A/N: Cross-posted on ao3!

A massive thanks to my awesome friends and INSPIRATION MACHINE QUEENS. Lostastoria—thank you oodles for always enthusiastically listening to my screamings, lol. Honestly, if it weren't for you, I don't think I would ever have found the motivation to actually follow through with any half-baked idea I've chucked at you. (AND THANK YOU FOR ALWAYS SCREAMING BACK, AHH!) And sable_fahndu—as ALWAYS. You are my MVP with the absolute best guidance and insight. Always setting me in the right direction when I never know what the fuck I'm even doing. ToT

I also want to credit NowisNox for being a huge inspiration for this at all. I absolutely just adored the concept of 'Karl and Donna stuck together taking care of a whole ass baby' from their story, What Remains (posted on ao3), lol. There are just so many amazing Donnaberg stories and content out there. Thank you to all the creators who have contributed work to this teeny fandom… ;u; All of it is just so inspiring, and I just felt compelled to try and write something of my own too.


Summary:

Having never known a thing outside the Village and Miranda's omnipotent reach, Heisenberg and Donna must navigate the uncertain road before them to find for themselves who they are and their place in the world. Tethering them together is the single other remnant left of the Village—an orphaned infant who the two former Lords are compelled to safeguard and preserve—and the shared burden of having endured and survived their pasts.

[Post-game continuation in which Karl Heisenberg and Donna Beneviento survive.]


Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction inspired by and using characters and elements from Resident Evil: Village, creative property of Capcom.


La Strada

Chapter 1

Freefall. Crashing back to the earth. Into flames and into hell. Presumably.

Was this normal? For death to feel this way?

Numb limbs hanging from a floating body. Floating…moving.

Moving?

More like…dragging. Or sinking, perhaps? Heavy and leaden.

Strange. There ought to be pain, but none of the senses register beyond a muddle and a blur. It'd felt like underwater without the drowning. It'd felt like the incinerator without the flames. Like finding reprieve in breaking through the surface, but without the air.

Salvation in bereavement.

Sparks from ash.

A voice in the darkness.

.

'Please…don't die.'

.

Die? Now why the fuck would I do that?

.

.

.

Not even the rattling in the walls, or the thunderous booming in the distance disturbed the stale air enough to rouse the motionless body that lied broken on the cot. Unsurprising, though, upon an afterthought—the cavernous corridors and halls of the Heisenberg factory were hardly any stranger to such turbulence. They'd been the lifeblood of its inner workings, perpetually in motion for more decades than its master could even recall to memory. Never slowing. Never halting. Never soundless.

Until this day.

Until its own architect had been felled and lain in the decay of his own failure here in its bowels.

A lifetime of machinations dismantled. A lifetime of contempt and seething indignation brought to ruin.

The reverberations of yet another explosion in the near distance sent a droning tremor through the crumbling foundations, enough for the cracks above to sputter its dust and debris down into the hollow chamber. A merest unassuming breath had been enough—unconscious and unsuspecting, and the particles that spilled into the lone occupant's nostrils and lips raked their way down into his throat. With a violent, heaving cough, Karl jolted back to life.

The sensation was not unlike drowning, if, in place of water, there'd been sand and gravel instead. But a bit of dirt had hardly been enough to bring down a Lord of the village. Even if it'd felt like swallowing bent nails.

But fucking hell, the pain that shot through him. And yet, as Karl sputtered his innards seemingly clear of all the rubbish, he realized then that the searing sensation he'd felt had been radiating from elsewhere. An attempt at rising quickly revealed that it'd hurt—like a bitch—to even move, and he'd settled on rolling himself off the cot he'd been lying in.

Doamne

Even those few inches to the floor felt like falling off the tallest of his watchtowers surrounding these grounds. (Hardly impervious to the occasional accident of his own making, he'd known that forty foot drop intimately.) Another good hack of the lungs ought to do it. The heavy sheet of dust over the concrete beneath him clung to his clothes—his clothes

It was then that Karl noted how light he'd felt. And as the senses slowly returned to the nerve endings beneath his skin, the chill of the still air, too, brought his attention back within himself. The absence of his heavy coat. His dirtied shirt beneath it, bearing smatterings of dull, rusted red around its tears, left untucked and unbuttoned. His hands scraped at the sediment between his fingers, beneath his nails only to find as well, some stray cloth and scraps all cut up and torn, strewn about. They roamed, half-blind, until tapping against something smooth and oblong that tolled with a hollow, metallic ring. A basin with a soiled rag folded over its rim, half-full with some cloudy liquid.

