Chapter Text
“Any particular reason?”
“Inspiring scenery.”
For all the weeks Theta has pretended to be quite alright thank you, Koschei has barely managed to restrain himself from tying him up and snarling at anybody who came bearing distasteful humour or exams. Theta probably heard most of the internal debate it took for Koschei to convince himself the pros of inspiring scenery outweigh the harrowing proximity of another edge to tumble off.
“You worry too much.”
For all the pride he puts in how well he picked up telepathy, Koschei is apparently not very good at keeping things in his head. "I don't worry enough."
Theta lies down on the rough surface discoloured by the sun, melancholy drumming of his fingers settled by his hips. "They are going to kill me, though."
Koschei tries to seal off his thoughts before they come, but Theta doesn't let on how much he knows. He lies down next to him, fingers running along the cuff of Theta's sweater before finding his hand. "Not if you don't let them."
"If only all murder victims had your brilliant insight, Koschei." Spiteful as it sounds, his fingers still latch on like a vice.
"I'm serious! Tell Quences they've been threatening your life and he's obliged to get involved with it."
Theta hums in indifference. "I don't think he cares. If anything, he'd be on Glospin's side."
"Get Innocet, then!"
"Like that'll work."
"Quences is required to know where she is! Get in contact with her!"
Theta struggles to find a loophole that is less than 95% snark. "Quences won't tell me."
"Give him a chance."
"Koschei—" Theta unwraps his hand, propping his body on one side to look down on Koschei. "This guy arranges marriages for diplomacy and simulates burn wounds as regular punishment, and you think I can just walk into his room and ask where my old roommate is because I feel like my cousins are out to get me?"
"YES!"
"So why aren't you out to kill me? I'd love to know!"
"You have asked me this fourteen times."
"And you haven't answered directly on any of those occasions."
"I—" he's right. Of course he's right. The steely eyes pin him down, demanding sacrifice to their temple. "I don't know."
"Of course."
"But hear me out. I should, at the most basic level. You're a supposed threat to the species, currently weak and more trouble then you're worth to keep around, and above that you violate a basically religious order. But I could not care less because you're so goddamn important." Koschei rips back one sleeve, letting the atmosphere kiss his skin better. "Four. Only four. There could be something like forty-eight by now. And you sat through Vansell badgering you for days. And got Drax to pass his exams five years running. And fixed the bloody matrix algorithm in your own House's TARDIS because you were bored. And while neither of us know exactly what happened, I don't think I would have lived past age eight without you showing up, then cuddling me to sleep on two occasions after I hallucinated literally Death incarnate."
"Most of that sounded exclusively about you."
"Yeah. Because the years of my life you were not involved in are an infinitesimal fraction of my existence."
"It's actually—"
"YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO DIE." Koschei sits up, grabbing Theta by the sweater front and cursing anyone who might have heard that. "NOT NOW, NOT THEN, NOT AT YOUR HOUSE, NOT EVER, ALRIGHT?"
Koschei startled him. His forehead lightly tingles from the impact of pulling Theta upright so fast, he is probably breathing much too aggressively into Theta's face, and he can feel individual fingertips through the fabric in his fists.
"Everyone—"
"Not you."
"Koschei—"
"Nope." He takes two shaky breaths that don't help in the calming down. "One day we're going to visit all of them."
He counts four blinks atop the saccade of his eyes.
"I’m more keen on inhabited planets."
He doesn't quite understand it yet, or how it really stimulates the right hormones, or why he feels a need for it only now he's experienced it, but he kisses Theta. Hard, he might describe it, but the process does not lend well to mental clarity of suh things. It's still strangely soft. And wet. And awkwardly positioned, maybe a bit too forward, and introspectively too noisy. But still good.
###
There are only two knocks on Koschei's door, which could mean anything. Wrong room? Offended cousin? Bargaining cousin? Housekeeper?
Marshmallows?
They walk in immediately after doing so, but refrain from speaking. Is there a social cue he is unaware of now?
"You got the right room?"
"Koschei, right?"
Koschei nods, trying very hard not to constantly glance at the raised brown patch on their long pale neck.
"There's a kid here, friend of Distvyk, and they've been talking for a while, but you know, this kid has been asking questions about you, and it's been like fifteen minutes, and like, I was nominated to tell you so..."
