Farhans Flame 2

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[[>]]
وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مِن صَلْصَـٰلٍۢ مِّنْ حَمَإٍۢ مَّسْنُونٍۢ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:26] Indeed, We created man from sounding clay moulded from black mud.[[/span]]
[[>]]
وَٱلْجَآنَّ خَلَقْنَـٰهُ مِن قَبْلُ مِن نَّارِ ٱلسَّمُومِ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:27] As for the jinn, We created them earlier from smokeless fire.[[/span]]
[[>]]
وَإِذْ قَالَ رَبُّكَ لِلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ إِنِّى خَـٰلِقٌۢ بَشَرًۭا مِّن صَلْصَـٰلٍۢ مِّنْ حَمَإٍۢ مَّسْنُونٍۢ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:28] ˹Remember, O  Prophet˺ when your Lord said to the angels, “I am going to create a human being from sounding clay moulded from black mud.[[/span]]
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فَإِذَا سَوَّيْتُهُۥ وَنَفَخْتُ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِى فَقَعُوا۟ لَهُۥ سَـٰجِدِينَ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:29] So when I have fashioned him and had a spirit of My Own ˹creation˺ breathed into him, fall down in prostration to him.”[[/span]]
[[>]]
فَسَجَدَ ٱلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةُ كُلُّهُمْ أَجْمَعُونَ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:30] So the angels prostrated all together—[[/span]]
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إِلَّآ إِبْلِيسَ أَبَىٰٓ أَن يَكُونَ مَعَ ٱلسَّـٰجِدِينَ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:31] but not Iblîs, who refused to prostrate with the others.[[/span]]
[[>]]
قَالَ يَـٰٓإِبْلِيسُ مَا لَكَ أَلَّا تَكُونَ مَعَ ٱلسَّـٰجِدِينَ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:32] Allah asked, “O Iblîs! What is the matter with you that you did not join others in prostration?”.[[/span]]
[[>]]
قَالَ لَمْ أَكُن لِّأَسْجُدَ لِبَشَرٍ خَلَقْتَهُۥ مِن صَلْصَـٰلٍۢ مِّنْ حَمَإٍۢ مَّسْنُونٍۢ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:33] He replied, “It is not for me to prostrate to a human You created from sounding clay moulded from black mud.”[[/span]]
[[>]]
قَالَ فَٱخْرُجْ مِنْهَا فَإِنَّكَ رَجِيمٌۭ
[[/>]]
[[span class="crimson"]][15:34] Allah commanded, “Then get out of Paradise, for you are truly cursed."[[/span]]
[[/div]]
----

[[=]]
+ FOUR YEARS LATER 
[[/=]]

Farhan leaned back, barrel of the rifle resting against the window frame.

“Pass me a drink.”

Sadr walked by, depositing a green can of Pakola into his waiting hand. They were on the third story of this office building, overlooking a small townhouse in Ashgabat. The floor was abandoned — the perfect place to set up for a stakehouse. They’d set themselves up in the conference room on the east-facing side of the building. The long table was dominated by surveillance and monitoring equipment hooked up to the house below, giving constant readouts of information.

“Anything interesting yet?” Farhan inquired.

“Not really.”

“Regretting coming yet?”

“Somewhat.”

“This is a bit late in the game to be considering a change to field agent, don’t you think?” he joked. For a moment, he set down the sniper rifle to crack open the can of soda and take a sip. 

“Trust me, I’m much happier in my lab.”

“I’m just saying, you’ve been volunteering for field missions quite a lot recently. Something I don’t know about?”

“Yes, I’m having a midlife crisis and know just the thing to make me feel alive: sleeping on the floor in an unheated conference room.”

They laughed, taking drinks from their cans. 

“Really though, why //did// you come?”

Sadr shrugged. “It gets difficult to see the reality of the work in your office all day. I was hoping for something a bit more… engaged.”

Farhan shook his head. 

“What?”

“Engaged. Listen to this buffoon.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s //work//, Parviz. You don’t do it because you’re engaged, you do it because it’s what you do.”

“I do it because I believe in it.”

Farhan scoffed, putting the can down and raising his rifle again.

“You don’t?”

“I believe in my next paycheck.”

Sadr shook his head.

“Even I cannot help the narrowminded,” he declared dramatically before returning to the surveillance equipment. Nothing. They’d set up two IR cameras facing the house from the south and the east. Over the past two days, they’d managed to completely fail to be useful, depicting only people entering and exiting, never a view into what was going on in the house.

“He’s probably using something anomalous to mask his signature.”

Farhan clicked his tongue in doubt. “There’s plenty of perfectly mundane countermeasures to infrared equipment, and they’re a hell of a lot cheaper.”

“I doubt money is an issue for our man. But you’re probably right.”

“Remind me what his deal is.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, I just know how much you appreciate the opportunity to monologue.”

