For a while I’ve been wanting to write a fic of Sigma confronting Fyodor that parallels the scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov confesses to Sonia that he committed murder. Naturally, I read chapter 107 and immediately went “This is it!” When I managed to pick myself off the floor, anyway.
Parts of the dialogue here (as well as, to some extent, the character reactions) are taken directly from that scene in C&P, but also Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. :3
The gun shook in his hand. It was warm, a low, unpleasant heat; it burned his skin. Acrid smoke rose from the barrel. His ears still rang from the shot he had taken.
Fyodor looked at him, calm, serene even. He looked small, sitting there on the floor hunched in on himself, small and powerless. A dangerous illusion. The left shoulder of the stark white prison uniform was soaked through with blood, but Fyodor did not seem to feel the pain. Or perhaps he was simply so used to pain that it meant little to him, and he was aware of no more than a dull sting and that his left arm now hung useless at his side.
Suddenly the weight of the gun was too much. It dropped to the floor and clattered at Sigma’s feet. A tiny, agonized cry escaped him.
Fyodor had told him everything.
He might have been lying. Wasn’t everything a lie with him? Everything he had ever said to Sigma, every moment they had shared in each other’s presence, hadn’t all of it been lies? But this wasn’t. Sigma knew it, and he could not lie to himself. The truth had been laid bare to him, finally and inexorably, and every word felt like a knife to the heart.
“Do you understand?” Fyodor asked him, terribly gentle.
Sigma looked at him, trembling all over, like a frightened child. He was silent for a time, struggling, with himself, with what he now knew, with what he now understood and still couldn’t understand. At last, in despair, he whispered, “What have you done to yourself?”
This was clearly not the response Fyodor had anticipated. His eyes darkened, but there was confusion in his expression, and even, perhaps, a hint of pain. “To myself?” He smiled, but it was a pale, strained smile. “How strange you are, Sigma. You ask me what I’ve done to myself? What about all I’ve done to you, to so many others?”
“But the worst suffering you’ve done to yourself,” Sigma said.
The smile faded from Fyodor’s face. All at once, the life seemed to drain out of him, and his eyes were empty, hollow. “To live is to suffer.”
“And to kill?”
“To kill is to suffer, as well. Men fear to suffer. But there is no salvation without suffering.”
“Salvation?” Sigma cried, in despair and in a flash of sudden, boiling anger. “Is that what you think this is?” His voice softened again. “Don’t you see? There is no one, no one in the world, unhappier than you are now. You have never been farther from God than you are now.”
The mask of calm fractured and Fyodor recoiled as if struck. “And what do you know of God, Sigma?”
“I know what you’ve told me. I read the book you gave me. I may not really understand, not all of it, but…I understand forgiveness.” He held out his hands, as if offering something. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve really been after all this time. Isn’t it? But how could you have thought you had to do this for it?”
Fyodor looked at him with his dark, empty eyes. “There can be no forgiveness, not until I have finished the work I have been given to do.”
Sigma shook his head. “No,” he said, desperately, imploringly, “don’t you see? No one put this burden on you—you placed it on yourself, because you think you don’t have a right to exist, because no one ever told you that you deserve to live. You’re not a demon, Fyodor. It’s this, this idea you’ve let take possession of you. This isn’t you.”
The fractures in his mask deepened, widened, and it all began to crumble, little by little, as Fyodor listened to Sigma and stared into Sigma’s wide, pleading eyes. But he only smiled, that wan, mirthless smile. “This is all that I am,” he said, steady, implacable.
“You don’t understand!”
“You are the one who doesn’t understand, Sigma. I know that I have been given over to the devil. I have always known. But this is how it must be. I tried to kill you twice. If you let me go, I will try again. You know that. Why do you torment yourself like this over me?”
