Chapter Text
Chapter One
8: "Why don't we have a wife?"
Zandik: "..."
35: "A what?! Hahahaha!"
18: "What is this nonsense again? As if we need anyone else besides ourselves."
35: "Pfft, I suspect the question has something to do with him spending hours this morning explaining his little plans to Columbina, and her pretending to care."
8: "She said my ideas are amazing and that she'd gladly help convince Pantalone to fund them! There's no way she was just 'pretending'!"
35: "I can almost see the old bourgeois's face when we ask for money for Aranara traps at the next management meeting with our little dove by our side... Pffhah! That's brilliant!"
18: "After all, our serious arguments for funding 'Sumeru research' keep getting rejected. We might actually come out ahead on this; the end result is the same."
35: "I beg of you, record it when you present this as a new project! Hahaha!"
45 (Prime): "Extremely amusing... let me make sure to enjoy the joke, considering this task would fall on me, as usual."
35: "Since you are our official face, undoubtedly."
45: "By the way, you could just take over for me. After all, no one could tell us apart if you were capable of forcing some seriousness upon yourself."
35: "Yet someone could. The other day, before I even spoke a word, she asked if you weren't here. Only then did she come in."
18: "Strange, she asked me the exact same thing."
65: "Likewise. I thought it was just some misunderstanding, but it seems there's more to it."
35: "Pfft, surprising, but it seems she likes all of us except you. Of course, I'm not surprised. I have no idea how I could become this insufferable in ten years."
45: "...If we are done amusing ourselves, let there be no doubt that the situation could become critical if we don't suppress it as soon as possible. It wasn't without reason that we insisted on letting no one close to us, yet here the kid can't even sleep without that hideous little toy he got from her!"
8: "How do you even know...?! Sutura is not hideous at all!"
18: "It has a name? How disgustingly childish..."
65: "It could indeed be risky. She is the first to get close to us, the first to know about us at all. Perhaps we went a bit too far when we allowed her to become such a part of our lives."
18: "Even our own parents wanted us dead; it's natural that this situation is new to us. Perhaps we are too lenient with her, but I find it unlikely she would betray us. She's like a sister to us."
65: "Hmm. It is unusual for someone not to think we're insane. In fact, she watches with interest every time, even when she almost cries from the sight, like during that transplant the other day. By the end, she learned to sew quite skillfully, singing to the patient the entire time. Is it possible she is the crazy one?"
35: "She keeps coming back over and over, no matter how far we push her away or how much of our work she sees. I wonder why? It would be an interesting experiment to look inside her head."
45: "Oh? Surely the Original could tell us the most about that. After all, he was the closest to her 'head' among us, wasn't he?"
8, 18, 35, 65: "He was WHAT...???!"
Zandik remained silent, lazily resting his chin in his right palm, showing a deep interest in the pile of reports scattered across his desk. His crimson eyes narrowed into slits.
He had never kept secrets from himself... until now. But now, a single tiny factor seemed to threaten the success of his entire life's work.
A woman creating tension among the segments? Could she even turn them against him?
And yet, instead of removing the woman from the equation...
He turned to the Prime segment, locking eyes with his 45-year-old self with a stern gaze. He completely ignored the provocation.
Zandik: "Our research efforts in Sumeru have encountered a few setbacks, and Gamma lacks sufficient experience. Take his place."
35: "Wait, you don't mean that from now on, at Fatui meetings, I have to…?!"
8: "WHAT WAS that thing with Columbina?!"
45: "Heh. So that's how we're playing? So be it. After all, the Original will always be more than all of us, right? Even when he breaks his own rules."
The Prime didn't even look back, leaving the lab with a mocking, all-knowing smirk on his lips.
Zandik knew well that forgiveness had never been one of his strong suits, especially in his forties. However, after the slam of the door, another much more pressing issue arose: four pairs of rather suspicious, glowing crimson eyes locked onto him in the darkness, demanding answers.
~☆~○~☆~○~☆~○~☆~
Columbina didn't even know why she had come here.
She had longed for her Moon for so long, and now that she finally had every opportunity never to return from there, she found herself once again beneath the night sky of Nod Krai, despite her hellish exhaustion.
She tried to believe she was only following an old, sad tradition; that this visit was just one final tribute to an old acquaintance; and she tried to ignore the suffocating sorrow that swept through her.
It is over.
He is no more.
Everyone else was celebrating, but for her, the sense of relief never came.
She walked along a sterile, abandoned steel corridor deep inside Paha Isle, the cool metal beneath her soles, chasing an old memory of someone who had vanished from this world long ago. In her hand was a single stem of a tiny moon-prayer blossom—its petals glowed ice-blue, the exact color that had been dearest to her heart since time immemorial.
She didn't fit here: the environment was too artificial, making her practically stand out in her moonlight-colored clothes, yet for some reason, she found this place comfortingly familiar. It reminded her of the old, secret laboratory beneath the Zapolyarny Palace, where she had spent so much time after joining the Fatui.
With the only human she truly believed understood her.
