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They correspond.
He calls him Daniil in writing, though they’ve never been this familiar with each other face to face. It happened seamlessly enough, nonetheless, and he has trouble remembering who named the other first with his first name, and when exactly the letters he gets from the morning train began to open with Dear Artemy. Sometime, between the lines—
Well, there is some unspoken law between them like this, nestled in between lines of writing. An intimacy, damning and loud as the word seems to be, perhaps borne out of revealing innermost thoughts, perhaps out of the ability not to look and be looked at while doing so, allowing for more daring honesty. When he reads his words, he can hear Daniil’s voice in his mind, drawn from memory—and memory conjures him at his most open, muttering in the dark of the Trammel or the Stillwater late at night. Hushed, revealing.
The train rattles. Half-consciously, half-by-habit, Artemy straightens the page with his thumb.
He likes Daniil’s writing. The slant of his hand, the same eccentric stilted pattern as his speech—and as in speech, his thoughts becoming lost to their own tangents, tangling, then occasionally unspooling into short bursts, emotion spilling in oddest of ways. The enthusiasm vivid in the descriptions of the methods he uses at the laboratory, or, movingly so, in his praise of the process Artemy had followed with the panacea, and a chemical analysis of the herbs he’d sent through. He’d worried, once, if he weren’t playing into a trap, revealing himself to an emissary of the Powers that Be. But he couldn’t help but put trust in Dankovsky, after everything.
And if he revealed himself to Dankovsky, Dankovsky repaid him in kind.
In his letters, it is as though Artemy observes his thought process unchecked: unraveling like Daniil never rereads his writing, folding the page and sending it off in a frenzy and without a second look, to prevent himself from crossing things out.
There’s something in the trust of this Artemy finds, for better or for worse, disarming.
... Dearest friend—if I may call you that, for through these written conversations of ours I have felt closer to you than to scarcely anyone—I stop to think, at times, how oddly wondrous for us to have crossed paths in the midst of terror. You have turned my thinking around in a way I had not felt to be possible—but more curiously so, you have left me with hope, where I anticipated an end to it.
Hope, perhaps, not in what I believed myself capable of—but in the order of things, and in having served a role I was given, alongside yours ...
He folds the page and slides it into the pocket of his smock.
In the span of five months, they’ve exchanged thirty letters. This last one, he will not answer.
Not in writing, at least.
He wondered, setting out with his rucksack and travelling coat, if Daniil would note this uncharacteristically long silence. Would he brush it off or treat it as a thing of worry. He wondered if the intensity of Daniil’s written sentiment carries in his thoughts during the hours of the day or at night, if he does think of Artemy beyond the time dedicated to their peculiar joint research and the act of writing itself.
In the hectic farrago of what Artemy conceived as his day-to-day academic life, the lull in correspondence was likely only an oddity in the middle of routine. Still—
He looks out of the window. In the distance, he can see the looming peripheries of Moscow.
Still, Artemy wonders.
He knows he thinks of Dankovsky, more often, and more insistently, than anything that could be dismissible as merely shared trauma.
***
When he finds the address he knows from the back of Daniil’s envelopes, it is not what he’d expected.
Daniil had described the Thanatica once, in a letter spanning several pages, slanted handwriting narrowing to fit the margins and smudging in places. The spine of the tall ceiling, light filtering in through glass; the marble of the staircase worn down with the steps of a myriad young scholars; the scent of formaldehyde pervading the laboratory and the corridors down at the morgue; the rows of seats in the medical theatre where Artemy pictured him standing in his black smock.
The tenement does not look like Thanatica, but neither does it look like any sort of place he’d picture Dankovsky willingly inhabiting.
A pharmacy crammed into the corner of an old street, the woman inside measuring him with a cold, calculative look before showing him to the passage out back. Tense, with an odd feeling in his chest, Artemy goes up the narrow staircase leading to the rooms above.
The steps are well-worn and carious, and a draft whistles through the broken windows, half-barred with wooden planks. He can hear birds, nesting up in the nooks of the ceiling, the noise of their wings echoing down.
At the top of the stairs, Artemy draws to a halt. He hesitates with his hand upon the rapper.
The wooden old door is set ajar; the number he remembers from the letters carved in copper digits.
He hasn’t announced his visit, something preventing him from doing so—some wish, perhaps ill-advised, of wanting to witness Dankovsky’s genuine reaction. Wanting to settle, this way, if his instinct was correct, and there was something—
Shudkher. The die is cast, as Dankovsky would say in superfluous Latin. Artemy pushes the door open.
The apartment is tiny, resembling an attic more than anything, with dormer windows spanning the entire length of one wall and the same cold draft across the wooden floor as in the corridor. A small cot is fitted into the opposite corner by a coal brasier and a narrow desk. In the corners of the windows, snow and rime gather.
On the desk, a stack of papers, something half-written perched on top. With a jolt, Artemy recognises his own name.
Dearest
Dear Artemy,
I hope you’re in good health.
