Chapter Text
His house was huge now, as compared to his apartment in Sumeru. Two floors with a cellar as well, nestled in the Snezhnayan wilderness far from the prying eyes of those who may detest his work. Objectively, the place was perfect. It was everything he had wished for when he was younger, no castle like his youth may have dreamt, yet something manageable filled with research papers and travel souvenirs; a monument to everything he had ever been. Objectively, the fine house in the woods on the bank of an ephemeral stream was a place the Doctor should be able to call home. It was a place he was proud of building for himself, a place he had poured more of himself into than anywhere, even his laboratories. The one place in the world, above any, that Il Dottore could call his own.
Why, then, did it feel so terribly empty? He had filled it wall to wall with his achievements, with art and diagrams and mounted taxidermy and everything else that remotely shimmered and caught his eye. No space was left on wall or floor for him to doubt himself. The fires were stoked as if it were midwinter year round, heavy handmade blankets draped over plush furniture, yet he trembled and shook like a child in the cold, like the boy that hadn’t the privilege of a carriage ride before arriving at the Palace gates. He had been content, one may dare say happy, before he checked his mail this morning. He had built armies from the ground and made himself into a being more God than Man. His wildest dreams were but a step away, his very mind and body on the precipice of something brilliant, something unknown to Teyvat and so wholly and perfectly his. And yet. And yet, rather than work on his projects, rather than pore over notes and equations and run further calculations, he sat on his couch and simply looked at the paper on his coffee table.
The detested thing, a disgrace to his very name and such a golden opportunity packaged in a way one had to have personally designed to ensnare him. An invitation, from the Academia, to host a speech and panel on his study and replication of elemental manifestation; this is to say, the research he had been pushing to have legitimized regarding his work with delusions and elementally powered technology of other manners was finally accepted by the academic community by and large. He should be ecstatic. Another dream, another lofty ambition settled – yet he could only feel static in his mind and the rising taste of bile in the back of his throat. It made his old injuries ache with unwelcome memory, phantom pain in a limb that had long since been replaced.
The Doctor was not known to be an overtly private man. Those who knew him by another name, those who knew him in the Academia, may have described him as “peculiar” or “skittish.” His coworkers now would call him “capricious” or “untrustworthy,” but with his demeanor as it was, private was not a word to come to mind. Nor was quiet, or stage-shy for the matter, to be a descriptor on their tongues. By and large, this was an opportunity he was excited to seize and use to thumb to those God-fearing, ivory-tower academics holed up in their Sumeru circlejerk unwilling to accept a Godless future the Doctor himself was pioneering. No, it was not a fear of presenting, nor a fear of the critique and questioning to follow that led him to feel this weariness in the very core of his being.
Rather, one had come to find that faking one’s death could become a rather problematic event when one is expected to return to the scene of the crime. It was not his darling future that terrified him, paralyzed him in his tracks, but the past as it loomed colossal and cast shadows longer still into that future that Dottore had tried so fiercely to protect from it. At the least, that Dottore had tried so fiercely to flee with to avoid it. He did always tend to be better at running than standing his ground to fight, didn’t he? Running was what he was good at, and running had been what he had done in the Academia when consequence and betrayal caught up step for step with his tendency to push the rules to their breaking point and beyond.
Never one to disappoint an audience eager to be proven wrong, the Doctor knew it was time now to pack and return to one of the few places in Teyvat even he was afraid to set foot in: Sumeru Academia. This did not mean the task ahead was to be easy.
Packing haunted him, reminded him he lived with only his ghosts as housemates. He finds the letters everywhere. Not only letters; drawings and badly aged photograms from far too long ago. One supposed finding the possessions of a dead man was natural when you were going through his belongings, returning to walk through his home.
It was irrational, to worry he was to be recognized. Dottore was taller now, by a good six or seven inches. He’d filled out to be a fine man of his own accord, given the hand he had been dealt – or, one supposed, the hand he had replaced. His hair was longer, evenly the blue that had started taking hold then. And then the mask– no, he was wholly a different man now. He was not the boy the Academia had turned out, he was not the boy that Cyno had carved the heart out of and left bleeding and poorly bandaged, left like refuse on the street for the Fatui to pick up. He was Il Dottore. He was The Third, The Doctor, the man who brought lesser Gods to their knees, the man who slew dragons. He was a God of his own realm, he was to be the End of the Seven. He was all of these things, and he was also positively terrified of going back to the Academia on the one in three hundred chance he knew someone there.
The Doctor had not felt real fear since he had settled into his position as a Harbinger. It had been a rough and tumble adjustment, but power suited him well and he settled into it with comfort. Not complacency— he did not think he could ever find contentment, not for long— but certainly comfort. His power, his word being utter law to his men, was a safety net to cover for his every mistake. He had not felt fear in so long because such a feeling did not come into being when you had absolute control over your surroundings, over the people you surround yourself with. Even then, it was an odd sort of feeling; this was no matter of life or death that sent adrenaline through him such as had been commonplace in his vagrant youth. This was a malaise that settled into his very bones, that left him glancing paranoid over at his shadow shifting in the firelight of his living room as he packed his personal belongings. He wouldn’t be gone for more than a week, and that was accounting for two days’ travel. It would be simple. He would stick to his itinerary, and return to normalcy before he knew it.
This was, at the very least, what he told himself when he loaded up his carriage, a box for his research and a bag for himself. A hand ran over the dense fur of the draft horse, the scent of barn animals settling over him and reminding him of when he first came to Snezhnaya; he used to be afraid of horses. In his village as a boy, he saw another child stumble out into the way of a carriage passing through and the horse, startled, crushed him. He used to be afraid of a lot of things; he was afraid of loss and of failure and of too-loud noises outside of his chambers at night.
He used to be afraid of a lot of things. Now his fears were more material, more real, more adult – loss and failure and too-loud noises outside his front door. Perhaps not much changed, after all. The Doctor was older, he was more efficient now in his studies; his bones ached with time now, and with old injuries. He was stronger now, and less afraid of everyone, but he was still very much afraid. Time has an interesting way of not allowing one to grow out of their wounds so much as letting one grow around the hurt, being shaped by it; a tree coming to encompass the nail driven into its bark. The pulp may grow, but the heartwood still lay at the center unchanged, even if not untouched. The tree may be felled, may be twisted into any such shape as the craftsman may want, but the nail is still inside of it, somewhere buried deep under varnish and polish: a thing unchanged and at the same time entirely transformed.
The carriage was loaded swiftly then; the Doctor disliked dwelling on that which was resistant to change, and this entire ordeal was like slow sutures in an old wound— to say in brevity, unnecessary and painful. He would get to Sumeru, he would give his panel, stay for complimentary drinks, and go home to his cats and his taxidermy and his walls of achievement.
It took little time to get from his estate to Zapolyarny Palace, wherein he exchanged his more utilitarian personal cart for the more lavish company transport provided by the Fatui. One of his own men was to drive, some boy whose name he really hadn’t bothered to remember, but Dottore did remember he had taken well to the experiments he performed and thus the drive should be in capable hands. Orderlies transferred his luggage for him while he boarded with his research in the main body of the carriage with intent to review it while he traveled. Preparedness was key to a good presentation, after all.
It is unfortunate, and perhaps not his own fault, then, when he finds old notes mixed in with the new.