Even though a long time had passed since then, it still lived vividly in her memories. She had almost grown used to the clinking of glass and the metallic tang of blood; the cries of pain, the dying pleas, and the sounds of the death throes echoing between the gray walls. Though they had shaken her at first, she believed it was all necessary for those people to be healed in the end. Even today, she still wanted to believe, just a little, that it hadn't all merely served a mad mind's lust for power.
Yet after every horror, when she herself ultimately witnessed the Doctor's emotionless obsession with knowledge, her memories kept returning to a certain day, barely a few decades after she had joined.
It was late at night, the false moon hanging high in the sky, when she stepped into the now-familiar corridor. An unusual calm had settled over the place; this time there were no anguished wails or tortured pleas. The deathly silence was broken only by the strangely vivid, almost out-of-place sound of a piano.
The melody was chaotic - tense and unpredictable -, yet... so profoundly familiar that it coursed through every cell of her body. Behind her blindfold, with her eyes closed, Columbina could almost see the racing notes; the music pouring from the instrument crashed against the laboratory’s cold walls in heavy waves, filling the air with a kind of abstract life force.
At first, she assumed it was some new experiment - a thought that would hardly have surprised her after everything she had witnessed over the years. Yet somehow, the music felt utterly unlike the methods of her fellow Harbinger. And the song itself... she could not fathom how he had managed to recreate it when even she no longer remembered it clearly, and only ever found herself humming fragments of it when her thoughts began to wander.
Slowly, noiselessly, she glided closer and closer to a side door she had never had a reason to enter before. Now, however, following the melody, her slender fingers wrapped around the doorknob, and after a brief hesitation, she quietly stepped inside.
The small room that revealed itself was not significantly different from all the others down here: its walls were illuminated by the faint, luminescent blue light of experimental vats and tubes. On the lone small desk against the wall lay a chaotic pile of scattered old books and notes, alongside an overturned inkwell that had dried up long ago, as if someone had recently taken out their helpless rage upon them. Other than that, a single piece of furniture stood in the center of the space: a richly decorated, grand piano that must have been modified with some Snezhnayan technology so that the keys glowed a vibrant blue with every stroke.
The eerie glow released by this framed Zandik's figure with an ethereal aura.
The older man sat at the piano, shirt sleeves rolled up, his long, slender fingers racing across the keys at an almost frantic pace. He wasn't wearing his mask like his younger segments, and though his shoulders noticeably tensed at the girl's approach, he did not stop playing.
Columbina stepped up to the instrument and quietly sat beside him on the wide piano bench. She could feel the tense vibration radiating from Dottore's body, though she was certain no one else would notice it. She had lingered by his side for too long - just as she had with all his other selves; she could read his movements perfectly, despite the flawless, emotionless mask hidden behind his smile, knowing exactly when he was annoyed, disappointed, angry, or in good spirits.
She didn't even know how long she had been studying her colleague's face - back then, in her mind, she might have even dared to use the word "friend."
The once taut, beautifully curved features deepened year by year, tracing a life path that she didn't know much about, but was certain hadn't been easy at all. She admired these changes, especially since she herself remained exactly the same throughout: an almost childishly young girl, untouched and pure like the freshly fallen snow on the streets of Snezhnaya, no matter how many centuries drifted past her.
Dottore, however... was completely different from when she first met him at the meeting where Pierro announced him as the Fatui's newest Harbinger. Even though she knew the reason, she found it difficult to identify the two as one.
Back then, unlike the others, the Doctor was the only one who didn't just measure her with a cold gaze, but almost immediately, theatrically flouting all court protocol, stepped up to her and authoritatively claimed her for himself. With a half-smile on his face, he trespassed into her carefully guarded personal space without asking, engaging her in conversation despite the fact that she didn't really know how to answer his questions, which seemed nonsensical at first.
A somewhat comical dynamic of communication developed between them: she would just listen, trying to learn every strange, unfamiliar expression, while he remained completely indifferent to how much she understood of his words—of which there was always plenty. His uninhibited, intellectual arrogance might have mortally offended anyone else, which was why the other Harbingers always tried to keep their distance, but to Columbina, strangely enough, this unfiltered directness was the only genuine point in this new, unknown world.
Dottore wasn't afraid of her. He didn't blindly revere her for her divine nature, nor did he judge her. He was simply... curious about her. And to her, in that lonely moment, it meant unutterably much that someone didn't see her as a holy relic or a dangerous monster, but as a remarkable mystery waiting to be solved.
In place of the insolently young scientist from back then, a much more mature man sat now, and though they seemed like two separate people, she could see the similarities exactly. Zandik had always said that everything that characterized him as a youth had died out long ago, yet whenever she was with any of them, she felt warmth enveloping her heart. Especially... with the Original, in whom all his other personalities united, forming such an incredible blend that it restored her admiration for humanity.
Columbina stared dreamily at the grayish, ice-colored strands tied into a ponytail, falling in rebellious waves over the man's shoulders; at the pale blue, ruffled shirt which now lacked the usual white medical coat he typically used down here - instead, the fine, dark fabric stretched directly across the broad, striking curve of his back.