In my last letter, I have unwittingly
Since we have corresponded last, I have reconsidered my
I realise now that the nature of the suggestion I made in my last letter was altogether too presumptuous, and I beg your forgiveness. If you are amenable, I vouch never to
I am sorry
Do I stand a chance of
He is so taken with the confused, troubled emotion that rises within him as he deciphers the scrawled writing that he misses the low whine of the door. It’s only the unmistakeable click of a gun being loaded behind him that alerts him. Artemy tenses.
“Alright,” says a voice, hoarse, but intensely familiar. “Turn around now, or I will shoot y—”
Awash with relief at the sheer sound of it, bracing himself for a different reason entirely, Artemy turns.
Dankovsky nearly drops his revolver.
He opens his mouth as if to speak or draw a breath, then lowers his hand, faltering. He looks shell-shocked.
And ghastly, Artemy notes with a twist of the heart. He is dressed neatly as ever, but his clothes are worn, vest sewn back together haphazardly where it’s come apart and frayed at the seams, the coat hanging peculiarly on his shoulders. He seems thinner still, hunched somewhat in his posture, his face gaunt. But there’s a strange glaze to his eyes and a red tinge to his cheeks Artemy accounts for with harsh weather.
Dankovsky swallows, breathing heavily, staring at Artemy almost in fear—or, rather, as if he cannot believe his presence, cannot rationally account for it. He’d given him a similar look, Artemy recalls, jolted, after the plague has been cured, and they had stood in the Steppe in the scattering of drizzle washing down the last of Polyhedron’s blood. Artemy had told him, then, “Just live.”
And Dankovsky had turned to him, as though snapped out of a trance, looking—
Just like this.
Despite himself, Artemy finds himself smiling, yielding to the ache of fondness. “You won’t say hello to me, oynon?” he asks quietly, reaching out.
The sound of his voice seems to unlock something in Daniil. He twitches, mouths, “Burakh,” almost noiselessly and drops his gun carelessly aside. Then throws himself forward, graceless, to shake Artemy’s hand.
His eyes wander dazedly, taking in his person, his face. “You—you!” he says, incongruously. “And here …! God, could it be—I’d never have thought—”
His gloved hand finds Artemy’s at last, grasping it tightly, nervously, as if he were trying to convince himself of what it’s feeling. It’s somehow excruciating. Artemy makes the decision almost without thinking: he takes Daniil’s hand, and instead of shaking it, pulls him forward into an embrace.
For one breathless moment, he stiffens in Artemy’s arms, body rigid, as though frozen still. Undeterred, Artemy tightens the embrace.
Something like a shiver seems to pass through Dankovsky, then: the tension relents. With a shuddering sigh, he gives into Artemy’s hold, drawing his own arms around him. Artemy shuts his eyes, smiling. He doesn’t know yet; nothing in Dankovsky’s reaction managed to tell him anything conclusive enough to settle his relentless question—but it doesn’t matter. Right now, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve got you, he thinks. Living proof you survived. Evidence, in shape of working lungs and a beating a heart he can feel through the layers of fabric dividing them, that there has been a living person behind the letters, that it all—
That it really happened to us.
He can barely hold in his relief, at having found him so fast. I’ve got you, Artemy thinks again, shaken. I’ve found you. He tilts his head, tipping it slightly forward, so he can gather the Bachelor a little closer. His own unshaven cheek brushes past the skin of Dankovsky’s forehead, somehow jarringly warm to the touch.
Artemy pulls away, leaving Dankovsky stranded, arms still half-reaching in a disoriented gesture which would strike Artemy as heartbreaking were he not preoccupied.
He puts a hand to Dankovsky's forehead instead, carding the strands of dark hair away.
It burns.
Dankovsky blinks, startled. His eyes are shiny and dim, and still uncomprehending.
“You’re feverish,” Artemy mutters, brow furrowed in concern. “Are you ill? Where have you been—out, walking like this? In this frost?” He lets his hand fall from his forehead, and rests it on the Bachelor's shoulder instead.
Daniil swallows, as if to gather himself. He doesn’t meet Artemy’s eyes anymore. “I’m fine,” he says, stymied. He is clearly still too disoriented to act convincingly. “Just a … a minor inconvenience. I have it under control.”
Something inside Artemy’s chest twists, ominously. “Do you?”
The creeping sensation from earlier returns: the same unease which grasped him at the sight of the tenement, the pigeons nesting in the corridor sewn with a frigid draft, the erratic unfinished letters spanning the desk over the untouched scientific papers. He can feel Dankovsky’s bony shoulder under the pads of his fingers, even through the thick layer of snakeskin.
He wants to ask questions, new and pressing ones now, pushing down the difficult one that brought him here, making it sink into the background.
He hesitates, torn. Daniil is eerily quiet himself, instead looking dimly to his side.
Artemy hazards: “What happened here?”
At this, Daniil finally moves away. He makes a few unsteady steps, hands linked behind his back. Glimpsed like this, he looks somewhat more like himself. His voice is still muffled. “Ah—it’s a long story.”