"What does this 'kid' look like? In brief."
"Well he — I mean, probably he — he's got short brown hair, sorta mostly white skin, you know? He's pretty short in general, he kinda struts like he's pretending not to be, right, and like—"
"Does he go by 'Vansell'?"
"Yeah, Vansell!"
Koschei pushes air through his lips like a horse. "Shit."
"Well what's wrong with Vansell?"
"Absolutely nothing at all." Koschei pushes past the nominated cousin he doesn't know and trumps down the stairs.
"Does he act strangely or have some other odd behaviour in the mornings, typically?"
"Well there was this one time — years and years ago — he showed up at the House soaking wet through the forest. Why, does he act up in the mornings or something?"
Koschei has reached a high enough status to effectively part a gaggle of smaller cousins by footfall alone. Vansell is seated dead centre in a worn out couch, ever so sympathetic, accompanied by a pod of oblivious others.
"What the hell are you doing in my House?"
Vansell stretches out two arms of plastic warmth. "Koschei, dear friend."
The pod of others greet him with eyes caught red-handed. Koschei stops short of them. "We aren't friends my any stretch of the imagination."
Vansell pretends to look hurt. He is very good at pretending. "You've been acting a little off lately, and I'm concerned for you. I was visiting my friend Distvyk and thought I might ask to see if anyone here might know." The smile on his face is about as welcoming as a shark that can climb trees.
"I have not been 'acting off', thanks, and it would take an idiot to believe you're being at all genuine. You are literally my least favourite person."
"Koschei, he's really only trying to help," Marshmallows confides, seconded by the faint nods of their small group. "I don't think he would have needed to go this far if you confided a bit more in him."
"Oh, Rassilon. Nobody tell him anything. At all."
"Don't be so afraid, Koschei. They've already helped a great deal."
###
Theta had taken six and a half steps away from his door, the first time he'd opened it since breakfast, when an enormous scream grabbed him firmly by the ankle and turned him right around. He left Owis in there alone, a decision constantly fraught with a slight paranoia and visions of potential future timelines of his bedroom completely thrashed. While everyone has been silently encouraging him to move for once, logical bit of his brain he’s ignoring telling him to maybe talk to Another Being, it seems the universe has other plans.
Owis is sitting on the ground, screaming and inhaling violently every two seconds as shrilly as his vocal cords will allow, cradling a hand against his chest. Fragments of glass surround him, any unsecured item in the room ruthlessly blown about by the gaping window. He didn't hear it break, which means...
"GET AWAY FROM ME." Owis shrieks at the sight of Theta coming closer, scrambling to his knees as blood soaks the front of his shirt a darker black. Two of his fingertips have disappeared. Definitely.
"What's the matter with you?" Theta tears the still-under-construction sonic molecular dissociation device thing from Owis’s other hand, tossing the useless apparatus on his bed. Koschei’s wonderful idea to keep Theta occupied at all hours, final use completely unknown. This is why it only looks done.
Owis continues screaming like he’s praying for death, Theta using a shard of broken glass to start ripping a bedsheet. Someone’s going to hear them and come running with something useful, no doubt.
"I SAID GET AWAY!" Owis has regained his standing function, now starting to pound on Theta’s chest with his functional hand. It provides adequate perspective into how much Theta has grown over the years. "I WONT LET YOU!"
"WON’T LET ME WHAT?" Theta is struck across the jaw with a fortunately placed bloody hand, which he grabs in an instant and twists into submission. Owis only screams louder. "IF YOU’D HOLD STILL, I’LL ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO HELP YOU."
“HOW IS THIS HELPING?”
Theta is forced to pull a leg out from Owis to slam him against the wall, dig an arm into his chest and use a knee to keep him still. Ish.
“HELP!” Owis screeches out the doorway, trying to shove Theta off him, which only makes the grip tighter.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" Theta growls, grey sheets soaking through in dark red. He ignores the touch of satisfaction derived from having an ethical excuse to have Owis aggressively pinned down. His injured hand is conveniently the only limb staying some shade of still, letting him wrap the sheet tight enough without tearing the flesh much.
"IT HURTS."
