Work Text:
“Lord Dottore!”
“Lord Dottore!”
The Harbinger heard his name called from a distance, long before he could even see the agent whose voice carried on the wind toward his tent. He never cared for the kind of field work he got stuck with; but when experiment results appeared favorable, he wouldn’t dare withhold his presence just because he didn’t want to be knee deep in snow for hours on end. After hours of collecting data, he finally had his machines analyzing his samples from within a warm tent.
Needless to say, he could not leave for the time being. Whatever urgent business came running wildly up to the open flaps of the portable laboratory tent, would simply have to be passed along to another Dottore.
Regardless, he approached the entryway and greeted the messenger with a suitably dispassionate tone. “What is it?”
The deep, heavy imprints of the agent’s boots dragged behind him in long strides in snow, expressing his urgency with whatever message he held on the tip of his tongue—out of breath and leaving the Doctor waiting for his clarification. He considered himself a patient man, waiting for his subordinate to speak, and withholding the innate desire to tell him to just spit it out already.
“It’s about Lord Regrator—,” he huffed, taking the last few steps to come closer so he didn’t have to yell over the wind rustling between them.
His lips pursed into a straight line, “What happened?”
Another few long moments passed with the agent trying to catch his breath, and a deep heavy weight settled somewhere at the base of Dottore’s diaphragm. Out with it.
“Lord Regrator collapsed, his breathing stopped after reports of severe confusion and signs of jaundice.” As one of the Doctor’s subordinates, he knew enough medical knowledge to properly assess and convey information without altering or excluding details. All of his associates underwent such required training if they wanted to work under him directly. This allowed him to parse out the severity of a situation quickly—and that mostly mattered with one particular individual.
“Has anyone measured his blood pressure, where is he now?” He asked, with a cold sterility that did not express the spreading dread that crept beneath his skin.
“The train in Sretomorosk, still. The medic on board said his blood pressure fluctuated between hypotension and hypertension, and his heart stuttered. They’re working to keep his blood pumping now. But at this rate he might not make it—What would you like us to do?”
Reasonably, the agent hoped that the Doctor would return himself to take such a large task out of their hands—obviously so that if Regrator died in the attempt to revive him, they could not be blamed. But he couldn’t return at the moment, even if the very thought stopped his own heart briefly—a heart he didn’t need anyway, yet burned his whole body from the inside at that moment. While his position placed him in closer proximity to him than the others, he had none of the tools required to save him.
He had no choice but to issue an order that would send Pantalone further out of his hands.
“Transfer him to 25’s ward, back in the city. He’s on duty. Have a message sent ahead of your arrival so he can have emergency equipment ready. Resuscitate him as needed… Keep his heart beating and oxygen at consistent intervals for the duration of the return.” He managed to give his order with an odd collectedness that earned a curious expression from his agent—though he felt the words fuzzy on the tip of his numbing tongue. “Go.”
“Y…yes sir.”
Back through the deep snow, the agent shuffled—just as hurried in his return as his approach. As the Doctor watched him leave, disappearing into a white veil, his vision blurred. Not just from the haze of snow flurries, but from the sudden shift inward, a tightness in his chest that begged him to breathe and yet would not allow him to. He didn’t move for a long period of time, long after the report came and went, taking the messenger back to a scene he couldn’t rescue.
Even if he returned, he could do nothing to alleviate the critical nature of the situation.
Even if he returned, he could not guarantee that he could make it there before a critical failure. His agent could radio ahead to move the train back to Snezhnograd before he returned and shorten the time exponentially—time that could make the difference between life and death.
Logically, he made the correct decision. Logically, Regrator’s survival chances improved exponentially with his order to send him back to base where 25 could properly assess and fix him. Logically, his mind should have been cleared of any distractions after sending his agent on his way.
However, the fog remained and an incessant itching in the back of his mind sent impulsive twitches down to the tips of his fingers. The desire to return with him, tensed the muscles in his arms and legs, like he could easily just take one step, then another, and another…But in reality, he remained like a statue, until the snow began to fill the agent’s path behind him.
