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Amiya freezes when she first hears the song echo through the bleak snowfall.
The simple sound of it makes her heart beat faster. She stumbles, head swiveling towards the melody that rings through the emptiness surrounding her, and pauses.
Despite all attempts, it is a broken, shattered thing. It croaks over high notes and stutters through everything else.
It is the most beautiful thing Amiya has heard in a long, long time. It's the only thing she has heard, save her footfalls crunching on snow, her own breath and voice harsh in her ears, and the lonely melody of her violin.
It's not a choice, not really, when Amiya stumbles forward to find the source.
After so many hours, days, and years with only her own voice to keep her company, tracking the only source of noise is easy. Amiya's footsteps crunch through the snow, the song growing louder, until she finds the source and stops dead.
"Out of everyone," she says, her own voice cracked with disuse, "That I had to find in this hell with me, it had to be you."
Mephisto does not respond. He has not so much as looked up at her as she approached, lost in his own misery. His shoulders shake with a sob, lips blue around his wordless wail, tear tracks frozen to his contorted face. Lost among snow and torn clothing, drying blood stark against the pale whites of Mephisto and the snow around him, he looks ethereal.
The sound is no longer beautiful, Amiya finds. It is pitiful.
Mephisto hiccups around another note, body seizing as he scrambles in the snow. His chest heaves up and down as he struggles for air, arms desperately reaching for the comfort of something that isn't there. His fingers close around snow, crumpling in his fingers even as he tries to hug it closer to himself.
Amiya sighs. She kneels down beside Mephisto and watches him for several moments. Like this, Mephisto doesn't seem like any threat at all. He only looks like a lost, scared boy.
He is still Mephisto. Amiya does not know what he deserves, at this point. She gathers him up in her arms, scooping his ice-cold body off the snow, and holds him, hands rubbing his back. In a low voice, she begins to hum her own broken song.
Mephisto shudders with another sob, fingers trying and failing to close around her shoulders. He scrambles for her the moment she touches him, desperately seeking any warmth, any comfort, any salvation.
Over the course of several long, long minutes Mephisto shudders in his grip, body folding in on itself, propped up by her arms. Slowly, the quakes quiet, his shivering lessens, and he merely hiccups instead of wailing.
"Mephisto," Amiya says, beginning to pry his arms off. "Why—"
"Mephisto," he says, beginning to shudder as he scrambles to keep his grip on her. "Who is that? Who are you? …Are you Sasha?"
Amiya freezes, heart pounding in her chest. "You don't remember anything?" she asks, voice strange even to her ears. Instinctively, she reaches out, trying to pull the feelings from Mephisto's mind to hers, scanning for any hint of falsehood. As with every time, it's frustratingly vague, muddy and unclear, faint impressions instead of emotions. Faintly, though, she can make out genuine confusion, lost among a storm of misery, hope, and the new bright flash of shame.
"I'm sorry," Mephisto gasps, flinching away. "Is that wrong? I can remember—Sasha. Does that make it better? Do you know who—"
"I don't know who Sasha is," Amiya says, and Mephisto wilts. "But I know who you are."
Mephisto turns to her, bald hope on his face. Something about the pleading set of his eyes makes Amiya's stomach turn, the way that he was looking at her like a lifeline. Amiya pauses, wondering which words to use.
"Your name was Mephisto," she begins. "You were… Not a good person. You killed and hurt—a lot of people."
Mephisto flinches, drawing his knees up, hands clawing at her back. He begins to tremble again, terror-stricken eyes glued to her. "I'm sorry," he gasps again. "I don't remember. I don't remember."
One of his hands detaches from her back to rip at his own hair. Clumps of white rip out underneath his fingers, blood welling up underneath his nails. It scatters, flying through the air before splattering to the snow.
Out of a sense of obligation, Amiya reaches up to stop him. She catches his hand, halting its path through the air. Mephisto looks at her, wild-eyed.
Amiya sighs, tugging his wrist so he stands along with her. “Come with me,” she says. “I’ll give you a place to stay.”
Amiya brings Mephisto back to her little house, a cozy, small thing that she's built through the many years alone. Warmed with the staunch efforts of several fireplaces, she drags Mephisto there to try and work some warmth into his frozen limbs. She wraps him in blankets and brings him thick clothes to replace his torn ones.
Despite the bloodstains all over his torn clothes, despite the traces of hair that’s still caught under his nails, he has no wounds. It’s all healed over.
Mephisto, for his part, doesn't quite do anything. He lets Amiya drag him, lets her sit him down and take care of him, all with the same blank-eyed look.