And you never thought to mention it, in writing, did you—Daniil?
Making up his mind, Artemy lets his rucksack fall to the floor. Dankovsky turns, sharply, and tries to mask the vulnerability of his response by circling his desk.
Artemy says, “Good thing I’m in no rush, then.”
***
“Let me buy you dinner,” he said.
Artemy held in the observation that Dankovsky didn’t seem to be able to afford doing so, sensing the strange tension in the air between them. Instead he allowed himself a wan smile. “Very cordial of you, oynon—but there’s no need. I don’t need to be wined and dined like the elites—”
Dankovsky cut him off. “This isn’t—” He set his jaw. “I want to treat you properly. You’re my guest.”
“An unannounced one,” Artemy said, and smiled again. But he could see it unsettled Dankovsky, wary of the change in his affect, accustomed to a frown of concern or half-permanent scowl instead. “But alright. Let’s do it your way.”
For now, Artemy thought. Dankovsky nodded sharply, and looked away once again.
Now, in the restaurant, he seems to fear being seen for too long. Flinches from loud noises, and shies away from the light, leading them into the dimmest corner of the establishment—instinctually, it seems, before he can stop himself and curb his own reactions. He eats fast, slowing down with effort whenever he catches himself, like Murky and Sticky when they were still starved after the Sand Pest. He carries himself with such tension his body seems taut like a straining rope, but his hands shake as they pick up the fine cutlery. He avoids eye contact.
Artemy can barely stand to witness it without lamenting. Oh, Danya, he thinks, the privacy of thoughts allowing for an endearment to slip he’d never let himself betray in speech.
“So,” he says instead, putting down his glass. The food is fine, perhaps excessively so—a plate of hors d’oeuvres and vodka Artemy has trouble focusing on—the setting clearly chosen in an attempt to mask something else. “What did happen, emshen? I must say, I’m a little surprised. In your letters, you said—well. You spoke of your situation quite differently.”
Dankovsky’s jaw tightens again. He puts down his utensils, touches a napkin to his lips, then slowly lowers it and crumples in his hand. Artemy can’t help but notice the leather of his gloves is greyed, worn down at the knuckles.
“Well—you know the crux of it already,” the Bachelor says uneasily, eyes trained on the expensive tablecloth. A little wax has dripped from one of the candles, staining it. “The Thanatica burned down. Hardly anything—hardly anything survived. Those lucky enough to escape went into hiding. Others perished. I have … I’m afraid I have exaggerated the extent to which anything could have been saved.”
Artemy frowns. “So, nothing…?”
Why did you leave, he thinks all the while, why did I let you. How can this be the better way.
“Nothing.” Daniil pauses, wincing. “My quarters were, ah, above the premises,” he adds, somewhat quieter. “Not that I would’ve been able to continue living there, of course … But I had to come see—”
His hand tightens on his fork. “My whole life!” he says, wonderingly. “My whole life, gone to ashes. I lied, yes. You would have stopped me—anyone sane would have. But I had to see it … with my own eyes. One last time.”
He presses his eyes shut. Then draws in a strained breath, and goes on, haltingly, “My license would’ve been revoked, of course, should they know I’m still alive. I’d have been hanged, or banished. I am… disgraced is the term, I believe.”
“Funny,” he says at length. Voice weak, oddly hollow now. “Daniil Dankovsky did die. In all the ways except the proper one, I … I never learned.”
“No,” Artemy says aloud.
Daniil twitches, as if he’s forgotten he is not alone. The look he gives Artemy is a peculiar merge of cold detachment and half-scared surprise. In any other circumstances it could’ve passed for scorn. Not now, though, and not to him, after learning in such a convoluted way the oddities of Daniil’s mind.
Artemy leans across the table. “No,” he repeats, quieter. “He’s alive and he’s sitting in front of me. He survived.”
Daniil swallows, holding eye contact with visible effort. His face is still tense and expressionless, but there’s that blurry despair to his eyes again, perhaps brought on by a fluctuating fever. “Are you quite sure of that?” he asks. “Sometimes I feel like this, this all—is delirium. I think to myself, the Sand Pest is still in me, perhaps, ravaging my mind, making me live in a horrid ... dream. But then I feel, no, this—this is too perverse to be imagined. Too pointed. I—I could never—” he breaks off, suddenly winded. His hand is folded into a fist so tight the leather stretches taut over bone.
Unthinkingly, Artemy reaches forward and puts his own hand on top of it. Daniil tenses at the touch, as though attempting not to flinch. His eyes bore into their joined hands, instead.
Artemy shakes his head. “I’ve seen my fair share of death. You’re no dead man.”
Daniil blinks and looks away. Nods, curtly, without speaking. Then he draws in a breath, “I want you to know, though—I did not lie, about our—about the research we have conducted, the analysis of your samples. I did it on my own. I never lied about my investment in—” he trails off, clearly lost for words.
The cause, Artemy finishes, borrowing the phrasing from his letters. Without speaking, he squeezes the Bachelor’s hand.
Daniil doesn’t take it away.