Sigma fell to his knees before Fyodor. His vision blurred; he had begun to cry. He realized he had been mistaken—Fyodor wasn’t the one crumbling, he was. He remembered the feeling of falling, falling, falling through endless sky. He felt they were falling now, the both of them, and the distance between them had never seemed so wide. Still, he tried to reach across that distance, so at least they could fall together.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, his voice soft, choked with his tears. “Maybe just finding myself a place where I can shut myself off from the world and from everyone who would use me isn’t enough anymore. But maybe you’re wrong about the Armed Detective Agency.” His gaze fell to the floor, a sad, wistful smile briefly appearing on his lips. “It sounds like a beautiful place, the Agency. It sounds like a good life. But I know I wouldn’t belong there. You told me that you heard melodies of sadness around me. I have never heard those same melodies around anyone else—anyone else but you.”
He lifted his eyes to Fyodor again. “We’re the same, you and I. We are both alone. We both had nowhere to go. We have both done terrible things just to find something for ourselves. But it can be different now, for both of us. You found me. And now, maybe I’ve found you. This—” he swept his arms in a wide gesture to encompass both Fyodor and their surroundings, the prison walls that closed them in, “isn’t you.”
He raised one shaking hand, almost, but not quite, touching Fyodor’s chest. “Maybe…maybe that’s what I’ve been sent for. To show you that.”
Fyodor did not respond for a moment. He shifted so they were both kneeling on the floor, facing each other, like penitents, and Sigma’s hand pressed into his bloodstained shirt. Sigma’s Ability did not activate. Not yet.
“It’s too late, Sigma,” he said at last, exhausted and with a kind of sorrow, hopelessness, even helplessness.
“It’s not too late,” Sigma insisted, firmly, but even more desperately. “We can get out of here. We can save Dazai-san, and Nakahara-san, and beat this game of Nikolai’s. I know you had a plan. I know Dazai did, too. We can all leave this place alive. And you and me, we can go back to the Casino, or…or to anywhere.” His voice broke, shattered like glass. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want you to die.”
He threw his arms around Fyodor’s neck, suddenly, surprising himself. His fear was now gone. “I won’t leave you,” he promised. “I’ll follow you anywhere, anywhere at all.”
Fyodor did not move, did not speak. Sigma closed his eyes, held him tightly, and waited.
Might make posting parts of my WIPs a regular thing, it seems fun!
Part of a scene from the next chapter of my fyosig fic, Falling is the Essence of a Flower.
Sigma realized they were, by unspoken mutual agreement, heading towards the ferris wheel. At last, they reached it. Sigma paused and looked up, craning to see the huge clock. 12:05, it informed him. Just past noon. They had been here just under two hours. It felt somehow both much longer and like no time at all.
“It’s very high,” he observed.
“You’re used to being much higher up.”
Sigma smiled. That was true.
“Don’t rats prefer to be underground?”
“Indeed,” Fyodor said, but, as ever, he looked perfectly at ease.
…
The view from the top of the ferris wheel was breathtaking. Tokyo bay was a deep glimmering blue beneath a pale sea of clouds above. In irregular patterns around the water’s edge, the city unfolded, a sprawling complex of harbors and streets and buildings. Alive and moving, like the ocean itself, the ebb and flow of the crowds and vehicles like the ebb and flow of the waves.
Opposite Sigma, Fyodor sat quiet and distant, his hands in his lap, his long legs partially stretched out across the gondola’s limited space. He was looking out at the ocean and the city below them with no expression, his eyes like shadows. Sigma wondered what he was thinking.
“It’s quite a view,” Sigma said, just to break the silence.
“Yes. I’ve always liked looking out at the ocean.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Fyodor regarded him with a kind of restrained, distracted smile. “It’s quite a spectacular view at night, as well, with all the lights.”
“You’ve been here at night?” Sigma asked, a little surprised, though he’d guessed that Fyodor had been here before.
“Da, a couple of times. Remember I told you Genichirou fell off a roller coaster, terrifying the park staff and guests half to death themselves? Well, that was the last time we were here. The first time, he brought me here at night. He actually managed to stay sober most of the time. I even had fun. Until we stopped at a restaurant and the owner offered Genichirou free sake because he was a fan. That was the end of that. Anyway, the other time it was Nikolai who took me up here at night—though we didn’t ride the ferris wheel, exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
Fyodor pointed to the roof of the gondola. “We sat on top.”
“You what?” Sigma’s stomach dropped at the thought.