Amiya’s at a bit of a loss. Still, as the day drags on into two, then three, then many more, she doesn’t tell him to leave. She doesn’t tell him much of anything. There’s nothing for Mephisto to kill, nothing for him to hurt out here. He seems caught between skittering away whenever she catches sight of him to lurking nearby wherever she is.
There is a part of Amiya, if she is being honest, that doesn't quite care that it is Mephisto as much as she cares that it is simply another that is cursed like her. Another from the broken, sick world that now only exists in Amiya's memories, another who bears the twisted rock scars that brand him as Infected.
Between the jagged rock formations that still jut from her skin, between the phantom pain of long-faded scars for the crime of getting too close to a village in need, it seems that she is not alone after all.
Can she blame herself, if she finds that she drifts too close to Mephisto? If she takes the time to notice the glint of light off the glossy black that forms on his collarbones, if she finds herself entranced by the way that sunlight hits the flutter of his eyelashes? Here, in the universe that she has built for herself for the sole purpose of isolation, lost within a wilderness where no traveler would dare wander, she cannot stop herself from marveling at the other who nestles into her space. Even if it is Mephisto, even if he is up to his elbows in blood that he does not even remember anymore, even if the flesh that makes him up is mired in the misery of others.
Still, she gives Mephisto too little credit. It's no wonder that he notices.
He kisses her out of the blue on a windy night.
Amiya yelps as his lips connect with hers. She jerks back, heart racing. “What—”
“Oh,” Mephisto says. He lingers too close, fingers hovering near her collar, eyes wide and clueless. “Did you not like it?”
Amiya takes a deep breath. “Why,” she says slowly, backing away and shoving Mephisto’s hands away from her, “Did you do that?”
Her hands are shaking, out of rage or fear or something else. Amiya exhales steadily and tries to calm them, squeezing them into fists. It doesn’t work.
Mephisto tilts his head. “I thought you wanted it,” he says. “You’re always looking at me. Did you not want it? Did I do something wrong?”
He sounds so genuinely oblivious, so genuinely confused, that Amiya grits her teeth. “Yes,” she snaps, with a brief flash of regret when Mephisto flinches back from the force of it. “Don’t do that again,” she commands, a touch gentler.
Mephisto shrinks, eyes darting around. “I’m sorry,” he says, voice trembling. “I’m sorry—I just thought—Well. Yes. I won’t do it again. Sorry.”
He is so broken. Pity stirs in her chest, and Amiya sighs. “It’s fine,” she says, even though it’s not really. “Just—why did you do that?”
Even though they’re so far from everything that matters, so far from anything that this information could help, Amiya is curious regardless. To see the reason behind the actions she couldn’t fathom, and try to connect them to the atrocities he had committed in the other world. And maybe if she knew why—she could connect with him. Help him. Show him another way.
Fighting and force can only get one so far, when one is trying to make peace.
“Oh,” Mephisto says, voice very small. His expression is downcast, and he peers cautiously at her before continuing. “I’d just—I’ll do anything you want me to.”
As he speaks, some of the timidness falls away, the barest traces of fervor lining his voice. It’s faint, but it’s the most conviction that Amiya has gotten out of him since they’d met several days ago. It’s the closest thing to the hatred and fanaticism she’s heard from him before.
Amiya freezes at the words. “What do you mean?”
Mephisto blinks. “I thought you wanted me to kiss you,” he clarifies. “And I’d do it, if that was what you wanted. So I did.”
Amiya exhales, feeling a headache building in her skull. There were… a lot of things to pick apart there. “No,” she says, going for the simplest. “Why me? Why do you want to help me?”
Mephisto looks at her with that puzzled confusion. As if it should be obvious. “You’re the only one here,” he says, that faint trace of intensity picking up in his voice. “And you saved me.”
Amiya needs time to think. She avoids conversation with Mephisto, keeping her distance as she tries to puzzle out what to do.
Mephisto… had grown attached to her, based off the brief, impersonal kindness she’d given him. Considering that he had lost his memories, he may have simply latched onto the first person he’d come across. It was clear in the way that he talked about it that he had no sort of will of his own. He was willing to do anything for her, abandoning any sort of personal reservations he might have had.
That might have been the root behind all of Mephisto’s crimes. If he’d grown similarly attached to someone who steered him toward violence, she could easily see how he would grow into the type of monster he used to be.
In the end, it seemed that Mephisto might be just a puppet. The real mastermind was someone else. That was… unsurprising. Mephisto had always seemed immature; maybe too much to be a commander.
Yet Mephisto was also responsible. He had purposefully made himself into a puppet, abandoning any morals he might have held. He was the one who looked upon his atrocities and decided that obedience was worth more than the lives he took.
