A/N: The second-to-last chapter. And it's the last full one. 29 is less than 2000 words. *sniff* I'm going to miss italicizing things and coming up with mildly witty A/Ns...
Theta has always wondered about K'anpo, which is what makes toasting to a week left of Lungbarrow slightly uncomfortable. But only slightly. They are surprisingly easy to talk to, or it's simply the fact there is influence of alcohol in every encounter of theirs. Theta is open-minded enough to let it be both without question.
"May I attend this wedding of yours?"
Theta sets down his drink. For once, it's different than 'whatever it was the first time'. This one's under 13%. "If you want to, I guess. Weddings aren't terribly exciting."
"And that's not why you're here." Theta didn't really choose to be here in the first place; it was K'anpo's 'intuition' that brought them to Lungbarrow to take Theta halfway up a mountain. They sit under some gnarled old tree, a strange sort of picnic, patches of slush lying about in the suns. The snow will come soon, as it likes to do, but not yet.
"I suppose not."
K'anpo's hair is woven with two yellow flowers, eerily trapped exactly in place in the short brown mess.
"You remember Koschei?"
"Koschei Actual Koschei or You Pretending to be Koschei?"
"Actual Koschei."
They lean back on the old tree. "What about him?"
Theta watches two birds flying overhead, squawking their mockery to the lumbering bodies stuck on the ground. "He killed Quences so I wouldn't have to get married and we could scurry off."
"Is that why you left him?"
Theta nods once. His old body can pull that off. "Somehow I feel responsible."
"Do you think it's because you left or that he did in the first place?"
Theta shakes his head. "Both. I don't know, it just…" He rips some grass out of the ground for some consolation. "I was surprised! And I'm looking back now to when we were kids and seventy-somethings and it makes sense he'd do something like that. Everything he said once he did it made sense. And for the past ninety-something years it was always the two of us, we didn't see the point of not being always together, because we always needed it. So that means either I have helped shape Koschei into someone who would find murder to be a perfectly reasonable option, or I would do the exact same thing if our positions were reversed, or…" He simultaneously wants to punch something and scream. "And it's not like I suddenly despise him or have seen the error of our ways or something I still miss him and I don't GET IT."
K'anpo listens to the whole thing like they're listening to a particularly odd mystery that seemed very simple at the beginning, but all the facts ended up red herrings twenty minutes in. They don't say anything, and Theta takes it as an invitation to keep rambling.
"We were always stuck together because we're both absolutely messed up. And I thought maybe, because we both are, we would be okay. But that's obviously not how it works, and I guess I thought it was for ages, and all the things we thought of doing are just gone now." He becomes conscious of the ravaged ground before him, demanding his old hands to stop ripping up grass. He thought he was done. Maybe he's not. "Because there's no point, is there? To anything! All life is finite, the universe is finite, it's all just going to be black nothing, so why do we BOTHER WITH ANY OF IT?"
His voice echoes a tiny bit. Just a bit. And the sound ends.
Theta leans back on their tree, feeling the repercussions of the shouting on his chest. "I'm done."
K'anpo doesn't say anything still, reaching into their hair. The yellow sarlain slides from their hair like it was never attached. All the roots follow the stem, splitting itself into thousands of tiny hairs from a single stalk. They dig a bit, where Theta tore up the ground, placing the thing in the soft hole. They look at Theta. He fills the hole back in with dirt.
Theta looks for K'anpo to say something, but they refuse, pointing instead to the flower rooted in the ground. It was ripped from its home and travelled from the only place it's ever been to be stuck in the dirt somewhere else, and it's still very much alive. And so, it seems, is Theta. Life stinks, ultimately, but it's so worth it.
Theta chuckles, one of the sounds that changed the most, still observing the brilliant yellows and deep reds. "How old are you, K'anpo?"
They pat Theta on the shoulder. "Much, much older than you."
###
"You look fine." Innocet came back as she promised she would, maestro of all the colours and lights and ceremony and costume. That, and the House. They get to wear white robes, without the headpiece, the only occasion outside of being Lord President. The white doesn't suit him. It never has.
"White's just not my colour." He turns from the mirror placed in his bedroom, catching a glimpse of the stars sitting in their place out his window. He takes Innocet's arm, body faded back to its old self. Glospin has really outdone himself.
Innocet moves her arm to grasp Theta's hand, swinging it slightly like they did when they were young. Today is his last march through the halls of his House, a kind of nostalgia very much separated from his last week at the Academy. Nobody talks of Quences's inevitable absence on the day of his orchestration, funeral come and gone months ago. That cushion gave Theta enough time to study for once, day in and day out, before requesting the exam again. He could have done better if he tried, but there's something to be said for passing with a 51%.
Innocet holds his hand until they are out in the arches of lights, coloured impressive gold and lilac. "You did amazing with the place," Theta tells her, resisting the urge to plunk down in the grass and gawk at the lights.
"They're traditionally supposed to be genetically modified lightning bugs producing a particular colour."
"What are these?"
She is forced to let go of his hand when she sees the black-robed cousin of Patience's house. "Electricity. The bugs always die by the end of the night."
"Thank you," he says, before she walks off their cleared area and into the crowd, before someone is always occupying his time and he won't get her alone. "For everything."
"My pleasure, Theta Sigma."
