Chapter Text
The doctor had not been a very tall man, but from where she had been looking, he may as well have been a giant.
The smoking shell careened to the ground, the brassy clangour of hollow metal rang across every crevice of her ear as he ran the action on the trenchgun back and forth. The receiver shot open again, its clockwork innards singing a shifting song as it clicked into place, locked.
In, and out, in and out. Steady were his silent breaths as his neck craned to best observe the twitching course of the awful thing. He knew it was dead, there was no way it could have lived anyhow. Not with its head and half of its body splattered against the damp wallpaper.
Wiping the blood from beneath his nose, Daan slung her lifeline upon his back as he shifted to survey the damage. There it was again, that unknowable look in his evil eye. The pistol fell from her trembling fingers as she tried to pull herself from the ground.
“I-” She gasped, her leg giving out beneath her as she failed, over and over again. “I-I didn’t need your help, cyclops…” she groaned, almost breathless as the delirium clouded every sense besides her vision.
The display was heartbreaking. All he could do was blink, his own breath taken as he watched such a commanding presence struggle and collapse repeatedly in a puddle of her own blood. This was not the Karin Sauer he had come to know. It was some simulacram of her, some pathetic mirror image brought to life by the pain as much as the moon's maddening vision of humanity.
His lips curled as she repelled him in her slurred hatred. The image of the scene just before his arrival burned itself into his mind, playing over without end. Her fall as the terrible thing in the white mask assailed her. Demented cackles gurgling from deep within its gut as she frantically cycled her lugr again and again, its telltale empty click failing her as the awful inhuman raised its gargantuan cleavers. Headstrong as she may have been, she was always thankful for help.
“Listen to me,” his words were insistent in a way she'd not expected from him. “Just sit still, I'll work my magic and you'll-”
Now here he was again, lecturing her. The earnest concern of his monotonous plea may have been endearing if he weren't so infuriating in how he delivered it… Seriously, who did Patches think he was? Her mother? She was fine… Sure she wasn't able to take herself from the ground, and yes her mind had been fogging over. But what did any of that mean? Nothing. Even if she had run out of ammo, the deathmask would have carked it one way or the other. She just needed to… What? What was she thinking? Oh, yes, the doctor and his ever annoying insistences.
“No, nonononono!” Her head shook in her abstract refusal, a dull pain she tried to caress in as gentle a manner as she could manage throbbed within her skull a moment later. She spat. “G-get your hocus pocus and your silly checkered pants out of here! I-I've survived here long enough withou-”
The wrinkled shadow below his one good eye twitched.“You’re tense.” He interjected flatly, hurriedly. His voice only a tick higher than it was prior. It was enough to silence her. “I can see your heart practically beating out of your chest, and if your breathing is anything to go off of I’d think you’d just run a marathon.”
It was entirely unnerving, he was calm. Much too calm. But even dull as he seemed, the urgency with which he crossed the floor and knelt at her side betrayed him. Without a second thought, a single tear was all it took to savage his sleeve in twain. There was nearly an objection as he rolled her torn skirt to the thigh, though it died on her lips as a horrible shriek of pain was born.
Nails boring deep into her palms, teeth grinding, her attempts at swallowing her pain worked questionably at best while his fingers worked to plug the terrible gash that dug to the bone.
“You’re in Hypovolemic Shock.” He said assuredly- as though this was just another one of their spats, as if this whole ordeal had been normal, somehow. Clinical. “As soon as your adrenal glands run themselves dry, you’ll be in the worst pain of your life if you don’t bleed to death first. And my sleeve isn’t going to do a whole lot in the realm of staunching the bleeding from your femoral artery. I’m afraid it's hocus pocus or the highway to heaven, Ms. Sauer.”
He hardly waited for her response to his ultimatum. He'd already propped her fully against the wall she had backed herself against, pulled one of those curious blue vials from his pockets and doused her wounds in its cooling embrace.
It stung, terribly. But not for nearly as long as she would have expected. Mind pervaded entirely by sensation, a new one’s arrival broke through the haze of exsanguination. To put simply, she couldn’t feel the antiseptic burn. Not as a clement pressure clenched her hand, not as fingers wrapped around hers.
