Vicissitude
Author's Notes- I was working on a Tot fic and another about Nagi and Farfarello carrying on alone after losing the rest of Schwarz, but both dealt with the same thing- the aftermath of teammate deaths. Some careful squashing together and recycling of interesting plots from another dead fic I had lying around, and it seems to make for a better story. Constructive criticism welcome!
Although Tot probably won't be involved in a relationship (in case anyone is horrified and disgusted by the inclusion of a girl in a Weiss fic), I don't claim to know what's going to come out of my head. It could potentially be any possible combination, and anything from friendship all round to a hardcore porny OT3, except with no hardcore porn and probably no OT3 either.
Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts, this is non-profit and no copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings- Character death, violence, possibly het, definitely slash and perhaps both.
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The sea was beautiful tonight.
It was a shame that the only one watching it was Farfarello, who did not appreciate this sort of quiet natural beauty. He found nature most beautiful when it was at its cruellest- hunting and the ensuring dismemberment, the slow reduction of an exquisite, working machine to nothing but scattered spare parts. There was no sign of life out there, the only movement from dark glassy waves slowly smashing themselves to fragments on the jagged edge of the beach he overlooked, and reforming again with the next tide to wash over them. The sky was a moody, muddy grey before the sun had set, and now lay low and oppressively dark above black heaving waters. It looked almost opaque out by the horizon, as though one could walk out there and chase the sunset without falling into the treacherous depths they all knew existed. It was a dark night and he knows from experience that the water out there is cold, deep. Even the thin starlight and the haze from the city lights wouldn't reach where Schuldig lay.
Usually, corpses floated to the surface within a few days when the buoyant gases forming in the torso balanced out the weight in the sodden lungs, where delicate alveoli float like fronds of seaweed in the water. There would be no water in Schuldig's lungs to weigh him down either; he had been dead and bled out before he was thrown into the water. But Farfarello had tethered him to the sea floor with chains and weights, and there Schuldig would stay until the creatures down there scattered him to a jigsaw bone puzzle and freed him once again.
He sifted dry sand and dug down to where it was damp and salty, and crumbled a handful, nothing but rocks and shells and bones ground to dust. The sea assimilates everything in time. When enough years have passed, a child walking along this beach may find a bleached bit of bone to go with the sea shells and driftwood and dried knotted seaweed they collect, a piece of the skull that had once cradled Schuldig's mind.
Farfarello came back to the beach nightly. It was a long walk from the Schwarz apartment, two hours there and another two back, but there was nothing else to fill his time since tower and team had fallen. By the time he started visiting, a week had passed and the place was no longer roped off with yards of fluttering yellow tape. They had already removed the debris and corpses from the tower, they being either the police, Eszet or Kritiker. He didn't care who had covered it up, just so long as they had left this place alone now. Most people did. If there had been visitors before that incident, then they stayed away now. There were no families paddling in the shallows by day, no dog walkers, no teenage couples walking hand-in-hand along moonlit sands, or skinny dipping in the waters where somewhere, Schuldig drifted at the ends of his chains.
Nagi had done his best to keep them all safe in the split-second he had to act. Crawford and Schuldig had fallen safely to the water under his telekinetic shield, and Farfarello had felt the gift grab at him tentatively, too far away and stretched too thin to do much. He had tried, but Nagi had known that the drop and the falling debris would be unlikely to kill Farfarello. Injured, yes, from that height the impact against the water alone could break bones. It hadn't, but plenty had snapped and cracked as the tower had crumbled and came down on top of them.
When he'd surfaced, Nagi and Crawford were nowhere to be seen. Schuldig still floated amongst the debris, uninjured but not conscious. He looked vulnerable then, as he never did before, the brazen orange of his damp hair muted to a sober dark red in the water. Schuldig had a hard, clever face designed for spite and malice, always smirking, too sharp to be considered handsome and never softening even in sleep. But there had been a faintly unhappy look then, like a child caught up in a nightmare, and that had been the first sign that something was wrong.