***
They take the long way back to Dankovsky’s quarters across the Patriarch’s Ponds, which Artemy suspects is either yet another way of treating him, or merely stalling the arrival. In setting sunlight, they walk in companionable silence, steadily, the atmosphere reminding Artemy once again of the narrow window of time right before Daniil left for the Capital. Then, too, did they walk side by side—across the Steppe, knees-deep in the last that ground would ever see of twyre, air still quite sweet with it, even while growing brisk and crisp with Autumn.
“How are you,” Dankovsky speaks out abruptly, as if only now remembering. “I am forgetting myself. You ... you surprised me, showing here—I got so caught up in it I never asked. And even in writing, we’d talk so much of our visions—but hardly ever private matters, as I was so reluctant to reveal mine … But I’d wonder, so often, about you, even without asking—so tell me. How … how have you been?”
Something eager inside Artemy pulls once again, coaxing out the stifled question—so you think of me, too. You have, over this time—
He catches himself, not now. Considers.
“Good,” he says plainly. “Got kids now.”
A bewildering array of emotions flits across Daniil’s face before it settles into an expression. “Well!” he says, voice only a little stilted. “Kids. And a wife, I presume? Congratulations, Burakh—you are quick to settle, my friend—”
Despite himself, Artemy bursts out laughing. “No, no wife,” he says. “Only a couple of rascals I’m taking care of. Sticky and Murky, you might remember them, they took a liking to me in the plague.”
There’s a pause.
“Yes,” Daniil says eventually, a strange shifty look to his eyes. “I can’t blame them.”
He looks away before Artemy can ask, and begins, “Sticky, I remember him—that boy always hung around when I was—” but before he can finish the sentence, his breath is cut off with a cough.
Awful thing, deep and rattling, wracking his frame till he draws to a staggering halt by the bridge. Artemy freezes mid-reaching out, hovering as Dankovsky leans heavily against the railing, unsure how to aid him.
“Medice cura te ipsum,” Daniil jokes at length, once the cough’s subsided, but his voice is still weak with breathlessness. He carefully avoids Artemy’s eyes, till the lingering silence forces him to.
Artemy inhales. “Da—”
“Don’t. Don’t judge me,” he interrupts, voice curt. His grip tightens on the railing and Artemy thinks his knuckles must be white under the gloves.
“This isn’t judgement, oynon,” he says, quietly. What else, the evasive slant of Daniil’s eyes seems to ask.
And ah, Artemy thinks morosely, how difficult to try and put it in words, both in writing, and even more so, now.
Care, over you, over the state of you; the strain you inflict on your body and mind, your solitude and the lack of warmth in your hands. I want to have a right to this care, he thinks. I want your allowance.
But he sees the instinctive, shut-away hostility of Daniil’s face. Instead of speaking, he swerves them off-topic, offering an arm to Dankovsky and taking him aback with the gesture.
Hesitantly, he accepts Artemy’s support, the vice grip of his own hand telling more of the degree of his instability than any words could.
They walk on in silence, Artemy mulling over the options of how to proceed in his head. Until—
“Where are you staying?” Daniil asks abruptly, as though waking from a trance. He draws to a sudden halt.
Ah. There it is.
Artemy gives him a sheepish smile, which Dankovsky meets with his usual sceptical frown, chin tilted up defiantly. The slowly setting sun paints odd shadows on his tightly wound clothes and tired face.
“Truthfully,” Artemy says, picking up his pace, and pulling Daniil with him, “I was going to see how well you receive me.” He laughs softly. “And only look into getting a room somewhere if you kick me out.”
There’s a pause.
Artemy considers the suggestion in his own voice, and assesses it as benign, easily hidden with the edge of amusement or a friendly camaraderie.
Beside him, Dankovsky blinks, disoriented once more. He has long eyelashes, startlingly dark against his pale skin.
He is handsome, still, in some ways more so now that Artemy feels allowed to look, unburdened of the pressure of the plague, affirmed in the reciprocated … well, friendship, if anything, by months of exchanged letters. To say he missed his face would be equal parts too much and unspeakably too little. He’d lost the possibility of seeing it before he knew to miss it, then grew into the feeling, learning it anew by slow, confusing degrees. And now—
“You still might want to,” Dankovsky says, softly, wrenching Artemy out of his thoughts. “I’d ... I would gladly house you. But you’ve seen how I live.” His jaw tightens, and he looks away.
Artemy shrugs, making sure the movement carries between them. “I’m no fussy guest,” he says, “I’m sure I can fit somewhere.”
Daniil looks at him. In the dimming sunlight, his eyes seem strangely bright. Clipped, he says, “Very well, then.”
***
The sun has almost set, walls saturated with a false warmth of dying orange. Dankovsky’s quarters are cold even so, and he rubs his gloved hands together as he ushers Artemy inside.
“Are you …” he begins, standing fully clothed in the middle of the floor, and gesturing sharply around. “Ah, by Jove. Are you sure you want to stay?”
Artemy looks at him evenly. “If you’ll have me.”