He managed to claw his way back upright before coming to rest, seating himself back against the edge of his cot to catch his breath. Propping an arm over a bent knee, he let his head hang forward. A sputter here and there still shook his aching body, so he let himself wait it out until his throat calmed and his lungs cleared. There'd been so much dust hanging in the air, and his body screamed for a canteen. Water or booze, he couldn't care less. Hell, even a swig of petrol sounded appealing at that moment. Anything to wash it all down.

His eyes then trailed ponderously back at that basin. He'd almost been willing to overlook its murkiness. Almost. Glancing at the dampened rag hanging on its edge, he noted the same rusty color in its fibers as those that stained his shirt. Okay, blood. His own, likely. So what did it matter? Another low tremor loosened more dust from the ceiling overhead. He glimpsed as much of the rubbish, too, drizzled down into the obscure liquid. He could feel his throat drying out even more at the mere thought. No. Absolutely not.

It'd been in his moment of repose that he'd felt it—the stinging in his side. Barely conscious of his own movements, he'd run a hand over his midsection to find some crude dressings, same as the torn rolls of cloth littered all around. A pause then, as his mind attempted to trace itself backwards to before he'd awakened. When had he ended up back inside the factory? His recollection came in static and quick-cuts—his metal army marching at last. Facing Ethan Winters.

...That boulder-punching asshole.

A sneer crept across his lips at the thought. He remembered the moment he'd seen his life's work lit up in flames. That entire section of his factory obliterated in a flash. All he could remember after that was furious red. How he'd been driven by nothing more in that moment than to make a stain out of that meddlesome little shit that continued to stand in his way. To hell with him and his brat. And after, he'd have pulverized Redfield and the remains of the rabble he'd brought along. Then finally—that evil cunt. The rest of this godforsaken, shithole village can go right along with her.

But he knew none of that came to be. Not even close. He couldn't even remember what had happened between him and Winters. A flash, the sensation of his body being immolated and utterly torn into, and then black.

Karl thought for sure that had been his glimpse of oblivion. First, the chaos of the noise and the burning before it'd grown dark, cold, and quiet. Yet somehow, he must have managed to drag his half-dead carcass back to this room, clinging to life the way it'd always known.

His sneer quirked at its corner, twisting itself to an embittered little smile. If there'd been anything at all that vile bitch had instilled in him, it'd been the will and the tenacity to survive.

Fuck Winters.

Fuck Redfield.

And fuck you, Miranda.

His mind had still been a haze, but screw the mysteries of those blurred-out frames. What he needed now was water. Karl managed to scrape himself back off the ground, kicking around the wayward tools and rags by the staggering shuffle of his leaden feet. He'd nearly fallen against the desk on the far side of the room, knocking half the clutter off as his hands pawed for the metal canister he'd always left there. With a desperate twist of its cap, he threw the thing aside before gulping down its sloshing contents. Old coffee. Good enough, he thought, swallowing with it the urge to retch.

Karl slammed the canister back down on his worktable, breaths heaving forth in wheezes. As his wits slowly settled, he shifted his gaze about to scan the room. It'd always been in a state of formulated chaos. Bottles, cans, containers—an entire shitpile lined methodically by the legs of his worktable. All empty, of course. How appropriate. What he would kill to down a swig of his țuică that very moment. Or hell, even some of that shit vodka the Duke procured on occasion from the East. The times he'd grumbled over his own ass to dump all that garbage before it'd become another stockpile of junk. Karl scratched at the scruff of his beard.

Every corner visible housed assortments of familiar clutter. Screws and scraps swept off into their little haphazard piles. A large piece in particular, appearing to be some portion of metal facing, lied propped up against the wall with loose ropes and ends left coiled around its base, all seemingly kicked away beneath the nearby cot. Elsewhere, toolboxes sat gathered, but with lids remaining solidly latched shut. Nothing out of place. And that'd been it—everything seemed arranged in place. Even for how casually the unused dressings had been left littering the ground, Karl had apparently still kept enough of his faculties to dispose of the most soiled rags. The little shit bucket by his chair had been half filled with red-stained shreds.

