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The Captain -a title, a joke, a noose- in charge of so many lives through manners of undying (ha!) devotion, held together by it, made into something not a person but also not anything else because only a person could suffer like The Captain, Il Capitano. A legend, a shell, a cacophony.
He returns to Zapolyarny Palace like a chained dog. He has been gone too long, which he knows because he can dig his fingers into the side of his jaw and feel bone. He is not looking forward to hearing the Doctor complain about how much harder it is to graft skin onto a person whose flesh sloughs off in chunks. Not in so many words, of course- to admit difficulty with his line of work would be to die, for Dottore.
But he will say:
“If this is painful you only have yourself to blame for it.”
And Capitano will hum, acknowledging. He will not say that he has long surpassed the point where pain, simple, desperate pain, unrelenting proof that he is real and alive (arguably) and has a body which can feel, has left him. He has very little in the way of a functioning nervous system. Dottore knows this. Dottore is the one who makes sure he can still move and speak and carry out easy tasks like petting dogs who run up to him on the street when he is away.
Other people are comforted by how much dogs like him. He has been told that any man who is so gentle with the little animals must be fundamentally and indisputably good. He allows them to believe this. He does not point out that he smells like meat.
There are no guards in the Harbingers’ quarter. What would be the point? No person fit and able to kill one of them would be held up any more by a couple of warm bodies. It would be a useless loss of life to station anyone there.
Because- despite the parades and the balls and the endless publicity, endless propaganda - the people hate the Harbingers. They are state-sanctioned trained killers, which is to say that they are very, very, very good at murder without repercussion.
The people know Dottore, who has a small pool of escaped children telling stories about the much larger pool of unescaped children, and they know Signora, who rampaged up from Mondstadt and left nothing but destruction in her wake. They know Columbina, who will take their names and their children and their stars and tell them that she is just collecting her dues for helping. They know Pantalone, who cuts and cuts and cuts their wages until they work nonstop and still sit out on the streets and freeze.
Almost none are Snezhnayan. They are imported liabilities, mostly inhuman, horror show freaks eating stolen facsimiles of hope out of their spiteful Archon’s boreal palms, who get press as though they are great heroes.
So the people hate them. It is deserved. They do not know him, for a story, a battle chronicle, but he receives their ire for the company he keeps. It is still deserved. They do not even know how much.
He looks out on the city outside Zapolyarny Palace sometimes. Watches people come up to the gates with torches. Watches the snow turn red beneath them as though they are true threats, as though a palace made of immovable ice will burn.
They (the Harbingers, now- switch the subject of conversation, specific, individual, organizational They, sometimes called as such in resistance groups because better not to chance Them hearing, knowing, finding out, summoned by Their own names like half-Archons) are supposed to kill anyone not welcome in the Palace. It is their duty, as the Tsaritsa’s collective right hand.
Sometimes when someone manages to get as far as his chambers he will let them come at him. Let them try to kill him. Maybe he was sleeping (as though he can). Maybe they crept up behind him and he could not hear them over his hundreds of charges. Maybe it would be nice, to let go.
Sometimes they cut him open in ways that would have killed him as a moral, mortal man, no matter how resilient. Slash at his gut and are shocked by the lack of organ matter. He doesn’t need them. Hasn’t needed them for centuries. They’re gone. Rotted away and cut out so that the mold didn’t crawl to the outside.
Sometimes he pats them on the shoulder when they have exhausted themselves and tells them to leave before they overstay their welcome, and not for anything to allow themselves to be caught by a gaunt man in a lab coat because they will suffer forever, forever, forever, and he would not wish that on anyone else.
That’s only sometimes, though. Sometimes he just makes it quick.
So when he sees, stark against the blue-white of Zapolyarny walls, red hair and slight frame and the typical fashion of dark overcoat and bright scarf common on Snezhnayan village children (that they are so much more visible in the snow- you cannot pass a block in Nod Krai without seeing the dirtied red and blue flash out from every streetcorner and alleyway, equally blue fingers holding out matchboxes and carved bowls) he draws his sword.
If he is found by Signora or Columbina, he will die horribly. If he is found by Dottore he will live horribly. Better not to chance it- better to take care of him now when he is not expecting it, not painless, certainly, but neither torturous.
