It's surprisingly easy to slip past the few guards outside the Clockwork Mansion. Inside, it's impossibly bright: he takes a measure of pride that no one has figured out how to modulate the hydropower. It's empty now: it's past closing hours now, and the workers have all gone home. The entrance has been reworked: his introductory audiograph has been replaced by a plaque offering some historical insight into the land that came before the mansion.
He doesn't remember how any of the mansion's construction came to pass now.
Idly, he tries to read some of the various plaques, but most of them are near impossible: the letters seem to change form as he puzzles them out. The ones he can read all talk about him as if he were already dead. Perhaps it's for his own privacy, and perhaps it's for convenience. None of the plaques he can read mention the coup.
Daud is only passingly interested in the plaques. Instead, he spends most of his time looking around at the ceiling. "That should lead to the inner workings," he says, pointing up to the windows. "There's machinery behind them."
"Those?" Kirin can't remember why he finds the idea of breaking them distasteful. "The levers," he says, searching through his fragmented memories. "There must be a lever—it goes to the lab—labor—it goes to the lab." He cannot shake off the notion that his brother is looking for him right now at the seashore.
Daud seems to know better than to ask him which one. He tries one, and Kirin recoils from the clicking as the floor rearranges itself. He doesn't know where he is now, and it frightens him badly now. Oh, he's lost, he's lost in the place he used to know every detail of. The floors turn and rearrange on their metal legs, the ceiling both drops and pulls itself neatly back, enclosing itself above them. Where does it all come from? Only when the mechanical workings have gone silent, does Kirin realize that Daud has been holding onto his upper arm, both to make sure they're not separated, but also to ground Kirin.
As they proceed deeper into the mansion, Kirin finds it more difficult to manage his thoughts. Perhaps, it's because the mansion was his home for so long, his home and his undoing. A labor of genius, a sparkling testament to progress in Karnaca, an impossibility. There are notes he needs to jot down at his desk—no, he's in the labyrinth, testing the pre-configured routes of the Clockwork Soldiers—no, he's on the balcony and everything is wrong and someone is screaming—
He's so scared of everything. Daud says something to him, but he misses it in his terror. He shouldn't have come back: it's all too horrible to bear. He doesn't want to think about the bleak loneliness of the days after waking up in the chair, the inexplicable communication gap between him and the servants. He'd rather be dead than endure that again.
He bolts away from Daud. He has no idea where to go, just that he wants to be away from here. And perhaps it's a force of habit, but he finds himself in the heart of the mansion—his laboratory. Slightly dazed, he stumbles through it, unable to grasp its construction now. There are different platforms under the glass floor, and much less in laboratory than there ought to be.
"Now we can talk," says his own voice.
Kirin turns towards the source to see his double. And yet, thinking of this other him as a double is incomplete. It is not an other, but himself—his refraction, bent through time. Kirin cannot stop looking at himself: the lines that have begun to creep at the corners of his eyes, the ghostly lines around his mouth, worsened by a nightly regiment of four hours of sleep.
"I have so many questions for you," his past self says as he advances towards Kirin, and in response, Kirin retreats slightly. "Afraid? You shouldn't be. No, no, come closer." His other self watches him closely. "When I first saw you, I took you for an automation. Something made in my image, but now I see that you are... not quite me. How ghastly."
He reaches out with the self-assured air of someone who has always gotten what he wanted, one way or another, and tilts Kirin's face from side to side. "You have my face, but you are not me."
Kirin breaks away easily. His grip is light: a test to see what he can get away with.
"It was an accident," Kirin says. He has the distinct thought that his other self would like very much to dissect him at this moment. Truthfully, he doesn't even want to speak now: every time he does, the insurmountable canyon between his distant, vaguely dreamy voice and the sharp, clear voice of his other self—his true self—makes itself known.
"Accident?" There is a quiet violence underpinning the mild amusement of his past self now, as if he's just wanting for the right opportunity. Not yet, not yet, but soon.
But Kirin cannot stop talking now, even as he senses something is terribly wrong. "Something went wrong in here."
"Really? What went wrong?"