“...Please?” His eye beading, pleading, staring directly into the endless depths of her soul. And there, as she caught sight of herself in his pupil, was something she hadn’t seen from anyone since they had arrived in Prehevil; empathy.
It was impossible to win with him. He always had to have the last word, even when it came to rescinding her death warrant. Scowl seared into her face, teeth grinding themselves to dust, she surrendered. Even if she didn’t want to believe him, there was little else she could do.
His touch was so very gentle, hardly that of a soldier. Ever so softly, the tips of his fingers set her face forward, his breath against her cheek, growing heavier by the second. With the click of his tongue, words that were not Daan’s slithered from his lips. Every syllable swirled in her head as pleasure’s gossamer web spun itself along every crevice of her brain.
Her spine arched unwillingly as she quivered, his whispers sharp and slick in her ear. And in a language she had never heard, no less. Though such trivial things did not prevent her from knowing every single word. Nor stop the butterflies that erupted in her stomach, the burning desire that smouldered in her heart as her imagination filled with all manners of imagery vulgar and obscene.
Desperate were her breaths no longer, only shallow as her fingers instead dug into the fraying hem of her skirt, knuckles whitening as the pain of her mending lesions married with the euphoria of her doctor’s delicate spell. The ringing in her ears faded away to the clarity of the silence that surrounded them. But silence was neither solemn nor sacred to Sylvian, not in moments like these…
She was left struck in awe as he pulled away, eyes wide, the last words of his goddess still ensnaring the stem of her brain. As the world itself returned to the closest approximation to normal this hell could conjure, she’d hardly even noticed, let alone cared as Daan centred himself at her front once again. His motions moving to pull the slacked lid of her eye as he pawed over her, the signature click of his lighter and the brilliant flame that came forth sounding the constricting state of her iris.
Her heart pounded. Not in the irregular skipping rhythm that nearly pervaded her death, but in a manner she had no utterly no right to feel. Not now, not glancing at him.
Vexed, his head moved from side to side, the line of his lips never shifting as he formulated his second opinion. “Hm.” His eye left her, staring off somewhere else as he pocketed his light, nodding ever so slightly. Though, he wouldn’t be very lost in his thoughts for very long.
The clap echoed through the mountainous halls of plaster and lime, the red hot sting was already beginning to welt as he refused to flinch, refused to soothe the growing bruise. As steadily as he could manage, he turned his head to free it from the position in which it had been struck.
“You pig...” The seething hiss barely escaped her gaping lips, her hand suspended still inches away from his face. Instinctively, almost, she moved to cover an imagined nudity from an imagined prying eye. The tempo of her every breath set by the pace of a trembling labour, each of her restored senses ground it their sharpest. Eyes narrowed upon him, though wholly unconcentrated on any one thing.
As if nothing had ever happened at all, the growing quiet between them was banished, a sigh lasting no longer than the flip of a coin passed through the doctor’s nose, the very corners of his inanimate lips curling to meet the barest beginnings of a smile.
“Good to see you haven’t suffered Cerebral Hypoxia…” He tried his best, paying no mind to her pinkening features, to the shiver that shot down his neck that forced the goosebumps to rise along his exposed arm, and most importantly, to the writhing resentment that boiled just below his control- one that demanded he meet her assault with words he would not have been proud of a moment later.
He stood, offering her a hand to get to her feet. Though, he was met with only a stuttering refusal, with abject horror as she perceived him. With not so much as another glance, quiet as a churchmouse, he took his strides from the foyer to the front desk.
There was a call to him, something furious, something demanding. The final words of the rather uncharming diktat he did not hear, halted by the impassable state of his mind. He was rather glad he hadn't heard.
From down a carpeted step, his shoes clacked on the checkered marble beneath as he passed an arch of Lombardian marble. Not that it was of particularly any note to him, not now, at least. Not while he was repulsed by all that made him.
His eye shot closed as the muscles in his neck seized. He had been illprepared, but he hadn't needed what little vision he still had to slip his hand into the interior pocket of his vest, the ends of his groping digits graced by the thousands of elaborate engravings of the object of his desire. Each line and curve passed over and savoured as though it were his own personal braille.
