Content Warning: Terminally ill child and a brief mention of losing a child.
Chapter Twelve
Surrender
2030
The infirmary bed fit her and Theodore without much trouble. The pile of colourful Duplo scattered about was a different story entirely though, requiring careful rearranging here and there while Theodore challenged every possible way in which the blocks could fit together.
Zofia's thoughts were much like those pieces. Often ill fitting. Scattered. Which wasn't to say she'd ever been good at keeping them in order… but this? This was different. In a dull, muted way; like her thoughts were bobbing in a well filled with thick fog; sinking, rising, bouncing off its side.
She didn't mind them when they were down the well, but it got real awful whenever they rose. It meant she had to think them.
Theodore handed her a square block of bubblegum pink Duplo, entrusting it to her for safekeeping until he'd find a place for it. Zofia took it, quietly and dutifully, and with an ache seizing her heart.
One of those thoughts poked its misshaped head out of the fog. She'd not invited it to, but here it was.
My little man Crane liked to call Theodore (or so the thought reminded her). Among oh so many other names Zofia had no hope to ever fully list. Sometimes he'd make up a dozen over a single lunch.
His little man. His little man who ought to be going all sorts of places with his eyes so wide. His little man who ought to grow up to be a better man than him. His little man who ought to grow up.
Period.
She turned the Duplo block in her hand. More ugly things rose from the fog.
Somewhere between her coming off the anger after Theodore had been born, and her finding love for a family she'd practically tried to throw away, Zofia had managed to forget how life beyond the Fall was a chronic condition. Perpetual pain that flared whenever it pleased.
Zofia's heart twisted in its barbed cage. The block's edges dug into her palm.
Maybe it was a kindness, then.
Maybe it wasn't loss, but relief.
Not her relief. Theodore's; who was about to be spared having to drag the condition out long enough to become truly cognisant of how hard it was.
. . .
That's morbid. Who thought that sorta shite? She squeezed the stupid block harder still.
Someone who'd never gotten the hang of grieving, that was who. Someone who'd lost family. Lost friends (many closer than said family). Lost her own life. And, yet, couldn't remember a single instance after when she'd grieved.
And if this was her grieving—if she was mourning Theodore already, even though she hadn't even lost him yet—then what stage was she at?
Denial?
No.
Denial was the spot of dismay Crane was in a holding pattern over, circling it. Endlessly.
Zofia looked to the door leading out of the infirmary room (the same one Theodore had spent his first few days in this chronic life in). An argument had been put on repeat out there.
"We don't have the equipment," Carina said. Again. But it didn't matter how often she had to echo herself, her voice remained steady and gentle. "Or the medication. And none of us ever dealt with—"
"A week!" Crane snapped back. "The fucking ward is maybe a week away." His voice was a thready mess and he, too, looped the same words over and over again; a loop Zofia feared might never end.
Well. Not until the end end.
Zofia pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She realised—sluggishly—how she'd set her hand against Theodore's head. She didn't remember putting it there.
He was warm, her palm informed her. (Because he was still alive.)
His hair was silly soft.
His breathing wasn't right.
"At a hospital that has no medication," the argument continued outside. At this point, Zofia could practically hear Carina stick her fingers out as she counted through all the reasons why the end was inevitable. "Let alone anaesthetics, no power, and no cardiologist. Look. Kyle—" Her tone dipped low. Full of compassion. "—I cannot fathom what you are going through, and I'm so—"
"Do not fucking dare. Do not fucking tell me you're sorry for my loss. Just do something."
"There is nothing to do Kyle."
A thump. Its impact made the walls shudder and Zofia wondered if there'd be a dent somewhere out there.
She dropped her hand from Theodore's head.
The moment which followed stretched itself out unnecessarily long. Almost as if it wanted to trap Zofia, giving her no recourse but to sit still and wait for the second which she feared so completely. (The moment Theodore's breathing would go from not right to gone.) Eventually, the door opened and Zofia fumbled to be present, her eyes skipping up to find Crane and his freshly bruised knuckles.
He had tears in his eyes. Also fresh. And desperate.
Like the bruises.
Zofia looked away, bullied by shame over how she wasn't crying. She should've been. Crying.
"Hey guys," he said, pouring every bit of cheer he had left into his voice. It didn't work though. The words cracked from his throat like dried dirt. "How about a little road trip, hm?"
She pressed her lips together. Crane had heard every single word of what Carina had told him. He'd understood them, too. He wasn't daft. But he'd tossed everything she'd said out anyway, because Kyle Crane had never been a man who accepted the inevitable.
In contrast, Zofia had long ago surrendered.
2036
On that day in the infirmary, in the company of Duplo and a child near death, Zofia had learned a thing or two about herself. Specifically, she'd realised how she grieved backwards.
Admittedly, before she'd gotten around to her realisation, she'd had to have a fight with Crane. A long one. A loud one. A painful one. One in which she'd fought to allow their child comfort, rather than to drag him across the territories to a place that couldn't help him. Where he'd die all the same, on the road. Scared.
