Prompt : Gifted

He had been a smart child. Intelligent. He took in information well, leaned how to apply it with the ease of someone who was notably astute. He would be knowledgeable, formidable, even genius, one day, if he worked hard enough at it. His foundations and his background gave him the best of opportunities and there was no doubt he would enter among the elite of the Time Lords.

Koschei was all of these things.

But he was never gifted.

In ways, Theta Sigma made him look like an idiot child. Whereas Koschei was deductive, a meticulous designer, Theta was an improviser. He took in information and managed to sort through the important things, and the ones that were less so – that was the way he said it, at least. He failed near every quiz ever handed to him, and anything vaguely mathematic or quantitative came out with a similar standard.

But his level of thinking had always been something beyond the other students. He was imaginative, something that Time Lords scoffed at and severely lacked, for the most part. He was a master of puzzles. He did more than put two and two together; he figured out ways to divide the pieces into wholes on their own, and make the outcome into five, six, infinity.

He sometimes broke the rules to do so, but between Koschei’s grounded and prestigious air and the young boy’s improvisational brilliance, the two managed pretty well.

So the two were not fast friends, not by any means. Koschei was a loner, was deductive and quiet and constantly analyzing the world around him to set a floor plan in his head. He was constantly looking for ways to navigate and to walk the correct pathways to get where he needed to go.

Theta was a step ahead of him; he analyzed everything around him to pull the information from it. He needed no idea of direction. He simply went forward and made up the ground plan as he went. Sometimes Koschei would have sworn that this boy could simply walk about and the world would follow with him.

It was funny, in a way. Koschei was smart. He was beyond smart. He was top of his class and by far among the most studious. It is strange that he never put two and two together, when Theta was a step ahead of him and the world followed after him.

But where Koschei looked at books and knew what other people knew, Theta looked at the stars and knew too little.

Three years later Koschei becomes the Master. He breaks over a gifted boy and, like the rest of the world, he follows after.