It was unprecedented, he thought, unbinding the case of silvered enamel from their hinges. Hardly fair at all. He had already been afraid, already had to ration anything that would have soothed it. He'd been ready to give so much of himself so quickly. What was this fresh hell? Punishment for refusing to obey Her whims? But why had now hurt so much more than any other? What made that visceral thing coil in his gut, hollow out his chest?
Time was running short. There was another awful squawk, another resentful call of his name.
It came open as he studiously pried its spine, a satisfying squeal drowning out the myriad other noises that fought for his attention. Already he’d found himself reaching for his light, his remaining hand expertly curling to pull the finely rolled white paper from to band and shut the miniature masterwork in one pluck of his fingers.
Though, he found he couldn’t. Not as he froze, not as he swallowed the apprehension that had slowly been welling at the back of his throat. Not as he blinked, gaze cast on the last cigarette. Bringing all the air he possibly could into his lungs, the case closed promptly with a slam, its gilded course disappearing back again into the purple silk.
His breath escaped him, drawn and quiet as he awaited the inevitable. Why hadn’t she taken off again? What was stopping her? She’d come in here on her lonesome, damn near died on her lonesome. It would only be fitting that she left on her lonesome too. What more could he offer her now, after he’d already given her his very mind? It was clear she’d not wanted to thank him. Not with her heels stomping across the marble behind him like that.
Worse yet, he imagined, whatever could it be that she had taken to heart? Sylvian’s blessings weren’t particularly clean ones sure, but all the same, Levi hadn’t deigned to shoot him in the chest after the whispers replaced the skin on his knees- the Lieutenant spat no venom when the fissure that split him from chest to hip was made nothing more than an ugly scar.
The god’s words were preposterous, so utterly perplexing. Raunchy and raucous to the point of comedy. The truth was that She could not bend the will of men like that. At least, not so instantaneously, not so-
“Daan!”
The reprieve was well and good while it lasted.
“Daan you bastard, I am NOT being swindled by you! Not by some parlour trick! What in the name of Alll-Mer did you do!?” What else was Karin to be besides indignant? What other thoughts were to cross her clarified mind? Dying one moment, alive the next? She took him by his shoulder, she refused to go without answers.
Without much resistance, she’d brought him around to face the consequence of his action. She’d half a mind to take the finger she shoved in his face to the empty socket in his skull and hook him ‘til he screamed ‘uncle.’
“In the name of Alll-Mer? Nothing.” She’d had just about enough of his hopeless disinterest by this point, that vile tone that infected everything he said- only the thread- the sinew- of the mildest emotion flecked in it.
She blinked. Was he serious? Her foot stamped, shaking her head as she seized him by the collar. “I’m not stupid, I’ve covered the Rondish Atomic Tests, I KNOW what you foreigners are capable of, so just spill it already! What trick in that sick little mind of yours did you whip out to make my leg better!?”
It was an interesting thing, really. Watching her work herself up over this. Was she truly so hard pressed to accept the supernatural? Not just as a fact of life, but as a part of the natural in and of itself? After all of this? After the suffering of the moonscorched? After the countless circles that granted them godly essences? After the molded apartments and seeing her own spectre on T.V?
He wanted to laugh. In all honesty, he needed to. What else was there to keep him stable with his dwindling supply of smokes down to the last straw? No, no. He reserved himself. He couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair, and more than that- it would cut this debate much too short.
“You know, if I told you I tried to explain this to you earlier, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d have a hard time believing the truth even if I swore on my good eye either.” He paused, the corners of his lips tilting with his head, decidedly downwards. It was one thing to bicker with him. But to bicker with him miserable? She was relentless. “Come to think of it, I don’t think you’d believe anything I told you at this point- about anything.” His shoulders rose as lazily as they fell. What else could he say?
And so she stared. That ugly, contemptible stare.The very shape of her face contorting to meet that award-winning scowl of hers. There really was nothing behind that eye of his, was there? A gaze as blank as a board. What answers could she pull out of a shell? Worse than that, an uncooperative shell.
She drew in a breath. He really was serious, she knew it. With a huff, the doctor was released.
It was impossible, she figured, to take your eyes from him. There was something so awfully meticulous and formal about this obtusely hollow and casual man. Straightening his collar and refastening that silly little tie of his, all the while half of his arm fell free from the tattered shreds from where his sleeve once was.