Beyond the eightieth year of his human life, his face had changed slightly: his cheekbones had become more pronounced, and the line of his jaw was slightly narrower, now faintly darkened by the shadow of silvery stubble. He was no longer a flawlessly ethereal beauty like Prime; time had left deep marks on him - but perhaps that was exactly why it was so hard for Columbina to look away before etching every tiny detail into her thoughts.
Fine lines were etched around the man's eyes from daily vigils, and deep furrows were left on his forehead from constant frowning...
He still appeared much younger than ordinary people of his age, but he could not escape the fate of mortals, no matter how hard he tried to find the perfect antidote against it. They always avoided the topic between themselves, but she had a strong inkling that the Doctor didn't create younger segments of himself by accident, as if defying time had become his obsession.
To remain unchanged... was it truly that valuable?
Zandik was the only one she could have asked, but she herself felt that he wouldn't appreciate it if she brought it up. Yet... there was a certain beauty in aging and the transformation of the body, and she would have loved to trace these signs with her fingertips, just to understand.
Only the man's deep crimson gaze remained invariably intense, making the overall picture even more intimidating.
As his hands raced across the keys, pale skin marred by countless scars peeked out from beneath his rolled-up sleeves, bearing witness to how long it had been since he stepped outside the palace where sunlight could touch him; he hadn't been to the surface in a long time, and by now, all his external research and Harbinger duties were handled by his segments instead.
It was a strange feeling... something she hadn't believed she could experience as a non-human being. She wouldn't have sworn to it, but remembering Rosalyne's words about love, somehow all signs pointed to the fact that she, too, was finally experiencing something similar.
Watching those long, slender fingers, she felt unusually weak.
They handled the instrument with such confidence, yet so gently... She had no idea the Doctor was so talented in something else, something that was far more art than science, but it seemed Dottore was capable of surprising her again and again until his very last moment.
She leaned a bit closer, almost unconsciously chasing that heavy, pure, yet suffocating presence that emanated from the man.
She didn't understand this sudden, tense curiosity in her own soul; she didn't know why her own heart beat faster from the way the piano's blue light illuminated his profile, she only knew that in this moment, Dottore was the only thing in the entire laboratory - no, rather in all of Teyvat - that felt real and alive in this false world. For a fleeting, foolish thought, she wanted more of him.
She took a deep breath, immersing herself in the moment, and stepping over the ever-present uncertainty, she turned to the only thing capable of calming the sea raging within her being: she began to sing.
She didn't shape words, but an ancient, pure, wordless melody, following the powerful chords. Her own song. It wasn't easy to keep up with the overly fast and powerful tempo, but her voice sliced softly, with sharp clarity, into the heavy air of the laboratory, like the first ray of moonlight shining in the dark night.
But then something unusual happened: she would have never believed herself capable of throwing the Doctor off balance - even when he was performing difficult surgeries, he always answered her silliest questions- but now, Columbina noticed a tiny change.
The man's fingers faltered on the keyboard for the space of a heartbeat.
Every cell in her body felt that after this, the previously powerful, tense chords slowed down, almost involuntarily blending with her singing, softening into a deep, pure, and harmonious accompaniment, as if she had woven an invisible leash around his mind with her voice, forcing his hands into a shared rhythm. Their duet ultimately became a far more terrifying, ethereal lullaby, a composition that connoisseurs would likely compare to madness rather than a sonata.
A sweet, gentle feeling pooled over her heart: the Doctor... was adapting to her. He, who never paused for a single moment for anyone, and even brazenly defied Her Majesty's will if it meant he could follow his own head! She didn't really know how she should react, or if she was even allowed to mention it. She decided instead to preserve this moment within herself until the end of time.
When the melody came to an end, Columbina's voice slowly died away, and with it, Dottore's fingers also stopped over the final, long-ringing chord.
She felt him slowly turn his head toward her, and in the darkness, his crimson eyes gleamed: a gaze filled with a wild, suffocating tension, before the amused melancholy on his face was replaced by his usual dismissive smirk. It was a more perfect disguise than any physical mask, one he could don instantly even upon waking from a dream.
"For someone who was protesting just the other day that you are capable of cooperating in silence, you interfere with my playing rather insolently." Dottore's voice was unusually hoarse, though he tried to smuggle his accustomed playfulness back into his words. "Furthermore, you have completely ruined my schedule."
Columbina smiled softly. Dottore always covered up with teasing whenever, on rare occasions, something slipped out of his control.
"Perhaps because you always try to reach the end too quickly, Zandik," she replied carefully, but the complicity between them lurked in her voice too. She deliberately used his true name, which no one else in the palace would dare utter - but for her, perhaps after the time spent together, teasing had become a sort of love language. "Are you afraid that if you slow down, your own thoughts will catch up to you?"
Dottore's body stiffened for a single second at the sound of his old name, but he didn't comment on it, despite surely being aware of how lenient he was with the girl. He would have retaliated against such insolence from anyone else, yet she never abused her privileged position.
At least, usually.
