Work Text:
Cigarette smoke smelled like his father. This disgusting, burning, clinging smell was the only thing that made Victor remember his father. The way his breath was brushing against Victor when he screamed at him, the faint aroma that clung to everything that his father touched.
Victor hated it with burning passion.
Its how his father smelled after he killed Victor’s mother. He can remember this disgusting smell filling every corner of the house, choking him, strangling him when his father was standing near at the mother's funeral. He swears he could feel the tobacco in his mouth when they lowered his mother’s casket into cold ground.
In that moment Victor promised himself that he won’t ever smoke. He won’t ever become like his father. This vile, large figure with the cigarette in hand. Screaming, lecturing, repeating same medical terms over and over, exhaling that poisonous smoke in Victor's face, reminding him that he wasn't ever enough. Always gruesome, strict, borderline furious, never satisfied. After their lessons his father usually would leave for good half an hour and come back to the dinner, drenched with that bitter scent. That insufferable habit made Victor sick to his stomach. He still was expected to eat dinner, even if he was on the verge of throwing up.
Yet there he was – hunched over the sink, scrubbing his hands, letting the hot water with soap wash away that disgusting smell. He felt like a criminal, desperately trying to erase the evidence of murdering his own principles. His gums were still filled with the taste of tobacco, the poison lying heavy in this lungs, seeping deeper and deeper into his flesh with every breath he took. He tastes his father on his tongue, and suddenly every inch of his body feels disgusting and dirty. Victor raised his head, staring at his reflection in the mirror, noticing how guilt creeps in the darkness of his eyes.
He remembers Father's face in dim light of a dying match. The tiredness in his eyes, and how it all relaxed when he inhaled the smoke. How his Father's wrinkles seemed to smoothen out when his fingers held a cigarette. For a faint moment he looked just like a tired old man, simply searching for salvation in tobacco. Weirdly, the moment Victor watched his father smoke in silence was the closest he had ever felt to him.
Even with that he felt miles away.
“Tomorrow” – he decides. The thought is sudden and certain.
Tomorrow he will conduct his experiment, and tomorrow he will overcome death. He will become twice the man his father was, twice the doctor he would ever dreamed of being.
And there it was - the taste of tobacco, still prominent on his tongue.