Everything struck as…strange. He'd still been unable to piece back together the scraps of his fractured memory. Even recalling that Winters had rifled through this room upon arrival, there'd been traces of something quite else lingering about that he couldn't quite place. The inexplicable orderliness within the haphazard. It'd all somehow felt reassembled.

Or perhaps it'd been a mere trickery of the mind, brought about by the lightheadedness that had still clouded his wits. How could his own aptitude be trusted when he'd felt as though he himself had just been reassembled? The seams of his fractures and hairline cracks still fresh and unmended. Should it come as any curiosity for such a strangely feeling sensation to leave its shadow lingering over his still barely waking senses?

He tapped his boot at the few rolls of gauze and torn muslin on the floor as he paced back across the room. How the resolve for self-preservation could manifest in an instinct so out-of-body for all of this to completely elude his conscious thought. Karl always imagined himself the unequivocal master of all things in his hands—his iron hammer, his soldats, his life and the destiny that he forged ahead of it. And yet, he could not remember his own thoughts, his own actions that had saved him from certain death. He simply could not discern any of this.

Distracted, he'd puzzled over his dressings with half a mind as he hunched himself over—a fucking mistake that had dawned on him far too late once his pain receptors fired in angered concentration deep in his gut. With a roar, Karl nearly doubled over before managing to catch his weight at the edge of his cot. He hastened to collect his old trench coat strewn at its foot before allowing himself a pause to pace his breaths.

Back beside his work table, the hanging canvas had been left drawn, leaving the entirety of his meticulously designed intrigues in full view. He let his eyes trace along the lines and pathways he'd drawn over it all. Everything had been flawless. Perfectly choreographed. It'd been inconceivable how it all came unraveled so quickly. So completely. His entire being clenched until he felt his molars grind. Until his white knuckles grew numb beneath the leather of his gloves. Until his innards coiled while he seethed at the ruins of it all.

The Lord directed his gaze to the angry red 'X' scrawled over the portrait at the bottom left of the wall. Even in soft-focused monochrome, the face of that hideous imbecile never failed to draw even the merest twitch in his brow.

Moronic Freak…

He continued counter-clockwise to the one he'd detested most bitterly, second only to Mother herself.

Lady Super-Sized Bitch…

As much as he'd hated that giant cunt, he would never have imagined that she would be the first of the Lords to fall. Admittedly, there'd been some measure of gratification in the thought. His gaze trailed on toward the last among them, the weakest link of the Four Great Houses. The one he'd have taken to have been eliminated in her place.

Ugly-Ass Psycho Doll…

He couldn't say if he was even less sorry to see that little, foul-mouthed shit go. Useless, insufferable thing. Had it even been capable of fighting for its puppeteer? He found himself pondering, having never once witnessed it engaged in any confrontation outside of lobbing its grating insults. Between the doll and its maker, he could never be certain from which hands had the marionette strings been drawn and strung, but he'd refused to concede to the idea that the screaming, animate jumble of wood and rags had been the mastermind of any conceivable intent. Across the portrait of the dollmaker in question marked the very same red strokes as the rest.

Donna.

Whose spectral silence made her more tolerable than the rest. A quiet end for a quiet phantom, perhaps. He could spare that much in thought for her, at least.

At the center of the spider's web lied the sole impetus of all the Lord's machinations. The very fiend for whom he'd devoted all his lifelong malice and scorn. He stared at her immaculate, unmarred image in silent indignation.

Three of four.

Had that been enough to satisfy his need for retribution? Could he be content with seeing her kingdom burn? Even at the cost of his own?

But kingdoms can always be rebuilt. To thrive once more, before razing one another to the ground yet again.

Yes. This is what he must do, then.

Survive.

Rebuild himself.

Grow stronger.

Karl hissed with displeasure as he threw his coat back over his shoulders.