There’s only a slight pause—a heartbeat, no more—before Dankovsky nods tersely. The lines of his shoulders are wound tight, and Artemy doesn’t know if it’s due to the unplanned weight he keeps putting on his words, or the arrangement itself.
Meanwhile, Dankovsky shuffles around the room, making half-motions as though to tidy. He moves to the bed, still in his overcoat, and starts stripping the sheets.
“I will get you fresh bedding,” he declares, uncertainly, and clears his throat. “Yes. And I can—that is, I shall take the floor.”
He seems to be losing grasp of some meticulously amassed strength he’d hitherto held inside, leaving behind an impression of something broken and unstrung, a clockwork disassembled. His hands are shaking as he fumbles with the duvet and he clears his throat again.
It occurs to Artemy he is trying to stifle a cough. Something in his ribs twists and tightens.
“No need for that,” he says, stepping forward. Daniil gives him a watchful sideways look before returning to his nervous task, even as Artemy hovers close. “We’ve made do before.”
There’s a small, but notably weighted, pause. Artemy watches the lean profile of Daniil’s face, his strong nose and the fine lines composing the shape of his face.
And he lets the implication unravel. “And, well,” he adds, quieter, allowing himself another half-smile. “You look like you need warming up.”
Daniil looks up, startled. His eyes are wide.
A flash or reflection in them, of something, finally, more alive. Something human and unbalanced with memory.
They should talk, Artemy knows. About the letters, ones sent and ones held off, about the nights at the Stillwater never brought up in daylight, about the day Dankovsky’s train left the platform for the Capital. About the one which will leave for Gorkhon in two days.
They have to talk, sooner or later. No wife, indeed. Nor anyone else, to hold like he had held a stranger, in desperation, in a strange bed, when every minute was scarce, and night could hide the faces and hands in search of comfort.
Perhaps for a reason.
Now, Artemy finds himself straining for breath in the lull between them. Dankovsky, unable to bear eye contact anymore, averts his eyes. Colour is high in his cheeks again, perhaps brought on with the fever.
Artemy wants to touch him, and doesn’t.
Dankovsky’s chest rises and falls, laboriously, before he turns away. “Alright,” he says, very quietly. “Let me change the bedding, still. If you want to—freshen up. There’s a …” He gestures towards the ensuite.
Artemy nods.
***
He lies down.
Looks up, at the carious arthritic ceiling. Thinks of the Haruspex’s Lair, and the trenches; then of Isidor’s house, rebuilt and fixed, waiting—kept warm by its inhabitants, those temporary and those fixed—for his return.
Dankovsky is still in the ensuite. Artemy can hear the whine of the faulty piping, the muffled shuffling and rattling of the man’s movements, the hum of running water.
Before his train left, Artemy had said, Wait, oynon. And, childishly, simply—reached out to grasp his hand. Dankovsky had turned, wide-eyed as he is now, with an attentive, doubting face. Too attentive, too searching of logic in an impulse Artemy couldn’t yet plausibly explain back then, not even to himself.
He’d almost dropped his wrist, abashed. And almost out of spite, he’d held on tighter instead.
Traced a thumb, slowly, over the other’s gloved knuckles. And he had thought, to bring it up to his lips. He could’ve done it, pressed his lips to the leather, or, peeled away, to the pale inside of his wrist.
Should’ve done it. Couldn’t have possibly done it.
“Travel safe, oynon,” he’d said. And shaken his hand.
Footsteps, now—measured, quiet, yet still audible on the worn wood. Artemy closes his eyes, breathing in through his nose. The damp air is cold, piercingly so.
“This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen,” a low voice says. “See what’s become of me, Haruspex.”
Artemy opens his eyes. Daniil is standing over the bed in a white nightshirt. He looks even more haunted and thinner like this, ribs making shapes under the fine linen.
“I see that you’ve survived.”
Dankovsky doesn’t move. “Are you warm enough?”
Without an answer, Artemy sits up.
Dankovsky tenses again, but doesn’t recoil, even as Artemy raises a hand and puts it to his sternum. He can feel Dankovsky breathe. Inhale, exhale, ribs expanding and contracting, toiling to break even with the strepitus of infection trapped in the lungs, the ribcage. Lines straining.
He takes away his hand and shuffles back on the bed. He draws his shoulders in, making space. Invitingly.
Daniil studies him with dark careful eyes, face solemn. Then he lies down, carefully, and turns away from Artemy.
A wanly yellowed darkness settles upon them, shapes still-visible in the dismal sheen of the city. Artemy can hear the low rattle of Daniil’s troubled breathing; can feel the weight of his body on the mattress. He smells different up close. Familiar: his skin, his cologne, and something sickly underneath Artemy wants to get out of him and shun forever.
How would you smell, he thinks, doused with months of warmth, ripened by the August sunlight, lulled to sleep daily with the scent of twyre. How would you smile, certain you’ll keep living?
Back at the Stillwater, they’d sleep back to back.
Not always. They’d sleep without touching.