Fyodor laughed. “Nikolai likes to do things a little differently. A man on a ledge, dancing over oblivion, tempting fate, or perhaps just desperate to live. Genichirou isn’t must different. Scoundrels, the both of them, and they both fancy themselves terribly romantic.”
Fyodor appeared amused. “Nikolai and Genichirou both love it here. They came here together once. You can imagine how that went. Genichirou returned with an entire stack of new books for me. He knew he’d messed up big this time. You should have seen the look on his face. He thought he was really in for it. But he was sincerely contrite, and their shenanigans ultimately had no impact on the plan, so I let him off easy.” Absently, he waved reminiscence aside. “I thought you’d enjoy it here, too. There’s plenty to do here, but it’s not so much that it’d be overwhelming for you.”
The answer to a question Sigma had not yet asked. That last part made him pause, caught in an onrush of feeling he wasn’t sure how to define. It was strange, to think Fyodor had been concerned about him being overwhelmed by something so wholly unfamiliar to him.
“Spasibo,” he said, a little breathlessly. He could feel himself starting to blush. Schoolboy crush, Nikolai had said. Was that what this was? He really didn’t know, and he might have told Fyodor that it wasn’t the park that threatened to overwhelm him, it wasn’t the fact that he was dangling in a small metal box a few hundred feet in the air that made him feel so unbalanced, so precariously posed on the edge of a fall. “For bringing me here,” he added quickly.
One shoulder rose and fell. “You’re better company, really.”
Sigma’s cheeks burned. He turned away and ducked his head, trying—no doubt in vain—to hide it. But Fyodor’s thoughts seemed mostly elsewhere, still.
“Um,” Sigma said. “Why—uh, why did you come here?”
One shoulder rose and fell in a shrug. “I just wanted to go somewhere quiet. Somewhere…away from everyone.”
Read on AO3 here!
The room was nice. Very nice, as a matter of fact. This was a high-end hotel, resplendent with all the accommodations expected by the wealthy, the important, and the powerful. Sigma supposed he was wealthy, technically speaking; the Sky Casino brought in significant revenue (“a shit-ton and a half,” as Fukuchi had eloquently put it), and all of it was in Sigma’s name. Sigma did not, however, think of himself as wealthy, because only Fyodor actually had access to any of the money (according to Fukuchi: “Fedya actually knows what he’s doing, and that’s why he runs everything and I just do what he tells me to do”). Sigma was, most certainly, neither important nor powerful. He felt completely out of place in this posh, modern western-style hotel sitting regally in the center of a city he didn’t know. The room intimidated him even, a little. Well, maybe more than a little.
“Is all this really…necessary?” he asked, timidly standing in the middle of the room and looking around.
Nikolai, who had brought him here, cackled and leaped onto the bed with all the carelessly destructive glee of a child. “Fuku-kun wanted to spoil us all a bit, so he asked Dos-kun to book a really nice room for you, just like he had Dos-kun get me a really expensive apartment to stay in while I’m playing secretary. ‘I’ve got plenty to spare,’ he said, with his chest all puffed out—” Nikolai demonstrated by puffing his own chest out exaggeratedly, “—like he thought Dos-kun would be impressed, even though he should know by now that Dos-kun disdains wealth and luxury and is never impressed by anything.”
That, Sigma knew, was quite true; Fyodor was never impressed by anything, least of all by anything that Fukuchi did to try to impress him. “Well…I guess it’s nice.”
“Besides! Dos-kun likes you. He’d never stick you in a crappy motel with the city’s riffraff. He’d do that to me, but not to you.”
Dos-kun likes you. Sigma let that sink in, startled by the very idea.
Nikolai bounced up into a sitting position, his expression abruptly solemn. “But!” he said with emphasis, pointing a finger at Sigma as if in admonishment, which made Sigma tense up. “While you’re here, you’ll need to play the part, make sure you fit in, just like I told you when you took over the Casino. Do you remember what I said?”
“Uh…”
“You need to be dignified and respectable!”
“Dignified and respectable,” Sigma repeated, dubious.
“Da! You must act like a man of substance. And men of substance blow their noses very loudly. You must learn to do the same.”
