Work Text:
Stacking work papers one on another until they’re as tall as her entire body. That’s what Sandrone has been doing for the past three hours. And every single time the pile grew taller and taller, reaching the top of her head, she’d push it down. Watching the papers fall and scatter, fly to the corners of the study, flapping like wings. Broken wings, that can’t go anywhere. And that can’t escape the foul, oppressive air inside the large room. Desks covered in other papers and documents, all ready to be stacked and then pushed down.
Sandrone kneels on the ground and starts picking the documents from the floor. Important researches, studies she did for different topics and matters, certificates of all kinds, forged approvals and denials, schemes and projects for machines she never created but planned to. Years of work, of hard work, sweat and blood she spit on every single inch of paper, on every drop of ink she spilled.
All trash, now.
One, two, three and then one hundred and then five hundred, all around her, and she picks them up and places them down again, piling them with a care she didn’t show to any living being. And in those movements, in those gentle caresses she reserves for that paper, there’s sorrow. She asks herself, minute after minute, if Pulonia, standing in a corner of the study, still as she told him to be, knows what’s going on. If he can understand why his creator is acting like that.
What a nice pile she makes this time. The papers line up almost perfectly. It’s a pity that she puts one hand on the side of it and gently pushes ahead. Falling down, again. How long since she’ll find some relief in this little game of hers?
She kneels again, and if she wasn’t confident in the perfection of every single gear of her own body, she’d swear she heard something creak. Perhaps it’s her crank, or some of her knee joints. She grabs the first paper she sees and flips it over, reading the title, the handwritten notes on the free, blank spaces around the printed words. She cannot recall why she was so mad, that day, that she stained a newsletter from Her Majesty herself, instead of using a white paper.
Oh, yes. Now she remembers it. Columbina wanted to try and craft some little animals with paper, and she used all of Sandrone’s brand new stack. For a moment, Sandrone’s vision gets blurry, all of sudden. A malfunction? Another one, along with the creaks? Fear sinks inside her chest and she stands up, barely noticing the way her body moves: like a broken doll. Stiff, wiry.
“Fuck you, wherever you are!” She yells, and for once, she can clearly listen to her own voice breaking in half. It feels like shattering glass. And after the mess, there’s that sorrowing, sticky sensation of looking at the pieces, sharp and all over the ground, and wondering why even pick up the rests. Sandrone didn’t break any glass, but the documents on the ground give her the same sensation.
“Congratulations, Columbina.” She exclaims. Talking to her own reflection, on the majestic mirror hung on the wall, taking all the place it could. There’s almost the entire study, reflected in it. Sandrone takes a few steps ahead and stares, just stares. At herself. Locks of hair falling all over her shoulders, her bun has come unfolded, her dress is crinkled up, like her thoughts. She looks like a crumpled piece of paper. “Congratulations, Columbina.” She repeats, raising both her hands to give herself an applause. Her smile is unfitting, but she couldn’t care less. She’s alone after all, now. And forever. "Congratulations, indeed. You’re the only one who managed to piss me off even when you’re not here! For how long…how long have you decided to haunt my rooms? Huh?”
How long has it been since she left? She…disappeared? One week? One month? Or maybe, five, six, seven months? Sandrone doesn’t know. Her memory module could be damaged too. Like her core. And her mind. And her arms, who worked slower every single day. She should go to that little kid, in Nasha. No, she doesn’t like in Nasha Town. Bullshit, anyways. No one can repair her.
“Because I’m not broken!” Sandrone yells, bursting out like a volcano, suddenly erupting. Then her throat hurts and her vision turns blurry again. Swearing, and inventing new words to substitute her old insults, because they’re not sharp enough to make her feel better, she makes her way through scattered papers and broken gears and whatever lays on the ground of the study, to a small cupboard in the East corner of the room.
She tears open the shutters, to the point they echo when banging against the wall. Piles of tea, ordered in coloured boxes, all decorated with elegant, curled characters to note the type, intensity, and provenience, that’s the treasure inside the cupboard. The only sight makes Sandrone tremble and shiver. A force possesses her, she can feel it boiling inside her veins, whatever it is it’s painful, and it has claws, which sink into her skin and flesh, tearing her open and revealing her mechanical core to the open air.
Sandrone follows that thing possessing her, her own rage, the fury of being so predictable that even her own mind is getting tired of her. She grabs the boxes, opens them by ripping the packaging, scraping her nails on the surface and watches as the letters and characters fade and shred. She throws everything on the ground. The tea, the teapot, which shatters, and the clank sounds more like a painful scream, the other teacups, everything. Everything.
Unsatisfied, her thoughts rumble again, her vision getting blurrier minute after minute. She stomps over the remains of her own slaughter, kicking away the rests, reducing the teacups to a cluster of unrecognisable ceramic crumbles, until the tea boxes can’t hold the tea leaves anymore, and those leaves themself get ripped off by Sandrone’s heels. Until the smell of that profaned treasure reaches her nose and makes her sway and pull back.
