Work Text:
The experiment is born at sunset, right after the last warmth of the sun trickles over the horizon’s edge and the buttery evening light bathing the laboratory retreats, leaving only the lonely chill that gilds winter nights.
He is not born a blank slate, as his master does not believe in such uncontrolled ideologies. Thus, when he wakes, he is already well enough along to read the embroidery swirling its cursive thread before his eyes:
Gold, he mouths, bleary-eyed and young. The words shift, pale lamplight pouring over them, until they’re replaced with cutting cyan eyes and pale blonde hair, tied back over a pair of spectacles. His master.
“It’s Rhinedottir,” she replies, and he shivers in the cold—but then the edges of her eyes relax. In the muddled illumination of evening, they almost look soft. “But,” she continues, “I suppose you should call me ‘mother.’”
The experiment makes for a happy child, in love with being the first success in a series of increasingly gruesome failures. He’s not perfect—his tongue twists improperly when he speaks, and his knees knock when he tries to stand straight—but he’s the first success, better than all those that came before. The valley where he plays is filled with flourishing plants and soft soil, fed and watered with the twisted remains of his predecessors.
“They make good fertilizer,” Rhinedottir explains as the experiment buries his fingers in the dirt. She kneels and digs as well, though she wears heavy gloves and excavates the soil with purpose. “But only to a certain point. The alkalinity of their blood started to interfere with the gardens, so I started feeding them to Durin, instead.”
“Drr-Durin?” the experiment asks, and shoves his whole hand into the soil. Maybe if he digs well enough, he can help his mother get her gardening done more quickly. Then he can ask her to read for him. He can read himself, too, but she knows all the more complicated terms, and his words always come out messy. He likes the way she looks at him when he figures out the smartest question to ask.
As his hand wriggles down through the dirt, his knuckles scrape against something sharp, and he yelps.
Pain is a novel sensation. His body is soft and uncalloused, easily chafed even by the soft clothes he wears. When he complained, his mother told him that exposure would harden him, and took away his shoes. Now he has calluses on his feet and can run wherever he likes, even though his legs stumble and bow—but his hands are still gloveless and tender.
He yanks his hand out of the dirt, breathless with the pain, and pulls a length of something that curves into a crescent of pale off-white along with it. There’s a jagged edge on one end that had scraped him along the back of his hand, and he throws the thing away from him.
Black is smeared along his knuckles. Rhinedottir clicks her tongue.
“Didn’t I just tell you that your blood is too alkaline for this soil?” she says. “And you’re ruining my rows. Go clean yourself up.”
“I’m ss-sorry,” he says. “I’ll fix it.”
“You can’t even fix the way you speak,” she replies, matter-of-fact, and turns back to the earth she is tilling. “I doubt you have the capability to address what I’m doing here. Just wash your hands and put on a bandage.”
The experiment winces. His hand still stings, but the sharp words worm their way under the jagged, bare edges of his own rib cage and prickle at his lungs. They make it hard to breathe as he stands and stumble-steps away, his breaths coming in big gulps as sticky fluid leaks across his hand and down his cheeks.
He never does find out who Durin is.
Eventually, she tries to fix him. She lays the experiment back down on the same table he was born on, moves aside new equipment that he’s never seen before. It’s difficult to fit it all around the deep chasm that makes up one border of the laboratory, but she manages. There’s a problem with his tongue, she says, and with the angles of his legs. All mechanical, but difficult to fix given the methodology used in his creation.
“And your mind, of course,” Rhinedottir elaborates, tightening the straps about his legs. They’re already a strain on the bowed shape of his bones, but it’s necessary, she explained, to straighten them. “But in alchemy like this, the exterior is not only a reflection of the interior, but intrinsically connected. Through modifying your more visible defects, I should be able to affect the rest.”
“What’s wrung—what’s wrong with my mind?” he asks, chewing on his lip.
Rhinedottir hums to herself, like she’s surprised he bothered to ask. “You’re unrefined. Progression of the magnum opus requires self-reflection. I chose to mold you from raw materials, under the assumption that the distillation process would then occur within you, but as things currently stand, you lack the self-awareness required to progress past the stage of nigredo.”
“I can—I can do it!” he cries.
“Only if I fix you. And it will hurt.”
“I can. I can.”
