Chapter Text
There are moments throughout a person’s life that they can never forget. As Singed sits alone in his cold cave, he reflects on those few and precious memories he holds close.
It had been one of Viktor’s bad days, the days where the cough rattling in his chest would echo off the walls of the cave. Isaac was beginning to worry, the sound of his son’s cough bringing up unpleasant memories of another sickly child fading away before him. Isaac could feel his thoughts start to spiral, hands shaking while holding the test tubes with his experiment. It had to work. It had to. He couldn’t lose another one.
The sound of a raspy voice called to him from the other side of the cave. “Isaac?”
Setting his stuff hurriedly on the table, Isaac rushed to his son’s side. “Viktor? What’s wrong?” Viktor was lying on his bed in the makeshift room Isaac had made for him. It was just a curtained-off section of the cave with a cot, but Isaac had tried to make it feel more like home for the boy by setting up a shelf with his inventions. There was a pile of cloths by the foot of the cot for Rio to sleep on, but as her health got worse, Isaac moved her to the lab full-time so he could monitor her.
Viktor looked down at his hands and fidgeted with his blanket awkwardly. Eventually, he looked up at Isaac hesitantly and said, “I can't sleep with Rio gone. I was wondering if… would you sit with me until I fall asleep?”
Isaac chuckled to himself. “Of course, mein Sohn, anything you wish.”
Viktor frowned. “What language is that?”
Isaac paused and thought back to his previous words, realizing with surprise that he had slipped back into his native tongue, something that hadn’t happened in years. “If it does have a name, I was never told it. It’s a trade language that my family has used for years; my father taught me it.” Isaac hesitated, memories of a young eagerly practicing her pronunciation and looking to him for approval. “Would you like me to teach you?” Slowly, Viktor nodded.
Isaac wracked his brain with where to begin. With Mila, he spoke the language to her from birth, which allowed her to pick it up like second nature. His parents had done the same with him, and so Isaac had no idea where to begin. Perhaps a story would be a good starting point.
“Let's start with my name: Versengt. It is an old family name going back generations. The story says that my great-great-great-grandfather was a blacksmith dedicated to his craft to the point of uncaring for his own safety. He would stay up days on end working, sparks setting his arms alight and burning him. By the end of his life, he was more scar tissue than man. The locals called him Scorched for how burned he had become, and the name stuck around for generations. My father told me that the men of our family are cursed to be so drawn to our craft that it burns us; everything else fades away next to the fire,” Isaac chuckled to himself, recalling a fond memory. “He would always say that he hoped I would be more singed than scorched by my passions. That is why I took on the name Singed when you first met me; it is a translation of Versengt along with a … promise to not repeat past mistakes”
As Isaac looked down at Viktor, he knew he had broken his promise; His heart had been drawn away from his work and attached to this child. His father’s warnings echoed in his head, ‘Do not get too attached to others, my son, they will burn you more than you can ever imagine .’ He thought he had learned his lesson with Lucille and Mila, but here he was getting attached once again.
Viktor mulled over Isaac’s words. “Passion for your work does not seem so bad. I have been consumed by work myself and seen the rest of the world fade away.”
“Then I must call you Viktor Versengt!” Isaac replied with a smile
Viktor paused, warring with some internal conflict. “Thank you… father”
Isaac felt his heart melt. It was the first time Viktor had called him father. A young Mila stared up at him from Viktor’s bed. Isaac vowed to himself that he would keep his son safe no matter the cost. He had lost a daughter to his obsessions, he would not lose her brother as well.
Singed mused to himself that, in a way he had failed in that promise, Viktor running away from his experiments, but he had a chance to fix his mistakes. After all, Viktor was still alive, unlike his sister before him.
It was the anniversary of Mila’s death. The first one since Viktor had come to live with Isaac. His practice on this haunted anniversary was to bury himself in his work, pushing his brain until he drowned out his grief with exhaustion, but he could not do such a thing with a child to care for. In the days leading up, he felt the cloud of sorrow begin to descend over him, macabre musings on what the beautiful spark of life could have become.
His thoughts on his daughter were always twisted and sharp with self-loathing for many reasons. First, because he had failed to save her, Mila’s blood on his hands as he cradled that tiny corpse, but she was not the only one he had failed. Before Mila, there was Lucille, gnarled and cruel like barbed wire but who did not cut him purposefully; he had watched her die giving birth to the beautiful spark of life he would adopt and raise, but in those early days, he had not recognized the gift she was. At the beginning, he had blamed little Mila for her mother’s death, hated her for bearing his friend's face but with none of the vicious personality he loved. He had hated her for being too much of her mother and not enough at the same time. It had taken two years until he realized how unfair he was to the little girl in his care, one that had wormed her way into his heart through stubbornness, but by then he had become buried in his research.
He had justified to himself that the girl would have so many more years of life to observe, and he had such important work to do, justified spending longer and longer days in the lab, barely paying attention to the little girl when he returned home. He was so caught up in his own world that he had failed to notice the illness develop and after she had died he had few memories of the little light that he had raised. He had come to the uncomfortable realization that he had failed at every step: as a friend, as a father, as a scientist, he had let both mother and daughter down.
But now he had a second chance. The world had gifted him another child to nurture and raise and Isaac refused to fail this one as well. It was so tempting to let his grief consume him, bury himself in the past in a desperate attempt to fix unsolvable mistakes, but that wouldn’t be fair to Viktor. He had learned already that he would have little time with those that he loved, the world robbing him of them at every turn, and what time he did have was precious. The lesson was hard fought, layered with years of grief and regret, but he could not afford to forget it .
And so he pushed past the haunting giggle of a little girl chasing butterflies, the echoing cries of “ Papa, Papa look ”, ignored the ghost dogging his steps as he watched his son. Viktor did not know the importance of the day and so he continued as usual, cocooned upon the cot Isaac had gotten him with his nose inches away from a textbook.
It was with a cruel sting that Isaac realized it was not Mila who Viktor reminded him of, but Lucille. With his brilliant mind spinning from idea to idea and his dry and cutting wit, Viktor carried with him the ghost of Isaac’s first friend now a decade in the grave. It was ironic that each of Isaac’s children carried parts of Lucille despite neither knowing her. Mila had been her mother’s clone but the opposite in personality while Viktor was a perfect mirror of his old friend's psyche. Isaac mused to himself that in a way he was still chasing the past.
But Viktor was different in his own ways, something Isaac had to remind himself when a different name tried to roll off his tongue upon finding the boy awake at all hours of the night with his research. Viktor was softer than Lucille had been, letting his guard down when he thought himself safe and trusting easily. Lucille had always carried her shields with her, looking over her shoulder as if she would never be safe.
Isaac hoped that his son would never know the level of fear that had caused his old friend to react in such a way. He hoped his son would have a better life than that but something told him this was not the case. Isaac had made his son a Versengt, one who would burn and be burned by all those around him. He had cursed his darling boy to be a roaring flame quickly extinguished by a cruel world.
It was the Versengt way to burn all those they loved, any who got to close would be scorched to a crisp. Isaac kept himself separate from those he loved for a reason: by his distance he hoped they would not be burned but instead only singed.
Singed chuckled to himself at the end of his memory; how foolish he had been to think he would not hurt his family again. He was a creature of opposites: Isaac, emotional and full of passion to the point of burning, Singed: a cold river of logic and science. The issues arose when the two sides tried to blend together; too much fire and his family was burnt, too much of the cold river and they drowned. He spent his life oscillating between the two different sides of himself, a pendulum in constant flux.
He hoped Viktor would not grow to become the same.