“Don’t stare at me like that!” She turns behind, her eyes and finger pointed towards Pulonia, which hasn’t moved once. “Don’t stare at me like that! Do you hear me?!” She’s not sure if he can. She’s not sure if she’s even speaking, maybe she’s just dreaming to. Maybe it’s all just a fucking dream, and she’ll wake up because Columbina’s singing, somewhere, outside her bedroom’s door. And she’d burst open the door, but only after listening to her, ear leaned to the wooden surface and eyes closed to let the melody reach her core.
“Can you hear me? On the moon? FUCK YOU!” Sandrone’s voice isn’t enough to let that pain pass through her skin and finally leave her. She needs to do something or every single stitch that keeps her apart will pop and leave her undone on the ground. So her next victim, a vase on the closest desk, on her left, ends up on the floor: Sandrone has grabbed it and quickly threw it on the other corner of the study. Ceramic creaking again. Why does she hear screams in every single noise? And why does she see rays of moonlight in every lamp’s trembling light?
After that night, when she remained alone and confused, she refused to see natural light ever again. She built lamps and lights that could win over the shadows, but couldn’t recreate the warmth of the sun or the crystal peace of the moon. Orange, neon light, painfully artificial, anything that could make her forget the taste of the moonshine on her cheeks.
What a theatrical, exaggerated reaction. What a waste of her precious time, and her abilities. What a pitiful excuse to isolate herself and close the doors of the study and ignore anything, and everything. Machines clanking around her, the pistons’ huffs and her own body decomposing: that’s what she’s been living on. For how long? She can’t really tell.
“What a disaster.” She says, like she notices just now the mess on the ground. Tea leaves, documents, even some blood, everything gives her the impression of a massacre. “Too bad I can’t bother to pick this shit up.” Sandrone makes herself a smile, proud of the cold blood she’s been using to handle the situation. Someone less methodic than her would’ve already gone crazy. Like, batshit crazy. Thinking about a machine that could reach the moon or something like that.
While lost in these thoughts, she walks around the study, and stomps more times on her own latest projects, which are, precisely, for a machine that could help her pass behind the fake sky and reach Columbina, wherever she is. But every single effort made led her to a dead end, an endless chasm of frustration and pointless projects. For people like her, extraordinary useless people like her, the sky is an insurmountable obstacle. Whoever put it there, Sandrone doesn’t even care who it was, which cruel deity that died anyways, did it on purpose, she’s sure.
Why create a fake sky if not to make the mortals on the ground wander like bugs in search of real sunlight?
Sandrone is not even made of real flesh and blood. She’s not a pityful, pathetic excuse of a human that walks around ready to fall to the ground dead. She’s unbreakable. Adaptable. Wise. Smart.
Her reflection stares back from the mirror. She adjusts some locks of hair and removes a few crumbles of sharp glass from her right shoulders. She didn’t even notice they were there, they probably got stuck on her dress when she smashed to the ground one of her lenses. A pretty valuable one, to be precise. But who cares anyway? There isn’t a lens that can help her notice a detail that could lead her back to Columbina. Because that witch used her own ways to get up there.
Sandrone could’ve figured something out, if she asked her, before everyone else. But no, she preferred to run away, from everything.
“You’ve always been a coward.” Sandrone spits out the mirror. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to get back to the moon? I would’ve stolen from Dottore’s research. I would’ve crafted something for you. A ship, something to get us both behind that fake sky. But no, no, miss Columbina wanted to go there alone! She prefers to hide in a cave and talk to animals and get back to those…priests!” Sandrone can’t stand her reflection anymore. She turns behind, her breath is heavy, she can feel something growing in her chest.
She made some research by herself, on old books, smelling like dust and piss, and with all the pages of the same colours of sand, cracking at the single touch. She searched for a particular type of seed that could grow inside a mechanical organism, or an organic one, but she found nothing. So, she reached the conclusion that the occlusion on her upper chest is not caused by roots of any kind. Which is weird, because she’s sure there’s something digging inside her and taking up all the space.
And it can’t be Columbina no more, because she’s gone.
Funny how ardently Sandrone desired for her to go away from her thoughts, while they spent time together. Nights, entire nights, in which Sandrone thought that if Columbina simply disappeared, the amount of hours she spent thinking of her would fade. And now that she’s gone, her absence is taking even more space than her presence.
Sandrone kneels on the study’s ground. It’s freezing, she can feel that coldness even through her thick tights. She should make another document pile. And then watch it fall, yeah, that’ll make her feel better.
“See?” She says, about then minutes later, when the pile is already reaching her knees. “Method. Method is what others are lacking. You must be methodic, in life, in everything you do. Documents on the ground? No worries. Pick them up and pile them. Have fun doing nothing on the moon. I, instead, I do something. I do something all the time.”
It’s so easy to imagine Columbina helping her, if only she was there. She’d sit on her ankles, knees close to her chest, and take the documents, one paper after another. She’d place them with care, trying to align them like stars in the sky. And she’d smile every single second of it, and if Sandrone was lucky, she’d even sing something, her lips slightly apart, just enough to let the melody slip out.