Return
Return
Return
Go back
Go
Back
Yet he stayed there, still at the doorway of his tent, with machines beeping dispassionately behind him. Beep. Beep. Beep. Pulsing like a heartbeat and creating discord with his own erratically moving pulse.
He had to place his trust in 25’s skills; a tall task for any Zandik to leave the work in another’s hands. He knew well enough that 25’s skill easily met requirements of the emergency task heading his way, but while all of the segments considered themselves Zandik, he did not consider them his equal in skill or passion. Leaving a task of the magnitude of Feofan’s life in someone else’s hands—even ones that could be considered also his own—left him despondent. Immobile. Stunned in a place where his body screamed to follow the hurried imprints in the snow, and his more logical mind reminded him he couldn’t do anything at that time.
A constant back and forth that pulled him in two directions, incapacitating him from any immediate action.
…Life without Feofan didn’t calculate anywhere into his existence and such a consideration, even for a moment in passing, settled like a disharmonious note that echoed through his body. Facing a real possibility that Feofan could actually perish roiled complicated emotions that churned intensely under his calm demeanor—threatening to break the surface, but trapped by his own hard set ways of self expression.
He couldn’t show his concern, even when left alone in an unforgiving tundra, with no one left to witness. But the raging storm beneath the placid waters stirred his thoughts, leaving silt clouding his mind.
What if
If he dies
What if he does not make it back
Dies alone…
Without any one of them
Without him there.
What if he returned to find him…gone.
Hundreds of years with his presence, and a greater than zero percent possibility existed that he may perish far away from his reach.
His chest burned, and he silently cursed Zandik’s design to make them mimic real human conditions. The breath he held for minutes pushed him far away from his body and into a tunnel vision where he saw nothing at all but a blank, empty void.
A solitary tear that one would never see on his face, but rather etched deep within, tucked away where a monster’s heart trembled silently for one person and one person alone. A hidden variable that altered the course of his existence tracing all the way back to the original Zandik, who tempered his devotion into each and every one of them. Someone uniquely valuable to him, to each of them, in a way that transcended any monetary measure. Feofan, once his greatest experiment, morphed into a foundation.
A foundation that splintered and cracked under his feet from the dread that weighed him down punishingly.
Pantalone never needed to leave his office, but he chose to travel to the town closest to the Doctor’s site so he could properly see his work in progress—an excuse of assessing assets, when personal interest brought him out of Snezhnograd. In retrospect, he would have doubled down on telling Pantalone to stay in the city if he thought for even a second he could end up in a health crisis.
He couldn’t know; logically, he knew he couldn’t have predicted it. Yet he repeated to himself over and over, I should have told him to stay.
But he never considered controlling Pantalone’s actions. If he wanted to go somewhere or do something, he had every bit of agency to do so without objection from any of the Dottore segments—himself included. Keeping him in a gilded cage never crossed any of their minds—at least not until that day he saw nothing but a white void leading out into the tundra, where on the other side, Feofan might have possibly died.
Feofan…The only person who ever saw Zandik as a person; and whose presence could be tracked tangibly in the different behaviors of 35, 45, and 65. At the end of his life, though Zandik never expressedly loved the person he became, he learned a measure of self acceptance shaped by the hands of one regular man—one who unburied himself from the dirt to live amongst the spotless upper echelon.
Zandik etched into each and every segment, a certain measure of devotion that none of them could escape. Though most of them would not have the strong relationship with him by the age they represented, Zandik’s concern for him bled to them all. The very reason 35 felt as though he piloted his body from some place far away when he returned to work in his temporary lab.
He struggled with his normal procedure of compartmentalizing and tucking outside issues away for later dissection.
Work would not pause for his crisis, but he didn’t move for a very long time by his own standards. When he did push his body to action, he did so with a numbness that just barely allowed him to do basic functions—tasks that required no fine motor skills and very little thought.
Trust 25 to handle the situation, he repeated inwardly.
If that one failed to resuscitate Feofan, he—their Prime Segment—may just erase the whole lot of them. A severe thought to have, while knowing the loss of resources that action would entail would be catastrophic to their progress. But in a deep dark corner of his mind, advancements in the absence of Feofan would lose a significant amount of importance.