It tickled her to watch the paradox in action. The queer dandy in the funny pants fussing over his presentation amidst the apocalypse, only a half-ruined shirt and a bloodsoaked silk vest to his name. A vest he’d soaked in her defence, a shirt he’d half-ruined to save her life.
Nevermind. Perhaps there was one thing that could force one’s eyes off of him.
It hadn’t taken very long before her hands returned to her pockets, before her notice was drawn elsewhere. The hotel- or, whatever this place was- had seemed entirely deserted. From the fine staircases to the elegant hallways, an almost unnerving emptiness crept beneath her skin, crawling as it pleased.
Suitcases and baggage carts, topcoats and hats, dozens, hundreds maybe. Each and every one left derelict, relinquished by owners who seemed to have existed one moment and faded into the ether the very next. Her eyes narrowed as about her mind began to race all manner of questions. There was no placard on the building's exterior, no name on Prehevil's map for this display of the Eastern Union's Interwar oppulence. She wanted to- no, needed to explore. She passed a guilty, fleeting glance at the doors behind them. Of the broom closet she just had to check, and the mess that had become of the fine red carpet and elegant white-patterned wallpaper.
The thought lingered in her mind, what would have become of her if that purple freak hadn't slunk in from crack in the door, twelve-gauge in hand like some sort of maniac. Even then, though, if he hadn't done... Well, whatever miraculous-magna-medical-fuckery he poured into her braincase- she'd have been dead anyways.
She hadn't meant to grumble, she really hadn't. But just what was it that he did!? Was he- no... No, he couldn't be. Those stomach churning thoughts, the words she knew nothing of but understood with absolute clarity... Oh, no, he wasn't fooling her anymore. He was connected somehow, to all of this- to the Bremish occupation, to this whole debacle with the hallucinogenics, just- some medical variant. And his words? Some strange dialect of Bremish- northern, it had to be, that's why she couldn't understand, and- and...
Oh gods.
Her teeth grit for the upteenth time, eyes firing closed as she shook her head. It wasn't just ridiculous, it was stupid. She was stupid. Some perverse sense of sickening catharsis washed over her as she contemplated just what exactly had brought her to this decrepit train of thought. Of all people, he was right about her! At what point did conspiritorial thinking, noticing patterns and connecting unseen dots- devolve into drawing connections where they just simply didn't exist? When did her sloothing turn into some tinfoil hat's red-string corkboard? She cringed, her face scrunching to its very limits until she could hold it still no longer.
She sighed, her eyes opening again to stare down the hall. She could have sworn that this time around, it was bigger, somehow. Longer than before, and hadn't that hat been situated on that baggage cart over there? No, she was going crazy. This place was taking its toll, and there was only one way this madness could be resolved. Craning her head to her shoulder, she caught him standing idle, heel tapping briskly on the marble as he stood before a gargantuan painting, looking on. It was odd, to say the very least. Whenever the doctor was left to his own devices, he smoked like a chimney. It was if cigarettes simply manifested in his fingers, materialised between his lips. Surely that mess of colours on a canvas couldn't have been so interesting as to see him bind his hands together behind his back.
And come to think of it? Regardless of his usefulness in a fight, he still had some questions to answer.
Her approach was quiet, as quiet as her shoes could manage. She stood in parity, feet spaced in as comfortable a stance as could be stood, and she stared. The space between them was by no means tremendous. And it couldn't be. Not if her plan was going to work.
Letting her shoulders fall with a sigh prolonged as it was satisfying, from the very peripheries of her sight she watched as she caught his glance, his gaze taken from the painting.
Her head fell on a curious tilt as she adjusted herself to stare the piece head on. Trapped forever in vivid shades of blue and white were the dull features of a red-haired old man, staring fervently into the the fourth wall's abyss. The bow of his thinning lip, the despondent wetness of his eyes. As if he steeled himself from anguish's serpentine coils, his thoughts not worthy of being heard. As if he'd wept not for the circumstance of his imprisonment, but for those who could not understand why he had chosen for himself this desolate exile.
It was truly immaculate in a way she could hardly express. It was disappointing, just how harsh she'd been on the thing from afar. Especially with the time ticking down for her task at hand.
