no pleasure in evil

Then I’ll burn you to the ground like an angry god.

                                                     Edmond Dantes

He looked at her with a mixture of amusement and slight horror.

“Don’t you think I look like Monsieur Lavoisier? In that picture, you know, the one with the giant lenses?” she laughed, putting her hand mirror aside and turning to him. “Where did you even get these?”

Her smile faded when he told her. She tore the sunglasses off her face and tossed them on the desk, disgust contorting her lovely features. She had fished them out of his coat pocket a few minutes ago, while they were busy greeting each other in the prosectorium in what now seemed their usual fashion—God knows and he, for one, could not wait to find out what her hand would have gotten up to if it hadn’t been for the glasses. The more their bodies learned about one another, the more they seemed to long for… more.

He hurried to hide the innocent, yet somehow offending, item from her sight. Naturally curious about all things vaguely scientific, he had intended to consult the doctor, the most scientific man he knew in town, and ask for his expertise. He wondered what it was about the darkened glass that made the wearer impervious to the magic of the damnable, dangerously lost snuffbox. Then again, the doctor, a rational, practical man like Shtolman himself, would hardly be of much help. The only expert with any practical experience in a somewhat related field was at the moment shivering like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet his eye. He didn’t need to ask. He still remembered the coldness of the barrel pressed to his temple and his own voice inside his head trying to fight another, strange voice that urged him to pull the trigger. He still remembered the indifference in her eyes—dull blue steel—as she had handed him the revolver and left him to die, and as he held her shuddering form tight in his arms, he knew that she remembered it as well.

His fingers convulse on their own, nearly breaking one of the ears. He exhales shakily, loudly and carefully places the sunglasses, now cleaned from the mud from the side of the road, back into their box and the box into his suitcase. They will be safer there for now, while he catches up.

They made love that night. She knocked on the door of his apartment almost defiantly, she undressed him with such urgency, she gave herself to him with such feverish frenzy, and she clung to him afterwards so desperately that he almost made up his mind to get her up, dress her and take her to that very church, where he had stopped her from becoming another man’s wife. The bastard’s wife.

Perhaps, he should have done that. Would that have made a difference? Would Krutin, or whatever his name was, have cared? He feels the black viscous mass of blind hatred stirring again in his chest, surging to his brain, clouding his judgment, and slams the lid of the suitcase shut with all his might, giving in for a moment, taking it all out on the piece of plywood. His lucky stars placed him and his broken carriage at the right place at the right moment, and it was that blindness that cost him so much precious time and nearly cost him his life. He thinks, his heart sinking into hot bitter shame, how perversely enjoyable it was to let the darkness take the reins, to have a perfect excuse to rid the world of another scum, because the man wheezing under his relentlessly pressing cane had to be that, because why else would anyone be helping— Oh.

He has never been the one to judge other people, let alone judge so quickly, let alone judge and deliver a verdict, and carry out the sentence. Shame and regret nearly flood him again. He grits his teeth and shuts them off, and lets his hands continue to pack: not now, focus, nothing else is important, only she is. And who would be looking for her now, had the hand of Krutin’s other henchman, the one he didn’t see aiming a gun at him, been steadier? He will not make the same mistake again. He will be ruthless, but he won’t let rage overwhelm him.

She wouldn’t like it. She wouldn’t like him. No, she would despise him. And a world where she despises him would be more unbearable than a world where she hates him. Emptier than a world where she doesn’t love him.

The only world that would be worse is a world without her.

(AO3)