The man in black robes stands behind Theta, slate in hand carrying all the senseless legal words they need to speak for it all to be official. "Sixty seconds to back out," the man hisses. Theta gives him an odd look. "Only joking, of course."
Theta doesn't find it very funny. He can see Patience from across their fabricated aisle, wearing the same robes he does, embroidery highlighted in lilac rather than his gold. They don't mean anything, the colours. They probably did, once upon a time. Someone starts humming. She doesn't move yet. Someone joins in a duet, and then three-part harmony erupts with voices added on in quick succession, and she walks.
It's only when she does, getting larger and larger in his field of vision, that he understands how badly he wants to run away. The absence of Quences has paled before the smallest of ventures to Sol III and the Medusa Cascade and all the things they did. The jar of pills he left behind has found a place in his mental TARDIS, an unbreakable, inexorable homage to an entire life barely dented. It taunts him, all the adventures never had contained so well in that one container, and it may never leave his head.
Patience stands directly in front of him, now. And it's now he understands how straightforward it must have been to go ahead and kill somebody to stop her standing in front of him.
###
Patience has an entourage of cousins fawning after her, getting their last goodbyes and conversations and secrets and laughs. Theta has Innocet, who has a great number of people, and he has Owis. Maybe if more people talked to Owis, he would stop trying to pursue any affection of Glospin's he could muster, addicted to the mind he always had with him that was so brutally lost.
Theta stands alone in their specially decorated hall within the Lungbarrow TARDIS, between gold and lilac balloons and an elegant painting displaying all the brilliant colours of a sunset on water. The music Innocet brought together for the occasion is incredibly diverse, samples taken from all over the universe where she could easily find something worth listening to. She asked if he had any preferences. He told her 'everything'.
The TARDIS translates it all in their heads, meaning manipulated melodically to suit translation and the rhyme scheme, if there is one. The cousins from Lungbarrow ask for dances from the cousins of Brightshore, all stepping the right way and holding the right distance. It's all so painfully traditional. Theta is consoled in the composition methods of Alpha Centauri IV.
"May I have this dance, sir?" A young red-haired boy steps up to him with no shame, the style of his clothes a bit different than his cousins. He is uncomfortably skinny. Why he is asking an old man to dance escapes Theta. "All in good favour, of course."
"I'm not really a dancer," Theta replies, gesturing to his entire self. "This old thing acts up sometimes."
"Nothing a painkiller can't fix?" The boy looks so young - barely an adolescent, yet tall enough - but so confident about it, Theta has a hard time trying to refuse. Positive inter-House relations, yadah yadah. The song from Alpha Centauri IV ends. He takes the boy's hand, which is a bit weird.
"Oh, alright then."
The boy smiles. Theta is not in the mood to try and place what's so familiar about him. Bright red hair? Greenish eyes? Forty-year-old? Alarmingly skinny? Theta puts his hand somewhere appropriate anyways. "I heard somewhere your favourite planet's Sol III, and I know a song from there, so I asked Innocet to play it just now."
They step into the group of people dancing, under brighter yellow lights and only hints of lilac. And now the song is familiar, too. Is everything here purely composed of rude awakenings and uncanny familiarity? Everyone around him has shifted, slowing down, some darking to stand closer to their partner in tight configurations. It's this song.
And it's that boy. He knows Theta knows. The sly smile has not changed.
"Your bit's not until the end."
"You're Torvic."
He looks down at himself. "I'm not too sure why that one happened, but it worked."
"How long has it been?"
He considers this, flawlessly starting to dance as the music suggests. Nobody questions the lyrical content of the song, some discussing its relevance to marriage on its planet or something else miles away from a shepherd playing music for the king he will one day replace. "Ten years. Ha! Another ten."
"It's been five months here. So you're older than me."
"I know." The song should be too bleak to have a chorus entirely composed of the word 'hallelujah'. But somehow, it's not. "How funny we must look."
Theta doesn't say it. His brain is erupting with things to say, confessions better left unspoken. He would kiss him, maybe, briefly, in the shadows somewhere, if it would not feel so foreign.
"You can if you like. I'll shut my eyes."
"How is it you can still hear me?"
Koschei smirks. That one has changed. "You're brain hasn't changed."
Theta nods, looking around the room. Nobody's watching them. They don't matter.
Theta kisses him, he who is shorter than the groom, for one second, still dancing properly, feeling only half weird on his mouth. It's different.
"You're line's next."
He doesn't know if it's for the tired body of scratchy vocal chords or absurdity of plants, but he lets the words pass him by as it tells him point-blank it all went wrong. Theta pulls the foreign body closer to him, brain commanding him to stop for so many reasons. "I'm afraid I'm stuck here, now."
"You didn't opt out."
It's almost over. "No. It'll do me some good, learning how to be an adult adult in a House with no residents trying to kill me. Attempting some proper independence. Actual responsibility."
"Hmm." The song ends, and in all good favour they bow to each other, departing from the floor. "I became a Russian myth on Sol III in this body. Koschei the Deathless, they call me."
"You said it was only ten years."
They reach the spot Theta was standing by himself, and he thinks Koschei might stay a bit longer. "I have a time machine," he says in a deadpan.
"How have they not caught you here yet?"
"Tradition." He downs a glass of punch in five seconds. "You can't arrest someone attending a wedding with no malicious intent, as evidenced by the bride and groom." He hands Theta the empty cup. "See you around, then."
"Don't get into too much trouble."
And just like that, he's gone.