The smell of burnt diesel and flesh and scorched earth assaulted his senses upon his first step from his factory gates. Only with enough distance could he see that it'd been remnants from which he emerged. The rest of his domain beyond had been left in smoldering ruins. More explosions and incendiaries flashing in the distance resounded through the air, already thickened with sediment—ashes of the Village's remains. This cull had been unleashed on two ends, it would seem. While Miranda's monsters tore away at the masses, Redfield's army, in turn, swept them up along with the fodder still left behind in their wake.

He wondered where that bitch was. How far along in her schemes had she come now? Had she torn Winters' heart clean out of that undying husk yet? The amount of pitiful desperation he could recall in that man's gaze.

And determination.

A sudden swell of those lost moments erupted in Karl's mind again. They'd come in flashes, in pulses, and mere impressions. And still, all he could truly recall with any clarity in but the loosest sense had been the stark oblivion sunken deep in his bones.

Fuck all of this.

Miranda would snuff it out of him. Poor, dumb bastard.

Feeling the chill of the weather worming through every inch of his exhausted flesh, Karl pulled his tattered trench coat tighter over his frame before dragging his deadened legs on, pushing up snow with each step, tracked by the dirt and mud beneath it. He'd headed towards nowhere in particular. Where in fuck had Miranda been lurking now? The opposite of there.

He ventured along whichever paths looked the least recognizable. Whatever turn that tread farther into unfamiliarity. Away. Just away.

As long as it left his failures in their ruins. As long as it left his memories in their ashes. Just leave this godforsaken shithole.

Another rhythmic string of ammunition rang in the distance. A boom. A rattle. More burning. It struck as rather droll, the happenstance of all of this partaken somewhere not within the borders of his foundries. Neither wrought nor willed by his command. Not being in control was something Karl detested nearly as much as Miranda herself. Her very existence, after all, had been the enduring testament to his own seemingly inescapable subjugation.

Fuck all of this!

It'd been unsettling how calm the air was, even in all its thickness. The anarchic symphony unfolding all around had been but a drone in the distance. His own lumbering steps, his heaving breaths, his damnable, earsplitting thoughts—all of it a penetrating dissonance against the white noise.

If his own mind were not such a loathsome companion then, the low snarls and feral pants nearby would surely have escaped his notice. They came a mere passing, like a dreadful waft just across the rustle of the surrounding foliage. A foreboding of horror written into the soil and bedrock of this cesspool like a signature.

Karl turned left to the sound just as a shriek filled the foreground over the rest of the noise. Sounds of the cull. The hunt. Of bloodlust and death. A signature he knew all too well.

He turned back to his path before him and trudged on.

By the fifth footfall, the snarl swelled again to his ears. It'd come even closer at the forefront now, pushing all else well into the distant atmosphere. On his sixth step, Karl halted.

"You got some balls…" he spat, as though the disturbance had been little more than an inconvenience to the not-quite-quiet he'd tried so dismally to take some respite in.

He turned to face the nuisance stalking him. What did this mangy shitbag want?

"Why don't you go fuck off somewhere for an easy meal, huh?" Karl dismissed the feral thing. "I'm not in the fucking mood."

The lycan didn't appear to yield, even in the face of one of its Lords. Karl could read in the bloodthirst of its singular gaze boring into him an utter disregard for reason or authority. No—the way its revolting saliva slavered between its bared fangs, the way its malformed muzzle furrowed all the way up to its glaring, sanguine eyes.

You dumb shit…don't even—

The smell of blood and torn flesh had been far too pungent for such a gluttonous, rabid beast to find its wits. Or, what little remained of it after the mad witch's cadous ate away what cognizance had once been there.

If it were not for his own physical exhaustion, Karl would have smashed the creature's head in at the end of his fist in a single blow. But his dulled reflexes had slowed him far too much—the trickling blood from his clenched hand stung where it'd been seized between the canines clamping down on him. It'd caught his swing in its maw and continued to bear down harder, attempting to tear away at his flesh, now frenzied by the fresh taste on its tongue.

Karl hissed, teeth clenched at the burn of his lacerated fist and all-consuming ire at his own sloppiness. He gritted his teeth when even the test of a merest tug only compelled the beast to then latch its clawed digits into his arm, threatening to tear it clean off completely.

Hadn't he just said he wasn't in the fucking mood?

