Work Text:
[TW: Murder discussed, fictional oppression discussed a bit]
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Today, the sky is hazy and white, and pinpricks of mist tickle the cheeks and noses of the children that are playing outside, blissfully unaware and uncaring of whether or not their parents think it’s too cold. But I cannot return their smiles and entertain their games, I cannot do much else than nod when they call me over for a round of tag, because today, I am crouched alone on the floor of my monstrous lair, and I am trying to make sense of the pages and pages of lies you’ve told me over the course of our working relationship.
To be perfectly fair, to your credit, it didn’t seem like Clara said. I don’t believe you hold no regard at all for human life, or at least you gave me good reason to believe in your better nature. When you’d send me on errands around town, I believed my efforts were going towards something that could end the horror we were living. And I was right. I think we might just have different definitions of horror.
From the moment you marched into my hometown, you postured yourself as my enemy. You made that quite clear. I cannot possibly name every single condescension, every single insult you have born upon me. But, of course, with time and patience, someone like you might say I had civilized you into a perfectly agreeable gentleman – at least as far as basic conversation was involved. Where I come from, we call it cultivating a friendship.
Nonetheless – I shook you of your ivory sensibilities, and so did everyone else in town, and you changed for the better. Your letters were friendly, and only slightly condescending. You were becoming human, and I was becoming proud to associate with you. To call you a friend.
I suppose there are many things in this world I don’t yet understand.
We have always disagreed on the definition of a cure itself, and you know that. No amount of denial on my part can change what has always been true. To carve both our brains open in search of an answer would show results like night and day, and ironically, that would normally be a very good thing for any scientific undertaking. I thought a cure meant no more suffering, and a brighter future for both our peoples – hence the “panacea” I had birthed from my own blood and sweat and tears. You thought a cure meant no more new cases, and whatever happened to those still sweating and hallucinating as their bodies fell apart, well… Happened. Hence the vaccine, which would help those not yet infected. I speak to our strength as a team, because in tandem, our solutions were genius. If we only had equal resources, we would be able to knock this plague back within a good week or so.
But… You resisted us. I will never know why, but you resisted what we could do.
You see, one thing we’ve never been able to speak about together is the Polyhedron. That great spike dug deep into the womb of the earth itself, rendering her barren, and her children starving. I would normally be able to tolerate praise of it, were I talking to Vlad – someone I was used to having to smile and bear my pains for. But not you. Not you, when you wanted to debate me about it, when you were not satisfied simply watching me smile and nod, when you would not stop until I was a genuine believer in its Miracles. And as time went on, you only became more and more fervent in your support – worship, even – of this monument and everything it stood for. Against all proof. Against all logic. What it represented to you was enough.
For me, it did not need to represent anything at all. The still-bloodied fairy coffin it handed me directly supersedes any metaphorical wonder it could imply to you and your loftier friends. But as the weeks went by, you were not only convinced it was harmless – you were convinced it was the only thing that could possibly save any of us. And then, when your insanity had nearly reached its peak, your thoughts turned from the town. They turned from us, and onto a horizon you thought of as ‘greater’.
The Polyhedron began to matter more than human life itself. Of course I believe in miracles – mine just have a different source from yours. Of course I believe in the betterment of man, but you began to believe that the betterment of man was more important than the lives of people. I suppose I just didn’t expect you to take this train of thought to its most natural, obvious conclusion.
Slithering through the lines.
Part of me wonders if you were truly lucid when it happened, if you could truly be blamed just as much as any other man who had committed such a crime, but the other part of me, the part where my logic resides, knows that ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the state of your mind, someone still died that night. What could possibly explain that away and make it alright?
I would not say that the Inquisitor and I were friends. That would imply that when she looked upon me, she saw a person. But when she put out the order to destroy the Polyhedron and all its fantasies, I breathed a sigh of relief deeper than I ever had before in my life. I knew there would be backlash, I knew you would hate to hear the news, but ultimately, I figured there was nothing anyone would be able to do about it. The Inquisitor’s word is absolute, it does not falter under debate of any kind. If she says that something must go, then it will be gone by the end of the night.
Without a trace, the flames crawl higher.
Since the Stamatins themselves were powerless to oppose her, so too, I figured, would you be. All this talk of man’s utopia would be done with, and we could get back to saving and improving the real, tangible lives of those we knew and held dear. Maybe my friend would return to me after a good, long night of drinking down his grief and raving with his lost lady’s handlers. I would have liked to see that, truth be told.
But the night I expected that to happen was the night that I found her courier’s body, crumpled up and bloodied on the cobblestone. I suppose I wish I could say my gut didn’t immediately know it was you. But after a good hour of sprinting around town, trying to find you and figure out what I’d say when I found you, there you were. You were sitting by the fireplace with blood on your hands, and then I didn’t know what to think anymore.
I searched your face for any hint of regret, and you gave me nothing. I asked you, begged you, to give me a version of this story that made sense. And all you told me was that you were glad you burned the papers the courier had, ordering the Polyhedron’s destruction. Because you first thought to eat them, but then decided against it. Because I’m a surgeon. Because I could have hypothetically “cut you up and taken them back out” of your stomach. And then I realized… There was no version of you that made sense anymore.
All this is to say… This is why it is now my responsibility to rid this town of the Polyhedron, whatever it takes. If I must be your bitterest enemy in order to keep those from the town and the surrounding fields I love safe, then do not think for a second that I won’t. You do not matter more to me than my friends, or my family. The only thing I can do at this point to keep my own sanity intact is to think of you as a sunken investment. I have nothing more I can sink in you. I’m all out of time and patience, I’ve run dry, Dankovsky. The world was never big enough for both of us.
Think on that as the curtain falls if you will think again at all.