Archive of Our Own ^beta

Patience spent more time with Theta than with the other young Lungbarrow cousins. She was more attentive with him. More affectionate. There was something special about him, she said, even before he was old enough to attend the academy. Frankly, he was glad somebody else had noticed. He knew he was special. Having an adult remark on it was vindicating.

***

When he got out of the academy two-hundred years later—well, two-hundred and fifty; he was held back—the truth was that Theta had been performing for so long even he wasn’t certain how much of the image he projected was his authentic self and how much of it was a performance. He knew the answer wasn’t a hundred percent either way, but he couldn’t give any more precise an answer than that even if he wanted to.

Koschei was the only person who probably could.

They were on and off and on and off all through their academy days, enough so that Magnus and Ushas took bets on when they’d break up again and how long before they got back together again, and so on and so forth. The way they brought out the absolute worst in each other was thrilling. Addictive. Either one of them individually was a menace to society; together, they were a weapon of mass social destruction. When they were together, all of time and space came down to just the two of them and Theta honestly didn’t give a damn about anybody else. Which was exactly why it was never going to work.

He didn’t want to be quite that brazen. It just happened when he didn’t keep himself in check. He had an overpowering personality; Magnus was able to take leadership of the Deca only because Ushas had a crush on him and Theta and Koschei were too busy bouncing off each other and leaving chaos in their wake. It was too much fun, and therefore, best left at the academy. Theta was over two-hundred now, no longer at the age where that sort of unhinged behavior was to be expected (although he was proud to say he was considered particularly unhinged, even for a student). Now was the time to get serious—or, well, as serious as Theta was capable of getting.

Of course, he didn’t cut contact with Koschei. He said he would (he’d shouted it, in fact), but he actually stuck by his words for only a few months before Koschei reached out and asked if he wanted to meet up for drinks, and Theta, knowing damn well the correct answer was “fuck off,” said yes.

The bartender, who’d been there for almost sixty-years, visibly tensed when Theta and Koschei strode in like they owned the place. Theta wished he could promise they wouldn’t do anything ridiculous, but that would be disingenuous even for him. The best he could promise was that he wasn’t planning on doing anything ridiculous, and that wasn’t much of a promise. Koschei ordered something fancy. Theta ordered a bunch of shots and did his best to seem like he was trying to act cool and tough rather than like he just didn’t want to deal with Koschei while sober.

“How’s teaching, hm?”

“The students are rather afraid of me,” said Koschei. “I suppose I can’t complain.”

“Have you made anybody cry yet?”

“What do you take me for? An amateur? Of course I have! What about you, have you driven any of your colleagues to insanity yet?”

Theta laughed despite himself.

“They avoid me. Though I do believe the poor monitor—ah—the fellows in alarm monitoring may be on the brink.”

“Oh, that’s no fun at all. If you aren’t even antagonizing your coworkers, what are you up to these days? Don’t tell me you’ve actually embraced the bureaucratic lifestyle, my dear Theta, it doesn’t suit you at all.”

“I’m getting married,” he blabbed. And regretted it instantly.

Well, it was bound to come up eventually. Better Koschei find out from Theta in person rather than hearing about it second– or third– or seven-hundredth-hand. People were talking about it, too; it wasn’t like Theta really stood a chance of somehow preventing Koschei from ever knowing that Omega’s widow was getting remarried. Koschei’s eyes widened almost comically.

“You—what?”

“I believe you heard me quite clearly.”

“Ought I to congratulate Vansell?”

“Oh, do shut up, hm?”

Koschei probably thought Theta didn’t notice him looking disappointed for a fraction of a second before bringing out the mockery.

“Well, then, out with it,” he snapped just venomously enough to ruin his unaffected façade.

“Patience Blyledge,” said Theta. “I don’t believe you’ve met her.”

“Met her—? Well, I’ve certainly heard of her—you cannot be serious!”

“She’s been working with House Lungbarrow for ages, I’ve known her for a very long time.”

“My dear Theta, she is ancient! She’s a historical figure! She probably went out drinking with Rassilon on his days off, if he ever took any of those. She—”

“I’ll remind you that I am over two-hundred years old, now, my dear Koschei. I am free to marry whoever—”

“Haven’t you known her since you—”

“I am well aware that she is older than me, thank you very much! Did you think I hadn’t noticed? Hm? Even I can only be so unobservant, you know.”