Boiling in his rage, Karl pushed back against the thing with the entire heft of his weight. Its jaw hadn't given in the least even as it lost its footing, shuffling its heels to regain a hold in the snow. He pulled back his left arm then, squeezing his palm into a fist before furiously bringing it down like a hammerhead against its skull with a violent roar.

"STUBBORN. PIECE. OF SHIT!" he fumed between each blow, pummeling deeper and deeper into splintering bone.

By the third blow, he heard the filthy thing yelp like some punished hound. He felt its fangs loosen from his torn arm.

By the fifth blow, it'd been sent crumpling to the snow in a bloody heap with a shattered cavity where its face once was. Not quite yet a carcass, Karl stood hot and heaving as he sneered at the twitching mess before him.

Blood for blood, you stupid fuck…

Karl spat over it. As if seeing its broken, mutilated corpse grow cold hadn't been enough, he then dropped the heel of his heavy boot down on its head, howling out all his failure and loss with the onslaught.

Once he'd finally kicked and stomped himself to exhaustion, he stumbled over into the reddened snow. "F-Fuck…" he uttered, his voice brittle in the air as he crumpled to his knees. "Fuck all of this… Fuck all of you… Fuck…" he breathed between pants. He continued to curse the bloody mess in front of him as though it were the very incarnation of all his misery and despair. The opportunity had slipped between his fingers all too easily, and this scarcely satisfying surrogate would have to suffice.

It'd fallen back into white noise then.

The smell of burnt diesel and flesh.

Sounds of the scorching earth.

Karl's breaths. His heartbeat.

Anguish.

A monster's death throes.

An innocent's weeping.

The broken Lord paused. What was that in the air? So faint to his ears? He quelled himself to better listen for this disturbance whispering from beyond the surrounding thickets. Digging his limbs into the snow, he scraped himself back to his feet as he craned himself leftward—the direction from where the former lycan, now stain in the snow, had come.

With a hissing wince, Karl glanced down at his right hand, torn and left nearly as bloody as the pulp sprawled at his feet. It'd been difficult to know whether it'd been the jagged lacerations or the freezing bite of the air that stung more. This was no good. The shredded glove would worsen the wounds if left to freeze against his blood pooling in its lining. Biting back his pain, he worked it off digit by digit until he could cleanly peel away the entirety of it, leaving the thing discarded with the rest of this filth.

Damn fucker did a number, didn't it?

A single shake of the maimed appendage sent spatters of red against the powdery white. Karl exhaled before trudging through the clouds of his own breaths deeper into the brushes.

Between the rustles of leaves and snapping of twigs, the sound began to grow clearer with each step. Unmistakable—yes, weeping. Normally, such feeble noises would come and go unnoticed against the greater shrills of what horrors lurked within these woods. Utterly inconsequential to that of the most laborious of the Four Great Lords. And yet, there'd been something in the quiet, fleeting agony of these faint cries. Perhaps they called to the wounds he'd born then, still fresh, still open and raw. His half-broken body. His beaten and wasted spirit. It'd taken a withered wretch to answer to the beckoning of another, one that would otherwise go abandoned by those who'd had their own woes to suffer.

What had this Lord left to himself now to bother with?

Once he'd stepped from the trees into the small clearing, he spotted the source then—a body curled up some distance ahead, and the smattering trail of blood leading to where it'd lain. Karl's gaze lingered on the heap for a moment. Just a bundled pile of flesh, really. Hardly any different from the one he'd left behind. So what was it then that compelled his heavy boots forward?

Karl hardly cleared three paces before he'd heard it again. A gasp of breath. Or…a wimper, perhaps? Whatever it'd been, its agony bore deep within his own lungs—how ragged, how utterly threadbare the dreadful noise was. And such a thing was hardly unfamiliar to Lord Heisenberg. Coming upon the body sprawled there in the snow, neither had the sight of it been anything even remotely exceptional. And yet, it drew his senses—his curiosity, magnetized not unlike that of those inconsiderable fragments and findings he manipulates with the merest pulse at the end of his fingers.

Strange. How it was to feel so infinitesimal to something so elusive. Something he could not see. Something he could barely perceive only in the most primal sense. Something he could undoubtedly feel as intrinsically as the brush of a specter's breath.