"Fleeing from my thoughts would be a boring, shallow, and endlessly futile pastime," Dottore stated amusedly. He knew perfectly well that Columbina wasn't primarily referring to his internal 'thoughts' - but rather to his six other selves - yet he played along. He visibly enjoyed the echo of his own deep-toned voice in the deathly silence. "The mind is merely a finely tuned machine, a complex clockwork, and I know the movement of my own gears far too well to be frightened by them."
His deep crimson eyes gleamed darkly in the lab's twilight as he slowly, embarrassingly thoroughly, looked her up and down.
"Yet for some reason, you are here, while they restlessly carry on in your stead as well." He gently stroked the far edge of the keyboard, taking care not to accidentally strike a single note. "In the past, you never left them alone... or rather, shall we say, 'yourself'?"
"How amusing." A dry, cold, yet all-too-weary mockery rang in Dottore's voice. He slowly turned away from the keys, and with his right arm, he closed the lacquered lid of the piano, leaving just enough time for Columbina to pull her hand away; though he tried to act as if he didn't care whether she was fast enough. Then, his long, slender fingers began a rhythmic tapping on the dark wood of the instrument while he looked down at her in half-profile over his shoulder. "After nearly a century, a creature is trying to psychoanalyze me who, despite being a Harbinger, has not taken on a single mission since joining because she is convinced she is unsuited for it. Yet I know exactly - in fact, since our trial, I even have proof - that with a single snap of your fingers, you could bring entire nations to their knees. This attitude is tragic."
In Dottore's expression, there flashed that typical, arrogant frustration of geniuses when faced with wasted talent. For him, who had torn his own mind to shreds for knowledge and personal growth, Columbina's way of life was obviously... illogical and infuriating.
He condemned this reclusiveness, but behind the pride lurked a hidden incomprehension as well: he was incapable of accepting why someone with such immense power in her hands wouldn't want to use it to reshape the world. He had brought this up more than once lately.
Columbina's gaze darkened slightly behind her blindfold, and for a moment, a faint shadow of suffocating sadness flitted across her face.
"Her Majesty currently has greater need of my presence than my... 'power'." Everyone considered her immense, capable of fulfilling any wish as a goddess, yet she didn't see in herself at all what was expected of her. The people of Nod Krai, Her Majesty... and finally, Zandik too. The only difference was that the Doctor didn't want to use her to solve his own problems. At least, that was what she believed back then. "And I don't think she is the only one in this place."
They looked at each other for a long, almost embarrassingly long time, until Zandik finally broke eye contact.
"How confident," he sighed. "And what wind brought my dear Columbina to this endlessly depressing place at this late hour, she who until now has spent her entire day in necessary idleness by Her Majesty's side?"
Columbina… his Columbina…
The name the Prime had given her, defying the Tsaritsa's order that she be addressed as Damselette after joining. Shortly after their first meeting, he had once likened her to a dove that had fallen from its nest, and the name soon became so much her own that the others began calling her that too.
Columbina tilted her head slightly to the side.
"Hmm... by that, do you mean you missed me?"
Dottore's gaze darkened for a moment, the mocking half-smile freezing on the edge of his mouth as his fingers tensed over his crossed arms. He hadn't expected this cheeky, pinpoint retort, but he visibly took pleasure in the fact that someone was capable of defying him.
He slowly leaned closer, until his lips almost brushed her ear, and his voice dropped to a deep, vibrating whisper.
"Oh yes, what a sweet notion," he said softly, his words infused with surprised, intellectual excitement. It was rare for anyone to see the underlying meaning in his words, especially when it could hand the other a weapon against him. "Let's put it this way instead: the atmosphere in my laboratory becomes annoyingly restless when their favorite little soul-soothing dove is absent."
Oh? Considering that every segment of his was essentially himself, he had practically admitted that he took pleasure in her presence. Even if the silent peace he preferred was routinely broken by her songs. Even if he wasn't capable of saying it openly, this confession made her happy.
Happy, and... perhaps a bit reckless.
"A dove that has just flown into the nest of the most dangerous predator," she mused softly, sliding her pale palm flat against his chest. "Yet the predator doesn't attack, even though he has the opportunity to eat her."
She felt a fierce heartbeat beneath her fingers as the distance between them, usually not too carefully guarded anyway, narrowed even more dangerously now. Normally, none of the segments kept much distance from her, touching her from time to time without any pressing reason. Sometimes with a commendatory pat on the crown of her head, sometimes with a teasing poke in the side, or simply grabbing and guiding her hand for instructional purposes... but the air had never been this vibrant on any of those occasions.
Zandik, however, was different than usual. Columbina found humans hard to understand, and he couldn't even be compared to the others, but in that burning gaze right now, there was something... vulnerable?
She smiled carefully as her other hand also sought support against the doctor's shoulder, sliding right next to him on the bench.
She expected rejection, but instead of pulling away from her, Zandik reached forward with both arms around her waist and, with raised eyebrows, gripped the fabric of her thick Snezhnayan coat in disbelief - as if aware of what he was doing, yet not agreeing with it himself.
"Bad idea," Zandik said then, in an unusually deep voice, perhaps to himself.
Columbina nodded with a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"The worst I've ever had."