It wasn’t as though Theta stood to gain much, politically speaking, from trying to find somebody his own age who’d be willing to marry him. Hardly anybody within a few centuries of his generation could tolerate him, and marrying Koschei was absolutely out of the question. Patience was wealthy, well-established, well-connected, she was his foot in the door of government—and besides all that, she was perfectly nice. Polite. Respectable. One of the vanishingly few people who never seemed to resent Theta during his childhood. When his mothers or fathers or older siblings would roll their eyes upon his arrival in their presence, Patience was always happy to have him sit on her lap and babble about whatever ridiculous topic was on his ridiculous little mind at the time.

He’d rather make an ally of someone older and pleasant than someone his age and as abrasive as he was.

It wasn’t good for him to be around people like him.

“I was rather hoping you’d be there. At the wedding.”

“I do hope you understand I’ll cause a scene.”

“Of course you will.”

***

Patience didn’t want a loud, extravagant wedding; at her age, as she put it, one eventually outgrows such things. She was kind enough to indulge Theta when he explained that his partying days weren’t over yet, and so as a compromise the wedding was a decently impressive occasion, but not as much so as Patience’s first wedding. Theta could live with that. Her first wedding had Rassilon on the guest list. Realistically, Theta was not outdoing that, no matter how much he should like to.

There were more members of the press in attendance than members of House Lungbarrow; Theta tried not to wonder if Quences not being there was a bad sign. Ah, well. The fact that they cared so little about their prodigal cousin that they were fine with allowing House Blyledge to upstage them like this wasn’t a surprise. At least the cousins Theta actually wanted there—a single-digit number—all showed up, save for Brax, which also wasn’t a surprise. More importantly, there was no sign of Satthralope or Glospin, thank Rassilon, they’d ruin the whole affair by their presence alone.

Jobiska showed up; or tried to, wearing some tacky ensemble clearly intended to upstage Theta (unsuccessfully, of course), and was removed by security before making it to the reception.

Koschei’s idea of “making a scene” consisted, at first, of having way too many drinks and saying unflattering things about the other guests. Theta asked him to lay off Arkhew and Innocet, but everybody else was fair game. Especially the press. Especially the one journalist who made some backhanded comment about how hard it must be for Theta to have to try and live up to his new wife’s late and great first husband. How was anybody supposed to respond to that? Koschei, for one, responded that Theta was much better-looking than any of Omega’s incarnations; now there was a way to cause a scene.

Once the marriage contract was signed and the judge pronounced everything officially in order, Theta was tempted to announce then and there that he would be moving in with Patience at House Blyledge, but he liked Arkhew and Innocet too much to put the burden on them of having to tell the rest of House Lungbarrow. And so instead of making a grand show of insulting his house, he instead made a grand show of drinking as much as he could and convincing the band Patience had hired to play one of his songs and let him sing. It was his wedding, he’d sing if he wanted to, and nobody could say anything about it. There was nothing about the song that made it inappropriate to sing at a wedding; in fact, the attendees probably assumed he’d written it for the occasion.

It was actually about Koschei, originally, and Koschei knew that. Theta made a valiant effort to avoid eye contact with him and focus on Patience while singing.

***

Patience spent the after-party calmly sipping her drink and doing the rounds of the room trying to make small talk with everybody. Theta really did try to follow suit, but he could only take so many thinly-veiled (or barely-veiled-at-all) jabs at his age, his house’s social standing, his political views, and even some about his performance at the academy, before he decided it wasn’t worth it. He did have some dignity. He cut off whoever was currently interrogating him mid-sentence to go and seek out the only person here he actually sort of enjoyed speaking to.

“Has it been dramatic enough for you?” grinned Koschei.

“You know perfectly well that it has not. Not that I don’t appreciate your efforts to liven things up, of course.”

“I’m assuming your dear wife was responsible for most of the planning?”

“All of it. Well, nearly all of it. She didn’t suppose I was up for the task, being only just out of the academy and all that.”

The next thing Theta knew, he was letting Koschei drag him into one of the stalls of the venue’s bathroom. He wished he could say he was reluctant to get on his knees, but he really wasn’t.

***

When he wasn’t at work or at protests, Theta spent most of his time with Patience. House Blyledge wasn’t as…dramatic as House Lungbarrow. Not as much explosive fighting. The Blyledge housekeeper never tried to attack him. But it wasn’t necessarily better. Nobody talked to him; they just sort of politely pretended he wasn’t there. They didn’t say it explicitly, but it didn’t take an uncommonly adept mind-reader to know they saw him as, at best, Patience’s trophy husband who was neither as important nor as interesting as her first, and at worst, some lower-class child she’d taken in out of the kindness of her hearts. She assured him they’d come around eventually.

She also said time seemed to pass quicker at her age, so he really hoped “eventually” didn’t actually mean “at some point within the next ten-thousand years.”

At least she wasn’t averse to sex.

