Chapter Text
Zandik has always been strange, and no one around him has ever had much patience for it.
It frustrates him how slow the other children are; he doesn’t understand why they can’t comprehend things he learned long ago or why they have only the most inane of interests. None of them like him. They give him odd looks, and laugh at him when he’s not trying to be funny, and call him creepy and stuck-up. He isn’t being stuck-up on purpose, but if he was then they would deserve it, because they are stupid. And he decides he doesn’t want to play with them anyway, because all of their games are stupid too, so it doesn’t matter that none of them want to be his friend.
Still, there is an unpleasant ache in his chest every time the class is let out to play and all of the others ignore him. Sometimes they even take his things or stick their feet out to trip him, but usually he can scare them off if he glares at them long and hard enough. Maybe they are all stupid and he doesn’t want to play with them, but he wishes he had someone. Someone who would listen to him when he talks, instead of telling him that he’s a show-off, or boring, or inconsiderate of others. Someone who would look at his designs and think they are interesting, instead of telling him he needs to focus in class and not draw on his papers even though he already knows what’s being taught.
It is both useless and painful to sit and hope. So he doesn’t. He turns inward, focusing on his own pursuits. In class he sits by himself and writes and draws, and at recess he sits and watches the ants, pondering the intricacies of their little bodies and how the joints fit together and how they all know what to do. One day another boy comes over and stomps on the ants he is watching, and Zandik’s face twists up and he lunges at the boy, knocking him down and hitting him over and over. The teacher has to drag him away.
Zandik’s parents are not pleased to hear of the incident. They do not tend to be pleased to hear of anything that has to do with him, but they are particularly unhappy to be called to the school yet again about their son. Only a couple of weeks ago, they had to talk to the teacher because Zandik was in trouble for correcting her in front of the class. Zandik thought this was an institution of learning, and that she would like to know if she was teaching everyone something wrong, but apparently not. The month before, they had to talk to the teacher because Zandik was on the verge of failing the grade; he had stopped turning in any work some time ago, as it is so simple he finds it torturously boring. And the month before that they were called to discuss Zandik’s “disturbing drawings”, which were some doodles of himself riding on top of a ruin drake as it flew.
No one has much good to say about Zandik’s interest in machinery. Zandik tries to explain that it isn’t specifically Dahrian machinery he is interested in, but this doesn’t really help. People get different funny looks on their faces when he talks about the desert’s ancient technology. They wrinkle up their noses and get all skeptical, which he supposes is better than the hushed horror or raging offense people take to his admiration of Dahrian technology. The teacher that caught him drawing ruin hunters went into a rant about how kids these days have no respect for those who fought to keep Sumeru safe, how Zandik would never treat it like a game if he saw what those things did to people.
It’s true that Zandik was born after the Cataclysm, so he doesn’t carry the same bad memories as the adults around him. Still, he thinks they are all being stupid about it. If they’re so scared of these things, shouldn’t they want to understand them better so they can stop being scared? If they’re so powerful, shouldn’t they want to know how to control them instead of getting rid of them completely? This is the Nation of Wisdom, isn’t it? Why do they all act like he’s doing wrong just by wanting to know something? Not only about machinery, either. He is often called an argumentative and obstinate child simply because he always wants to know why.
Maybe they’re right that he’s obstinate. It’s always been the case that the more Zandik is told something is off-limits, the more curious he gets about it. And he sees no reason to follow a rule if no one can give him a good reason for doing so. There are so many rules that are illogical or unfair, or that some people are allowed to break but not others. If everyone let him make the rules, he’d make sure they were sensible and fair. But no one is very interested in what he has to say about such things.
Either way, he isn’t going to let other people’s stupidity keep him from what fascinates him most. Zandik has always enjoyed taking his toys apart and then putting them back together more than playing with them traditionally. Nothing is exempt from his curiosity or from his inclination toward understanding things by breaking them down into their constituent parts. His interest in machinery is only a natural outgrowth of that talent. He was obsessed from the moment he heard about the enormous machines that were used to wreak havoc on Sumeru; a very different reaction from his classmates, who wanted to be reassured it couldn’t happen again. He reads everything about machines he can get his hands on, Fontainian or Dahrian or Deshret, it doesn’t matter. Last year he even found a defunct ruin drake in a field near the rainforest, which he sneaks out to look at on a regular basis.
He does soon learn it’s not worth it to argue about these things, as it won’t change anyone’s mind and only serves to get him in worse trouble. When his father first found him writing about his ideas for new kinds of ruin machines he threw the entire journal into the fireplace and called him a cursed child. It is really not Zandik’s fault that most of his father’s family died in the Cataclysm, leaving him to run their business all by himself. But he gets better at keeping his interests to himself after that.