Kirin shakes his head. "I—I don't remember. I woke up in a chair, but I don't know what it does." He had hoped for a kind of camaraderie with his other self, some shared bond across time, if only because they had both been the same person at one time. But now, in the presence of his past self, Kirin starts to understand that a change has come to pass between them and how hopelessly foolish it had been to hope for any mercy from his past self. Now, he's only trapped.
"That's convenient." His other self muses a moment. "The only chair in the laboratory proper would be the electroshock machine. Surely I would not have been stupid enough to fall asleep in it while it was fully powered. And then, what? A rat pulls the lever? No, this was planned." He pauses. "Which suggests one of two possibilities. But enough on that. Tell me about what it did to you. What did the machine take from you?"
"Everything," Kirin says. He cannot follow along with the asides and musings of his past self. The walls seem to close in him.
"Fascinating," his other self replies. "It made a genius into a simpleton. Burnt out my glorious gift. And unlike the baker, you don't seem to retain anything technical whatsoever. I heard you and your little friend stumbling through the mansion. Do you not remember how anything works now? And what about your companion? He moves like a killer. Did the Empress send him?"
Kirin shakes his head. There are too many questions now. He can't follow any of them.
His other self thinks for a moment, carefully considering the evidence available. "Now that would be extraordinary if true," he concludes to himself. "It's a longstanding speculation that the assassin Daud was marked, but he hasn't been sighted for more than a decade now. Has he come for me? How delightful." His gaze returns to Kirin—a horrible fear sparks in him at the sight. "Or has he come for you?"
"The Outsider likes to pit all his Marked against each other," his other self continues, half to himself now. "It's the only pastime for a god, I suppose. Who knows what he gets from his facsimiles of revenge. I certainly don't care about the why of it all, just the how." A strange hunger comes over his face, as he contemplates the limitless power of the Void. "And I want to know how I managed that one? All this time, and the Outsider chooses now to listen? When there's nothing left of me?" He pauses, switching his monologue to address Kirin directly. "Surely, you're not curious as to what you and I could do together with that? The worlds of possibilities are limitless."
For a brief moment, a shadow appears on the wall, before adjusting itself.
"it would—" Kirin fumbles for the words, acutely aware of himself right now. "It would make you die."
"Surely not," his past self replies. "You're not dead, and you have the Mark. I know you do. Which hand is it?"
He reaches for Kirin's left hand to slip off the glove, but Kirin pulls his hand out of the grasp of his other self. Again, a light touch. Just another test.
"You chose to spare me," his past self continues. "You must recognize what I can do. Why don't we just test it out?"
Test echoes in Kirin's mind. He had run several tests on something important once. "The replica of the Heart beat for thirteen minutes before turning to ash," Kirin says, by rote. "It had been soaked in a… in a…"
"An electrified solution of ionized bronze and whale oil," his other self finishes. "But I had to wait for the moment of his death before placing it into the solution. The Academy only gets upset when one of their own perishes. Such small minds." His past self sighs. "The protocol's so temperamental, so susceptible to changes in temperature and humidity." A pause. "And that's only the beginning of what we could do."
Kirin shakes his head, his heart loud. He doesn't want to witness his own death.
"Who do you think you're protecting? Certainly not me. The Empress? What are the odds that you so happened to fall sleep and the machine turned itself on? A hundred to one? A thousand? No, this was planned." His past self pauses. "There's no mention of a coup anywhere: the Empress is still on her throne; the coup is either dissolved or never came to pass. No, no, someone ruined me. A rival? Unlikely. No one has even gotten to the heart of the mansion. A servant? Unlikely they'd even understand how to power the machine. This was done with intention. Delilah? Perhaps. She is the double-crossing type—but not the type to leave her enemies alive."
His past self is so caught up in his own self-congratulatory monologue that he doesn't notice the shifting of the shadow above him. Instead, he takes Kirin's growing fear for confirmation of his thoughts.
