Work Text:
By the very nature of Felix’s research, it’s futile.
By the very nature of Felix, rather, his research is futile. Felix can’t know anything that Charlotte doesn’t know, on some level. It may not be conscious knowledge, but it has to be present in some way, because he’s only an extension of her.
Charlotte doesn’t know how to cure the ink cough. If she did, she would have done something about it, more to stave off everyone else’s worry than to save herself.
Because Charlotte doesn’t know how to cure the disease, Felix doesn’t know how to cure it, and no amount of poking at specimens will lead anywhere. The specimens themselves are useless on account of not existing - Charlotte is the only real person in this house, and she doesn’t keep bodies around to examine or tape together with duct tape. Felix can see the grisly wounds some of them have and not feel an ounce of sympathy, because those are imaginary wounds on an imaginary person who came into existence that way. They never even felt it.
He could do other things with his time, he knows. Not anything useful, not set spiders on the students who call Charlotte names she doesn’t hear or even accompany her real places so she can go to the aquarium or the mall without being alone. But he could watch TV, and Charlotte’s head would make up programs for him, programs to his liking. He could play games, even learn to beat his uncle at chess since Charlotte used to know the rules. He could do things that would be much more fun than dissecting bodies while knowing that they will never turn up anything useful.
And yet, he barely leaves his laboratory. He can step out to make Charlotte tea, if she’s with him. On rare occasions his uncle can coax him out for a brief break, but otherwise, he leaves only to eat and sleep. He’s thought of setting up a cot for himself in his laboratory, but Charlotte would scold him for not taking care of herself.
As if she’s one to talk. He could almost laugh.
He can’t know anything she doesn’t know, and he can’t do anything she couldn’t do, but he still has his own personality and his own thoughts, and it’s those thoughts that constantly remind him that she’s deteriorating so quickly in part because she’s not taking her pills, and she’s not taking her pills because she can’t bear to make the tenants disappear, himself included. The thoughts that constantly remind him that she could die (she knows that, she just won’t admit it) of an illness that came to her after he needed to ‘go somewhere’ and she obligingly created somewhere for him to go. Even if it’s not really the fault of the Oracle - Felix knows enough to know that the sickness exists, if not in the exact form she perceives it - it’s impossible not to blame himself on some level. ‘I wanted to go somewhere, so she went with me to protect me, so she took in the Oracle, so she became sick.’ The logic is sound, on the surface, and it’s hard to dig past the surface when his thoughts are a cacophony of ‘she’s sick because I was bored’.
If she dies, the tenants won’t exist, and if she takes the pills again, they’ll disappear. The difference is minimal to them but enormous for Charlotte. And yet she won’t take the pills, because she fears losing them more than she fears wasting away.
Convincing Charlotte to start taking her pills again and finding a cure for an actual illness from experiments that did not happen and never will are equally impossible. Felix chooses the latter because it’s easier, because he doesn’t have to face her and say that he worries, that he would be willing to disappear forever if only it meant that she was sound in mind and body, that he cares about her too much to see her do this to herself for his sake.
It’s simpler to hide in his imaginary lab, press imaginary scalpels into imaginary bodies, and deny every painfully real feeling he has.