Sigma blinked. “Blow…their noses?”
“A truly dignified man has a truly dignified nose, and when he blows it, it is as loud as a trumpet. This earns him the respect of all those around him, especially those of a lower station, who cannot blow their noses nearly as loudly. Here, try it!” There was a box of tissues on the nightstand; Nikolai grabbed it and chucked it at Sigma, with an amount of force that seemed quite unnecessary. Sigma, whose reflexes were actually quite sharp, managed to catch it before it struck him squarely in his own dignified nose.
“Um…okay.” He took out a tissue and blew his nose. The sound that resulted was more like a heavy puff, decidedly not trumpet-like. Nikolai sighed.
“Well…we’ll have to work on that. Anyway, wanna see what’s on the TV?”
-
Some time after he had been left on his own, Sigma sat on the bed—enormous, as soft as a cloud; he wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight, but at least he’d be comfortable as he tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling—and looked at the knife on the nightstand. Steel gleamed flatly in the white light. Nikolai had given it to him before he departed. Sigma did not want to touch it. He had left the room, earlier, venturing out onto the street, but when he had returned the knife was still there where Nikolai had put it.
He had used knives before, and once he had used a gun. He had never killed someone.
He had not actually been told, in so many words, that he was supposed to kill. But a knife in a man’s chest was likely to accomplish that, intended or not.
Sigma rubbed his face and leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees, his hands over his eyes. He thought about his casino, miles and miles away, somewhere high up above the clouds. If he could complete this mission, he could return to her. He must hang on to that, let that guide him through this.
It was still a few days before he had to do his part in the unfolding of events. All he could do now was wait, and try not to lose his nerve or his mind. Much easier said than done.
With a long, shaky breath, Sigma straightened. Just then, there was a knock on the door.
He started. Hastily, he hid the knife in his coat, which he had slung carelessly over an armchair.
“Yes?” he called, taking a cautious step toward the door.
No answer. He waited, heart pounding. Seconds ticked by, stretching the silence until it was almost unbearable. At last, there was something: the unmistakable click of the lock disengaging. The door swung open.
“Fyodor?” Sigma blinked, surprised.
He looked a mess, like he had just taken a nasty tumble or something. His clothes were dirty and stained faint crimson—blood or wine or both, it was hard to tell. A sleeve was torn. His hair was messy and matted around his temples, like it had been wet. Otherwise he seemed unscathed, but he looked utterly exhausted. He was carrying a bag.
“I’m going to use the shower,” he said by way of greeting, and, kicking off his boots, he went straight to the bathroom.
“Okay,” Sigma said, bemused.
Ten minutes later Sigma was still standing there, unsure what to do, when Fyodor reemerged. The bag must have had a change of clothes, because now he was wearing black pants and a dark blue sweater. Sigma had only ever seen him in the usual outfit he’d walked in wearing—white shirt and pants, black mantle, white ushanka—and the effect was kind of startling. He looked different—smaller, somehow. He was only a couple inches taller than Sigma, but it always seemed like he towered over others, even with the way he tended to hunch. The heavy mantle draped across his shoulders made them appear broader and hid, to an extent, how thin he was, made him look less—delicate.
It wasn’t just that, though. Sigma had to drop his gaze and turn away, hoping to hide the blush he could feel rising traitorously on his face, betraying that he thought Fyodor looked—attractive. Beautiful, really.
He had thought this before, and it was a strange thing to think about this man he barely knew and was sometimes afraid of, a strange thing to have imprinted itself on the image he had of Fyodor in his head, the essential idea of Fyodor that had formed alongside his ideas of Fukuchi, of Nikolai, of his clients and other people he knew and had known. The idea of Fyodor was far less defined than these others, and ever-shifting, like a shape in mist, like the patterns traced by falling snowflakes in the wind. There were occasions when it settled into something clear and solid, and when it did, instead of the faint undercurrent of the fear and uncertainty and even repulsion that sometimes stirred in him when he thought of Fyodor, he felt something warm and somehow bittersweet, something he could not name.
He felt that nameless something now, looking at this new image of Fyodor, filed away with the few memories he had of the other man.