Another wheeze, and the body shifted, turning itself upon the encroaching sound of crunching snow. Long tresses of hair fell away to reveal the face of a woman—a girl, truly, hardly of age. Her unkempt locks had been pulled from a braid, stuck against the stains of blood now frozen on her lips and even more of it seeping through her tattered shawl. Barely hidden beneath its rags had been the deep gashes torn into her shoulder and neck. Despite the savagery of such wounds, the girl's only saving grace might well have been the relentlessness of the weather, so cold against the flesh as to slow the flow of blood, if only to stave off death for a mere few minutes more.

Karl tilted his head as he observed her. He'd seen plenty of death. He'd been witness to the final breaths, the lost wayward gazes, and even the tearful pleas of those on its verge. None of it in particular evoked any real sentiment within him. Not anymore, at least. He'd beaten that out of himself long ago. He'd learned quickly, even as a child, that there had been no place for it if he resolved to survive Miranda.

So what of this poor, dying wretch, then?

He looked into the girl's eyes. Green. Almost like his own. Perhaps more vibrant in its hue, where his own have paled. Perhaps more poignant in their depths, where his own have grown hardened and shallow. She gazed back, lips parting only to relieve another fading breath past them.

"Vă ro..."

Karl narrowed his eyes, trying to decipher the barely audible rasps.

"...R-Rog..." she continued. A plea.

Many pleas came across the ears of the Four Lords. Few of which ever drew any of their concern. Karl waited to hear what this one would solicit. A morbid curiosity, if he were to place the wandering notion. The wishes of the dying often brought some sense of vindication to him, a thing he'd never care to admit to another soul, living or dead. It'd been perhaps because in the deepest reaches of his conscience, he'd held one for himself as well. Another secret for the grave.

Of course Lord Heisenberg had wishes. Of course he held dreams. But to admit to any regrets he might bear to the Reaper itself was to accept his own mortality, his own frailty. The very possibility of his own defeat and death.

And the passing thought of how they'd all been torn from his grasp now left his old bones colder than the winter's touch itself. Perhaps, then. Perhaps that had been the sentiment keeping him there in the presence of this dying girl. To bear witness to the end of her life. No one would have done so for him. And as much as it'd numbed him inside to think about, the very thought of it cut into him even more so than the shards of his shattered dreams.

"Mea..." The girl paused to draw a breath, surely so painful that she'd nearly choked at the effort. Watching her labor so just to speak stirred the Lord with a barest twitch of his brow. "Copilul mea..."

What...?

Karl's gaze furrowed with his confusion. In that moment, she then drew back the heft of her overcoat. What he'd taken for thick winter layers had been the infant child this dying girl had kept hidden away.

A mother trying to protect her child. Who gave her life to save it. The irony had been so befittingly tragic. And it'd hardly even been the first of its kind in this cursed place. The bitch who called herself the immortal god and keeper of this backwater hell, who debased him by calling herself his mother. Who would sooner leave any 'child' of hers to rot in the snow for beasts to pick off than lose so much as a feather from those fiendish wings. And here, lying before him, another—a child hardly grown herself—who'd clung to life with all the might left in her frail little being, solely for this moment. An act compelled by desperation to see her own saved.

The very same desperation he'd seen in Ethan Winters, perhaps? Karl couldn't be sure. Truth be told, he wouldn't know. And who could have conceived such fortitude could be fostered by a sentiment so pitiful? But then again, what was it that had kept him alive? To compel him onward, to come to this moment now, standing before this girl to bear witness to her struggle?

"Violeta," the girl uttered to him. She spoke this with the clarity of resolve beneath her waning strength.

Karl saw then, as she clutched onto the bundled infant, struggling to raise her arms. Realizing the feeble attempt to move, he lowered to his knees to come closer to her. "You'll die faster if you keep talking." The warning, though coarse, came rather gently from the Lord.

"Violeta," she spoke again, this time, inching the bundle closer to him. Blinking slowly, she turned her half-lidded gaze to the child in her arms with what might have been a pained effort at smiling.

"Hey, what are you—?"

"Ia-o," she pleaded again, urging the child into the Lord's arms. "Vă rog."