She couldn't really have said what kind of crazy notion was driving her - perhaps the sudden, suffocating empathy washing over her for the man whose cold scientific armor was finally, irrevocably cracking before her?
Her silky hair fell like a soft, ebony curtain around their faces, shutting them out from the reality of the cold room in an instant. The last remaining millimeters between them vanished as, with closed eyes, she pressed her own soft mouth infinitely gently and sensually against Zandik's somewhat rigid, razor-thin lips.
It was like a quiet, wordless confession; a very delicate touch that deepened in bated breath, with which she flooded his ice-cold, dark world with the pure warmth of her own being. She had intended it as a gentle confession, a cautious declaration that steps across the hard-fast rules of reality and simply exists - but all lofty thoughts fell to dust when the physical contact crashed down upon them with staggering weight.
For the first millisecond, Zandik's body froze like stone, as if his mind, which until now had accurately seen through every factor, was completely incapable of processing the received information for the first time in his life. He didn't pull away, but he had visibly lost control over his own consciousness.
Scientifically speaking, he had touched thousands of women emotionlessly, seeing them as pieces of meat that he expected to lead him to his ultimate goal. He himself, however, as he had hinted a few times in the past, had never felt the need to be touched by anyone. He had learned to tend to his own injuries at a very young age so that he would never need anyone else, and to Columbina's knowledge, if he had biological needs at all, she considered it very likely that he had completely suppressed them as a useless waste of time.
True, she had no experience in this either; since her birth in Nod Krai, it had never crossed her mind that she herself could fall captive to the wonder humans called 'attraction' and would even sacrifice their lives for; but she wanted that if the man ever looked back on this moment, he wouldn't think of it as something he could have spent his valuable experiments doing instead.
So she smoothed her small palm against his face and poured her whole heart into the touch.
At first, the kiss was nothing but a chaotic meeting of fire and water. The Doctor's lips were dry, tense as a bow, but Columbina did not rush. She gently mapped out the beloved face, her thumb moving almost unconsciously, lower and lower along the sharp curve of his cheekbone.
There, where the fine lines of suppressed tension sat deepest in the corner of his mouth, Columbina's fingertip went still, causing a stifled, almost desperate sound to tear from Zandik's throat.
This was not the voice of the confident Second Harbinger, nor that of the all-knowing, seasoned scientist; rather, it was like a tiny short circuit, a muffled electrical discharge in a perfectly calibrated machine. The man's entire body tensed, his breath catching for a tenth of a second, as if Columbina hadn't merely touched his skin, but had stripped bare his most fiercely guarded neural pathways.
The girl smiled softly behind her blindfold as she felt the taste of discovery.
Until now, she had only watched curiously from afar this tiny area, barely a few millimeters wide, in the corner of Zandik's mouth, where the man hid all his opinions, emotions, and defense mechanisms. From here originated the mocking half-smiles with which he observed the entire foolish, inferior world; here the muscles tensed when he suppressed his anger at the latest missions from Pierro and Her Majesty, which, the filthier they were, the greater the chance he would be decorated with them. And this tiny point twitched downward every time the loneliness became too heavy for him down here in the dark.
It was like a secret coordinate that the Doctor himself had forgotten, or perhaps never even knew existed, but she had been watching it for years, along with every other movement of his.
The girl drew closer until their breath had completely become one. She turned her head and followed the path of her fingers with her lips. Leaving the center of his cool mouth, she pressed an infinitely soft, almost feather-light kiss right there, into the left corner.
The effect was immediate and overwhelming. Zandik's shoulders, which until then had stood rigid and defensive, suddenly gave in. His fingers, which had been gripping Columbina's thick coat convulsively, now loosened; instead, his palms pressed hot, almost pleadingly against her waist, pulling her closer - even closer - to himself.
Columbina felt his lower lip tremble beneath hers. Every single time she intentionally touched that sensitive, tense spot with the tip of her tongue or the soft curve of her mouth, another hoarse sigh broke from Zandik.
It was as if the Doctor, who had written thousands of notes on the workings of human anatomy, was now helplessly watching his own body rebel against his logic. He didn't know what to do with this intensity.
When Zandik's lips finally kissed her back, barely perceptibly, and a low, hoarse sigh tore from his chest, the stiffness was replaced by something far deeper, an almost painful clinging.
His always-confident fingers, wrapped around her waist, now sank tremblingly beneath the fabric of her Fatui coat and intertwined across her back. Though he was never famous for gentleness, even during the riskiest experiments, he held her so carefully now, as if afraid that if he moved too quickly or too hard, the fragile illusion would shatter into pieces.
It was hard to believe what they were even doing. After all the other segments treated her as some kind of sister, which they had voiced more than once, she never thought this could come of it.
As their chests pressed together, she felt the man's heartbeat completely break free, thumping in a chaotic, desperate rhythm, synchronizing directly with her own racing pulse.
There was no time to think further, and Zandik kissed her as if fighting for his life. As if all the accumulated loneliness and exhaustion of a mortal, aging man wanted to dissolve once and for all in the girl's timelessness. And she, for the first time - even though she was far from the true moon of her imagination - felt truly at home.