Which came as a surprise after some of her comments about people his age having a higher libido and how that usually went away after the first regeneration. Fate willing, he probably had at least another eight centuries before he had to worry about all that, although eight-hundred years was probably nothing to Patience.

No, Patience was fully on board with having sex—quite a bit of it, in fact—because she was dead set on having children. As in, the old-fashioned way (apparently having a maternal relationship with younger cousins just wasn’t “the same,” whatever that was supposed to mean). She was convinced she was one of the vanishingly few Time Lords who could have children, and had “hope” that Theta was another. Theta knew enough about how pregnancy and childbirth worked to wonder why any Time Lord would ever want to put themselves through it, but Patience was absolutely insistent, and, well, it was her who’d be doing the whole carrying-and-birthing thing, so who was Theta to judge? Having kids was just another way to be scandalous and go against the norm.

It was probably awful of him to think that the sex wasn’t nearly as good with Patience as it was with Koschei. It was also true. With her, everything was calm, slow. The idea of even asking for her to tie him down or choke him or hit him was absolutely laughable; even if he did ask, she'd almost certainly make some patronizing comment about kids his age being wild and silly.

On the other hand, he didn’t get much social interaction that wasn’t with Patience, and mediocre, boring sex was better than nothing. She did ask, once, why he blocked her out telepathically every time they laid together. He made up some stupid spiel about telepath sex being too intense for him at his age. The real reason was that he didn't need her to sense him thinking about Koschei the whole time.

***

He felt like some kind of caged beast pacing its enclosure. His coworkers didn’t like him any more than he liked them. His own cousins made it quite clear he was not welcome back at House Lungbarrow; his wife’s cousins still mostly ignored his presence. Back when Quences used to insist he go into politics someday, Theta had always disagreed with him. Now, politics was the only opportunity he had to really get into it with other people; sure, it was almost always in a hostile context, but Theta found shouting at people about the benefits of interventionism to be more enjoyable than spending his off-work hours lounging around House Blyledge antagonizing its drudges and trying to get a rise out of its residents.

Almost every day, he imagined just…not caring anymore. Telling everybody to shove it and running off. He and Koschei always used to fantasize about going renegade someday, though in their fantasies they always ran off together, and Theta was not going to do that. If he and Koschei ran off together, they’d almost certainly bring devastation and chaos to the rest of the universe; an idea that held a non-zero amount of appeal, actually, but no. Absolutely not.

Patience said it was normal to feel restless at his age. Theta supposed that was a polite way of telling him he’d get over it. 

He didn’t speak to Koschei for two years after the wedding, during which time Patience successfully got pregnant and carried to term a baby boy. Theta was all sorts of things now that his younger self would be flabbergasted by; a bureaucrat, a politician, a husband, a father. At least people were judging Patience too on that front. Theta was no longer alone in being viewed as completely off-his-arse insane. He and Patience were That Insane Couple now, she the senile old fool and he the rebellious youth, and Rassilon help their poor probably-doomed-to-grow-up-insane son.

Theta would be lying if he said he hated being a father. The kid was cute, and thankfully he did not seem to have inherited his father’s…attitude. There was also something a little bit vindicating about caring for a child; he imagined telling his own older cousins, “You see? It’s easy, you great bloody incompetent bunch of troglodytes.” He wondered how young was too young to start learning about the downsides of planetary isolationism.

***

As much as he was enjoying fatherhood more than he’d ever expected to, Theta still jumped at the call when Koschei asked him to go for drinks. Perhaps more enthusiastically than he wanted to appear. This time, he’d call it off for good.

“I suppose congratulations are in order, though I can’t imagine why the two of you couldn’t simply use a loom, like normal people.”

“I’m…” Theta took a long sip of his unholy energy drink cocktail. “I’m not entirely certain myself. Apparently, I may come to understand when I’m older. Or so she says.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know any better than you do, my dear Theta, but I don’t know anybody else who had kids the old-fashioned way, at any age.”

“I don’t know. She’s also regenerated before—eleven times, actually—Borusa always did say that regeneration is the most painful thing any Time Lord can experience, so perhaps childbirth was perfectly bearable to her.”

“Don’t you think there’s a chance Borusa may be full of it? Regeneration can’t be that bad. Every Time Lord does it, twelve times, so one would think that if it were truly as painful as he claims, you’d see a lot more…failed regenerations.”

“Well, now, I have no idea. I’m only two-hundred and sixty, hm? I’ve never regenerated. And you know—er, you don’t know either.”

“I imagine having one’s limina severed must hurt more than regenerating.”

“I don’t imagine there’s much use in speculating when neither one of us is likely to find out firsthand for another several centuries.”

“What, are you against having ideas, now? I thought you were smarter than that.”