Without a word, Fyodor dropped the bag—presumably now containing his dirty clothes—next to the nightstand and then dropped himself down onto the bed in a very similar fashion, smashing face-first into the pillows. Not long ago Sigma had seen him faint for the first time, and for a moment Sigma was terrified it had happened again. Then Fyodor shifted, turning onto his side, and Sigma breathed a sigh of relief.
Hesitatingly, he walked over to the bed and sat down on the other side of the mattress, careful to keep a respectful space between them. Fyodor had always kept his distance from Sigma, and Sigma had never tried to cross it. Fyodor had crossed it, once. The memory, of a touch as light and fleeting as the brush of a feather, tingled strangely on his skin.
“Are you…okay?” he asked, after a moment of silence that felt awkward, at least to him.
Fyodor’s eyes were closed, but he made a face. “I was hit in the head with a wine bottle, and now I have a splitting headache. So I’ve been better, I suppose.”
“A wine bottle?” Sigma all but shrieked, loud enough to make Fyodor wince and touch his temple. “Someone hit you with a bottle? Are you all right? You could have a concussion!”
Forgetting himself in his shock and concern, Sigma reached over to touch the back of Fyodor’s head, feeling for a bump, but Fyodor swatted his hand away. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t fuss. There’s no concussion; I know the symptoms. Just a really bad headache.”
“Who hit you?” Sigma was frankly bewildered. He could not imagine someone just…hauling back and walloping Fyodor in the head with a bottle. It sounded like something Nikolai would do to Fukuchi while they were both drunk—or while Fukuchi was drunk, anyway; Nikolai seemed to have a superhuman ability to hold his liquor, while Fukuchi was prostrate after about two shots of vodka—and laughing like madmen.
“Port Mafia Executive. No need to swear revenge on my behalf—he’s dead now.”
“Oh.” Sigma shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. The Port Mafia, right. You killed him. How, I wonder? He didn’t ask. He didn’t really want to know.
Fyodor curled up into a loose fetal position, tucking one arm under his pillow. The pillow was starting to soak through, but he did not seem to mind. Wet hair hung over his face in a thick black veil. Long lashes rested dark against his pallid cheeks. Lying there like that, he looked smaller—frailer—than ever.
“Um,” Sigma said. “Why—uh, why did you come here?”
One shoulder rose and fell in a shrug. “I just wanted to go somewhere quiet. Somewhere…away from everyone.”
There was a subtle shift in his voice that Sigma did not know how to read. Beneath the fall of his hair, his face was pinched and haggard. A fracture in the mask of deadly serenity he wore like a second skin. Curled in on himself, saying that he wanted to be away from everyone, away from the world, he looked so vulnerable. And young. Too young, too thin, too pale. Just a boy, sickly and tired and in pain.
He wants to die. Nikolai’s words echoed coldly in Sigma’s head.
He managed to speak, the words sounding far away to his own ears. “But why…come here? Didn’t you know I’d be here?”
“Yes.”
“Did you…want me to leave you alone?”
“No. Your presence is soothing.”
Murmured but clear, the words hovered in the space that separated their opposite sides of the bed like an offering waiting to be accepted, and for a moment Sigma’s heart stopped dead in his chest, stealing his breath, leaving him unmoored and fumbling. The unguarded, uncalculated nature of the admission was perhaps more startling than the admission itself.
Sigma understood so little about Fyodor, Nikolai, Fukuchi, or the vaguely defined relationships that bound them all together in this organization. His own existence was a mystery to him. Where had he come from? How had he ended up in the desert, with a train ticket to nowhere and no memory even of his own name? Was there a family somewhere out there, searching for him? Why was he here? Why had he been born? A thousand things he did not understand, a thousand questions with no answers. But more than anyone or anything, it was Fyodor who unbalanced him, who threw his every sense of perception into a jumbled haze of confusion and emotions he did not have names for.
Finding his voice again, he hedged, “Maybe we should call Fukuchi-san. You could be really hurt.”