And this was the moment that changed everything: the elemental kuuvahki began to leak from beneath her skin so powerfully, as if her entire being had begun to prepare to become one with the other. The pure moonlight energy poured through the kiss like a soft, all-engulfing wave directly into the man's essence, surrounding and saturating them both, flooding the tiny room with a dim white light.
Columbina felt the Doctor recoil slightly from the touch of the sudden, intoxicating stream of energy, but he didn't let her go. His two eyes opened and locked with her own gaze, which was open a crack for the first time in so long.
She hadn't wanted to see for a long time, but at that moment, she felt she would miss something. And indeed, there was something inexplicable, something meaningful in Zandik's gaze, as if everything had suddenly fallen into place.
But then, the sound of the door slamming open poured over them like icy water.
They broke apart almost instantly, gasping for air, turning as one toward the ominous figure leaning mockingly against the doorframe.
The Prime stood behind them, elegant, his arms crossed over his chest, wearing the most blood-chilling smile Columbina had ever seen. Although his mask concealed most of his face, she could still feel the biting mockery with which he looked at the pair of them deep in her bones, and an inexplicable, dark, and tense vibration of energy instantly filled the air.
"What a delightful composition," Dottore’s silky, bone-chilling voice rang out. He stepped further inside with measured, ruthless strides, causing Columbina to spring to her feet and back away from him against her own will. He didn't ask for permission; he dropped his gloved hand onto the crown of her head in his usual manner, but this time, there was absolutely no playfulness in the gesture. "It seems we have succeeded after all in extracting the energy signature of our most valuable test subject."
Zandik did not agree. Nor did he deny it.
…
Test subject?
Before... he had never called her that.
'Our little dove'... 'our little sister'... 'our dear'...
That night, something changed irrevocably.
~☆~○~☆~○~☆~○~☆~
The depths of the Nod Krai laboratory were freezing and echoing, like a forgotten crypt. Strangely, not a single soul remained. She figured Her Majesty must have recalled those working under the Doctor back to Snezhnaya after the defeat of the Second Harbinger came to light.
The traces of the inhumane research that had taken place here recently still loomed dark on the cracked walls, the overturned instruments, and the metallic debris scattered all around. Columbina’s footsteps glided noiselessly across the dust-covered floor, barely touching the ground, pushing further and further into the darkness.
Grief suffocated her heart, along with a gnawing sorrow over the loss of her first home.
Rosalyne was dead.
Capitano had not returned from Natlan...
Sandrone had died too, because she had been weak, unable to protect her.
And Dottore... the man who had once meant the entire world to her... the last fragment of his being had met its end by her hand. Did she regret it? She couldn't quite decide. The Prime had become so dangerous that she had no other choice to stop him, even if her own heart shattered to pieces in the process.
As she ventured deeper into the unlit, somber space, the scent of machine grease and dust was suddenly permeated by something else, something heavy and suffocating: a chilling, thick stench of blood.
The girl froze. There was barely any light source inside, flickering mostly on the screens of abandoned machinery, yet the floor was still clearly, visibly covered in a vibrant red liquid.
She took a deep breath, and preparing herself for whatever horror she might find within, she cautiously descended further. Hydro energy flowed erratically beneath her soles with every step, the metal walls eerily echoing her every move, but she did not stop; she headed straight toward the center of the room.
And then she saw it: slouched against a heavy iron tank, the outline of a human figure materialized.
The dark silhouette lay in the dust like a ragdoll, his once-white coat practically soaked with the continuously spreading blood, while one of his legs lay on the ground at an unnatural, twisted angle. His mask was cracked, shattered into splinters, but from beneath it, that familiar, glowing crimson gaze still flashed at the girl.
"Doctor?" Columbina whispered, her voice breaking in disbelief against the cold walls. The flower nearly slipped from her suddenly weakened fingers.
A hoarse, yet still insultingly mocking grunt came from the darkness. The man lifted his head slowly, with visible agony.
"Why... who did you expect... in my lab?" he squeezed out, trying to swallow the blood welling up from his throat.
Columbina stepped closer slowly, her eyes wide with shock, but then she gathered the last remnants of her self-control. "Indeed. It should have been suspicious that the body was missing."
Dottore’s lip twitched into a faint, dismissive half-smile, though pain immediately shot through the grimace, and cold beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He was surely preparing a sarcastic remark, but when his gaze drifted to the ice-blue petals in the girl's hand, something unusual flickered across his face.
"Oh, you brought flowers too...? I thought those were only meant for the others."
"You're bleeding heavily, don't speak," Columbina cut him off.
What on earth was she doing?
This single question repeated in her head as she knelt beside the man, indifferently watching the blood stain the hem of her own dress, her entire attention locked onto his tormented face, marred with deep gashes.
"It's nothing," the man whispered, his chest heaving from a lack of air. "One is... bound to cross paths with a bit of... a moon goddess's wrath now and then."
Almost purely by reflex, she placed two fingers against Dottore’s carotid artery, exactly the way he himself had taught her back then to check if their current patient was still alive. His pulse felt ominously slow.