Someone finally appears in the doorway, Theta catching a hand with a medical kit and at least two sets of legs, reaching the end of the wrapping of fabric, but knotting it…
Owis finds a missed precaution and slams his knee up between Theta’s legs, bloody mass slipping from his hands in a moment of pained reflex landing him on the floor. “Owis…” he groans, turning to the right and curling his legs up.
“What on Gallifrey did he do to you?” Theta hits his head on the ground, cursing the very floorboards that grew into this forsaken Household.
“Glospin.”
“You look like a fucking fetus.”
Theta demands his legs to function, to pull his body mass up, to confirm no he is not dying, it just feels like it. Glospin is giving Owis the only hug Theta has ever seen him execute, cradling the small boy gently as any mother. In a wild second of hallucinogenic pain and less-than-functional neurons, they could be the classic sort of father and son.
“Owis, we need to sit down to wrap your hand,” he cooes, Owis obliging and being led to his bed with Satthaltrope behind. The screaming banshee has been subdued to a sobbing child, face contorting itself into something pitiful and worth defending. Theta can’t say he can look on it with much sympathetic sorrow. “Arkhew, can you get Theta out of here?” Glospin barks without taking his eyes off Owis. The cousin who looks somehow incomplete without their double tentatively regards the crumpled mess that is Theta, jerking their head towards the door.
He might oblige if he weren’t bloody, suspicious, and incapacitated. “You chop off part of a kid’s hand?” they growl, towering above Theta.
“Arkhew just drag him out of the room he’s practically a twig!”
“He did that to himself.” Theta replies, mind not working enough to think up anything tactical.
Arkhew snorts, grabbing Theta by the middle and dragging him out of the room. Theta used to associate that room with peace and Innocet, on occasion a smudge of Rynde’s memory. It’s been a while. Theta dumped on the ground, Arkhew slams the door, leaving him to wonder if Arkhew was even in on the glaringly obvious intention in the whole setup.
Eleven of his cousins stand in the corridor, eyes boring into him, all arriving at the same conclusion. He is the Prydonian, after all.
###
Vansell finally walks off, for what reason Koschei doesn’t care, as he finally has one of the only cousins he could claim to know alone for the first time in two days. Marshamallows just started reading a novel, and while he has learnt from experience it’s very bad form to interrupt a novel, well. She’s only just started.
“I’m sorry, I… can’t remember your name.”
She smiles despite it all. Oh, the advantages of having an overly kind cousin. “Parsillontralthenedru.”
“Parsillon?”
“Just Parsill.”
He nods, once. “Thanks, Parsill. Can you tell me at all what Vansell’s been doing out here? Honestly?”
“He’s friends with Distvyk. Is that a crime?”
“It is if he’s been talking about me.”
She shakes her head, opening the novel again. “Good heavens. Don’t be so paranoid.”
Koschei scoffs. “That kid is a psychopath!”
Marshmallows sighs. “There aren’t any psychopaths, Koschei, we’re loomed.” She closes the novel again. “What has he even done? Seems plenty friendly to me.”
Got a study group to collectively ignore him all at once? Asked a handful of cousins about Koschei’s well-being? Stole his boyfriend for five days before it was even a thing?
“Wait, wait, wait, boyfriend?”
Three heads now decide to involve themselves in the conversation. He’s losing it. “Wait, wait, wait, you can READ MY MIND?”
Marshmallows goes back to the novel. “Only when you’re screaming.”
Koschei would like to gesture a number of things at the general population for not helping ever, but refrains in light of Marshmallows’s wise “So why don’t you ask Vansell why he’s here?”
There’s the smallest of noises from the hanging gap in the stairs above him, and two feet scurrying away.
“That literal whale dick.”
“Excuse me?”
Koschei shoves aside anywhere from one to five flocking cousins, past the unstable “naturally carved” bookshelves, taking the worn down stairs two at a time.
Two four six eight ten eleven (large cousin) twelve fourteen sixteen eighteen nineteen room 301 (don’t trip on the root that refuses to leave) room 302 room 303 is locked. He might pound on the door. He might try breaking it down because it’s bloody unattached from the House. He can hear Vansell inside perfectly clearly, but everyone would hear him if he tried going inside.