Not always. At times in the night, they’d draw close together, both of them holding on, never clear which one had reached for the other first.
Sometimes—
They don’t touch now, Daniil’s body a careful asymptote, his shoulder blades level with Artemy’s bent head. They don’t touch, but Artemy wants them to, he wants like he’d feared he’ll want. He has confirmed something already, simply by virtue of his arrival and sharing a space.
Yes, Artemy thinks, half the equation solved—I still feel it.
Do you?
A question, whispered but jarringly present: “Why did you come here?” Barely a sound.
By the rules of the game, Artemy could pretend to be asleep. Instead he mutters, “To settle some things.”
Dankovsky twists, face half-facing the ceiling momentarily. Artemy can see his eyelashes like this.
“The Pest—it is gone?”
“It’s gone.”
“Are you—” A moment of hesitation. “Are you sure?”
Artemy studies his profile. Nose, lips, hair. I came here to tell you, I don’t think I ever will be certain of any of it. I think I need your presence, to ground me in remembering what I know has happened. I need you—
“I’m sure,” Artemy says, not quite certain of what he is speaking about.
Dankovsky turns away, curling in on himself again.
Even further away. Unbearably so.
“Good.” Then, as if to himself, “Thank God.”
For a moment, Artemy keeps watching the tense shape of his body. He thinks idly of the odd tenuous relationship Daniil mentioned having with religion, of the half-discussed foundations of Thanatica and the pull of the miracle of the Polyhedron. He’d been invested, surprisingly so, in Boddho, in what became of Clara, when they took to writing. It’s not so surprising anymore, Artemy thinks, his desperate looking into the fossils a miracle had left behind.
“Goodnight, nookherni,” he says at last, quiet, not certain if Dankovsky is awake.
He is tired but alert. The newly affirmed ache inside him has changed, accommodating the new shape of wanting. Something letters couldn’t settle but physicality can: a certainty that he misses more than an idea. Right now, he could reach out and trace Dankovsky’s elbow, his bicep, the hollow of his neck and ear. He could bury his face in his neck and breathe in. Artemy shuts his eyes again, thinking of the ticking clock, the train set to leave in two mornings’ time, and the practice with Stakh left in charge, too blunt and rough round the edges to manage the patients alone. Mishka at breakfast, unhappy with disturbed routine, asking Lara if he’ll ever come back. I’m coming back, Artemy thinks to her. I was always going to come back.
Daniil’s voice rings out in his head: But I had to see it … with my own eyes. One last time.
He almost shudders. We are alike, he thinks. Tomorrow, I will—
The window rattles, a slither of cold wind crawling over the room, stealing even under the covers. Next to him, Daniil tenses, drawing in his shoulders, then coughs. He seems to fight it, stifling the sound and staying the involuntary movement of his body, as not to wake Artemy from his presumed sleep.
In sudden harsh clarity, Artemy sees him on the bed in the Stone Yard, delirious with fever, spine arching in futile fight for breath. Sticky’s tremulous voice, Will the Bachelor die? And Artemy replying, No. He wasn’t certain, then, either.
The memory burns, sobering. Daniil coughs again, a spasm across the body.
Enough, Artemy thinks. He reaches and draws an arm around him.
Daniil’s breath hitches. “You shouldn’t,” he chokes out. “Frankly, I don’t know if this isn’t—contagious.”
Artemy presses a hand to the centre of his chest, steadying. Under the touch, Dankovsky’s heart has picked up a quicker pace.
“Shut it,” he mutters, to the skin on the back of his neck. Dankovsky shivers.
“Breathe,” Artemy instructs, voice low, “I’ve got you.”
And, slowly, Daniil unstrings in his hold, letting himself lean back into it. As he yields to sleep, his breathing evens out.
Artemy holds on.
***
He wakes too early, the disorienting haze of sleep still thick upon his mind.
Slitting his eyes open, he maps out the dim contours of the room, the sheen of light from the window and the frame of the bed, finally—the cold absence next to him. A brief flash of fear, that he’s been deceived—were you ever really here? But just then, he finds the dim shape of Dankovsky close still, sat on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands.
Too sleep-heavy to do anything subtler, he reaches out, blindly. His fingers stumble upon Daniil’s leg.
He turns, abruptly. His face, though vague in the dim light, seems slackened and less cautious than usually, some conflicted emotion in the new tangle of features.
Sluggishly, Artemy reaches further, drawing a small pattern on his knee. He punctuates it with tapping three times with his own knobbly long fingers, before letting his hand splay across the narrow plane of Dankovsky’s thigh, grounding.
Daniil reaches over. Frowning, worry drawing unwelcome creases upon his still-young face, he cards the cold fingers of his ungloved right hand through Artemy’s hair, and Artemy shuts his eyes again, leaning into the touch.
It’s gentle. Knowing.
He has half a thought to gather his strength and pull Dankovsky fully back under the covers, then lie like this, just breathing together, skin to skin.
The thought is never finished, scattered by rhythmically persisting touch.
Artemy sleeps.