"You are going to die." She didn't even understand why her voice cracked at this fact. Wasn't it her own power that had put him in this state? No, Dottore's own madness had brought him here, she corrected herself.
And yet…
"Is that so? What a wise observation," Dottore hissed back, closing his eyes as if his sheer pride were the only thing keeping him alive.
Columbina did not answer. She relaxed her hand, and the air above her palm suddenly trembled. Out of nowhere, pure, cool, and shimmering water began to form, gathering into a soft sphere between her fingers.
Dottore slowly opened one eye, watching the movement with keen interest - an almost clinical curiosity. There was no fear in his gaze, only a sort of deep, resigned weariness, like someone who had already calculated every possible outcome and accepted his fate.
Perhaps he expected her to finish what she had started during their battle, which was why his eyebrows knitted together in question when, instead of the anticipated attack, Columbina gently, with incredible caution, brought her hand closer to his chest and began to wash away the clotted, dark blood from the gaping wounds. The cool water brushed softly, comfortingly over his taut, feverish skin.
Though the old days felt as distant as if they had happened in another lifetime, the Doctor's cold lessons of the past instantly came alive in Columbina's fingers. Her delicate palm brushed along his heaving chest, assessing the extent of the injuries. The gashes were frighteningly deep, but the dark red fluid was streaming onto the floor slowly, sluggishly. Perhaps... he still had a little time before he bled out completely.
"Do you have bandages anywhere?" the girl asked, while the water trickled down to the floor stained a faint red.
"In a laboratory? Take a guess," came the hoarse, choked reply.
"Where?"
"You can't be serious about wanting to treat me. You? Treating me?" For the first time, genuine, unfiltered disbelief crept into Dottore's amused voice.
"Will you stop mocking me for one damn second?" Columbina snapped, her voice striking the metal plates with such force that the Doctor nearly flinched. "No matter what an asshole you are, I never wanted to kill you!"
The man was genuinely stunned. He had never heard his former little dove sound so raw and furious, and he certainly had never imagined that Columbina even knew - or would ever use - a word like ‘asshole’. For a moment, the shock completely silenced his cynicism.
"Outside the airlock... In a crate," he finally groaned out, and though he tried to suppress it, a deep, painful whimper escaped his lungs as he attempted to shift his broken leg on the floor.
Columbina sprang up and slipped noiselessly under the heavy, half-lowered door, continuously chanting to herself that she must be capable of saving a single person. She had learned enough in the past, and though she had assisted in horrors as a naive, foolish girl, she could truly put her meager healing abilities to use this time. But why on earth did she want to save him after everything that happened - the man who bore the guilt of so many horrors on his soul? She would have time to think about that later.
Soon, she returned with a large, heavy box of gauze. She knelt beside the man again and began unwrapping the bandages with swift movements, scanning the laboratory's sparse equipment.
"As usual, you don't use disinfectant? What kind of doctor are you?" she asked, thoroughly annoyed, seeing that the crate contained almost nothing but bandages and blades. Naturally, she found no painkillers either. 'Those who are truly in pain will pass out anyway,' the man used to say all the time in the past.
"Only when it matters," Dottore muttered, his head lolling weakly back against the wall of the tank. "The ones I cut open here usually didn't survive anyway."
Columbina’s face twitched with helpless rage. "Alcohol?"
"You know my... opinion on it," the man whispered, his eyes closing once more.
It was one of Zandik's oldest, strictest principles to almost never ingest alcohol or drugs. Always, under all circumstances, he claimed that a human's greatest asset was a clear, sharp consciousness, and he considered anything that could harm or dull it for even a single second to be a disgraceful, unforgivable sin.
During their years spent together, Columbina had never seen him drink - not a single one of his segments. Intellect was sacred to them; intoxication was deemed the refuge of the weak.
Columbina wasted no more time on words. She saw the deathly pallor spreading across the man's face and knew that with every passing moment, they were drifting closer to the edge of the abyss. With a decisive movement, she snatched one of the gleaming blades from the box and set to work. There was no room for hesitation now: with a single sharp slice of the scalpel, she ripped open the man's blood-soaked coat, then his dark blue shirt, removing the heavy, ruined fabrics from his shoulders with a single tug.
She thought the sight couldn't possibly be that horrific, yet the moment the Doctor’s broad chest was exposed, Columbina froze for a second - and not primarily from the sight of the wounds.
During the long years spent together, they had stood side by side countless times over the ice-cold operating tables beneath the palace. They had examined an innumerable amount of human bodies together with sheer clinical indifference, but him... she had never seen him bare before.
Hidden behind his clothes and mask, the Doctor had always been an unapproachable, unearthly phenomenon, an ideal to the girl, whose humanity had only been evidenced by that ancient night when he had uniquely lowered his walls before her. Yet now, here he lay before her in his raw, vulnerable, and mortal reality.
The girl’s heart leaped, but she immediately shook her head angrily, dismissing the unworthy thought.
Not now. Not here.
She fiercely commanded herself back into the present, forcing her focus onto the urgent task at hand, for the man's wounds were far too real to allow for any wandering thoughts.