Fyodor groaned, turning his face into the pillow so his voice was muffled. “Please don’t. Genichirou will flip and kill the whole Mafia, and that’ll screw up my plans. And if Nikolai finds out about this, he’ll be crowing about it for days. I’m fine, really. Just…let me stay here until my head stops hurting. I took some painkillers, they’ll kick in soon.”
Let me. As if he was asking.
“And I’m going to have to deal with Dazai soon,” Fyodor said plaintively, resignedly. “That’s going to be an even bigger headache. I think I’d rather get hit in the head with another wine bottle. Talking to him always feels like getting something smashed over my skull.”
Sigma frowned, puzzled. “Who’s Dazai?”
Fyodor raised a hand and flapped it in a half-hearted gesture of dismissal. “You’ll meet him soon enough. If all goes according to my plan, anyway. Which it will, of course. One way or another.”
That sounded ominous, very ominous, but Sigma did not need reminding that he was just a puppet in a grand scheme he could barely begin to comprehend.
“So I just want to lay here. For a little while.”
“All right,” Sigma relented. He sat back against the headboard, clasping his hands in his lap and watching Fyodor discreetly out of the corner of his eye.
There was silence, for a few moments. Sigma’s thoughts had begun to wander when Fyodor spoke again. He sounded half-asleep now. “Are you nervous?”
Sigma tensed. “Nervous?”
“About what you’ve been asked to do.”
Sigma took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said at length, only because it was pointless to lie to Fyodor. Even a sleepy Fyodor. “But I’ll do it.”
“I know.” It came out almost as a sigh, and Sigma wondered that he seemed…sad.
He started to speak, then stopped himself. He looked away.
“Have you gone anywhere, checked out the city at all?”
“Uh.” Was Fyodor…trying to make small talk with him? That was new. “Not really. I mean, I went to a bookstore that’s nearby. It was nice.”
“Did you get any books?”
“I bought one, yeah.”
“Is it good?”
“Well, I just started it, but I like it. It’s a book of short stories.”
“You like books?”
“Yes,” Sigma said, mystified.
Fyodor lapsed back into silence for a beat or two. He opened his eyes, and finally brushed the hair from his face. He was not looking at Sigma, but up at the ceiling, his expression pensive and distant.
“Life,” he began, as if speaking to the room rather than to Sigma, or perhaps just thinking out loud, “can be such a burden that it becomes more like a labor, a duty that we’re fulfilling only because we have to. We don’t really know, or care, why we have to, we just feel that we do, and tell a human being that they have to do something, and they will do it, maybe with some grumbling, but without question and without any real rebellion. Mankind have always been willing to defy God, no matter how His decrees may improve their lives, but never willing to defy the decrees of their fellow man, no matter how it may ruin them. Life becomes just like a job, and a dull one at that. If there is one thing that all human beings can agree on, it’s that life is better from a book. What is life without books? Ask a human being to think for himself, and he will be terribly confused, but give him a book, and he’ll know precisely what to think and what to feel. In that way, I suppose we all are born from books.”
Sigma certainly felt confused. “Yeah, I suppose,” he said, trying to sound like he had understood half of that.
Fyodor closed his eyes again and snuggled himself deeper into the mattress. He might have been chilly, but he made no move to get under the covers. “You should buy more books,” he said to Sigma.
Sigma nodded, slowly. An idea came to him, and tumbled out of his mouth before common sense could check impulse. “You like books, right? You could come with me to the bookstore, when you’re feeling better. Maybe you’ll find something interesting.”
“Too much to do,” Fyodor muttered into the pillow.
“It’s not far, you can spare an hour or so,” Sigma insisted, without the slightest idea why he had latched onto this idea so strongly.
Fyodor hummed thoughtfully, but did not reply.
Sigma’s heart was pounding again, not from fear now, but from a kind of anxious excitement, even eagerness. He could imagine it, could almost see it—leading Fyodor down the street to the small bookstore, with the bright red bench out front and the cheerful sign in the window advertising a popular new children’s book. He could show Fyodor where he had found the book he’d bought, show him the rest of the fantasy literature lined up neatly on the shelves. Maybe Fyodor would gravitate to another section—history, philosophy, poetry—and Sigma would follow him, and find out what kinds of books Fyodor liked.
