A/N: The final chapter! You're all finally rid of me!
Theta hears that old whooshing again at the cusp of twilight, evening's last thoughts sinking below the horizon to the dark can have a turn. Patience could always get Arkytior to bed at exactly this time, but the skill has completely escaped Theta in her professional absence. The baby hasn't worked out how to walk yet, but she most certainly would if the capability graced her path. Theta is, at the moment, consoled in the fact he only has to keep her on one knee.
He loves reading to her the most, one of the many activities that blow the changing and crying and spitting and feeding and diapers out of the water. The brilliant little thing picks out different shapes as words already, matching pictures to black lines and pointing to the moon outside ecstatically. Theta can see little traits of his on her body and in her brain, the beautiful blend of genes nature intended from the start.
It's been ten years, yet again, and Theta has enjoyed life more than he thought he would. The degree in temporal engineering, the wife he has come to know as a good friend, the little package of flesh and brain he has become fiercely attached to. Arkytior. In all his adolescent years, he expected the whooshing interrupting an incredibly basic story about a rovie might be exhilarating, a welcome sound, but in all truth it scares him. Terribly. Because he has to answer it.
"I wonder who's out the door?" he asks his daughter in a cheerful voice, but not one people tend to speak to babies with. Arkytior's so damn smart, she'll probably understand language either way. Theta swoops her off his knee, earning a delicate giggle, placing her in the crook of his arm. He leaves all the lights on, the door unlocked for the moment.
He'll be coming back.
A small wind blows the smell of rain into the atmosphere, light grey clouds above waiting for their turn to pour from the heavens. A single oak tree stands in their yard, perfectly centred in the left half of their allotted grass. They live almost at the edge of the city, a place small enough to not require a glass dome and purely enormous buildings. He likes it.
"How long has it been?" Koschei asks, standing in the doorframe of his beloved TARDIS. He already knows the answer.
"Ten years." Arkytoir makes a noise, practically forcing Theta to express some kind of a smile. He stands exactly across from Koschei, two metres from the ship. Arkytior wants to say hello. Theta doesn't let her. "You?"
"A week. See? We're even again."
"So it's been just over a week since Russia?"
Koschei nods. "I might pop back just to scare 'em all again. They're fun."
Theta nods, not needing to deliberate the options that will be proposed to him. He has learnt to think things through in advance.
"Do you feel stuck?"
He sighs. "In a way. But a good way. I have a kid, a good friend to help me look after her, a degree, job experience."
"That sounds unbelievably boring. Oh, the places I've been."
Theta swallows the part of his mind still slave to a century of wanderlust. "I've got a couple minutes."
Koschei grins, the smiles of old lost to time. And Russia. "Oh, here and there. The beginning, more or less. Around Andromeda - including Junk, Museum of the Last Ones again, Terileptus, Skaro, the Pillars of Creation, Zebadee, Spekra," he pauses, "Lethe. Turns out I have killed two people." Koschei looks at Arkytior, and she looks back, cheerful as ever, safe in her father's arms with a stranger about. "She can come, too."
"I'm not coming."
"Because Gallifrey is so much nicer than every other point in space and time. With its babysitting and jobs and one plain old dimension of time. What happened to you?"
Theta hugs Arkytior closer to himself, feeling her tiny, fragile ribs against his chest. "I owe it to her. She can't grow up like that."
"She'd be the daughter of the universe itself."
"She's an infant, Koschei." He hasn't said that name in over a decade. The last time he did, it was smothered in anger and shouting and irreparable arguing. He says it again, without any hint of any of that, like he used to. "Koschei."
"I love you, you know. I'm doing this for you. It wasn't exactly fun."
He doesn't want to know who it was this time. Koschei disappears into the tree, door still open. "Glad to know it wasn't fun." Theta covers Arkytior's eyes. His baby will not be exposed to death before she can talk. Koschei reappears with a body dragged along the floor, his own stature too small to lift all the weight.
"I don't like killing, Thete. But it was necessary." Koschei sets the body outside his ship, Glospinninymortheras seeing no more. "Once I leave, he'll be released from the temporal lock on his body. So it will seem he just died now, and nobody else is home."
Theta takes his eyes off the cousin he once hated, death lifting him of the need for such emotions. "Why was this necessary?"
Koschei returns for a moment to his old self, the one who would follow him into the shower out of inbred paranoia. "If you don't run now, just take a little more time perhaps, you'll get a better job and wait for your kid go through all of school and wait for grandkids and wait for them to grow up and suddenly it's been two regenerations and your job is too good and your wife is the most important thing and you're too attached to the little house at the edge of town to leave, and you will die here."
Theta hugs Arkytior a little closer, watching his entire existence of millennia flow through Koschei's fingers like sand.
"You still have the key to that little TARDIS repair shop downtown." Of course he's been watching. "If you won't run off with me, you better run by yourself."
Theta knows exactly where the key is. He presses two lips together, and he should be so very, very mad. "You said it turns out you have killed two people."
He nods. "Just the two."
There is some part of Theta that feels like he's always known. It suits him.
"She calls me Grandfather, around here. People tend not to notice, since it doesn't mean much anymore, thanks to the Looms." He bounces Arkytior up and down a couple times, in the way she always finds reason to giggle at. "It should be just Father, really, but grandfathers are so much more fun." He takes a long breath. "I'm afraid her mother won't be around to say otherwise."
Koschei's smile has returned, slowly.
"There you are."
The part of him that could not care less about the house at the edge of town is excited in a way he hasn't let it be in a long time.
"Now get going already. Or I might kill you for making me a felon."
A/N: The End
*slumps back in chair*
finally