A/N: IT'S THE HOME STRETCH, I don't know how I feel about this

Theta looks at his teeth in the mirror, peeling back his lips and cheeks to see all the way to the gums, all the way down the sides. They're the only things he's been particularly caring about. He hates the feeling of having grime built up on the surface of his teeth, whether or not it's there. It's a good kind of distracting, deliberating what shade to the HTML code his teeth are, mentally taking note and checking on his slate later.

Offline slate, that is, shiny and new but with no uplink capabilities to the Matrix, and therefore no way to communicate with anyone else. Centuries ago, people could still send letters and things through the mail, but that was phased out in favour of digital words and 3D fax machines. So he's almost entirely trapped at Lungbarrow for the next ten years. And who knows how many after that with a wife.

He only stands in the bathroom now because it's the one place worth standing, dim lights and mirrors and too much traffic of cousins. Practice in changing mood in an instant.

It's a waste of time, standing in front of a cold mirror, bare toes curling in on themselves to keep warm. But it's something besides lying awake in bed, thinking over what he's missing or the sums he has started memorising to eliminate everything else. He wonders now if the House has died and only left its inhabitable carcass behind, the number of machines and appliances and shortcuts that have been put in making it more cyborg than whatever a House is.

His brain eventually leads him away from teeth to biology and immediately back to sums again, the pictures of days passed still too vivid and too sad. And it's only been three months. #FEFFD4.

Their ghosts walk along the halls with him, his own sorry memories projected into the dark without enough to distract him, fatigue itching away. The two best states of being are complete overstimulation and the deepest corners of sleep, but everywhere in between happens much more than both of them combined.

There's Koschei at twelve years old, walking next to him, scared of the dark and tentatively grabbing onto his arm as Theta grabs on back. There's Ushas at thirty, grumbling something about yesterday's test being too easy and the quality of Prydon education. Drax lumbers behind, trying to flirt with Mortimus and failing terribly, but Mortimus plays along all the same, rubbing paint of glue off his hands. Even Jelpax saunters ahead of them, white braid falling halfway down their back in the messy sort it was always in.

He lets their voices overlay each other to muddle into something incoherent, but Theta puts the words there so he knows exactly how they all sound, exactly when they sounded, and what Theta really said in return.

He doesn't say anything because he's not properly hallucinating, only remembering vividly in a state of grief he didn't think he would feel. They're all going to leave, go other ways eventually, every student is going to feel the momentary loss of the idle companionship of education. But it'll have an end, it'll be complete, they won't be leaving people behind. They'll be all walking one and the same.

Theta has allowed himself five months to process every feeling of jealousy and longing for the hallways and classes, five whole months to put things in mental airlocked canisters and file them away to rot and never have to be pulled out again.

He lets himself lie awake watching people that aren't there for one month, and the month is coming to an end, yet he has no intention of stopping them. Innocet would tell him to stop. To think of something else, all with good intentions. Owis doesn't talk to him much. He gets more conversation out of an empty mental TARDIS than he does another physical being in his bedroom.

Then again, he's only ever been used to two specific people close enough to kill him in his sleep.

He wonders if he should pull up a mental Vansell to scare them all away, fading into the walls and out the door and out the windows. They can fly. They're only thoughts.

He can't bring himself to do that, just yet.

###

Dear Koschei,

I'm not sure how Quences even managed it in the first place, but what do you know? I'm finally dead. He put a lot of thought into this, apparently. I think he knew the inspector. Meanwhile, all the unchaptered cousins got checked, and turned out shockingly perfectly fine. It took a bit to get Owis settled down, probably because Glospin was trying to freak him out. As usual.

Right so I'm dead, which means I really can't access the Matrix without somebody asking for authentication and "Koschei" is already a registered citizen and any name I make up doesn't have a Loom record. Hence, I have purchased the cheapest paper I can find and have taken up letter-writing as communication. I hope my writing is actually legible. Sorry about that.