Farfarello took Schuldig back to the Schwarz apartment, alone, and the others had never returned. The cup of tea that Crawford had half-finished remained unwashed at the side of the sink, evaporated to leave a gummy layer of syrup and then grew white mould, while his neatly folded newspaper yellowed where it lay. Nagi's computer was still turned on, the screensaver drawing endless multicoloured loops and swirls and humming quietly until someone cut the electricity to the place on the fifth day. To a casual eye, the place was a modern Mary Celeste, the occupants disappearing unaware in the middle of their everyday lives. Farfarello knew better. He knew Crawford and the equally careful, thoughtful Nagi would have left behind nothing incriminating, no personal correspondence left unshredded, no computer files left intact. The only things here were meaningless personal possessions bought in their stay in Japan- clothes, toiletries, electronics and groceries. The police could take this place apart and find nothing truly of value.
Schuldig had remained unconscious for most of the first day, and beyond that he would sleep no more unless Farfarello sedated him heavily, first with homemade cocktails of tranquillisers, sleeping pills and antipsychotics, mixing all of the medications that Schwarz had thrived on to find something that would keep him under for more than an hour or two, and towards the end he had kept him on morphine almost permanently.
On the first day, Schuldig woke up screaming. Usually Schuldig's eyes were both cold and bright, blazing blue like the focused flame at the tip of a blow torch, but when he woke up this time there was no sense in them at all. Farfarello had never seen an insane telepath before, but he knew it happened when their mental shields went down. Humans produce a great deal of white noise. There are anxieties, neuroses, regrets and other preoccupations running on constant loops, clips of memories and snatches of songs playing constantly to fill the mental silence that most dread and a telepath would kill for. They constantly rehearse their plans for the future and analyse actions from the past, they keep up a steady commentary of their own actions, and juggle a constant dizzying flow of information from the world around them and their long term memories, flowing back into and out of their current train of thought. Schuldig had told Farfarello once that most of those people who looked at them strangely were only a few thoughts away from madness themselves, that it took very little to push a person into insanity. He'd done it a few times just to illustrate his point.
Without anything to guard them against this, telepaths didn't typically last very long. It was a constant, dizzying mental assault as they simultaneously lived a thousand lives until they couldn't separate their own thoughts from the static around them and they took on the neuroses and fears of everyone around. It could very quickly destroy a telepath's identity, push them into insanity or simply overload their mind from a constant mental onslaught.
On the second day, Schuldig blinded himself in his left eye to try and stop himself from seeing something that was only ever inside his head, and Farfarello wondered if it was one of his own thoughts that had played over and over until Schuldig couldn't tell what was real any more. On the third day, he managed to get further than usual before the pain from the headache dropped him, far enough to break a mirror and try to slash his wrists. It was a poor, messy job and Farfarello thought that with all the time Schuldig had spent in his mind, he should have acquired a finer knowledge of human anatomy and which arteries to cut for rapid, fatal bloodloss. But then the screaming assault in his own head had probably drowned out most of his old memories by now and lost them under the lives of another thousand people. Farfarello bandaged him back up and waited to see if the tranquillisers would kill him on top of the blood loss, but Schuldig continued to wake up every two hours for the next four days, fifty more doses of mixed medications that did less and less as time passed.
On the fifth day, something began to rupture as fragile blood vessels gave way under the mental overload. The first sign was a nosebleed and Farfarello turned him onto his side so that he wouldn't choke on any of the blood that might run back down his throat. By evening, two more bright bloody patches had appeared in his remaining eye, tiny crimson and scarlet bursts like fireworks in a white sky. He waited again, but none of the haemorrhages seemed to be fatal.
On the seventh day, Farfarello killed Schuldig himself.