***
He wakes again to a blindingly bright morning. The sun is higher now, scattering inside through the windows. Daniil is scratching something on paper at his desk, bundled up in his coat and gloves.
Artemy finds both their blankets drawn around himself. “Aren’t you cold out there,” he croaks out.
Daniil twitches. He turns to look at him, briefly, before turning sharply away. “Ah. Good morning.” His words are strangely stilted, posture rigid again.
“Morning. Did you sleep well?” Artemy asks, sitting up and rolling his stiffened shoulders, trying to stretch the joints.
A moment of silence, the nib of Daniil’s pen pausing over the paper.
Then, stymied, “Yes, thank you.” He still doesn’t turn.
Slowly, Artemy puts on his unlaced boots, gets up from the cot and walks across the room, draft across his ankles, dragging the blanket with himself. He approaches the brasier and pokes at the dimming coal inside.
Misery and hell, he thinks. He straightens. “Do you have any milk? Tea?” he asks. “I’ll make us breakfast, if you tell me where to—”
“Really, there’s no need to keep up this farce,” says Dankovsky, voice unnervingly clear.
When Artemy looks at him, he is sitting with his hands fisted on the table, eyes fixed upon the wood.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have to pretend,” Daniil says, and finally turns to look at him. His face is deathly pale, eyes glazed with fever again. “That you don’t see this. You were never supposed to see this, but here you are—” He cuts off.
“This?”
“This,” Dankovsky says, gesturing jerkily, angrily, around them. “The way I am, this … last stage of decay … I didn’t want it like this. I never wanted you to—” he cuts off, struggling for breath. “To see me like this.”
Artemy thinks, ungainly, of all the threads he needs pulled together in order to coherently say what he’s been meaning to, and finds himself too scattered to do it in any concise manner. Carefully, he sets the metal poker down.
“When I—” he hesitates. “When I came in, I saw your letter on the desk,” he begins, and instantly regrets it, as Daniil flinches as if he were struck.
He gets up from his desk and strides away, then turns in place, agitated. Hands linked behind him, breathing ragged, he stops in front of the desk again.
“Of course you did,” he says curtly, with another grimace of a smile. “No, no—don’t worry! It’s only fitting that you saw it.”
Artemy draws the blanket around himself again. It’s cold, so cold. He wants to pull Daniil back close and wrap them both up, maybe get them back in bed.
“I’m sorry,” he says instead, quietly. “I should not have looked, I just …. saw my name.”
There’s a moment of silence. Daniil stands completely still, outlined with the bright window. At length, he shakes his head. “My own fault, leaving them like that.”
Artemy steps forward again. “Oynon, I came uninvited into your house.”
Dankovsky laughs, but it sounds choked, more a sound of distress than anything else. “My house…!” he exclaims. Then he picks up, haltingly, “Perhaps I am not being truthful, after all. Perhaps I did want you to come and see this, and have pity over me. Out of some pathetic …”
He breaks off, and turns abruptly. “I am not making sense,” he says, almost smiling. “Forgive me. I wanted to see you. Of course I wanted to see you. And I don’t know what I hoped for more—that you’d come or that you wouldn’t.”
There’s a pause.
“I don’t understand,” Artemy says, stepping yet closer, towards him. Slowly, as not to startle a skittish animal, still dragging the blankets with him like a shroud. “What are you so horrified with? You’ve seen me at much lower. I have seen you.”
“It had a justification, then.”
“Justification?” He shakes his head. “You don’t need to justify sickness or misfortune.”
“What, then?” Dankovsky demands, voice harsher. He is close now, touch-distance. “You’ll absolve me? Do I get your blessing?”
Artemy blinks, drawing to a halt beside him. “You want it from me?”
Dankovsky shuts his eyes. His face is strained, as though he is in pain, both hands gripping the counter. Artemy thinks, briefly, of other ways of solving this, conveying somehow—beyond words.
“You must know by now,” Dankovsky says, stiffly. “What I want from you is much worse than that.”
There’s a pause.
“Worse,” Artemy echoes. “I see.”
Dankovsky almost flinches, but holds himself still. “Do you,” he grits out.
And Artemy hesitates. Well, there it is, comes the thought, though it is neither striking nor elating. The revelation is bitter as much as it is sweet, and Artemy knows better than to consider it anything but fragile.
Careful, he thinks.
“You haven’t said,” he then says, slowly, “anything to me that I wouldn’t say to you.”
Daniil’s reply is so incongruous he almost misses it. “Perhaps not yet. But I would have.”
Artemy inhales. “Daniil, I came here.”
Daniil inhales sharply at his own name, as though it hurts to hear it. In the pale morning light, his skin is almost greyish, paper-thin. If Artemy reached out, he could trace the sunken shape of his cheek, the small scar of a cut across it.
“Yes, you came,” he says at length, scarcely over a whisper. “You’ve seen—the state of me. Veni, vidi, vici—again, there’s really nothing to say.”
There’s a pause. Artemy draws in a breath. “I won’t say it, then.”