Given little choice in the matter, Karl caught the little thing, his inexperienced hands cradling it at full arm's length away. He gave the child a glance before turning back to the girl, whose dulling eyes grew full with tears as her wistful smile now shone across her stained lips.

"Îmi pare foarte rău…" she lamented to the child with her trembling hand outstretched, only able to manage the brush of some fingers against the fringes of its swaddling blanket. A sob cut across her following gasp for air. "Violeta mea…"

The girl's hand fell limply to the snow then. Her eyes stilled. Her breathing quieted at last. Karl grew silent. Inevitable as it was, her sudden passing still left a rippling shock deep beneath his skin. She'd grown cold and motionless, and he'd been left with this child. A fucking child.

Who was now crying.

Its wailing alarmed him once it erupted without so much as a warning. He was never exactly partial to children, but merely because he hadn't a single notion of how to manage them in the least. And ones of this sort—an infant, and one that looked hardly months old—were the most helpless of its kind. At least Winters' brat never made a peep.

For fuck's sake…

What was he to do? It'd have been easy to simply leave it with its mother. How cruel could that be, really? It'd join her soon enough. Karl peered down at it—

'It.'

He was starting to sound like fucking Miranda.

"What was it she called you…?" he murmured aloud. "Violeta? A girl, then?" With a sigh, he drew her closer against himself, rocking the little bundle uncertainly as he rose to his feet again. "Hey. Come on. Stop crying, will you?" he implored the infant. "I know. It's fucking cold…"

Once he'd tucked her underneath the breast of his coat, he nudged a fold of her blanket from her face for a glimpse. The newfound warmth soon consoled her, marked by the sound of her humming coo as she settled down, gazing up in blissful ignorance at her unwitting guardian.

Temperamental thing.

Green eyes, bright and bold, just like her mother's. Her little tufts of hair a fair, nutty shade, and her face, olive in complexion—all a spitting image of that lifeless girl in the snow. Her coloring was not common of those native to this region. Surely, she must have had Romani blood in her. How wretched, that a clan of free wanderers would find their generations doomed in this pit under the thrall of a false, Black God. Had it been that their ancestral children, too, were stolen from their mothers' arms?

Just as he had been?

Karl peered again into the infant's wide, unsullied gaze. A wonder. This pitiful thing. To have been born in such a hell in the smallest, darkest corner in all the world. Easily crushed and swallowed by this unhallowed piece of earth, if no other set of eyes bothered to even look her way. And yet, within that newborn gaze, the Lord witnessed such awe. The purity of unknowing. Pristinely gifted by the simple miracle of nascence.

He could not help but wonder—perhaps he, too, bore such eyes at one time. Once himself a newborn of this world. Once an innocent like her. Karl often disdained to be burdened by such thoughts of what once had been, the forgone possibilities far too embittering for his conscience's lament. But they'd now taken hold of him in heart and mind. The surrounding quiet had allowed for their whispers to resound like lingering past echoes. He felt his lips stiffen, and the makeshift cradle of his arms held fast to the child in them.

Even a tiny remnant claimed from this burned kingdom might suffice for a triumph. Yet another offering undeserving of its misery, stolen from the Black God's altar.

And so Lord Heisenberg collected the foundling beneath the sparse folds of his coat, pulled his hat lower over his brow against the winds, and drifted on down the snowbound path.


A/N: All the bits of Romanian in this were literal Google-tier translation searches, lol. We know how that goes, so I apologize for any linguistic weirdness or inaccuracies there. But for anyone who would like some idea, these are rough translations yielded by Uncle Google:

Doamne = 'God/Lord'

Țuică = a plum brandy iconic to Romania

Vă rog = 'Please'

Copilul mea = 'My child'

Ia-o = 'Take her'

Îmi pare foarte rău = 'I am so sorry'

I apologize in advance for any long delays for future updates. I'm horrifically slow and inconsistent with output, and work/hobbies sometimes offer little time to squeeze much writing in for me. (Why must there only be 24 hours in a day?) But I've got SOO much planned out for this story, and I hope everyone will have the patience to stick this out with me, haha. Please feel welcome to subscribe so you can get the notifications for any new posts whenever my ass gets around to it.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read, and I hope you enjoyed it so far! Any comments are greatly appreciated! Have a happy holiday! ^_^

12/25/21