The screaming, senseless thing upstairs no longer resembled Schuldig, and by now it was obvious the damage was done. His shields had fallen for good and he couldn't claw his way back from under the ruin that had became his own mind. Farfarello went back upstairs and waited for a second to see if Schuldig recognised his presence, but it was just another mental assault for the telepath to cope with and it brought only pain. He thought about simply using up the remaining morphine and sending Schuldig to sleep permanently, but it seemed right that the telepath should die by his own hand. Farfarello's knife went between two vertebrae straight into the brain stem, and then it was all over within seconds. Schuldig had probably expected a more violent end. Most in this line of business did.
He dropped the corpse in the sea, remembering one time that they'd gone down to the bay and watched hysterical teenagers discover the floating, swollen carnage from a night of slaughter three days ago. The sea wasn't kind to corpses. They didn't drift peacefully as people liked to imagine, hair floating around a chilled white marble face turned up to the stars. For one, they almost inevitably floated face-down and for another, they bloated and changed colour and fish nibbled away at their eyes and soft tissues. If they stayed down there too long, their flesh changed to a soapy white wax known as adipocere. "When I die," Schuldig had said, his eyes sparkling with a malicious sort of mirth as he watched them screaming at the find. "I hope someone throws me in the ocean,"
And that was where he lay now. But Farfarello had taken him out far enough and weighed him down so that he wouldn't float back to shore. He would have preferred to bury him, perhaps a lingering memento from his Catholic days when they were told that the dead would one day rise again from their graves while Schuldig was left bound to the ocean floor with the small, simple sea creatures that God wouldn't bother to pass judgement upon. But the soil around the beach was loose and sandy, only held together by the roots of thin salty grasses, and he wondered if the thoughts of others might still filter down to where Schuldig lay. Nothing would reach him out there. His mind would be broken down and scattered by the strange crawling things at the bottom of the sea, his empty skull filled with cold black ocean water and dreamless now.
Farfarello did not mourn, precisely. He didn't feel sorrow in quite the same way that most people did, not since his family had died and his mind had broke, but there was something a little raw and aching when he thought about Schuldig. More than anything, he felt displaced. Since leaving the asylum, Schuldig had always been a constant presence in his life and in his mind. He had walked brazenly into the cell one day, unarmed and completely alone and removed Farfarello's straitjacket without any trace of fear. Someone like that must be either very brave, very dangerous or clinically insane, and in Schuldig's case, probably all three. Farfarello had been interested enough to follow him out then, and he had followed him ever since.
He didn't even feel any hatred. A part of him recognised that God had let Schuldig go and messily too, his mind tearing apart under the gift He had given him. But he couldn't summon up any anger about it. The poison that had driven him for years was suddenly drained and left only emptiness, no relief, and he missed it. However twisted and misguided, it had given him purpose. He had found solace in religion as a child, and found it again in the murder of priests, in the open red puzzle of corpses that held no answers in death or in life.
He stabbed a knife over and over into the thin soil, thoughtfully, switching hands every so often. It would blunt it, but Farfarello didn't care. He'd taken it from a would-be mugger a few nights ago. It was a poorly-balanced, cheap blade, but he took it because it had been there, just as he had routinely took the man's life because he was there, not because he felt any particular joy in it any more. There was an empty space behind him where Schuldig should have been watching, smirking, alternately switching between their minds to share Farfarello's joy and take his own pleasure in the victim's confused, dying thoughts. Schadenfreude, they called it in his own language.
There was a presence approaching now. They travelled soundlessly, but he could feel someone or perhaps two of them coming up behind him. He didn't know whether a slight hyperawareness of his surroundings was part of his gift or just something uniquely him, but Farfarello didn't care either way. He could simply tell that they were there, that they were young, even more so than himself, but there was an unusual strength about them.
"What are you, Greyfriars Bobby?" A soft monotone voice said, barely stirring the night air any more than the faint breeze. Farfarello understood the reference, but wasn't offended. He only resumed fiddling with his knife and wondered why Nagi hadn't referred to the more familiar Hachiko. They'd all seen the statue one time, and Schuldig had delighted in telling some of the children who flocked to it that Hachiko probably only returned because the locals had fed him and not out of misplaced loyalty towards the memory of a dead master.