He walks away. No matter how hard he tries in his head, there’s no configuration of words that can describe Vansell to justify breaking down the door.
###
Ten minutes later, Vansell struts down to the commons and tosses a book into his hands like everything is perfectly alright, charming smile enticing one of the few cousins always found behind a book.
Koschei is already back up the stairs.
The door is hanging wide open and he closes it behind him, picking a route around a floor of havoc in sock feet. The quilt, the sheets, the mattress have one at a time been thrown off the bedframe and pitched in some direction, knocking over the dresser, toppling things strewn carelessly on the desk, burying the tiger he crafted. The clothes that were knocked out were thrown like confetti, landing everywhere and precisely placed to cover the window.
There should have been crashing, tumultuous racket, and maybe all his cousins thought nothing of it. More likely, he staged the chaos in precise silence.
Koschei picks up the corner of a sheet, tossing it at the bedframe, only to clear a path to the mirror. He doesn’t see the tiny tiger.
The mirror used to fit the wall like a glove, seamlessly ingrained and bending perfectly at the top and bottom where the House felt it should. There are two caved points for two hearts, splinters shooting and arching and spitting out shards that have come to rest at his feet. Koschei can only see bits of himself, obscured fractions where he watched himself grow year after year, where he once told Theta Sigma he would dye his blond hair #003B6F.
Vansell wrote on one of the bits of glass in ink. “I was bored.”
Absolutely nobody is going to believe Koschei.
He starts with the glass.
After all that, with a meticulously arranged court system and no word to Quences, Theta was still put back in his usual bedroom, the wide range of reasons being there was “no reasonable motive for murder” and nobody wanted to have him sleeping anywhere near them. With much uncharacteristic sympathetic dialogue, Owis agreed to this arrangement.
After all the screaming and ‘I won’t let you’s of the morning, Theta would expect Owis to be cowering against the wall, staring him down and wielding some over-exuberant mode of self-defence. Instead, he lies quite comfortably under a nicely made blanket, covers hiding his chin as the big brown eyes blink at him. Like he’s trying to fall asleep but forgot to close his eyes. A dim light on Owis’s side of the room casts something of a halo around him, light fading out far before it touches Theta.
He would feel more comfortable lying in the dark trying to fall asleep to occasional whimpers and scared sniffling instead of the constant blinking, however quiet.
“How’s your hand?” Something flies into the makeshift window, stuck together with indelicate haste until a new one is installed, hiding the fact there is a piece missing.
Owis gingerly draws the blanket far enough back to let his right hand out, wrapped in layers of thin white synthetic softness, the top of which looks like it has been dipped in paint. The dried blood offsets the white much better than the grey sheet, now hardened into its shape. “They gave me an anaesthetic and found something to stop the bleeding, so…” he trails off, trying to give Theta a Glospin face, but it doesn’t work. “We need to get bone and tissue repairing nanobots from the city tomorrow.”
In a way, Owis reminds Theta of Koschei in the first few nights he knew him. Small, scared, can’t sleep. He tried to harbour bitterness and unfeeling for as many of his cousins as possible to prevent the sting of them leaving like Innocet, but try as he might, Owis will always find some spot of redemption in Theta.
“They didn’t change the bandage?”
Owis shakes his head, eyes widening as they always do. “Satthaltrope said it’ll be fine all day.”
“They’ve had that on you since this morning?”
Owis nods, retreating ever so slightly into his blankets.
The one fortunate aspect of the judicial court was the attendee-wide consensus to leave the medical kit (however primitive by Time Lord standards) with Owis. There is a small pang of the emotional sort with the idea of Koschei superimposed on the cousin that flinches when Theta rises, opening the white and red sphere to withdraw simple could-be-cotton.
"It's ok, I don't need to change it really I'm fine I—"
Theta shakes his head not too fast, summoning every supernatural force of reassuring motherhood to clothe him for just two minutes. "Keep it dried there too long and it could get infected and slow down the tissue reconstruction process. Even loomlings aren't immune to everything." Theta kneels by Owis's bed, waiting for a hand instead of taking it by force. Maybe that wasn't a good idea. "I can do it for you."
"Will it hurt?" He forces out, two unbound fingers curling closer to their protector.
"Can you feel your fingers?"