We can stop this, Sigma wanted to say, suddenly. It’s not too late, not yet. Come with me to the bookstore. Then come back with me, to the Casino. You gave me a place; let me give it back to you, and it can be ours. I don’t want this, and I don’t think you do, either. But I think I want you. I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know why I was born, but you could give me a reason. And maybe I could give you a reason.
He said none of this, of course. Belated, common sense had caught up, and now he was blushing again, inwardly scolding himself for this burst of reckless stupidity.
“Why don’t you read to me?” Fyodor suggested, startling Sigma out of the moody turn his thoughts had taken. “From the book you bought.”
“Huh?”
“Read to me.”
“Um…oh. Okay.” The book was on the table; Sigma almost tripped over his own feet and fell on his ass in his haste to get up and get it, and then almost tripped again in his haste to get back. He took a deep breath to try and steady himself and calm his nerves before he opened the book and began to read, slowly and haltingly at first, gaining confidence as he went along.
“Li Zheng of Longxi was a very talented and learned young man who, in the last year of the Tianbao era, passed the qualifying examination to become a government official. He was put in charge of constabulary and military affairs in the area south of the lower reaches of the Yangzi River. But, strong-willed and self-confident, Li Zheng could not rest content with his status as a low-ranking official….
“….‘Little by little I grew apart from the world and distant from others. I fed my cowardly self-respect with dollops of rage, shame, and self-pity. We are all of us trainers of wild beasts, it is said, and the beasts in question are our own inner selves. In my case, the beast inside was my self-important sense of shame. That was my tiger, and it damaged me, brought sorrow to my wife and children….”
He stopped when he realized that Fyodor had fallen asleep. His breathing had slowed and evened out; the tight lines of his expression had smoothed. He looked peaceful, now, though shadows of exhaustion were still there, and once more it struck Sigma how young he looked, and how strange it was to see him this way.
Marking his place with the complementary bookmark he had received with his purchase—something that had delighted him—Sigma closed the book and set it on the second nightstand on his side of the bed. Fyodor had said he only wanted to stay a little while. Probably there was work he needed to do for the plan. He always seemed to be working on the plan, setting every piece in place, pulling every string that needed to be pulled. The other three of them—Sigma, Nikolai, and Fukuchi, along with, Sigma assumed, the mysterious fifth member of this organization—were just more pieces to be put into their proper places. He played the tune, and they danced along in blissful submission. Or, in Sigma’s case, he stumbled along, desperately trying to follow the instructions given him, because he had nothing, not even a name, and nowhere else to go.
Sigma supposed he should wake Fyodor up before too long. For now, though, he’d let Fyodor rest. The time Fyodor had fainted, in the casino, Fukuchi had told Sigma that Fyodor rarely slept. Maybe it was because of all the work he had to do for this, because of an almost monomaniacal commitment to what they were doing, that he deprived himself of sleep and by his own admission could go days without even eating. Maybe it was why he had let himself be captured by the Port Mafia and subjected to violence at the hands of one of their executives. Or—maybe it was what Nikolai had told Sigma.
He wants to die.
For now, for at least a little while, he’d let Fyodor rest.
After a prolonged hesitation, Sigma very carefully tugged the covers out from under Fyodor. He froze when Fyodor stirred, but resumed when the other man did not wake. He pulled the covers over Fyodor and tucked him in as best he could.
“Just sleep,” he murmured. “It’s okay. When you found me, I said I’d do whatever you needed me to do. I’ll watch over you now, if that’s what you need from me. I…I can do that for you.”
He went back to his book, but it was not long before he started to feel sleepy himself, lulled by the hushed, steady sound of Fyodor’s breathing. He himself had been having a difficult time sleeping lately. Half-forgotten, the knife had been left hidden inside his coat slung over the side of the armchair in the middle of the spacious room. He wished to forget it entirely, and for it to stay forgotten. He wished, too, that Fyodor could forget whatever it was that made him hate the world so deeply.
He laid down on his side, facing Fyodor. His hands rested on the mattress, mere inches from where Fyodor’s rested. The last thought that passed through his mind was that even that small distance seemed so wide. It always did, no matter how close they actually were.