Then, before Capitano can reach him to cut him down, the boy turns. He is Snezhnayan, by his pallid complexion and hollow cheeks, and a little bit older than Capitano saw by the back of him- but still a boy, and perhaps still too young even to be made a soldier. A shame, to throw one’s life away so young.
Capitano takes in the firm set of his shoulders and the Vision at his hip and sees, for a moment, a past so far gone it should be lost completely, folded away and washed out to sea like so much sand. Righteous conviction, baseless ambition. A mirror.
He does not hesitate until the boy bows, and catches him off-guard, stops him ten feet away in the hall.
“Lord Capitano!” He says. His voice is raw, wind-whipped. Capitano can imagine him standing out in the cold yelling against it, ordinary. “I humbly submit myself before your impressive presence.”
The worshippers are exponentially worse than the would-be assassins. To dedicate oneself to the personified harm of one’s own fellows, even by uncomplicated foolishness, is vile, repulsive. The required buy-in is immeasurably steep. It is either to turn a blind eye to the misery of a peer or to be tangled in pretentious allegiance to an Archon who blights her own land for no cause but to take some resource from her own overlord she despises so deeply she no longer cares for her people.
Again: vile, repulsive. Capitano ceases to hold, takes a few long strides forward while the boy continues to prattle.
“I thought I mightn’t meet you until much further after my induction- it’s been- what, two months? Lord Pulcinella- I was in his rank, you understand, and then I ascended to be under Lady Columbina, but that wasn’t for particularly long and I’ve not met her either- told me that I would be lucky to ever meet you at all, because I’m going to be sent out and- sincerest apologies, my Lord, have I offended you?”
Capitano holds his sword at the boy’s neck and he does not flinch. Closer, his eyes are like frosted glass, unreflective. Unnatural. Unreal.
“What are you, boy?” Says Capitano. He does not elaborate. Does not give him an answer to parrot back.
“I’m Tartaglia.” Says the boy, as though that ought to mean something. He looks upset, corners of his thin mouth pulled down, hands curling in his great overcoat. His eyes do not change. “The Eleventh?”
“What?” Says Capitano, stupidly. Dumbstruck.
“Childe,” Tartaglia continues, a little bit desperate. “They just cut out a section of Lady Signora’s retinue and transferred it to me. I was at the Banquet. I won. You were there.”
The Harbingers' Banquet is a bloodbath, and Capitano has tried to forget every one of the events since their inception. Vaguely, he remembers their transpiration, but it is so much easier to forget a face when you have hundreds inside of you. Usually, there are no survivors, and even if there are, the Tsaritsa looks down upon the sole victor and declares them unfit for her closest in some way.
Childe. Childe. What a mockery! What a farce! What a tragedy!
Capitano thinks about killing him anyway. He would be disciplined for dispatching a colleague, but it might be worth it.
He thought about it with Lord Arlecchino as well, on her induction last year. But House Children stop being children once they are House- there is nothing that comes with her position she has not already seen.
Tartaglia, though, is fresh-faced and admiring. He does not look like the haunted teenager Capitano picked from the rubble of a decimated observatory, who had followed wordlessly when he told her she was being taken into Snezhnayan custody. He looks like a boy.
Childe. Sadistic, cruel, abhorrent.
Capitano is not good. He accepted that a long time ago, so far divorced from this moment and yet carrying on through it. This close, Tartaglia should be able to smell decay, but he does not react to it.
Capitano is a coward and a fool and a monster, because he puts his sword away. The sheath is heavy against his leg again, heavier even than before. He can’t do it. All he is is a well-practiced murderer and he cannot take anything from this boy because to do so would make the betrayal he’s been saddled with apparent. He is not good, but he wants to be. It’s a false kindness and it’s one that makes him feel better, not having to kill a child.
Childe. How hysterical, how sardonic.
Tartaglia tilts his head to the side and smiles, all teeth, closes his eyes in a practiced motion of faux-amiability. Capitano takes his shoulder and squeezes, puts all the apology he can into it. Walks past. He can feel reverent eyes on his back.
Childe. A title, a joke, a noose.