"Truly something, isn't it?" Daan said, finally. His attention now fully her's.
For once, she'd not felt compelled to argue, not loath to agree with him. A simple nod was all she could muster.
"I've always liked this one-" he uttered, his every word dripping with the utmost reverence as he fastened his hand to the gilded frame. For as dreary as he always seemed, the rare warmth that came to him always seemed to suit him so well, or so she thought. "-his 'Portrait of the Self.' I'd heard it sold after King Richard emptied Rondon's national museum to fund the war effort... ...But I had no idea it ended up in Prehevil."
Turning to face him, her eyes shone in intrigue. "Incredible how it seems like everything important ends up in this little Hicksville-Nowhere..." Even in astonishment, she still had to snark. "What's his name?"
"Was, you mean." Seemed he wasn't much different. Couldn't just let a moment simply be a moment. "And it was Theo van Grijs." His admiring grasp ran up and down the spralling gold.
"Never heard of him."
"I'm not surprised," he insisted earnestly, his desperate fingers balled as they left the display, falling just above his heart. "He was Frisian, and never appreciated all too much until he passed. Just before the First Great War. I remember seeing his face everywhere when I was young. Books, photographs, recreations..."
She caught sight of something in his eye, something she couldn't quite place. It was as if he had been thinking of nothing, and everything all at once. There was just something to him, something about him, something in his voice. The way his chest rose and fell as he... What was he doing. Hesitating? Reminiscing? Of course. How exactly on brand for him. Just when she was about to get something out of him, he cloistered like a frightened clam. Though, there was something that piqued her interest, something she was certain she could ask without hassle. Enough could be inferred from his voice alone, even if she wasn't inclined to believe it to begin with.
"Daan?" She started, thinkng the words over in her mind as they came out. "Are you Frisian?"
The lid of his eye rose, something manifested in the great darkness behind the vacant space of his stare. "...Yndie." He finally said, straightening his posture. "Jo wisten dat net?"
Ever so slightly, her mouth came agape. Rubbing her forehead, she tried her absolute hardest to stifle the disbelief. What an awful language it was- and it certainly wasn't the language he'd whispered to her. "That's... almost unbelievable. You don't sound anything like any of the Frisian MNG liasons I've spoken to."
"Eh..." He hesitated breathily. "I don't need some insipid jacketed outsider telling me what sounds Frisian and what doesn't."
"Copying me now? I don't know whether I should feel appreciated or if I should slap you a second time." She averted his eyecontact, revelling in the seconds it seemed to be taking for him to prepare his comeback. Though, she couldn't help but notice that it ever came.
He tousled his hair, restoring the full extent of what vision he still had. Taking one hand across his ribs and setting his free elbow upon it, she couldn't help but feel like she had seen this before. It took a moment, but she realised he'd taken to mimicking his own mannerisms when he smoked, cigarette, of course, absent.
"I'd rather you feel appreciated, I only have two cheeks, you know. I like purple, but I'd rather not look like a plum." His head turned just barely, though, he was right. She must have hit him harder than she thought, it was already the ugliest shade of eggplant she had ever seen.
"No, no... Just trying to lighten the mood." He gestured to her, his index and middlefinger seemingly with an imaginary smoke between them. "My parents had this nasty habit of avoiding staying in one place for too long. I was speaking Rondish before I could walk- it's no wonder why I don't sound like your other bleeding hearts across the border, I was practically an expatriate in my own home."
Something gripped at her. She had finally, truly gotten something out of him. It was... well, as wholly astounding as it was entirely unfulfilling. There was so much more to him, she knew it. But this tone... It was entirely foreign to him.
There was hardly even the telltale neutrality, the fleeting apathy with which he treated his every word. His voice just sounded so... Empty, as though there was not even a single emotion, no, not even neutrality or apathy behind it.
Was that even possible? Whatever, it wasn't relevant. She wouldn't push her luck. It was unbecoming, and worse than that, off topic.
"As unfortunate as that is, I gotta ask; what about our conversation up until that needed lightening?"
He popped his lips. "Right, you're unfamiliar..." He paused, his arms crossing. "van Grijs was a longsuffering man, and that pain he felt bled into almost every single one of his paintings, for good and bad. At least, that's what I think." His shoulders fell with an exhale from his nose.