Rhinedottir eyes him skeptically, but eventually presses her lips together into a thin line and turns away to pick something up. Then, she reaches for his mouth.
She pries her fingers into the soft tissues of his jaw until he has no choice but to open his mouth on a cry. She shoves something metal inside the moment the opportunity presents, and—snip!
The suddenness of it all is more shocking than the pain itself. Salt and iron fill his mouth, along with the acrid taste of dirt, but his tongue moves more freely. The experiment simply stares up at his mother, black ichor trickling from the corner of his mouth, too startled to cry.
“One down,” Rhinedottir says, placing the shears back on a table, “and one to go.”
She turns towards his legs.
Walking hurts, even though he wears shoes and doesn’t need calluses anymore, but the experiment learns how to walk straight. He doesn’t stumble anymore, and is able to control his tongue so that the whimpers of pain that trickle up the back of his throat stay there.
Rhinedottir is pleased, and watches him every day like she is waiting for something. He talks more, now that the sound of it does not make her wince—talks and talks and talks, of the things he reads and the things he is now able to help out with in the lab, until she tsks and says that with a lung capacity like that, he should apply himself to glassblowing.
Glassblowing, as it turns out, is difficult work—but it does not require the experiment to use his legs overmuch, and so he is glad to perform it. The molten blobs of sand are rough and hazy when they drip from the end of his blow pipe, and the shapes he creates are lumpy and streaked-through with black instead of the beautiful works that his mother spins from her own breath.
He does not think much of it, proud of the fascinating, sharp-toothed shapes that swarm around his heels. They are lupine and sleek, and hurt to touch, but slip-swim through the air together in packs even though they lack the beating hearts of something alive. He thinks they are beautiful.
When Rhinedottir sees the first, she crushes it under her heel and tosses the remains into the laboratory sharps bin. The rest scatter over the edge of the pit, and the experiment is alone again.
“Impossible,” Rhinedottir snaps, scrubbing her hands through her hair. “Painfully mediocre. One of the defining characteristics of a living thing is to be able to create new life. How can I have misjudged my success so poorly…”
The experiment opens his mouth, but she has already swept out of the room. After a beat, he realizes that she was not even speaking to him in the first place.
Eventually, the experiment finds out what she is spinning, and it is white. Rhinedottir smelts out of sand, alchemically tempered by the pale qualities of chalk. A purer starting material, to the result of a beautiful product.
He brushes his fingers over perfect skin and fine, pale lashes, and looks up at Rhinedottir. “What is this?”
She blinks, smiling to herself as she gazes down at the new product. He thinks she had forgotten that he was in the room, but she seems pleased now, like she always used to be when she still read him stories and answered the clever questions he came up with.
“This,” she says proudly, “is Subject One.”
Between one heartbeat and the next, the experiment feels something inside of him twist.
“Subject One?” he asks, hating the petulant whine that threads through his voice. “I was first. I’m Subject One! Why does he get to be Subject One? You might as well throw me in the sharps bin with the rest, if I count for so little!”
Rhinedottir’s lidded gaze finally flicks over to him for a single moment, a bright, bored gaze of molten Rhinedottir. It is the first time that she has looked at him all week. “I thought you’d prefer Subject Two to your real designation,” she says. “You’re so sensitive, after all. Nigredo.”
He flinches back. His heel catches on a bit of upturned flooring, a remnant of the dragging corrosion of his glass mis-creations, and another sign of his flaws—and he stumbles, arms pinwheeling as he tips over that yawning, hungering maw at the edge of the laboratory.
Rhinedottir catches his arm, and he hangs, suspended.
“Watch out,” she says. “You haven’t met your brother Durin, yet, who lives below”
Stone foundation crumbles slightly under his foot as he shifts for balance and the breath is punched out of his lungs by the sheer panic that seizes around his ribcage. He freezes, staring up at his mother’s eyes, reaching for her wrist with his free hand.
“Mom,” he says. “Mom, please pull me up.”
She eyes him. It’s the same expression she had when she was looking down at that piece of him under the magnifying lenses.
“You may have had a point earlier, Nigredo,” she says slowly. “About the sharps container. Your nails are making me bleed.”
He clutches tighter, and warm wetness beads up—under his fingernails, and in the corners of his eyes.
“And,” Gold adds, “I really don’t need two subjects.”
His eyes go wide.
She lets go.