Zandik’s insistence on imbedding his personal feelings into his supposedly neutral segments may have damned them all from truly unbiased behavior—at least where it concerned one single man.
The one single man who acted as the sun the rest of them inadvertently orbited around. If that sun flickered out on a random winter day with no warning and no fanfare…then what would hold the rest of them in place?
Nonsense, he blinked. He, Dottore, did not need his presence to function…
…but he liked it. But he wanted it. Valued it in the way a collector values his most cherished coin. Feofan belonged to him, after all, so it made perfect sense to feel some kind of way about the potential loss. Feofan had to bear witness to the new world he planned to create; to die before that time could amount to nothing short of betrayal, and Feofan never went back on his word.
If he could not trust himself, then he could at least trust Feofan’s stubbornness.
He won’t die. Simple enough.
But even so, in spite of attempting to rationalize his thoughts, his hands still worked against him. Before he realized he’d done so, he’d started cleaning up his work station. Several boxes of delicate work packed up in the time his mind attempted to soothe the unrest that left a deep, trembling burn in his chest. While he couldn’t simply throw everything in storage and catch an immediate train back to Snezhnograd, he could put away his unneeded supplies in preparation to return as soon as his experiments concluded.
He could expedite his work, gather sufficient data to work with, and leave the rest of the station to a subordinate to handle.
Return
Return now
Go to him
Not yet, he couldn’t jeopardize his goal—Feofan would be irritated with him if he wasted the funding. He retrained his hands from packing to sorting his samples, trying to get himself back on track. Every movement had to be deliberate, forced, and every thought set on repeat until it became a mechanical operation.
But try as he might, his mind slipped and his automatic response returned to packing away his lab until all that remained were the parts he could not interrupt—those of which suddenly became the enemy of time itself for him.
Waiting.
Waiting for results that seemed so…
Irrelevant at the moment.
Damn it. He strained not to swipe his hands across the table and fling everything off into the void at the edge of his vision. But he did not. Instead, he placed his palms flat on the table, leaning his weight on it and holding his breath. One minute, two minutes. Three… then he started over. One, two, three, repeat. For more hours than he could count, until the machine beeped loudly.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
He released his held breath and immediately snapped to collecting his data, taking far less care than he usually would in packing it away—storing it in something he could carry in a bag—then shoving the machine into the last remaining box without much gentleness. The machine could be retrieved later along with the rest of his temporary station.
On an open notebook, he wrote specific instructions on where to send these items, how to pack them up in whatever vehicle they would elect to ship it back with, and he pinned it down to the bare table with hastily filled beakers—packed with snow to weigh it down.
Then he left.
Marching through the now filled-in path his messenger took to return to the train station. The train may have long since returned to Snezhnograd, but he used his influence to expedite another, barking orders the moment he reached another agent. All in the immediate vicinity belonged to his division and none would hesitate to act on his command—they knew better, and the nature of his orders often came with a deeply dangerous undertone should anyone fail to comply.
They responded to his demands, but he heard none of them—only saw them disperse in the directions he assigned them. Some to call for the next train early, and others to return to his station out on the tundra. By the time he himself arrived at the wait station, the sky already fell dark. At that point, Feofan either waited in recovery or…
He pressed his lips into a flat line, unwilling to let his anxiousness pass any further into his expression—not that anyone would see it with his mask covering most of his face. Yet it helped him maintain the frosty composure that kept everyone at a comfortable distance and maintained an impression of calmness. Calmness that he did not actually feel.
Until he laid eyes on Feofan, alive and breathing, he would not settle the churning in his chest. Damn this irrational affliction…
The stress of the unknown overwrote the usual qualms he had with traveling—not that he, as a segment, experienced physical motion sickness anymore. The remnant memories of his past difficulties often inspired him to try and focus his mind elsewhere while traveling, for the purpose of ignoring those wisps that no longer actually affected him. However, the oppressive squeeze in his gut from factors related to Feofan felt like echoes of that familiar nausea.
He closed his eyes and leaned against the window of his private seat on the way back to the city. If he slept, the trip back would feel like nothing at all; but he scoffed at the concept of sleep, when his pulse bounded from his chest all the way down to his fingers and toes.
