#yeah of course I was gonna write SOMETHING after last chapter dfghjkjhghj

[fyodcrs]

Salvation

Fyodor/Sigma (spoilers for ch.107) [Read on AO3]

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.