Zandik was born into a moderately well-off merchant family, their heir and only child. He is the spitting image of his father save for the slight curl to his hair, which he got from his mother, and his unusual crimson eyes, a trait neither of them possess. In his earliest memories, his parents were pleased to have an intelligent son. He is not sure when they changed their minds. Perhaps when it became clear that he was at least as strange as he was intelligent, and that he would not outgrow his strangeness. He knows that they would like to have a second child, but that his mother struggles to conceive, or else he would surely have been replaced by now; his father approves of nothing about him, and his mother, when she looks at him at all, looks at him like she cannot believe she bore such a thing.
His father is the most vocal about how Zandik is an unfitting heir, one who brings shame to the family. Your useless son, he once called Zandik in a fit of especial pique with his wife. Zandik suspects his father is right that he is unfit for the business; being a merchant seems to require speaking to a great many people, shaking their hands and winning their approval, and Zandik rarely if ever finds approval when he speaks. Once he creeps into his father’s study and goes through his documents to fix several accounting mistakes, hoping to prove he can be useful in his own way. When his father discovers it the next morning, all it gets Zandik is the belt.
His mother, meanwhile, makes sure her son is fed and clothed, but does not care to associate with him much beyond that. Her disapproval is silent and tight-lipped; she does not have to use sharp words to make her point when a severe glance from her will cow Zandik far more quickly than his father’s bluster. Whatever will we do with you, Zandik, she often says. It is the softer version of his father’s What is wrong with you, Zandik. He wonders often why she gave him the name she did, but this is one thing he has never been brave enough to ask. Maybe she never wanted him in the first place. Maybe she could already tell there was something wrong with her son.
But she does have at least a little more patience for him than his father. If he is well-behaved, she will entertain a question or two, perhaps even offer a piece of advice. Once, she spots him hiding under a table at a social function before anyone else does and tells him sternly to come out. “It’s too loud,” he protests.
She pauses. “I know,” she says, “but we must endure. Don’t embarrass us, Zandik.”
Zandik is so startled to be agreed with that he actually does crawl out, even though everything is still just as loud.
Another time, Zandik decided to look inside his plush bird toy, the one he has had as long as he can remember and cannot sleep without. There was only stuffing inside, which was boring, and then his father tried to throw it away. Zandik cried and cried until his nose was clogged up with snot. His father said sternly that it was only the consequences of his actions and that he should learn not to ruin the things he likes. But that night, as he paced up and down the halls, refusing to stay in bed, his mother sighed and said to follow her, that she would allow him to fix his mistake. She had some mending she’d been putting off, and Zandik sat quietly and watched her sew, committing the actions to memory. When she was done she told him to run along, and Zandik went and fetched his plushie and put back in as much stuffing as he could and clumsily sewed it up, pricking his fingers half a dozen times. It’s slightly lopsided now, with a line of thick messy stitching up its middle, and his father huffed and sighed when he saw Zandik still clinging to it, but he didn’t take it away from him.
Over time he comes to suspect that his parents do not love each other any more than they love him. Their union was an arranged marriage, and there is little warmth between them. His mother is chilly and cordial to his father, rarely reacting to his barbs with anything but a silent, contemptuous gaze, which is not quite as effective on him as it is on her son. His father is almost always frustrated with her, and seems to blame her for how Zandik “turned out”, repeatedly asking why she hasn’t taught him how to behave.
Zandik knows his mother spent some time studying at the Akademiya before marrying his father, for which she had to abandon her studies. According to his father, she would not have gone far there anyway because one side of her family was from the desert. Though his father speaks disdainfully of those who sit around all day with their noses in books and their heads in the Akasha, it sounds wonderful to Zandik. If he could choose, he thinks he would like to become a scholar. Perhaps he would finally find others like him there. “You would make a good scholar” is just about the only compliment he gets from others, after all, even if they don’t always sound complimentary when they say it.
If only he could hurry and grow up faster. Then people would take his ideas more seriously and let him study the really interesting things. Sometimes he idly daydreams of becoming such a respected scholar that his father will have to admit he is not useless after all, and his mother will think he is interesting and want to speak to him rather than shut herself away for most of every day.
But for now he remains small and powerless to change much of anything, with no way out of his gnawing loneliness. Sometimes Zandik thinks of running away to live in the rainforest with the Aranara, but he only ever saw one once, and it fled from him when he chased after it to try and pin it down and get a closer look, and no one believed him about it because hardly anyone ever sees Aranara anymore after the Cataclysm.
The Aranara would probably like him better than people do, though. Often Zandik thinks he must not really be human. It would explain everything, and maybe if he could find out what he was he could find others like him, and then he wouldn’t be so alone. Next to his ideas for machines, he likes to doodle little bird-creatures, imagining one day he will sprout feathers and fly away to be with his real family, who will be able to tell when he’s sad or angry or happy even though he doesn’t always make the right faces, and who will furthermore care whether he’s sad or angry or happy rather than telling him his feelings are inappropriate for the situation and make him a nuisance.