The eerie, dark gashes of the kuuvahki had plowed through the flesh to a terrifying depth, immortalizing the moment of impact in chilling patterns. Columbina’s throat tightened at the sight, but after the initial confusion, the old, cold routine instantly returned to her fingers. She grabbed the thick roll of gauze and began wrapping it around the man's upper body with stoic precision. She did not skimp on the material; she wound it around wildly and tightly to stem the relentlessly leaking stream of blood. She found it a bit difficult to hold and stabilize a body so much larger than her own, but she wasn't yet accustomed enough to her new power to boldly dare call upon the help of the kuuvahki.
The snow-white bandage was instantly swallowed by the heavy, crimson darkness during the first few layers, but the girl kept wrapping the gauze until the gaping wounds completely vanished beneath the stiff, clean binding.
A hoarse groan tore from Dottore's throat at the suffocating tightness, his forehead slumping onto Columbina’s shoulder against his own will. His right hand lifted slightly from the dust, as if wanting to push the girl away—or perhaps merely trying to touch her—but in the end, no strength remained for the motion: his arm fell helplessly back onto the freezing metal floor.
"Try to stay conscious," the girl said firmly as she secured the final piece of fabric and set down the scalpel. "Wait here!"
"And here I was planning to run away," Dottore gritted through his teeth, but behind the banter, utter exhaustion was now clearly audible in his voice.
Columbina slipped under the airlock once more, and now out of sheer annoyance, she began rummaging through the crates outside in a hurry. Nothing. Only screws, metal components, and sterile syringes.
'Perhaps on the upper level...' flashed through her mind. She couldn't imagine how the Fatui soldiers and lower-ranking researchers, forced to work alongside Dottore and living in perpetual fear, could have endured this suffocating, spine-chilling laboratory without a single drop of alcohol.
Through the dark, ruined corridors of the upper level, she searched through everything she could get her hands on with undeniable stubbornness. An oppressive feeling trembled in her chest as she pried open the lids of heavy wooden crates, having no idea why she was doing it. Why was she fighting for this monster's life?
When they clashed in the final battle, when her divine power broke free, she had truly wanted it to hurt him. She wanted revenge for the manipulation, the lies, the way he had treated her after realizing that the power of the kuuvahki was something he could exploit. Afterward, he had used her as a test subject for years without batting an eye, unconcerned with her feelings... her pain... all while smiling at her the entire time, saying, 'we are family, we help each other, right?'
And the most horrific part wasn't even what he had done to her.
The blood-stained dissecting table, laid out…
The mocking, 'Zandik? Oh, he's dead. Do you still wish to see him like this?'
The images of the empty hospital wards she had desperately walked through…
18… 25… 35… 65… 8… all gone.
Only a tiny plush toy, marred by countless stitches, stared back at her from the minuscule, dreadfully simple bed in the very last room, tilted strangely, as if someone had recently hugged it tightly in terror and agony.
She hated... she truly hated the Prime! With every beat of her shattered heart, she felt rage toward him. But now, seeing him lying in the dust, frozen in his own blood, the image of Zandik suddenly flashed before her eyes. And then the images of all the other segments she had once known and grown so deeply attached to. She knew there was no difference; he was the exact same Zandik, a piece of him, only... he had been so consumed by darkness that he ended up destroying himself through it.
She couldn't forgive him. At the same time, she was incapable of not seeing in him everything that had once made her lock all his versions into her heart. First and foremost... the Prime himself.
Hope was almost beginning to desert her in the dark warehouse, her throat tightening with helplessness, when finally, deep inside a bag that had seen better days lying in a corner, she met with success: her hand closed around a half-empty bottle of Snezhnayan Fire-Water. Some guard must have hidden it from the Doctor.
Columbina cut through the path back to the elevator almost as if flying, down and down, through the airlock, straight to the deepest depths of the laboratory. But when she returned to the ring of machines, her movements suddenly froze.
Dottore still sat in the exact same posture she had left him in, but his body had slumped even further. Only his head tilted unnaturally and limply to the side, as if his neck muscles had finally given up the fight, no longer able to support his own weight. Sweeping away all sanity, she ran to him and began calling out his name, cradling him fearfully in her arms.
Dottore did not answer, lying completely unconscious in her arms. His pulse was frighteningly weak, shrinking to a barely perceptible thread beneath the girl's fingers, and his breathing had become so shallow that it barely lifted his chest. He was still alive, but his body had given up the fight, escaping into a deep, dark unconsciousness away from the agonizing pain.
"Zandik..." she whispered in a trembling voice.
What could she do? She was weak, helpless...
Wait.
Weak?
Nonsense. She possessed the power of the Three Moons. When she closed her eyes, the faces of her Sisters smiled at her encouragingly. It was time to get used to the fact that she was no longer just a helpless shadow, severed from her own light!
She took a deep breath, letting the surge of raw kuuvahki permeate her body, and the Moon - the real, her very own Moon - answered from afar, filling her body with infinite power. Carefully, so as not to tear open the fresh bandages, she enveloped the man's heavy, abandoned body from the ground in a white light, and prepared herself to commit what would likely be the greatest sin of her existence as a Moon Goddess.