"Apologies, again. I suppose I just needed to lighten my own mood. Thinking about this again is interesting to say the very least." His head fell on the slightest of tilts, shaking. "I spent hours reading about his life," a dry chuckle escaped him. "Felt that if I could speak to him, he'd understand me better than anyone could."
Karin's lips couldn't help but to arch alongside her brow. Sobstories were nothing new to her, and neither were odd people who came from broken places. But this? This was the most Daan had said about himself to date.
It wasn't hard to imagine him there, no older than her when she'd been spirited away to Jettiah- sat admiring the wiry bearded man in the painting, dreaming of a life better than the one he had. It made her mind wander, trail off into what exactly made the doctor-to-be so miserable, what terrible things connected him to such an apparently tortured soul.
She had half a mind to take her hand from her pocket, bring it to his shoulder. Offer him something as a childhood he clearly had no desire to acknowledge came back to swallow him whole.
But half a mind is just that, and her own reserve came to triumph beyond the need to indulge her weak, weak heart. She lamented, kissing her teeth as she finally, truly saw him.
"...Daan?" She inquired, taking a single stride towards him.
"Hm?" He raised his eyebrow, his eye widening ever so slightly.
"...If I promised to try and believe you as best I could..." She hesitated, she couldn't look at him. not like this. "...Do you think you could explain what you did to my leg?"
He blinked. Once, then twice. His hand slipping into his pocket, he turned from her, beginning the walk to the grand spiralling staircase. His free arm came to wave dismissively as he went along. "I see no reason why not," he called, his leisurely pace undisturbed. "But let's walk as we talk. I think I've finally figured out what this place is- a spa. And a rather exclusive one too. A river that feeds Lake Obetni runs through the courtyard in the back, and just so happens to feed a number of pools too. I'd like to see what the Eastern Union's rich and powerful left here before they all up and left."
She couldn't believe him. That was it, there was no more empathising with him, no more even attempting to connect. He may as well have been an alien with how out of this world he seemed to be acting. He certainly looked the part...
At the very least, his intent seemed to match her own. But this wasn't a case of great minds thinking alike, no. No one like him could have a great mind, not after a stunt like that. She couldn't let it slide. But then, how could she provoke him...?
"Sanitarium, you mean." She snickered, making sure she kept pace with him. His headstart and long legs wouldn't keep him in the lead for long.
"I beg your pardon?" His bewilderment was absolute, he really did have no idea what she was talking about.
"This place was a rather exclusive sanitarium, not a spa, doctor."
"I find it hard to believe that this was once a home for the mentally unwell. What brought you to that conclusion?" Befuddled as he was unaware, it was almost too perfect.
A sharp exhale came from her nose as she approached his side. "What are you talking about, doc? Where'd you get the impression that something like that was what I was implying?" She craned her neck, faux realisation invigourating her features in the most animated show she could manage.
"Oh, oh! No, not those awful places you Rondoners have where you lock up people who just need help." Her finger raised as she dismissed him. Revenge certainly was sweet. "Sanitariums are what they call medical retreats in Voroniya, and when they subsumed the Eastern Sanctuaries, the term just stuck."
Catching her in a passing glance, he stared for a moment. She did look quite proud of herself. Narrowed eyes, a thin, self-satisfying grin, sharp as a knife. She really did need to get better material...
She scoffed. "Just what are you looking at? Watch where you're going. It'd be funny if you crashed into something with two eyes, but with one? That'd just be sad. And I really don't feel like feeling bad for you right now."
"Sorry." He fixed his sights forwards again. Had this hallway been getting longer? No, it was just his depth perception playing tricks on him. "Force of habit."
"Force of habit?" She raised her eyelids. "And where is it normal to ogle women as a 'habit?' Huh?"
"Frisia, I suppose." He forced the words from his mouth with a halfhearted attention. It wasn't entirely a lie, he figured. "And 'ogling?' Don't flatter yourself too much, Ms. Sauer. Has anyone ever told you that by definition, it's the most insincere of praises?"
She could be forgiven for hearing at least something about him before they died, he decided. Though she could never be allowed to see the phantom of the smile that came to grace the hard line of his mouth.