For a time there is a stray cat Zandik feeds, and he quietly considers it his first and only friend, sneaking behind his parents’ backs to bring it scraps. It likes to rub its small, soft head on Zandik’s hand and purr, which makes Zandik’s chest all warm like he might start purring too. It has more toes than most cats, making its paws look large and unwieldy, and he likes to think it is a fellow outcast. “It’s okay if the other cats bully you,” he tells it. “I’ll keep feeding you.” After all, the cat is useful. It gives Zandik something to do in the long empty afternoons when he feels like screaming from boredom. Usually he would solve this by finding something to read or to take apart, but he is leery of disassembling any more furniture after how much trouble he got in last time, and he has already read all the books in the house twice over.
But one day Zandik goes out in the yard and finds the little cat dead, its throat torn out by some larger, fiercer creature. Zandik stands and stares at it for a very long time, his chest getting tighter and tighter. Then he goes and puts on some gloves and finds an empty box to put it in. Never one to be squeamish, he brings its corpse inside, intending to take it apart and look at how its unusual toes attach at the joint. Understanding it better is all he can do for it now. But his father catches him and gives him a belting for it even though Zandik was handling it carefully, not allowing it to dirty anything.
“What is wrong with you?” his father demands, panting slightly with the effort.
Zandik knows better, but seething with the injustice of it all, he turns and glares at his father. “I hate you,” he hisses. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
This is the only time Zandik can remember enraging his father so much that he loses control and strikes him in the face, toppling him over onto the floor. “You will show me respect,” he snarls. “I am your father!”
What is wrong with you, what is wrong with you, what is wrong with you. Zandik wishes he knew. Maybe if he could locate it, he could cut it out of himself. Become something that anyone could want.
*
Zandik’s mother gets pregnant again when he is eight. As her belly swells and his father’s excitement grows, so does Zandik’s dread. He becomes surer and surer that this baby will take everything from him.
He tries to stay on his best behavior, hoping it will help if he is meek and unbothersome, but it barely makes a difference. They have been assuming his every action is intended to cause trouble for years now. Soon he is lying awake at night, so anxious he feels sick with it. His parents already hardly tolerate him - how much worse will it be once they have a new, better child? The thought of watching them love it - hugging it and fawning over it as he’s seen his classmates’ parents do - makes his eyes sting fiercely. Worse, his father has started talking about sending him away to a boarding school, and even if no one likes him here, the thought of starting over far away from anything familiar is terrifying. And what if they like it so much better without him around they won’t let him come home for break? What would he do if they throw him out completely? He’s read his mother’s full set of encyclopedias, but he doesn’t remember the parts about plants he could eat as much as he does the parts about history and bugs and machines.
The worries roll around inside him, gathering weight as they go, becoming a tangled ball that he cannot begin to ignore or pick apart. Until one night he finds himself standing over his mother with a steak knife in his hand, thinking about cutting open her belly.
Zandik knows he can never earn his parents’ love; all he can rely on is his sole utility in the family, his role as the only heir. Even if they hate him, as long as he is the only child, they need him. It is this thought that sends him desperately, impulsively into his parents’ bedroom, sweaty fingers wrapped around the handle of a knife. He hesitates, breathing heavily in the dark.
But I don’t want to hurt her, he thinks.
But then they’d have to keep me, he thinks.
He will never know if he was actually going to do it. Before he can make up his mind, his mother wakes up and screams. His father tackles him to the ground and wrenches the knife from his hands, and for the first time in his life uses the buckle end of the belt to beat him, and then locks him up in the pantry.
In the dark, through the closed door, he hears his parents arguing more fiercely than they ever have before. “I won’t have an abomination like that in my house,” his father shouts. He can’t quite catch his mother’s reply, but her voice is raised, too, and he can count the number of times that’s happened on the fingers of one hand.
Zandik’s stomach sinks. He has made them hate him, and he didn’t even get anything out of it. He should have never followed such a reckless impulse.
(Or else, says a little voice in the back of his mind, he shouldn’t have hesitated.)
It’s hard to tell how much time passes. When Zandik is finally dragged out of the pantry, his throat is dry and his stomach is empty and his legs are stiff and his back has scabbed over. His parents clean him up, hardly deigning to look at him, and then he is put into a carriage and brought into the city where his father does business. Zandik doesn’t realize what is happening until they are walking up the steps of the building and he is able to read the sign. This is a place for broken children, damaged children, children whose parents are at their wits' end. He goes cold and tries to dig in his heels, but his father’s hand is firm on his shoulder and he is forced to stumble on.