"A new hypothesis—" his past self continues. "The Empress had one of her underlings come to dispatch me in an 'accident.' She must have found out somehow. Why would the Empress spare you from trial and execution as a traitor? She's not getting any inventions out of you, clearly. No one's getting anything out of you. No, no, it's because she's already doled out her punishment. The only question is who." He thinks a little on this. "Ah, of course. The Lord Protector. It all adds up. Well, then, I believe that answers all my questions. Daddy goes to solve his little girl's problems yet again."
Kirin only watches him, overwhelmed by his own thoughts and the sinking feeling of inadequacy. It's somehow much, much worse than he had ever imagined it to be—to be beside himself and fully aware that he will never be that person again.
His other self smiles. "Don't be so afraid. This is a marvelous opportunity. We can test out the machine some more now, and see if we can improve the situation. Stimulate this and that area of the brain. See what happens."
Nausea rises in Kirin at the thought. "No."
"I imagine it's not the most pleasant of prospects," his past self says. "But what else are you good for? We can make a note of what it's made of you already. It's dampened your thoughts, your will, your creativity. You can't really follow along with me, can you? I can tell you're faking it."
"No," Kirin says at the thought of being his own experiment.
"It doesn't matter what you want. If you haven't learned that already, you soon will," his other self says nonchalantly. "The world is cruel and hard, and we are only what it makes of us."
Kirin can see the cruelty on the face of his other self—that insatiable desire to cut and chip away at life, the drive to pluck out the very essence of life itself and fashion it into the mold of the mechanical. And he can still feel it moving inside him, ashes of what had been, simmered down to plucking the legs off beetles—perhaps some things run too deep and he will never be rid of this, but it no longer consumes him. And yet, at what price? He would have never chosen this path, not at this cost.
"You must know what I can give the world, what I could give Karnaca. The best you could ever hope for would be to spend the rest of your days being looked after and fawned over like a talking pet. I could bring so much progress to the world—and even you must know this; surely the remnants lie buried in your head as well. History is shaped by great men, men who remake the world in their image—men like me. No history was ever made by men toddling after their nannies, barely able to read now. Do you really think that's a life?"
"It's mine," Kirin says simply, his only offering against the deluge. "It's my life."
"It's mine too," his past self replies. "Do you think I'd like to live like that?"
And perhaps it would have been better to have lived the rest of his life without this confirmation from his own lips.
"I want to live," Kirin says, despite it all.
"Only one of us can do that now. Better me than you." His past self sighs. "You will have to give the mystery of the Void up to me before you die. I have so many new ideas to test now."
His past self lunges towards him with a drawn sword.
Kirin, frightened, pulls back and seamlessly draws on the Void to reappear on the balcony.
"Excellent!" his past self says, his face flushed with the rush of violence. "Let me see it! What did the Outsider give you?"
Kirin understands in that moment that his past self intends to hunt him down, throughout the mansion if need be. Over his past self's amused taunts, he catches Daud's eye. There's a question on Daud's face: he's been holding back all this time to give Kirin the space to deal with the problem he's created on his own terms, but—
Kirin shakes his head. He doesn't want to see his past self dead. It's not a matter of newfound mercy or pity, but a desperate wish to hold onto the past. Otherwise, it will only continue to recede from him. He doesn't know how he can resolve this, though. Cage his past self, kill his past self, let himself be killed—they're all impossible choices.
The longer he waits to make a choice, the more likely that his past self will make the choice for him.
"Come out," his past self says. "It'll be over quickly. Don't make me waste my time looking for you."
His head hurts badly now as he tries to reason out his choices. He doesn't want to kill his past self or be killed. As for caging—he knows what it's like to live a trapped life. There must be another way. But now he's staring at the floor and not sure what he was contemplating before.
"There you are," his past self says cheerfully.
Kirin dodges the next strike.
They go in circles, and as they do so, Kirin becomes aware of the lines again. They come more easily to him now: perhaps touching the Void is only a matter of practice, like everything else. He sees the golden lines in his past self, yes, but also the fluorescent ones from before.