Sadr accepted this as fair with a nod, before launching into it. “The house belongs to Dominick MacCandless, someone who is decidedly not Turkmen. He’s an English-Hungarian antiquities dealer, specializing in authentic Arabian and Islamic artifacts with unique characteristics for the discerning buyer.”

“Which means—”

“In other words, he’s a fence for Islamic artifacts looted during the Iraq war or the Syrian Civil War or any of a dozen other conflicts. He’s hardly the only one, but he’s certainly the biggest that we’ve managed to pin down a location on.”

“How much, you figure?”

“Hard to say. Probably turning over several million dollars annually. We’ll know more when the bug starts transmitting data from his computer. Should be within a few hours.”

“So remind me why we don’t just kill him.”

“Because he’s one brick in a very large wall, Farhan. You’ve never understood this.”

“I understand my job. I don’t understand why I’m prevented from doing it.”

“Okay, fine. You kill him. Then what? Then some other scum rises up to take his place. These are the systems of capital, Farhan — behind every demon is ten more waiting to take his place.”

Farhan didn’t say anything, and the room suddenly became warmer. After a second, Sadr realized his mistake.

“Sorry.”

The room cooled again.

“It’s fine. But you just kill them too.”

“And then you spend the rest of your life tussling with one brick when you could be trying to figure out how to topple the tower. We need him alive, we’re trying to build an idea of his distribution network. Then we can move from there. Recover artifacts from his buyers, and track down his dealers. That’s how you accomplish real change.”

“You’re excited about this, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. This fellow represents everything we don’t. Capitalism run amok, criminality intertwined with archeology. The West looting the East for all its worth.”

Farhan looked through the scope of the gun, down at the house’s balcony. All he saw was a man in a button-down and shorts, bald and laughing while he talked on the phone. A target.
----
Sadr tried to ignore the moaning. 

It was easy at first to dismiss it as the sounds of the old building, steel girders groaning in the cold of the night. But it had gotten louder and louder. Now, it was clearly discernible as coming from Farhan’s sleeping bag in the corner: a mixture of moaning, groaning, and whimpering. Fragmented words in Arabic escaping his sleeping lips.

“Please… no… //please//… I’m sorry…”

Sadr had known Farhan since he was fifteen. He had taken him in when the boy was arrested, seeing his potential. He had watched him grow into a man — strong, confident, authoritative. Somewhat reckless, perhaps, but still.

He had never heard him have a nightmare before. But there was never a doubt in his mind of what Farhan was imagining.

“I don’t //know// anything—”

He had never been quite the same after the incident in Egypt, even after the surgery. It had taken him months to recover properly, to learn to eat and walk and fight. To get to a point where the General was comfortable sending him on missions again. The therapy helped, somewhat, and he said that he felt better. But the nightmares persisted. 

He was thrashing, now, against the tight confines of the sleeping bag. Sadr rose from the chair, striding over softly and unzipping the bag, loosening it. Farhan’s thrashing eased. He wasn’t sure if the claustrophobia had always been a thing or whether it had arisen after the incident, but either way, Farhan was terrified of small spaces or tightness now. He would never admit it, of course — but in moments like these, it was difficult to miss. 

Just one of the many changes that Sadr had noticed. Once, the two of them had always gone to //jummah// together when he was in Tehran, sharing a coffee afterward on their way back to headquarters. Sadr had offered again, once, during Farhan’s recovery.

“Sorry, just not feeling up to it.”

He had nodded. It was perfectly understandable, given the boy’s condition — it was a struggle to keep some foods down, still. So he asked again next week, and the week after that, and again after that. As Farhan improved by leaps and bounds, aided by the fire in his eye — he still denied.

Initially, Sadr had assumed he was avoiding //him//. That he blamed the doctor for his condition. 

“I’m sorry. I blame myself too,” he confessed one day.

Farhan had stared at him in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“For your capture. For everything.”

He laughed. “Don’t be an idiot. It was my fault for getting caught.”

And then they had gone to lunch, and everything had been alright. And it took until the next week for Sadr to realize — it wasn’t him Farhan was avoiding. It was the //jummah//. 

Indeed, he had stopped praying at all.
----
“Did you sleep alright?” Sadr probed gently.

“Fine. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

Farhan was staring at the audio mixer on the table, one of the headphones held to his ear. The waveform indicated nothing more than silence being transmitted by the bug. After a minute, he set it down.

“I think the asshole went to bed. It’s three in the afternoon.”

“Well, I suppose he does work on UK time.”

Farhan shrugged. “Anything interesting from his computer?”

“Plenty. Sorting through some of his emails now — a lot of them are encrypted, so no chance of reading those, but many of them aren’t. He was talking to someone last month about meeting in Hong Kong next year for an exchange of artifacts pulled from Yemen. What’s in Hong Kong?” he questioned.

“MC&D,” they realized at the same time.

“Shit,” Farhan swore.

