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As he watched Zandik collapse into dust on the breeze, Feofan felt heavy. The weight settled as if someone had tied a cold jewel to his heart with leaden rope, and was pulling tighter and tighter as the lead leached into his blood and poisoned him from the inside.
It was not his first time grieving, but it was the worst he had ever felt.
It hurt.
Irminsul burned absently overhead, the fragments of memories and history lost to the vast sky in wave upon wave of smoke and putrid ash. It joined the lead in his blood, carving a path through his desecrated arteries.
He couldn't bring himself to breathe. On that hilltop, a tether to Celestia's rule consuming the sky above him and painting the air aflame, he should have been overjoyed. But Zandik burned with it, and that agonised him.
Feofan turned away and watched as the sky above him flared and danced with glowing sparks. Steady smoke behind, a towering column that lit the scene in a hellish backdrop as flecks of brightness floundered and fled like cowards from the burning tree, the accursed, foolish burning tree—
No, that's enough of that. Archons, he needs a smoke.
|//\||//_
Feofan returned to the camp, apathetic mask welded to his face and wielded like ice. He felt like ice, all over, as his lungs burned and filled with smoke. If his mask were physical, it would be encrusted with jewels; yet they would not be amethyst, nor any colour anyone would expect from him. They would be crimson red, a carmine stain on his face that everybody could see. Claret on his hands, carmine on his face, and inside he would be encrusted with crimson eyes. A tiered display to be sliced like some showpiece, to be torn apart at the mercy of the Jester's plots and the Tsaritsa's mockery of 'love'.
He is already torn apart.
He is already plagued by crimson eyes that nobody else could see.
Reds still paint the clouds as the sky fades to blue from his vantage point, his purview for now. He could still control this part of him, even as the sky danced alive with Zandik's blood. Or was it Dottore's blood? The masses certainly seem to think it the latter, none of them ever knowing Zandik.
He mourns both.
Only one of them is from an investment viewpoint.
As hard as he tries, he could not bring himself to look at the skies and understand why such moralistic 'heroes' can be happy about their freshest murder.
|//\||//_
It is Pantalone who boards the carriage to Snezhnaya. Then the subsequent boat, and train. It is Pantalone who steps back into Zapolyarny and refuses to look at the whispering recruits and circulating rumours.
They seem tentatively eager to celebrate.
What a contradiction.
What a farce.
It is Pantalone who steps through the steel door into the still laboratory, but it is Feofan who feels part of him has died. Part of him flew away on the wind and ashes of that grand funeral. The flames ate at it before it spluttered and died, burning and crying in silent agony, unable to scream.
Feofan slumps to the floor before the steel table heralded as a 'desk' and lets molten tears fall. They splatter on the ground like a bloodied, tainted thing, disgusting to that meticulous part of him that plagues his head day after day. Yet they are clear.
His hands shake. A terrible, strangled noise seems to resonate out from beneath him and echoes terribly around the barren place, taunting him as his throat burns and his eyes keep blurring with pathetic water droplets.
They are too late. The fire has burnt itself to nothing, just ashes on a splintered tree that he cannot undo with water.
With anything.
And it festers and burrows in his heart and joins the lead and the smoke and the throttling strings that tighten like barbs around his chest and don't let go, and just get tighter until his breath rattles and his hands shake and... and–
With fumbling hands, Feofan reaches for his lighter. Pantalone lights the cigarette, as it glows like the sky that fateful day, red and orange flecks that dance and taunt him, taunt him for being so weak, for not being enough to keep it together.
Feofan inhales and feels his lungs burn, bronchioles and alveoli alight like branches and leaves, blackened and destroyed by the flames. And he can't bear to take another drag.
He watches it glow before extinguishing it on the tiled floor.
'Feofan, how many times must I tell you how smoking destroys you so? If I were not here, you would be dead.'
The voice comes unbidden, and Pantalone does not want it. Feofan relishes in the sound of that voice before it splutters and dies like a candle starved of oxygen and recognition.
"I am sorry, Zandik."
Feofan murmured quietly as he succumbed to his exhaustion on the floor of the lab, unforgiving and cold. He would do anything for the sun to never rise again, just to never be reminded of that burning tree, and his dear, burning Zandik.
The tree haunts his dreams, and Zandik's face blurs from his memory like a smoke-hazed illusion, never to exist.
|//\||//_
The other harbingers do not care.
If anything, everyone seems satiated, like ugly, twisted monsters that dare to play fool even when a fellow almost-human is lost to the farce of the world.
It is worse when Sandrone returns.
The sheer hypocrisy from her, holding such disdain for Zandik when she hardly knew him. When she herself has hurt and wasted things just like he did. It makes Feofan burn with rage. Pantalone keeps it shuttered and quiet, but it only flares higher. But the meeting must go on, some puppetted stage show that only serves the mockery of this reality.
"Mora isn't water."
He doesn't recall what absent platitude he declared after that. It was without cadence and numb, regardless.
If Mora were water, it might have extinguished the tree. It still burns in his periphery. He often sleeps on the laboratory floor, mind replaying the moment Zandik faded into just more fuel for the fire, how the acrid smoke billowed high above and the heat seared his back as Pantalone turned away, unwilling to look upon the moment it all crumbled.
He wakes often on that floor, coughing phantom smoke and shrinking away from the imagined inferno like a coward. It disgusts Pantalone, how easily he cowers away. All Feofan can muster is a flicker of disdain for those who called the murder a victory. Who celebrated with dinners and glee as 'a job well done, yes, putting the monster down—'
There is no other way he could possibly imagine it, for the heroes to keep on living their lives pretending to have empathy for all.
Feofan feels nothing much either, anymore. Pantalone is unable to even muster a professional smile to appease his colleagues.
They both think the man who calls himself 'Feofan' is pathetic. And they are both him.
|//\||//_
He cannot remember when he still indulges in cigarettes, yet the sheer quantity of times he awakes next to an overflowing ashtray are numerous, and thus he must still be filling his lungs with acrid smoke.
They are all beginning to notice, his insipid colleagues. They watch him stifle coughs into handkerchiefs more, and think him weak. They think the physical ailment is where it ends, glossing over the dull, monotonous cadence of his voice as if it's barely heard. An obligatory silence for the dying man, as he drifts away into the air like a cowardly flake of ash driven merely to return to the arms of its life, fuel and soul.
The wind picks him up and takes him away to drift and fall slowly in a haze of smoke and numbers.
His previously precious Mora means nothing.
His body means nothing.
His mind means nothing.
He means nothing.
His colleagues do not see the depression as it drains him like a parasite, shifting through veins as it seeks his brain. It is a parasite of apathy, and its sole desire is his unending slumber at the end of his world.
Feofan knows it is the end of his world. And he has nothing more to say. Distantly, some sickened, smoke-choked, flame-famished part of him enjoys watching his colleagues stare without seeing, without knowing anything. Even the Jester, the hailed Director who is supposed to oversee them all. But overseeing requires knowing, and the Jester does not know anything about Feofan, not at all.
Certainly not at the moment. Pantalone spews numbers of sheer nonsense at them and they all nod along like all is accurate and right.
Like all is just with the world, without the 'monster'.
Who is humouring him, and who is merely oblivious? He tries to see, but the smoke clouds his vision as he turns, and watches the vague impression of Dottore dissipate on a sigh of the wind.
They are all monsters, wearing human skin as a farcical pretence while they lament their existence in this burning world.
And he is the only one burning still, that has ever been burned at all.