She did have the power here to—try and change Mephisto. Break him away from the old path that he'd walked, until years, decades, or centuries down the line, when they could maybe be free of this strange prison for the two of them, he could help people instead of breaking them.
The thought leaves a sour taste in her mouth. Though the end result might be better, it would still be the same for Mephisto; blankly following orders and not thinking for himself. It would be hollow. She would just be manipulating him for her own ends.
She could… help him. Try to ease him away from his dependency. Guide him to a place of empathy and kindness as she taught him to find his own will. She was no stranger to helping traumatized people, to connecting with them and trying to change hopeless worldviews. She could do the same with Mephisto.
But then… another thing. Another thing that skitters around under her skin despite the other conflicting emotions that war with it, the one that she’d been ignoring because (or maybe against) her better judgement.
What about the people that Mephisto had killed? The wives he had widowed, the children he had left to starve on the streets without parents or homes? What about the people who he had left to burn to death, their skin melting off their bone, muscle and tissue and blood all boiling alive? The ones who he had left to bleed out slowly, misery their only companion until they had finally slipped away, missing arms or limbs or forced to die cradling their dead children, their dead lovers, their dead siblings? All while the Reunion commander who had done this to them laughed and laughed and laughed, wild glee bouncing off stone and echoing through ruined lives, without a trace of remorse or regret or sympathy for all of the lives he had taken, all of the people he had left broken—
What about her, she thinks with a stab of wild hysteria, who had seen many of these victims, sat with them and felt their sorrows, had become so familiar with them that sometimes she could not tell which pains were hers and which were ones that she had borrowed from the people that she had found bleeding off to the side of Chernobog's destroyed roads? She was the living testament of a tiny fraction of Mephisto's crimes. She knew, more intimately than anyone, how deep his sins ran. She had lived through a countless number of them. She knew how many lives he had on his shoulders, all while he sat here warm and happy and content, blessed with the ignorance of who he was and all the people who could not have the same luxury because of him —
“Please,” she begs, looking up at the Cautus in front of her. It hurts. She coughs wetly, doubling over from the pain. Tears prick her vision as it goes white, and for a long minute the only thing she can do is gasp helplessly and wait for the agony to pass. “Please. Kill me.”
“My children,” he says blankly, staring down at the broken concrete in front of them. There’s nothing left. First his wife, now his children—his little ones. They had all been so small. They’d never hurt anyone. Maria had only just been learning how to read. “That monster killed them.”
“Why is this happening to me?” the teenager gasps. He blinks away tears, and tries helplessly to move. It’s no use. There are bloody, ragged stumps where his legs used to be. His arms are disfigured, burnt all the way to bone. The smell of it is sickening, and he gags on it. “What did I do to deserve this?”
Why did Mephisto get to forget? And who was Amiya to let him? To treat him as an innocent, to watch the way his hair fell across his forehead, to admire the slender line of his fingers as if they were not soaked through with blood? Who was she to ever forget?
Mephisto had forgotten. Maybe, if she helped, he could become the type of person who helped others. But he still had so many crimes to his name. No matter how far he ran from them, they would always be his. Even if he became a saint, he would still need to atone somehow.
Were the people he hurt ever even real? Amiya swallows a sob at the thought. She carried so many of those people under her skin. She could catalogue each of their miseries, each of their tragedies, with her eyes closed, but she didn't know a single one by name. There were countless more who had died alone, with no trace left to ever mark that they had ever been real at all.
Maybe, by now, Amiya was the only person that Mephisto had ever hurt. There was a lost world that lived inside her head and nowhere else, with no evidence to ever show that it was real. Maybe she, instead, was the one who had never been real. Maybe she was only ever made of smoke and tears.
Wasn’t that merely even more evidence of her duty? It was her responsibility, and her responsibility alone, to ensure that those accounts survived. With nothing to prove their existence, she only had her own memories and her trust in herself to guide her. She could not forget. She needed to press on.
Amiya exhales slowly. She didn’t have to help Mephisto. He was a murderer, a psychopath. He had hurt hundreds of people. He had hurt her. She would never be able to forgive him, even if she thought she needed to. No, Amiya did not owe him anything, especially not something that would take so much emotional and mental effort.
But maybe she was just like Mephisto. There was nothing else for her. There was no one else. There is a part of her that clings to him and wants to beg him to stay, the lost and lonely part that had ripped her apart in her isolation.
Amiya thinks of a little boy, broken and small among snow and blood, gasping out sobs between notes of song. Pitiful, lost, and confused, flinching from loud noises like a stray cat.
In a small cabin lost within the snowy wilderness, far from all civilization, two former enemies coexist. There’s no affection between them, but maybe that’s alright.