, in the long run, quite the improvement. Only problem is the bakery was never rebuilt. Ushas seems to be enjoying this sudden change in course.
"It was going to be, but then I thought 'well if everything is all new and rebuilt and the bakery isn't there, what's the point'?"
"That and we haven't actually gone past Hamlet before," Ushas says, balanced perfectly despite the uncomfortable driving.
"Another thing," Theta adds. "Ninety years and we haven't gone exploring."
"Didn't we go camping a couple times?"
"Technically, we were on a study trip. So it doesn't count."
Koschei does not mention how everything they're doing is technically against the rules, because he has decided not to care. "How far off are we going, then?"
"Far as we can get."
The sparse plants outside Hamlet turn into fields and hills. All the nature out here was regrown after the majority of it was desecrated ages ago for industrial purposes. Theta keeps flying in a straight line, only averting from his most direct route far away when he must.
"Isn't there just a city this way?" Koschei asks after half an hour of conversation based mostly on the past.
"Only if we go further North. We're due Northwest."
Theta flies straight ahead for two hours straight, passing little towns and farms and odd terrain. Koschei has broken into the bag of various foods when he crests another bare hill, revealing blue-green mountains.
"Is that copper?" Ushas asks between bites of a banana.
"You bet," Theta replies, aimed straight for the rocks and the metal. He only stops once the skimmer reaches the giant wall, parked on a ledge overlooking the world below. He takes a sandwich.
"How far did we go, then?" Koschei's legs rest on solid ground for once, pointed down the alarming incline of the mountain.
"Two hundred kilometres? Roughly?"
Ushas sits in between them. "There's a city on the other side of here, part stuck in the mountain." From up here, they can see at least halfway back home. "Used to be a mining settlement."
"We passed four towns kinda like Hamlet," Theta says, looking back up the mountain as if he might be able to see the city through solid. "We never visited any of them."
Ushas nods, scanning the horizon. She doesn't mention how she and Koschei are very much capable of doing so themselves in the following decade, leaving Theta to his wistful finality.
"I've been here ninety years." He turns to Koschei, and Ushas, but Koschei in particular. "You two should. You never how much you could've done before you have no more time to do it." He throws part of the bread crust as hard as he can, watching it fall to the ground. "Time lords included."
I still can't hear it. Theta drops his hands from Koschei's head, but keeps his forehead in place. I have no idea what it is.
I've stopped trying to find a definition and just went with it.
Theta's legs wrap around Koschei's waist, his hands planted on the rough surface they sit on to keep himself from falling over. A sunset is best seen from the roof, but regardless of position, is still a painstakingly slow process to watch. Koschei could hear the angry popping of noise in Theta's head for wanting the suns to speed up already, and scolding himself for wishing time would speed up on his last day. They can't even see it right now.
We'll figure it out one day.
We better.
All the things they should talk about have been brought up and passed over the week of forced nostalgia Theta insisted on, leaving them now with a strange lack of worthwhile conversation. Or maybe it's them so arduously avoiding the elephant in the room everything is simply excluded from Permissible Things.
Theta lets his head slide from its place, falling forward until his torso meets a barrier and his arms wrap around it. How much do you want to bet there isn't even a virus?
Koschei keeps his hands on the ground for both of them. I want to know what constitutes 'virus'. Slight genetic deviation where it's not supposed to be? Actual illness? A single anomaly?
Probably an anomaly they didn't want happening again. Poor kid's going to be strapped to a lab bench for days.
The ironic thing is you are the least likely to have a Loom virus out of everyone on Gallifrey.
That's my favourite part. He adjusts his head once, twice, trying to find some suitable location for it. Can we just go back downstairs?
I thought you were watching the sunset.
At the rate it's going, we'll be up here another half hour.
So…
Theta detaches himself from all other body parts, freeing himself enough to stand. "Come on, you."
Koschei doesn't need to be told twice.
Theta packs in mostly silence, determined to keep his hair an absolute mess and by suggestion will go ask Ushas for a comb. For old times' sake. The silence can only be extended to his voice, crashing and muffled thumps escaping from every object he throws into the suitcase with no care for order, or state of repair. His pulse has been higher than normal since six in the morning, when Koschei turned the lights back on.
Theta pelts a random shirt at his suitcase, standing in the middle of the bedroom to stare down that makeshift table of theirs. The tension in his shoulders fades after a second, whatever he had in mind to angrily pick up next lost. He kicks one of the wooden beams that would not dissolve. "WHOSE FUCKING IDEA WAS A VIRUS?" He whips around, facing Koschei. "WHY'D MY MOM STICK ME IN THE LOOMS TO BEGIN WITH?" Koschei never prided himself for having a superb grasp on psychology, or what to do with people Having An Emotion in general. "HOW COME QUENCES'S ONLY IDEA WAS FOR ME TO FAKE MY OWN GODDAMN—" Koschei almost tackles him, but remains upright, running the risk of being punched in the face by not clamping Theta's arms down.
He stops yelling, even in his head, angry tense muscles relaxing everywhere but his legs. If Koschei had to assign a colour to Theta's mind, it would now be steely grey. "I'm not allowed to cry. I'm technically an adult."
"Adults have emotions, Thete."
The last word is what ultimately confirmed it.