It's not a malicious curiosity that drives Kirin to pluck at those florescent lines, the ones he has begun to associate with temporality—just a self-centered curiosity. And for a moment, the only question in his mind is what if, what if. His past self is still stuck in time, encased, static, and if he only adjusts the lines, he'll be back in the flow of time, damned to age and die just like them all. And he pulls at them, like a stray thread.
His past self stumbles, confusion marring his face. "What have you done to me? I'm here, and I'm not... I'm—" He clutches the balcony railing, reeling from the onslaught of memories that have not happened yet for him, memories of what he is doing in 1849, the morning after the séance. The memories form a layer next to each other, like sediment.
It would be absurdly easy to kill him now. Kirin wouldn't even have to touch the Void to do so. A simple push off the balcony would suffice, but Kirin's paralyzed there, dumbstruck by the sight of himself in distress. He's misjudged again.
"Why do I resist?" his past self says through gritted teeth. "I'll replace both of us in this timeline. What do I care who sits on some moldy throne on Dunwall? There's progress to be made, and men like me make it!" His knuckles whiten from his grip on the railing. "What have you done to me?" he repeats, like a wounded animal. "You've done something. Have you damned me to become you? Is this some inevitability of fate?"
Kirin experimentally tries to move his arm. Slowly, slowly, his body seems to come out of its shock.
"My time is limited, then," his other self manages. "How long? A few years? Months? Before I lose my glorious gift? How could you damn me like this?"
Daud is there now, having reappeared from his place in the shadows.
It's Kirin's turn to reach out to Daud this time. His fingers tangle in the stiff wool of Daud's black coat, a material better suited for the cooler climates of the Empire than the perpetual warmth of Karnaca. Kirin clutches at Daud's arm—an inchoate plea to let him have this final indulgence, one final weakness.
In turn, something moves across Daud's lined face—a mixture of pity and understanding.
And Kirin knows this will just another regret to carry with him for the rest of his life, but he lets his past self go free again, sending him to suffer with the knowledge that everything will be lost soon enough, knowing there is no crueler fate he could give himself. It doesn't feel like a mercy, because it isn't. Instead, his fingers slip free of Daud and he sinks onto the floor, clutching at himself in his desolate mausoleum.
They sit on the roof in a long silence that curls around them like smoke. Everything is falling so quickly away from Kirin now, and yet, the only thing that stays with him is the newfound knowledge that his condition is not a quirk of fate but a punishment. The longer he tries to hold onto the fragments of what happened directly after he woke up to be his own stranger, the more it recedes—never gone, but farther away each time. The blinding pain—a constant. The clicking of the machine as it cooled down. His own words, free-form and unstrung, falling fast and unbounded.
Yes, there was someone there.
What else was his other self right about?
He doesn't trust this other self. He has no doubts that this other self would be quite unbothered about replacing him: this would simply be another strange yet ultimate inconsequential turn of fate. But the alternative—
That would be like burning down a cathedral.
He's terrified that all those things that his other self has said about him are true: that his life doesn't have any meaning and that now, it's only fit for being used for a bigger cause. He has made another terrible miscalculation, and now the only way out is to destroy himself in one way or another. And perhaps, he has already set that inevitable destruction into motion.
The lights from the nearby houses and residences gradually flicker out as the occupants settle down to bed. Above them, the stars move in their perfect order, a clockwork universe.
Daud, in turn, only watches him. The shadows deepen the lines on his face; it's impossible to guess how he's feeling now. " I can take you back," he offers at last.
"I want to be here," Kirin says. "But it is so hard." He doesn't want to be put away and forgotten. He wants to be in the world, as difficult as it is. And he's ashamed of how limited his words are and how they can't begin to convey his thoughts—his thoughts that seem to be only his now, locked inside his skull. It's more than hard to see himself as he was—it's tearing something inside him, the part of him that had grown numb to the past and his wants, that had pushed aside his swirling memories disengaging with time to rearrange themselves into a new timeline free of any order.