While it would probably be amusing, don't arrange a funeral with all my remaining friends and pretend I'm actually dead. If you are, invite me. I'd love to see it. It would probably be more fun than teaching myself practically everything, of which I am currently procrastinating. He lets me go into town and pick up "curriculum-based equipment" nowadays. I go by Koschei, because I am supposed to be dead and nobody knows who you are. I honestly wish I had a tutor, as my self-motivation is hovering around 0/10 at the moment. I haven't actually learnt anything besides cosmic geography. Sort of.

I'm pretending to not miss you lot, like I'm on some sort of extended break between Junior qualifications (do not write that word down, holy shit) and the next ten years. Decade. One tenth of my education. It doesn't sound like a whole lot, but like I'm getting married in twelve years and then how long am I stuck?

Get me out of here.

Closing Salutation,

Theta Sigma.

###

Dear Koschei,

I was going to wait until you replied to the last letter, but it dawned on me you might not be able to even send letters from the Academy, and chances are you didn't receive it in the first place. There are a hundred better methods for transporting information across large distances, so why would anyone maintain a mail system? Even if there is sort of one? I could not find a purely logical purpose for writing another one without a reply, other than procrastinating and keeping my psychology more or less in check.

Remember the time we were playing War Games with Magnus in our second year, then we got Ushas to join, we got caught by Borusa, and I started singing? Tell her that story. I don't think I did. But I remember telling you that story, and it was fairly early on and you were very confused. Mostly because I could not describe the origin of the song.

These letters don't sound very much like letters in books, I realise. Yes I read books. I don't do my homework but i read books... According to them these things should all have some declaration of love and a paragraph on how much I miss you, which I find redundant and a waste of paper. Which is hard to get, mind you.

(I'm also partially suspicious someone in the practically nonexistent mailing business is reading every one of these and it would be rather unsightly.)

I must keep these at a page to prevent myself from rambling.

Declaration of love, I really fucking miss you,

Theta Sigma.

###

Usually at 03:00 when Koschei couldn't sleep, he'd wake up Theta and bug him until he was verbally caged into submission, or in another shape or form. After staring at a wall that used to be a gaping hole for half an hour, he decided to see what venturing into the kitchens at this hour would produce, be it something other than people already awake and looking for breakfast. Which he doubted. Usually he wasn't particularly hungry after just waking up to begin with, but with a lack of anything else to do and a time lapse of a year and a half since actually seeing Theta in the flesh, well. He might as well be. Maybe they have coffee.

The kitchens were actually empty, although not unlocked, much to a number of students' satisfaction. Four quarters, rules of said four differentiating in everything from curfew to the kitchen. Second quadrant you got quite a talking to for being out of bed at this hour, but here all the doors are always unlocked, provided you don't turn anyone's head in the process. Apparently Junior Time Lords are responsible enough not to make noise.

Eh.

Some responsible group of people, whom in another life he would aspire to be, already have a number of hot drinks set out on a table next to where they all study in a manner quite unlike what he used to do with Ushas and everyone else. All numbers and diagrams and order and whispers and being all studious, were it like an actual study group and not a bunch of bored smart kids sitting around each other for the good company.

"You mind if I drink this?" he asked one of them who merely waved him along, resulting in Koschei now sitting on a staircase with a hot mug in his hands and a wrapped wrist that got burned with clumsy hot water. A bit of pink extends out either side, but he's covered it with a sleeve as anyone would in the middle of the night with snow falling outside. Snow at the Academy. Theta would love it.

His drink is still too hot but he makes a point to nobody of sipping it, daring blank space to tell him off for being careless, or not paying attention, or just getting noticed and caringly instructed to wait for it to cool off, you idiot or you'll burn your tongue for two days and not be able to taste anything. He used to mix sugar in his coffee, but decided against it, what with a burned hand holding in a number of curses directed at whoever decided it would be a good idea to not watch where they're going in the middle of an unsupervised corner of cafeteria.