But once the fight had choked on its own anger, it'd become clear: Backwards had been how she'd grieved her life in Harran. How she'd let go of the world. Of her freedom. Her parents. Her friends.
Her only child.
Much as she accepted… this. All that lying flat on her back on an uncomfortable mattress. The thick stone walls she couldn't negotiate away. The perpetual chill touching her skin (a small luxury, she was burning up). The solid red of her marker, its tiny speakers muted by one of Waltz's many GRE gadgets.
Her hollow, hollow, head, where static crawled on the insides of her skull and a pinprick of panic hung suspended at its centre.
It blossomed sometimes, that panic. Unfurled like a blood-soaked leaf being dropped into a pool of water so it could write You're going to die in bloody letters. Except it wasn't about to be the lifeless sort of dying.
It'd be the other one.
She clenched her jaw. Her heart kicked. The panic flared. She wanted to get up. To hobble up and down her cage trying to outpace her own thoughts, but then her wrists reminded her of her restraints. They were new. From yesterday (or a year ago), when she'd hurt herself having an argument with a rock wall. Besides. What'd be the point in pacing? In being up. In doing anything at all.
The panic drained from her mind. She'd become hollow once more.
Time moved on. The world kept turning. Thoughts pillaged her mind and she wasn't entirely sure they were her own. They twitched too much and had the wrong colours on, as if they wanted to masquerade as something they weren't; like a clumsy child finger-painting someone else's life on the wrong fridge. Zofia didn't know how to stop thinking them (or how to stop them thinking themselves) and when they did eventually go away, she almost missed them.
Bit after that, things got... bad. The static in her mind swelled, growing until it filled her head entirely and her whole world was noise. Least until words began to distill from the constant rushing sound; words she heard as much as she knew them.
"Why so glum, Vincent?" Lady Séraphine asked.
Her voice hit Zofia in a painful, sensory-overload sort of way. Almost as if they were being tattooed against her eardrums. She tried to cringe away from them, but there really was nowhere to go.
"We need to slow down," Waltz said. At least his voice was just painful and didn't come scraped off the inside of her skull like the thick static you could lick from an old TV.
"Don't be ridiculous, you've outdone yourself." A heel clicked on stone. The noise was sharp and bit at Zofia's ears. "Allow me to demonstrate. Again."
Even lying down, Zofia's world seemed to suddenly turn about itself. An image flashed past her mind's eye; a suggestion of a finger twirling, demanding she spin-spin-spin. The suggestion was as ugly as it was convincing.
But Zofia did not stand. (She couldn't have even if she'd wanted to.)
Zofia did not spin.
Her fingers curled. Clung to the mattress. And as Zofia resisted, anxiety wanted to overwhelm her. Not anxiety over her being trapped. Or alone. Or not-dying. But anxiety over how she wasn't doing what was demanded of her. How she denied the nails scratching at her brainpan.
Beyond Zofia's cage, metal rattled. The Lady Séraphine laughed as her audience out there did exactly as it was told.
"Delightful, aren't they, my puppets? We should get them dresses."
There was a sigh. "Stop."
Anger burnt away the spinning sensation, like fire might scorch paper. "You're a sour man, Vincent. A brilliant, but sour man who would do well to celebrate his successes, not try and hobble them."
"There won't be success if we keep going at this pace, Séraphine. She's far beyond the point where she should have turned. At this rate I have no way to know when I'll lose her, whether it's a day from now or a minute."
"So?"
"The moment she turns, we forfeit our leverage."
"I repeat myself: So?"
Waltz sighed. "So, she won't be of any use to me anymore and I might as well have another one of your pet Banshees in here."
Zofia finally turned her head, her eyes skittish things that wobbled and didn't much like having to focus. They skated over the walls and ceiling until they found Waltz looking at her through the small window in her cage's door. Briefly, anyway. They kept skipping left and right, never quite settling, and took in a world that didn't look at all how it ought to look.
A psychedelic layer of colours had settled over it, twisting its shapes and smearing its edges. Worst of all though was how someone had painted Crane in her with her. Had put him over into the corner, to the right of the door, where he was the only solid thing in sight.
He was younger than he should have been. The Harran sort of young, she decided. No crow's feet. No grey in his hair. Less scars. This was Crane as she remembered him from their first ride down the Tower's elevator together. The elevator with its black and white checkered floor. And its lights going bing. bing. bing.
He wore the same grey-blue button up shirt as back then, its sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. When he reached into his chest pocket, looking for a packet of gum he'd never find, Zofia's heart remembered how much she'd feared him as the cabin had taken them down.
He was talking. But she couldn't hear him.
"I'm not risking it," Waltz said.
A click. Above her, the UV lights came on. Pain quickly followed; her exposed skin convinced it was being coated in hot ash. Zofia squeezed her eyes shut. She didn't scream.
"You damn well will," the Lady Séraphine snapped.
Another click. The UV lights died.
The pain lifted and Waltz's voice rose, barbed with an unspoken threat. "I need her alive if I'm going to help Mia."
"Oh my dear Vincent, and you need to do as told. Or Mia will find herself orphaned," said the Lady's, her threat not subtle at all.