Owis's eyes dart away from Theta in two directions, then back again. "Not those two."
"At least they gave you a proper anaesthetic." There holds out his palm, partly wanting to wheedle out the details of whatever Glospin was planning, partly because the world might be a nicer place if people wrapped wounds more instead of caused them.
"It won't hurt if you hold still."
Owis swallows one, trying to scan Theta's face for something malicious or some great lie, but can't find anything. A tentative hand is placed palm up in Theta's, dried blood keeping the first two from curling slightly like the other two. Much to both of their advantage, Owis holds still.
"Why are you doing this?" He squeaks, watching a stiff bandage uncurl from his hand.
"I consider it a crime to ignore medical concerns. And you really don't deserve to have your fingertips chopped off."
They are ragged, as if someone tore them off, lacking the precision of any functional molecular dissociation apparatus. He'll need to work on that.
"Have you had an infection before?"
Theta smirks at his tone of voice, shyer than Theta was the first day of school.
"Once in my left ear." He reaches the end of the fabric, pressing it down and waiting for it to fuse. "It was interesting making up an excuse for needing medicine."
He was something for some sign of amusement, but Owis continues to regard him with those owlish eyes. "There you are. Sanitary bandage."
Theta gets off his knees, smiling, taking two soft steps back to bed.
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it."
###
The first thing Theta is aware of is unbridled trauma, so strong it penetrated his idle dream of undersized breakfast and forced him awake. His hearing perks up first, registering the curdled sound of crying behind him before the rest of his body follows. In one startled, swift movement he jolts upright and slams the lamp on the wall on, adrenaline-hyped eyes finding their way to "Owis?"
The boy didn't even bother crawling under the covers, opting to curl into a shaking ball pressed against the wall. His face is covered in tear stains and mucus, entire body convulsing in compressed sobs and something else so strong he can't identify it.
Theta places a hand on his shoulder, making Owis nearly jump out of his skin.
"It's just me, it's okay..." Owis hasn't moved. His brain is still wholly consumed by the great complex emotion that somehow landed him in the wrong bed. "Owis?" Theta moves his hand to Owis's forehead, using so much brain power to distinguish a single clear train of thought from the mess he could uproot the House. There's a single concept repeating itself in almost a linear fashion, but Owis doesn't have words to describe it. Theta can feel it, can understand its shape and form, but doesn't know what it is.
"What the devil is going on up here?" Theta just about falls off the bed, as Quences has managed to sneak his way into the room. Quences points one shaky, knobbed finger at now-hyperventilating Owis, leaning on a gnarled black staff that could be an extension of his arm if it wanted to. "Why is that boy screaming like a banshee?" Quences glares at Theta like a judge might glare at a serial killer.
"I don't know, sir." Theta tries moving Owis out of his steel ball, but he refuses to budge, getting shorter and shorter of breath.
The patterned unnamed thing in one burst gets a step clearer, the rest of the mental haze still ecstatically confused.
Theta but twitches as Quences hobbles towards the possessed child. There is some primitive reaction of a desire to shield the kid from the world he can't quite explain. Like a craving for celery and peanut butter that never quite makes sense.
Quences slowly raises his staff, pressing the tip into Owis's back. Theta can hear someone moving outside, running but not speaking, and Quences shoves Owis harder.
"He looks possessed," the Housekeeper growls in his version of thinking aloud, rubbing his unshaven chin with a hand.
"Sir, his telepathic screaming communicates patterns of severe trauma. I think he's in—" Quences brings his staff down on Owis with crippling force, "shock..."
Owis finally moves, limbs exploding and folding back together in a new arrangement as that continuous, blood curdling scream escapes his brain and tears through the House via the lungs.
"Works every time." Quences dares Theta to argue with a disdainful comb of his hair. "I don't know how to get him to stop screaming."
"ARKHEW'S DEAD." Their tear-stained roommate has appeared in the door, flanked in shadows by murmurs nobody can hear over the infernal screaming.
Quences slowly turns his head back to them, curdling the screaming in Owis’s brain to nauseating panic. Theta needs to fight the urge to sink down at the overwhelming screeching in his head.
“Take him out,” Quences growls.
Theta drags the boy off the bed, scooping him up with an arm under the knees. He runs.