He finishes his coffee in what could be ten minutes or two, only knowing it never did cool down to a palatable temperature and burned the entirety of his mouth. It will not taste vibrantly for three days. He knows he is found a long time later, eyes glued onto soft specks of white floating down through the dark. There is no glare on the window because there isn't enough light to throw it off, giving view to miles and miles of empty sky, stars replaced with frozen water that goes down, down down…

Ushas finds him eventually, sitting beside him in the middle of the staircase. He doesn't know quite how she managed it, if she installed a GPS system into his head along with Theta's decades ago, or if she was looking specifically. You can leave traces of a mental imprint on space and time, but none that Ushas would be able to find. He can only tell it's her by the way she clears her throat, the impatient you know I'm right here mixed with the equally as metaphysical I wonder. He thinks he makes things up in his head to give them labels and sort them out even if they don't make sense. In fact, he knows they don't make sense.

He feels her pry the mug from his hands, peeling back fingers that snap into place on air, absent of the subdued metal that makes an ever so soft clink as it is set down on the marble-wooden stairs beside him. Ushas knows how the two mix. Koschei doesn't. She sits right beside him without making a sarcastic comment or ordering him around, or informing him of the time and what classes he has.

The tapping starts in his fingers again without anything to hold them still, feeling flesh press against flesh and feel the bone underneath, making them a little bit numb but not all the way. Maybe they go more red. He doesn't know; he's not looking.

"It's a Bad Day." He says it after an unknown length of time he romanticises as an hour that could really have only been four minutes. The tapping still goes on, making his speech follow some sort of pattern in his head that sounds easy to break but isn't even close to easy. It regulates everything: breathing, speaking, dancing. Blood circulation.

"I can tell," is all she replies with, catching him off-guard with a voice that isn't snark or timid or thoroughly unamused with everyone around her and wishing to go back to science. Dissecting something has always taken priority over other Time Lords, in her time. It doesn't startle him enough to take his eyes off the window, and he might be falling asleep but nothing's there enough in his head to tell him definitively so. He could be dreaming all the snow, Ushas, tapping. He doesn't dream tapping, it can't make its way into dreams now. He's sure they're there anyways and he's only dreaming not having them there.

"Its only four in the morning." He sort of sings, voice higher up than it usually is on purpose but at the same time unintentionally. Koschei grins softly at the idea he's going insane. All for unjustified reasons he can't see past and only knows that they're unjustified because he has Theta to compare to.

Ushas's head is all of a sudden on his bony shoulder, making him lean into the railing very slightly to his side, head making contact with the wood and marble hybrid he doesn't understand and is probably a hoax or some very powerful co-existence on two planes of time and space that merge into this one with varying solidity depending on what works. Her hair gets kind of near his mouth, near his face, falling out of the ponytail it's usually pulled up into, Koschei always wondering why she doesn't just cut it all off. To annoy herself, maybe. To make it look like she actually has less hair, maybe. Because she doesn't want to, like everything else, probably. "It's 05:45."

He raises his eyebrows, the effort his muscles are using suddenly very much present in his conscious mind. Wow. Movement. It's been a while. "I've been out of bed almost three hours." He still looks out the window, the length of time before him making it impossible not to look anymore. His brain has been longing off and on to see something else, to be torn off the monotony of snowflakes falling from the sky and sticking to a frozen ground he can't see below. They almost hurt now, he will see the image of snow every time he closes his eyes for the rest of his life, he will dream snow, he cannot escape the snow now, even if he burns up in flame he will not be able to rid himself of the constant cold he's away from, inside, warm, with an empty mug of coffee that burnt his entire mouth and left it in pain for only a short amount of time.

"You need to talk to somebody," she tells him, the momentary I have no intention but sitting here dropping in favour of her constant need for paying her dues to the mental sanity of people so they don't get in the way of her science.

"Like a therapist?"

"You didn't really see her much last time."

"Hmm." He thinks for the thousandth time that every snowflake looks a bit different than the last one, and it will never be witnessed again and melted into a monochromatic buildup of oxygen and hydrogen that will all evaporate again into almost nothing. It's both depressing and wonderful at the same time. "I thought she was a 'he'."

"You're only proving my point."