But at the same time, he cannot despise this cruel part of him—instead an almost-pity substitutes itself for anger in his heart: he understands himself as he was, can see himself as he appeared to others. It's a strange mix of envy and resentment that turns in his heart: how much he would give up to be whole again! To have an easy command of his own thoughts again. And yet, he has strangely found some comfort in being held close and read to, to sense the words traveling through another person from the movement of the chest to the vibrations of sound. Will someone read to him when he gets back? Or will that already be a chore? Everything is so gossamer and fleeting.
And there is always something that remains. He cannot escape the conclusion that he's extraneous now.
"Did you know?" Kirin asks, and there's is no question of what he's referring to. It has been weighing between them.
"I suspected," Daud admits. "I know what the Lord Protector's like."
It's easy to chalk this up to just another turn of the wheel of revenge: another thing taken, another life ruined. After all, has he not done the same to others of his own free will? Somewhere, in the flickering lights of Karnaca. the lights that break the unending night and echo on the sea's surface, there is someone just like him, whose mind he burned out with his own hands and his own careful calculations.
Is he not also responsible for this? That, as well, cannot be undone.
How does the baker live now, as the perfect inverse of him: able to carry out the technicalities of his duties, but devoid of an inner life? Perpetually useful, but hollow. The ideology behind his Clockwork Soldiers, translated to flesh. Most likely, the baker was subsumed back into the daily life of Karnaca with no interruption, save to his family. (Kirin's not sure how correct he was anymore: there's more than one person in Karnaca fully convinced that he, also, is a hollow shell.)
The only person who could understand him in this way is the only one he cannot reach. And then, like the tides, his thoughts recede, but the unease in his heart doesn't.
"Do you think he was right? The other me?" Kirin asks. "What if I never get better." And he doesn't let himself think about how much rests on his hope to be different—no, not now. He doesn't want to think about how part of himself was simply burned out forever.
"I don't think he's right about anything," Daud replies slowly.
"He would be able to change Karnaca." And how he could remake it! A glorious place of progress of machine and flesh. He could realize all the thoughts that are only slumbering half-formed in Kirin's mind.
"I don't think anyone would like what he could change it into."
"But he could."
"It doesn't take a genius to turn a city into a nightmare. Only the most banal cruelty you can imagine." Daud pauses, softening his voice. "Karnaca has always been dying." A painful tenderness creeps into his voice underneath the gruffness. "It runs on the broken."
Silence falls between them, and the city continues on without them.
"If you don't get better, we can figure something out," Daud says.
"Will you get rid of me?" It's the logical solution, Kirin thinks. Why keep around broken things? Broken things are either mended or done away with.
"It won't come to that."
Kirin considers this. "Everyone leaves," he says. "I don't know why. Where do they go?"
"Who is they?"
Kirin pauses. "I don't know. Everything is not in its place anymore." He struggles with the words to tell Daud about how his memory is no longer linear anymore, but fragments fading into one another, unmoored by time or place. "I think—I think Sokolov was here—no, that's not right. He's in the labyr—labry—no, he's not there either. He's not anywhere, but I thought he was just here. I lost something, and he looked for it with me, but we didn't find it."
The words are harder to manage now, but Kirin disregards this sign that he's quickly approaching his own limits, if only because he doesn't want it to be so.
Daud only watches the stars split the horizon. "Sometimes men run from what they've created."
"He didn't create me," Kirin replies, picking at his gloves. The daytime warmth has left in favor of a chill.
"I've been to the Academy," Daud says. "I know what they teach: bend the natural world to your will. Exorcise the mysteries of life until there's nothing left."
Kirin ponders this as best he can. "Sometimes I'm waiting for him to find me, and then I remember that he's gone."
Daud frowns. "Sokolov?"
"My brother." Simply admitting that seems like a confession that he isn't a god among men—born brilliant—but that he's only a mortal man made from mortal means, with a family of origin like anyone else.
"You have a brother?" Daud regards him with interest, but Kirin only stares ahead into the darkness.
"He's only a bastard. He's gone now too." Truthfully, Kirin doesn't even know if his brother is still alive. He seemed like the type of man to die after he'd completed his duty, if only because there was nothing left for him, of him.
"Older?"
