cordiiceps:
the smoke is suffocating, even with a rag tied across his face, the fumes seep through and make his weary bones ache with fatigue. as he drags out the next body, a soldier he’s spent countless hours with on patrol, his hands begin to shake. it could be nerves. knowing gil’s scratched, while not infected made, could still have caught a spec of the wrong blood. but the more likely option is the lack of alcohol in his system, tremors making it hard to keep a good grip on the heavier lives lost.
he’s lost track of the number of bodies he’s thrown into the fire now. he’s lost track of how long it’s been since the last tortured scream. half an hour? an hour? two? nik wonders if by the end of the quarantine, he’ll be throwing gil’s body into the same pit, mourning him for a second time. that thought makes him nauseous. or is it the fumes?
a voice calls to him, one that he can’t claim is all to familiar. but when the face comes into view, he recognises the young man who arrived with teddy quijadas. felix. nik only offers a grunt in acknowledgement, forever a man of few words, and takes a deep breath before bending down to grab the legs of the body felix stands next to. nik wonders if mara and teddy have felix in on their little plan, he wonders what type of parents they are. do they keep secrets like he has done?
as the pair haul the body off the floor, nik watches the other closely. in an ideal world, he’d have whispered words of fealty already. but this wold is far from it, and his name is tained with the blood of maniacs and innocents alike. “felix, right?” at least i can be friendly. “teddy’s kid.” he doesn’t diminish their relationship on the lack of blood ties. if he did, then daiyu would be nothing but a niece. they toss the body into the pile, and nik wipes his hands on his trousers to mask the tremors. “appreciate the help,” he mumbles.
.
Felix utters a soft thanks when the other man pauses in whatever he's doing to help him out, but the fact that he lingers after they transfer the body to the burn pile is something that Felix hadn't expected.
Neither is the inquiry in relation to his dad. He has to bite his tongue, in a rare moment of wariness of his words, when he wants to immediately respond and add: and Mara's. He knows the cat's kind of out of the bag already since the Water Treatment Plant, takes pride in finally being able to own up to variations of the sentence: Yeah, that’s my mom and dad. Hell, he'd even confirmed it to Daiyu Volkova of all people, but Felix knew less of this man. As friendly as one could sound in the midst of their grim task, Nikolai Volkov was still a Volkov. And Felix didn't know enough about his character to make that kind of gut decision like he had with Daiyu. His opinion of this man was still somewhat yet to be determined. If there was a chance he didn't have the information yet... and it wasn't something they wanted him to know, he didn't want to put his foot in his mouth.
"Yeah. That's me," he says instead. And then there's the thanks. Unexpected. "Yeah... no problem. Just helping out where I can," this, at least, is something he doesn't feel like he needs to filter with omissions, despite the fact that it was grim work.





