His fingertips have really started going numb from repeated impact, but the muscles keep moving as if they were stuck in a constant cycle like the snowflakes are falling. They won't fall up. Won't stop falling altogether, either. "I don't need therapy. Nothing's happened."

"A lot of things have happened." She lifts her head again, rattling the mug slightly but he can't see why or where. "Do you need a list?"

"But you need an imminent reason to go in for therapy. Time Lords can manage themselves."

"Every species thinks they can manage themselves."

"Theta's Sol III people can't. They're all too panicked because everyone's rotting all around them, so they try to make themselves the best so people remember them in statues and things."

"Every species in the universe tries to make themselves the best." She puts a hand on his shoulder quite tentatively, given the way she had her head on his shoulder. Like there's some breach of contact only noticeable when just barely past the line, but not so far out the thought is already strange.

"We already call ourselves the best. We don't need help."

"You have been staring at a window for two and a half hours."

The statement itself makes him sound like a hopeless child with nothing to live for, or some dying old cripple that can't do anything about it. The snow keeps falling and he can't take his eyes off it. He can feel the railing digging into his skull, feels the stairs underneath him that have been uncomfortable so long he doesn't notice, feel some cold breeze as Ushas moves, but it's not cold. Only a breeze. "You can file that and they'll take you."

"I can't file a window."

"I can file your own symptoms."

He shrugs. "Of what? We were engineered, right? All the kinks worked out in Looms?"

"That's factually incorrect. You've got as much of a mental capacity as Theta." She starts walking down the steps just a few in front of him, standing and walking to block his view of the window. It is all being taken up by robes she put on at this hour, still caring so much but not enough to put her hair down for a reason he doesn't quite understand yet. He doesn't understand much. In the scope of all time and space, he knows just about nothing. He can't see the snow anymore, and he has to drag his eyes up to Ushas's face in the lighter-now dark. She looks as tired as he does. "If you don't put your name in, I have to."

"Isn't it anonymousssss?" he drags out the the word as she kneels in front of him, assuming the role of responsible older sibling like she took to more with Theta gone than before. The logical course of action would have it reversed because she's younger, but not by much.

"How can it be anonymous if you need to be referred?"

He shrugs his shoulders and takes the hands she holds out for him to grab onto, gently pulling him up from the sitting position and almost making him fall over. His backside is half-asleep, his fingers are tingling, and his legs were bent like that so long there are slight pins and needles in his feet. They are immediately taken over again with a binary cardiovascular system. He knows everything about him looks a mess and he should shower, what with the hours still left in the mornings he used to sleep all the way through like a normal sentient being with too much time on his hands.

"Go get washed." She tells him back in the instructing voice supposed to help him through education but not life as a whole, her resilience in having him as mentally well as possible something rather odd he again doesn't understand. A lot of things are odd in the world. Only took having only two eyes to see it through for him to grasp that fact.

"I used to think I was indestructible," he thinks aloud, being turned around to march to the dormitories again.

"You certainly did."

###

Theta has learnt to pretend to look like he knows what he's doing, to look at other people like they are worth looking at but not intimidating as they have developed to be, minding his own business to the extent sociological practicality allows him to be. He has been alloted a bit of money from the House itself, a sort of allowance in the place of having an actual job. It's a problem when you're dead and all. He briefly remembers his fiancée having a job on the weekends outside her Academy, wondering how on Gallifrey she manages both at the same time.

"What'll it be, then?" A rather well-dressed bartender raises one eyebrow across the table at him, gender gloriously irrelevant, cleaning of glasses perfectly executed without the need for eyes. Theta picked the location for its cleanliness and lack of complete discord, and clean it certainly is. He still feels too young but knows full well he isn't, and nobody can tell. If anything, the bartender across from him looks younger. "You awake?"

Theta shakes his head to jolt himself out of a degrading mental tangent. "Something light, I guess."

"Anything in particular?" The glass glaringly reminding him of a measuring flask is placed in front of him, bartender putting both forearms behind it.