“You don’t have to send me away,” he blurts out, and then, not quite believing himself, “I’ll be good. Father- please-”
“Silence,” his father growls, fingers digging into Zandik’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. “You’re not even sorry. I won’t have a violent little monster like you around my child.”
And what can Zandik say? He isn’t sorry, and maybe he really is a monster. Probably only a monster would think of doing what he did. I’m your child, too, he thinks desperately, but perhaps he is the only one that has ever mattered to. He wriggles frantically in his father’s grip, turning to his mother. “Mother,” he pleads-
But his throat closes up with only a glimpse of her remote, resolute expression. He knows there is no hope even before she speaks. “It’ll be better for everyone this way,” she says quietly, sounding downright exhausted, staring straight ahead.
So Zandik stops protesting. He stops digging his heels in. He follows them into the institution and sits, silent and numb and compliant, as they finish arranging the proceedings. It’s like a light has gone out inside him, like he’s ceased to be real. The desolation is simply too large for his body.
He already knew his parents didn’t love him, but he thought at least they cared for him a little. He is their son. Humans are supposed to care for their children.
(Maybe he isn’t human enough even for that.)
His father leaves the room without speaking another word to him, but his mother lingers in the doorway. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a familiar careworn object.
It’s Zandik’s plush bird.
“I brought this for you,” she says. “I thought you would…” She falters under his unblinking crimson gaze. He knows his face is frozen into expressionlessness, and that people find that eerie, but he doesn’t remember how to make it do anything else. “Well,” she says, and pushes the toy awkwardly into his hands. Muscle memory makes his arms wrap around it. “Goodbye, Zandik.”
And then she turns and is gone.
Zandik doesn’t feel anything. He is silent as the staff show him around, and feed him dinner, and take him to his bunk.
Only deep in the night does some barrier break inside him, and he curls tightly around his bird, and cries, and cries, and cries.
*
In the following week, Zandik develops a general antipathy toward the world. No one likes him any better here than they did at home, and the other children are even stupider. He carefully hides his plushie beneath his bunk every morning, worried someone will steal it. The adults are cold and impersonal and don’t appreciate him taking things apart any more than his parents did. When they catch him at it they rap his knuckles and make him stand in a corner. He sniffles himself to sleep every night, his bird clutched tightly to his chest.
And then one morning Zandik wakes up without it.
In fact, he wakes up in a completely different room than the one he fell asleep in.
The lights are a bright, sterile white, and the cot beneath him is scratchy and uncomfortable. His body feels odd and weightless, his mind sluggish. When he blinks open his eyes, there are several people with mint-blue hair standing over him.
“Father?” he blurts, his heart giving a sharp jerk in his chest, believing for one cruel instant that his parents have come back for him.
The faces in front of him crinkle into identical expressions of affront.
No, none of these people are Father. Their hair is the right color, but Father’s hair isn’t curly. And Father wouldn’t dress like this; each looks more bizarre than the last, sporting ostentatious plumed coats and strange half-masks. Zandik kicks back in alarm, pushing himself up against the frame of the cot. “Who are you people?!” he demands.
“You mean you don’t know?” one of them asks. Zandik glares at him and immediately gets a dizzying feeling. It’s a young man with sharp, contemptuous eyes exactly the same shade of red as his own. In fact, they all have the same red eyes - at least, the ones whose eyes he can see.
“Come now, 18, he’s still a child. You can’t expect him to be as quick on the uptake as you were,” says someone else with mild reproach. Zandik glares in that direction too and finds it’s an old man with a monocle, leaning on a cane as he gazes welcomingly down at Zandik.
Zandik does not trust this tepid warmth. “Where am I? What do you want with me?” he demands angrily. “Where - where,” a horrible thought strikes him, and his breath hitches as his hands flex emptily. “Where’s my bird?”
The men all stare at him with varying stupid expressions of discomfort, surprise, alarm, and disgust. One with a beaked half-mask tsks and turns to the old man. “Zandik, did you really have to make this one quite so young?”
The old man cocks his head impassively. “Eight was an important age for us,” he maintains. “It was a pivotal perspective, and one I would like to see preserved.”
Zandik surges up to his feet on top of the cot, his hands curled into fists. “You haven’t answered any of my questions!” he shouts hotly, his eyes beginning to sting. “Where is it? Did you throw it away?”
There’s a delicate pause. Then the young man - the one they called 18 - looks down his nose at him and stiffly says, “We lost it when we were fourteen.”
Zandik may be a child, but he is not stupid. He noticed how they’re saying we, us. How they called the old man Zandik. A suspicion forms in his mind, however impossible it seems. He has never had trouble believing in things others would call impossible once presented with the evidence.
The old man smiles as he watches the realization click into place on Zandik’s face. “It has been nearly seventy years since your last recorded memory,” old-man-Zandik informs him. “Welcome to Snezhnaya, 8.”
Zandik proceeds to burst into tears.