“Definitely not good,” Sadr agreed. “If he flips everything to them, it could be lost in their warehouse system for years until they put it up for auction. We might never see it again.”

“Well, a year is plenty of time.”

“It’d be a travesty,” Sadr lamented, like he didn’t hear him. “The sooner we get rid of him, the better.”

“Sure.”

Something about the tone of the sure stuck out to Sadr.

“You disagree?”

“I said sure.”

“But you said it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you think I’m being dramatic.”

“I think you //are// being dramatic.”

Sadr cocked his head. “I don’t know how you can say that. This is dozens of artifacts, most of them with anomalous effects, headed to stuff the coffers of rich Europeans. It’s our heritage being sold off piecemeal.”

Farhan put his hands up in mock surrender. “I’m not disagreeing, I just don’t… feel as strongly about it as you do. That doesn’t make me a bad person.”

Sadr looked at him for a good, long while.

“No. But it does make you different.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve noticed things, Farhan. You just don’t care anymore.”

“The hell I don’t. I care about you. I care about our brothers.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the mission.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, I don’t care about that.”

“Farhan!”

“Look, you can be a true believer all you want. That’s not me. It doesn’t stop me from doing the job.”

“But you //were//. You were the strongest voice behind me. Always talking about reclaiming our history, expelling the threat. Rejecting the Foundation’s western hegemony.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“It was before Egypt,” Farhan said, rising to his feet.

“Why should that change anything—”

Before he could even finish his sentence, the room had become burning hot. The air itself simmered and broiled with heat. His breath turned to steam in his throat, and for the first time in his life, Dr. Parviz Sadr was scared of Farhan Moradi. 

Then, just as quickly, the room cooled. Farhan was breathing heavily.

His voice was quiet but razor-sharp. “Don’t ever say that again.”

Sadr answered just as quietly. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand.”

Farhan leaned against the open window. It was some time before he spoke again.

“Look at this asshole. Look at him relaxing on his patio while he hawks stolen history.”

He turned around, smiling sadly at Sadr.

“That’s where your belief has gotten us. To Europeans in Turkmenistan selling our artifacts, looted by American soldiers from a war-torn Middle East. Are we better off than we were twenty years ago? Has anything really changed for us?”

“You’re young, Farhan. Trust me. Things used to be better. They can be better again, if you believe.”

“No, they won’t. Things will get worse, and worse, and we won’t stop them because we’re pining for some image of a unified //ummah// that doesn’t exist. If it ever did.”

“My God, Farhan. Having faith in our mission doesn’t make me an extremist.”

“No. But you know what they call blind faith? Zealotry.”

“Okay. Maybe I’m a zealot. Maybe belief leads me in circles. But if you don’t believe in anything, where does that lead you?”

Farhan laughed. There was a strange glint in his eye.

“I don’t know. But I know where my belief led me.”

“Where?”

“A basement in an Egyptian prison.”
----
That night, Farhan sees a campfire in his dreams.

“You again.”

“Me, once more.”

“It’s been a while.”

“It has. But you summon, and so I form.”

“Yeah. I wanted to ask you a question.”

“To unravel the mysteries, I shall endeavor. Inquiries abound, what discourse do you sever?”

“It shouldn’t be too hard. Why did you fucking lie to me?”

The flame sputters, taken aback.

“What are you talking about?”

“I asked you if you could fix me. You said yes.”

“My mending touch bestowed, ailments put to flight. Vision restored, shadows banished from sight.” There was a hard edge to its voice.

“But you didn’t make me whole again.” Farhan rapped the side of his head. “Here. I expected to be the way I was. Before.”

“My vow was never such, dear Farhan, recall: not to make as was, but to tend, to heal, to stall.”

“I expected you to make me right again. And since letting you into my head, I can’t care about things. Everything feels grey. Uninteresting. I take stupid risks. Put myself into danger, and don’t care about how I get out. Like…”

“As though you’ve already taken your final breath,” the fire offered.

“Like I’m already dead,” he agreed. “And now I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“Farhan, some wounds are too deep for even my deft.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

The flame began to shrink.

“Get the fuck back here, I’m not done with you!”

The voice shrank with the flame. “Be not a fool, Farhan — find solace, find creed. Belief, seek, in faith's garden, plant your seed ”

And then it was dark again.
----
Sadr opened his eyes. 

“Farhan?”

It was quiet. The conference room was empty. 

He stepped outside, into the corridor. Similarly abandoned. He came back in, and only then did he realize the sniper rifle was no longer leaning against the window, and that there was a note on the table.

He read it, once, then twice. He flipped it over, looking for a “haha, got you!”. He ran it through a cipher mentally, hoping it was a code. Nothing.

Sadr crushed it in his fist and [[[the-night-fires| began to weep]]].
----
= [[size 130%]]**[[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/farhan-s-flame/offset/0 | Part I]]] | Part II**[[/size]]
Farhans Flame 2

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