Kirin considers this. "I—I don't remember." He pauses. "When I was seven, he was twelve…" It's the kind of calculation he'd have been able to make instantly before, and now it slips from him. The numbers are obstinate and unyielding. He glances down at his fingers. Not enough to count to twelve.
Daud places his hands next to Kirin's. "Let's try now."
Kirin begins to count aloud, starting with Daud's left hand. He touches each digit lightly as he assigns it a number. Daud's right pinky becomes number ten, and his own right thumb and forefinger become eleven and twelve.
"And if we take seven away," Kirin says, struggling now to remember it all.
Daud curls all but three fingers inward. Kirin counts the remaining ones again.
"Five," he says, but despite the small twinge of pride, he can't remember why he was doing any of this. And it's still as jarring as before. He's starting to suspect that he will never be used to these moments of absence.
Daud notices this lapse. "Your brother was five years older than you," he prompts gently.
Kirin thinks a little on this; his head hurts badly now. "Yes," he says. "He was." His brother is only a ghost now in his memories, blurred around the edges and out of frame. He can't even remember their last meeting now; it seems that he simply faded out of his life.
"Would you want to see him again?" Daud asks, unable to hide the perpetual curiosity of an only child in the lives of those with siblings.
"I don't know. I don't think he'd want to see me again." Kirin cannot imagine what it would be like to see him again anyway. His brother seemed eternal and implacable in the way that older siblings appear sometimes—a marker of the time when it was just the two of them.
Daud frowns, but Kirin has already forgotten what they were talking about.
"The orbit of the sun can be determined by its position relative to—" he says. "No, no, that's not right."
Daud recognizes this sign. "You're overtired," he says. "Do you want to rest?"
"The copper wire runs parallel to...to..." Kirin frowns. That's not it at all, but his thoughts scatter anyway. He nods, not trusting his words anymore.
Daud gets up from his position on the roof. "Hold onto me," he says, pulling Kirin close to him. Kirin complies, resting his head on Daud's shoulder. He feels the Void move through Daud like a controlled river, and when he opens his eyes again, they're back at one of Daud's hideouts. Daud helps him into bed, adjusting the blankets just so, and sits by him, making noncommittal sounds of acknowledgement as Kirin continues with his stream of unrelated thoughts. As he settles into the blankets, his thoughts gradually begin to separate again from each other. Exhaustion weighs him down now.
"That's a lot to think about," Daud says at last, when Kirin's grown quiet.
Kirin murmurs something in response as he closes his eyes. He's not sure what to think of that when he's used to his thoughts being called babbling.
Daud waits until he's certain that Kirin's fallen asleep, and then he rejoins Thomas in the living room of his hideout.
"Your guest seems to have taken your bed," Thomas says, barely hiding his amusement. "Take mine. I'll make up a pallet."
"Nonsense," Daud replies. "I'll be fine with a pallet."
"Take mine," Thomas repeats. Offering is the only way he allows himself to make his feelings known, and Daud knows this as well. Thomas didn't have to find him again after all these years of trying to hold Daud's legacy in Dunwall together, and failing to do so, returning to Daud's side for whatever may come after that.
Daud regards Thomas. "Are you one of those who wear devotion like a noose?" he says, allowing himself a rare moment of indulgence, as he strokes Thomas's cheek with a gloved hand. He revels in the evening stubble on Thomas's face—a little sign of his humanity.
Thomas leans into the gesture. "Only for you."
"Will you find your peace without me?" Daud asks softly. And it's a fleeting moment of pain to know that there's still something he must do without Thomas, that it would destroy Thomas to follow him to where he must go. He has made up his mind on what must be done.
"That's a hard ask," Thomas replies.
"You must," Daud insists.
Thomas meets his gaze, full of youthful self-assurance. "I will find you where ever you go."
Daud smiles and shakes his head. "Not this time."
Thomas takes a breath to steady himself. "Am I so replaceable then?" He can barely keep the jealousy out of his voice.
"Never," Daud reassures him.
"Then stay a moment. Let me have that."
And in that quiet hour, he pulls Daud down with him to watch the stars trace their paths in perfect form across the night sky, holding onto this moment against the knowledge that it will end.