"Tot felt him go. She's.. she seems to have some telempathic abilities,"
If she was an empath, then she had been a broken one. There was an extra strength that arose from her now. It was tentative and unfamiliar to her, and might destroy her yet. It didn't remind him of the telempaths he had known before either.
"Oracle is gone,"
Farfarello understood the difference in Nagi's tone between how Schuldig had gone and how Crawford had gone, and perhaps it would have been easier for Nagi to take if Crawford had died rather than left them behind. He'd known that Oracle would leave, as soon as everything went wrong and they went crashing into the ocean among the debris of the falling tower. He didn't blame him either. It was simply the way that Crawford was. They had failed and he had cut his losses and got out before Eszet or Kritiker further complicated matters.
"He brought you to shore first," Farfarello said, finally. Small, battered and knocked out from the strain of using his gift, Nagi would have never made it to the beach relying only on the mercy of the tides. He wasn't sure whether it would help if Nagi knew that their leader had taken him to safety first before leaving them all there. But Nagi would know that the most practical thing for Crawford to do would be to methodically shoot him before he woke up, and leave no witnesses to the tower incident alive.
He can hear Tot shifting uneasily, not comfortable in his presence, and wonders what it took for Nagi to bring her back from the dead. She had undoubtably died. Farfarello had a surgeon's precise eye for anatomy and he had struck to kill this time. Schuldig had found it amusing to feel her mind snuffed out of existence, baffled, confused and hurting. Contrary to popular opinion, many people feel little fear or sorrow when they died a sudden violent death. There simply isn't time for them to comprehend what's going on and come to terms with the end of their existence before the shock or bloodloss gets to them. Schuldig had found it even funnier when he felt her come back some time after Schwarz had fled the mansion. Farfarello wondered briefly what would happen if Nagi brought back Schuldig. He'd never be able to free himself from the chains anyway. By now his corpse would have swollen and the links would be embedded in his flesh.
He stabbed down again without looking, and this time the knife went through his other hand and would have pinned it to the ground like a butterfly if the loose soil was strong enough to cling to the blade. Farfarello looked down dispassionately, and jerked the knife free. He could feel everything except the pain- flesh parting, the sand-encrusted blade grating against bone as it came free and the blood welling up to wash away the grit and dust. It had severed his lifeline abruptly, about a quarter of the way down.
He finally glanced around, but could see little of them in the dim light. Tot hung as far back as she could with her hand linked with Nagi's. Her whole posture spoke of mistrust and unease, ready to bolt at any second. But however unwillingly, she had still came and that was the only important thing.
"Come back with us," Nagi said. His voice was emotionless as ever. He spoke only of practicality, of keeping an insane and potentially useful teammate safely out of the way. Farfarello thought that maybe Nagi had cared somewhat about Crawford, if only because the clairvoyant had taken him from the streets and made him who he was today, but beyond that Nagi didn't bother caring about other people any more. He certainly hadn't cared much for Schuldig who disliked most people on principle and could be casually, thoughtlessly cruel because it entertained him. Nagi didn't show any expression now either- no pity, no sympathy, no sorrow. The dim night light drained him of any colour, but his eyes were always strangely flat anyway. He held Tot's hand, but whether it was to comfort her or anchor her, Farfarello couldn't tell.
"They'll find the Schwarz apartment soon enough," Nagi said, by way of explanation. "It's not safe to be there,"
Farfarello was neither suicidal nor particularly attached to life. He never had felt strongly either way. He existed simply because that was the way things were, and while he'd sometimes taken stupid risks that should have killed him, he had never sought death deliberately. Schuldig's death hadn't changed that. He didn't fear Eszet or Kritiker finding him, but neither was he particularly attached to the place, not any more. Farfarello was too well acquainted with death to continue holding the usual sentiments towards resting places and human remains, to hold a vigil by something that was no longer anything but disintegrating bone, flesh, minerals.
He stood, and walked after Tot and Nagi without a backward glance at the ocean.