Sandrone lifts up her glance so quickly her neck snaps. For a moment, a dizzying and beautiful moment, she saw something, lingering in the corner of her sight. But oh, it’s gone again. Hanging around with ghosts is not as bad as Sandrone thought it’d be, if she ever laid her thoughts on such a foolish matter. Why would she even bother herself with ghosts when, back then, she already had a white lady haunting her rooms? Her bed chamber, lit up by moonshine every single time Columbina would sit on the bed and sing.
Sandrone would come back after the longest days, legs and arms tired from giving orders all day, and she’d find her singing, inside her room. Those days, she didn’t fight, she didn’t yell. She’d just sit outside her own bedroom, close her eyes, and listen. When Columbina stopped singing, Sandrone stopped listening. That’s how it went, so many times she lost count. And then, she’d run away, to her laboratory, before Columbina could open the door. She was blind anyways, she wouldn’t have seen her laying on the ground. Or perhaps yes? Sandrone never understood how Columbina saw the world.
She had perceptions, most of the time. But Sandrone can’t tell how she perceived her. Maybe there was a weird aura of dazzling light, surrounding the Marionette. The only thought that Columbina looked at her through dirty lenses makes Sandrone’s head spin.
“What was I doing, again…?” Sandrone lowers her glance once more. A, yes, the pile. The documents. Handwritten notes catch her attention, like burning ambers after a blaze that devoured everything. She picks up the paper from the ground, there’s her shoe’s print on the words, she must’ve stepped on it, but she couldn’t cancel Columbina’s characters. To be fair, they are almost all scribbles, which vaguely reminds to her own name, Columbina, and Sandrone’s.
She stares at those letters, surrounded by nonsensical spirals.
“What a waste of ink.” She murmurs, lips barely open. And yet, she can’t help but notice that Columbina knew the movements to trace down their names on paper and let them intertwin, letters weaved one to another. She sits down, head spinning. “Pulonia…” She murmurs, placing the document next to her, on the desk. Some time before, maybe a week, maybe a month, all those projects on it, the unfinished scale models, the tape and bolts, would’ve made her happy. If not happy, satisfied.
Because she could sit down and work and create something, and be a step closer to her goals.
But now, what’s the use?
“What’s the use, Pulonia?” She breathes out. “Do you really, does all of this mean that, in the end, my only goal was her? Because if it’s not like this, then…” She looks at her hands. They seem foreign, now. “...then why do I feel like this? Like the sun exploded and the moon fell to the ground and all this shit burned to ashes? Didn’t the world stay exactly the same, beside her departure?”
Pulonia stays silent, no matter how many glances Sandrone gives him. Or how many minutes she keeps staring, first stubborn, then desperate, more and more, until time passes. But Sandrone’s time core is broken, she knows, and days are minutes while seconds last hours. When she stares down at the ground and closes her eyes, she’s tired. Like she’s never been before. And she’s not sure if there’s a remedy for it.
“Bullshit.” She says, but her voice isn't as sharp and menacing as before. Right now, it sounds like she has no more energy to put in talking. Throat sore, she hasn't had one in a long while, at least, before Columbina’s departure.
That term, again.
Departure. As if she went on a trip, on a journey to learn new things and mature and then come back. “She's not coming back.” Sandrone words out, slowly. She once read saying something out loud gives it power to be true. So she held close to her soul those words, scared to hear the echo around.
But why keep it up? Why go on with that pathetic masquerade? Sandrone stands up from the chair and walks away. Away, but to the other corner of the room, helplessly searching for a place she didn't notice before, where to sit and rest. She swears Pulonia is following her around, with his glance, but it's hard to tell where he's looking.
Everywhere she looks, she finds a piece of Columbina. A small fragment of what once was, and what Sandrone thought would last forever. But that flame painted her the wrong colour. Now everything falls into pieces and she can picture so perfectly the radiant portrait of her. Of her smile, of her mask, of her songs, of her way of hanging around, even if Sandrone kept pushing her behind.
Almost as if Sandrone couldn't close her hands around what could've been, before it disappeared forever.
If there were any windows left, Sandrone would look outside and wonder. Instead, she wonders staring at the mirror. How pathetic she looks now. Slowly, she stands up, she didn't even notice she sat down again, her own body is starting to betray her.
Sandrone always thought Columbina was a coward. Because she let herself be used like a puppet, by the Tsaritsa, by the other Harbingers. She thought she was a coward for her passive way of accepting Sadrone's harsh words, for how she always bowed her head and stayed silent when disappointed.
But Sandrone always thought of herself as a coward too.
Standing in front of the mirror, she can see the entire picture. Columbina’s ghost is evanescent, she'll never leave her alone. Sandrone knows she'll haunt her until they both die, and fade in time.
“Coward.” She breathes to herself. “You could've told her what you felt for her. Instead, you ran and hid. And now, you get what you deserve.” Words delightfully painful to hear. Cutting just as deep as she needs it to be. Slipping out of her mouth just a moment before she raises her left hand and punches the mirror.
Glass breaks, skin rips off, blood and broken pieces on the ground, together.