Theta shakes his head. "Surprise me?" The bartender raises an eyebrow. Theta always hurt himself trying. "But less than 13%."

"Haven't seen you around here before." Someone else steps up to the counter, and for a wild second he thinks it's Innocet. He did this all the time with Koschei and Drax and Mort and— "Do you always wait five seconds to respond to things?"

"No, I'm just—"

"Preoccupied." They immediately turn around with a full glass, and Theta wonders how they did it so fast. "I know the symptoms."

Theta could sit in a corner and not say anything as he intended, but some sense of boredom keeps him going in a conversation he didn't sign up for. "Symptoms of what, may I ask?"

They seem to pull a checklist out of their head. "Easy. Unchaptered, bad grades, some complication in a romantic situation, you're not supposed to be here but have consumed alcohol before and know it works."

"Were you on the forensics division at some point?"

"So you don't always take five seconds to talk. Don't think you have many people to talk to."

"Seriously."

They shake their head, picking up a refill request without looking or speaking or acknowledging its existence in any way aside from having it in their hand. "I've had all kinds in here. And I've worked here a long time."

"Is it a fulfilling job?" In all honesty, there is a part of him that misses the small talk.

They smirk. "It's intriguing. I get to see a lot of weird people. Makes me feel fulfilled in my own endeavours."

He always thought alcohol tasted weird and sour, the after-effect one of the many delicacies of existence. Liquid that causes mental and physical alterations that are not natural, yet not considered poison or a toxic substance. "Does that make me one of the weird people?"

"I'd say you were a Prydon if I didn't know any better." Theta nearly chokes on whatever drink he was served that is faithfully above 13%.

"I'd say you're Patrex, but the Patrexes don't serve in bars."

"A fair point." They smirk at the amount of ruptured breathing still going on, correct in their assumptions. "I've only met five Prydonians out here. You're interesting." They check the time on the back of the room, shrugging. "I'm off in five. You're inherently lonely and have a tragic romantic past I want to hear about."

Theta snorts. "Can't say I'm looking forward to it."

"Definitely Prydonian."

He swallows before trying to respond. "I'm technically unchaptered."

"And technically not lonely."

Theta cannot contradict what they said, and cannot bother to tell himself to run away and hide in a closet while he still can. He's tired of hiding in closets. In bedrooms. In Houses. In his head. "You'll need to give me your name first."

They jump onto the counter and swing their legs over as is obviously practised on many occasions, giving Theta a hand to shake. "Call me K'anpo."

###

Your name's on the envelope I'm not putting it in here,

Look at me, wasting paper. It seems you have no paper at all to reply to these with. You had all summer, nitwit. I'll pretend it's just a very, very slow mail system.

Books have also outlined I need some groundbreaking quotes in these things to pass as a letter of an incarcerated soul writing to his lover. So instead of studying for my Gallifreyan Politics exam (WHICH I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR), I wracked my brain for a creative quote I'm going to pretend I made up myself. "The opposite of love is not hate, but complete and total indifference." Slightly redundant at the end, but I like it. Well, philosophically it therefore means Daleks could love the universe a lot less than they already do. And really if you honestly don't love someone, it would be kinder to be completely indifferent instead of torturing killing them. Although, I am conditioned to view love as the opposite of hate and not an idea separate of the quote's presented false dichotomy, so my philosophy is skewed. As usual. (The Daleks could still calm down a little and it wouldn't hurt.)

I feel like I should make these more sentimental than I am. Or maybe you like them all choppy and slightly impersonal? I would know if you wrote me back.

I actually made a friend the other day (sort of. It's a long story), which I find fairly impressive for a deceased individual. They're a barperson who served me a higher concentration of alcohol than I requested, then wanted to hear my "tragic backstory". They still think my name's Koschei. They probably always will. Only problem is Quences somehow found out I had an Actual Conversation with Another Person, and in some obsession for my own personal safety told me to "not" and talk with the cousins if I must. Tried that once at breakfast, they mostly haven't let go of the previous breakfast, which is irritating.

Philosophically yours,

Theta Sigma