If they left a corpse, he’d have considered digging his maker back up from his grave for the purpose of desecration for creating them with such a vulnerability.
Thus the train ride back lasted an eternity—through the whole of the night hours and into the morning—until he felt the train slowing as it approached the grand station. Then he opened his eyes and straightened his body, ignoring the faint quiver in his fingers. He battered down the instinctive urge to stand and depart while the train remained in motion. His appearance sooner or later would change nothing.
Feofan’s fate had been decided well before he boarded the train back on the edge of the frozen void. He should have left the uncertainty behind in the snow, but until he had an answer, he could not breathe easily—despite his unfeeling outward appearance.
When prompted to disembark, his agents spoke words at him, but they went through him. He merely nodded to whatever they said, and he instructed one of them to cart his data back to the main lab. From there, his feet carried him to where Feofan…or Feofan’s body would be.
Nothing else in between mattered. Logically, if he looked around, he’d be able to suss out clues to the state of the nation’s top financial tycoon, but he could not see or hear anything but the two paces ahead of him and the pounding of his own heart.
He could have run, sprinted through the city to the gates of Glupov, but he chose to walk and maintain his composure. Feofan himself might mock him if he went racing through the city in panic. Every step, one after the other, led him toward the reveal in an automated rhythm. One step, two step, three step…
Until he passed through the gates, up the steps, and into the private quarters set aside for The Doctor.
There, in the hall outside of 25’s lab, he crossed paths with the Doctor on duty himself.
“I was told you returned early,” he started, adjusting the glasses over his nose. “He gave me no shortage of trouble… but he will recover.” The younger segment offered a stapled stack of pages to him and with a numb hand, he took it.
The flood of relief that drained the tension back from his head to his feet left him feeling queasy again for a different reason, but he tempered it back with a deep inhale. “What happened?”
“He was poisoned. I detailed in the report the measures I took, but he will come back from it with dedicated care and if he follows the guidelines I laid out for him. We will make sure of it. He asked me to deconstruct the poison used on him, but I have other obligations.” He didn’t explain it further, leaving the information in his hands. “The samples are in the lab, I drew several vials of blood.”
“I will make use of them,” he said, nodding absently, eyes shifting toward the door that Feofan should be behind.
Though the younger segment could not see his expression, he knew well enough what the mask hid away. “Go see him, he should be awake.”
He didn’t speak another word to 25, and 25 didn’t elect to linger any longer—letting him step into the lab that served as Feofan’s patient room for the time being.
Alive. Alive and arguably well—at least well enough to already have asked for the chemical make up of the poison someone tried to assassinate him with.
His stomach churned for a whole new reason. Anger.
He stepped into the room and into Feofan’s line of sight. The banker had the nerve to look up at him with calm, doe-like eyes. Calm and pitiful, when the Doctor knew he likely also roiled with rage underneath a placid exterior.
“He said…someone poisoned you.” He looked him over, stepping up to the side of the bed. Alive, alive and breathing, and looking up at him with eyes that could see through his mask in ways no one else could.”
“That is the case,” he nodded, but Feofan’s interest in the topic took a backseat to something else he observed. “Are you alright?”
“…what a nonsense thing to ask,” he mumbled after a moment, refusing to acknowledge how not alright he would have been if he arrived to find a white sheet pulled over a lifeless body. “Worry about yourself, Feofan.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere now, am I?” He smiled, having the gall to act unharmed and relaxed, when the Doctor almost lost him. “25 said he planned to pass my request on to you. Did you see it?”
“I did, and rest assured, Feofan, I will have a sample for you within a matter of days.”
“You have my appreciation, Zandik.” Feofan reached out to take his hand, and he didn’t decline the action—still too numb from his near catastrophic loss to try and rebuff the comfort that physical touch brought him.
“Rest, you will be taken care of.”
And he…he had every intention to make someone rue the very day their miserable parents brought them into the world. He needed a test subject to ensure the accuracy of his reverse engineering, after all. And if this test subject happened to lose all of their fingers, limbs, and unnecessary organs along the way…
…Well, someone would learn the cost of threatening Zandik's primary objective.