“And I thought you weren’t an idiot.”

“Funny, I’ve always known you were an idiot.”

“Shut up!”

They drank an unreasonable amount of alcohol and went from speculating about what regeneration might feel like to gossiping about their respective coworkers to ranting about interventionism to arguing about their ever-more-different views on what sort of intervention was a good idea to shouting some rather creatively profane insults at each other to, finally, being dragged out of the pub by security. Apparently that sort of behavior fell under the description of “causing a scene.” Theta wondered what it said about him as a person, that he had more fun having a shouting match and getting kicked out of a bar with Koschei than spending a nice, quiet day with his wife.

“Shall we find another pub where we have yet to cultivate a reputation, then?”

“Is somebody not keen on going home to his wife and son?” sneered Koschei.

“Shut up.”

At the next pub, Koschei ordered a mocktail, apparently lucid enough to show some restraint. Theta showed no such thing, doing some ridiculous number of shots in rapid succession and forcing Koschei to do karaoke with him. They stood on one of the tables and danced—probably as terribly as they were singing—and it wasn’t as much fun as it had been in their academy days. Back then, shout-singing and dancing on tables was one of Theta’s favorite ways to skip class. Now, even as inebriated as he was, he still felt a little bit ridiculous.

When their song finished, it took less than five minutes before Theta found himself pressed up against a bathroom stall, pants yanked down and tunic hiked up haphazardly. He was almost tempted to just abandon all pretense of dignity and be as loud as he wanted; let someone catch him and Koschei fucking in a bar bathroom. It wasn’t as though either one of them had a good name to disgrace.

***

When Theta got back to House Blyledge, the house was reluctant to let him in. He didn’t need to be a trained housekeeper to feel its disapproval practically accosting his mind, and frankly, he didn’t want to have to deal with this shit in the middle of the night. He leaned on the door and jabbed his epasi against it.

“Fine, let—fuck—don’t let me in, then,” he slurred. “I’ll bloody well sleep outside, hm? Stupid house. House Lungbarrow is far handsomer, you know, and—”

The door opened, and Theta cut himself off stumbling through it and bit his tongue.

He woke up the next day, with a hangover so prodigious it had him wondering if perhaps this was what regeneration felt like, when his bed got fed up with him sleeping late and tipped itself over to dump him on the floor. He didn’t respond to any of Koschei’s messages. After all, he was trying to call off this…whatever they had.

Patience greeted him in his home office with her antexes tense and her face stern.

“When did you get back?”

“I don’t know, some time after fifteen-o’clock.”

“Fifteen—really?”

“I don’t know, I was really quite drunk. Now, I—”

“You aren’t a student anymore, Theta. You have a son! And a career! It’s time to outgrow that sort of thing.”

She wasn’t even angry. Just exasperated. Like scolding a rambunctious child. Theta wanted to throw a real, proper tantrum. Scream and throw things. He settled for rolling his eyes. He’d drag her down to his level yet.

“I thought it was normal to feel restless at my age, hm?”

“Oh, Rassilon help me. You’ve always been so mature for your age, why start being petulant now?”

“Funny, you used to find my antics charming.”

“You aren’t six years old anymore! It was cute then. It isn’t now.”

“Can’t there be a party—a work-partying balance? I see no reason why I can’t do both. And what I do with my time off is my business!”

Patience sighed.

“Peylix was never this obstinate—”

“Don’t bring Omega into this!” cried Theta. “I’m two-and-a-half centuries old, for crying out loud!”

“Well, you’re acting like a child!”

***

The Bureau of Possible Events was soul-crushing. Yelling at the High Council about why they should have more contact with other worlds was soul-obliterating. Theta and Patience had four children, now, and being so obviously new and inexperienced at childrearing compared to her was humiliating. Sure, she had been working in childcare for umptillions of years and he really was a complete novice, so it only made sense that she’d know what to do (and he wouldn’t), but with the way she kept expecting him to be as good at it as her—and the way she got disappointed and exasperated when he wasn’t—made it intolerable.

He loved his kids, he really did. He could never blame them for any of it. But he wasn’t cut out for parenting. Nor was he cut out for bureaucracy. The prospect of going renegade and fucking off to the other side of the galaxy looked more and more enticing every day.

The kids would probably be better off with their mother. Let them grow up to be normal.

Every time he met up with Koschei, he told himself this would be the last time. This time, for sure. Of course, he never stuck to it, because Theta had no integrity whatsoever. Being around Koschei and just letting loose and being wild and irritating was easy, so much easier than the rest of his life.

Theta didn’t like who he was when he was with Koschei, but he liked trying to be a normal, respectable Time Lord even less.