At that, Dankovsky turns to look at him, light catching in the iris of his eye.
Slowly, Artemy reaches for his right hand, unclenching it from the edge of the desk. Stubbornly and deftly, he undoes the button and does away with the worn leather, peeling off the glove. The hand underneath is pale and cold, skin cracked open and blistered from enduring frost.
“What are you—” Dankovsky’s voice trails off, as if he’s afraid to finish the question. His left hand convulses on the desk.
Undeterred, Artemy holds his hand carefully. First he pries the fingers open, as if to examine. Strokes down the bones of it, then, phalanges and down to the ulna, thumb tracing along the blue-branching cephalic vein in the wrist. He can hear Daniil breathe audibly, with effort, and can feel his pulse under his touch.
At last, breathing in slowly, he closes his hand and brings it to his lips, pressing a kiss to the knuckles.
“Oh,” Daniil’s voice, almost faraway.
He sounds shaken.
At length, Artemy looks up at him. The Bachelor’s face is tight with a new emotion. He swallows. Then, his fingers twitch, hand withdrawing—only to clumsily reach and cradle Artemy’s face instead. His touch is cold but unexpectedly delicate.
“You, too, then?” Daniil whispers, voice too quiet to carry even disbelief.
Artemy stares him in the eyes. “What did you think, tenegh,” he mutters.
As though despite himself, Dankovsky looks down, abashed. Gives a small laugh. Then he moves, still touching Artemy’s face.
“Well,” he says under his breath, eyes half-lidded as he leans in, looking somewhere lower, at Artemy’s mouth, and—
Against the wish of every inch of him, Artemy leans back. “No.”
Dankovsky stills.
He gives another laugh—strained now—and he leans stiffly away, mirroring. His breathing sounds strained again, rattling.
He says, “I’d say you give mixed signals, dear friend—but maybe I’ve simply misinterpreted.”
Artemy shakes his head, taking hold of Dankovsky’s wrist again, and tugging him back close. He tenses at the touch, clearly nonplussed—by the gesture or sudden closeness. Unfazed, Artemy rubs his hands up and down his arms, warming him.
“First, oynon, we have to deal with your consumption,” Artemy says.
Daniil blinks, clearly taken aback. “Consumption?” he repeats, incredulous. “Oh, hardly. It’s—it’s the wretched cold.”
He coughs, as if on cue, the body remembering itself and breaking his stupor. Dutifully, he turns away from Artemy, pressing the gloved left hand to his mouth.
“Always worse in the morning,” he chokes out, eyes watering.
Artemy nods, planting one hand more firmly Dankovsky’s shoulder.
“Mm,” he muses. “A little antibiotic tincture, Zürkh, and you’ll be right as rain.”
Daniil snorts, giving him a sideways look. His eyes are watery and red again, but there’s still something new and uncertain in them. “Don’t tell me you brought it with you, mind reader.”
“No,” Artemy says. “But I will.” He draws a breath, steeling himself. “Or I won’t have to.”
Daniil scoffs, fixing his coat tighter around himself. He picks up the glove Artemy discarded and tries to work it back on. Artemy notes his hands are shaking. “Will you post it for me?” he asks, with another brittle laugh, “Along with one of the letters—”
“Not quite,” Artemy says, “what I had in mind.”
Daniil is, now, desperately not looking at him. “No?” he says, airy. “Then—”
Artemy talks over him, “You seem to be under the impression, Bachelor, that I’m going to leave you be as you are right now,” he says. “You’re not quite so lucky.”
Daniil’s strained, slow breathing. “No?” he repeats, incongruous.
Artemy nods. “I want you to come with me.”
“No,” Dankovsky says.
“Yes. This?” Artemy gestures at the room, at the desk. “This is no life, oynon. Especially not for you.”
Dankovsky sighs.
“Say I do,” he says weakly, smiling again. It’s crooked, sardonic. “Say I do go with you. Where shall I live, then? What shall I do?”
“I have a house,” Artemy says bluntly. “There’s space for you there, as long as you need it. And don’t you worry, emshen, there’s work. You’ll work as much as you want to—hell, you can consider this a business offer, if you want to.”
Dankovsky laughs, a touch hysterically. “Business—oh, how very romantic. Chivalrous, even … I’m not an orphan in need of adopting, thank you very much.”
Artemy stares at him. “There’s no shame in needing help, oynon, but I don’t think you’re ready to accept that. Accept, then, that there’s no shame in accepting it.”
Dankovsky doesn’t answer. His eyes are glazing over, distant now. He seems, suddenly, very far away, despite his closeness.
On impulse, Artemy adds, “You don’t have to come forever.”
That gets him the attention of Daniil’s dark eyes.
“You’ll come back here,” Artemy says. “If you want to. But you have to get well first. You owe me—consider it my payback. Get better.”
Something passes through Daniil’s face like a convulsion. “God, do even you hear yourself?” he whispers. “Artemy. I can’t ask this of you. Even I’m not that—”
And this is the first time you’ve spoken my name.
He says, “You’re not the one asking.”
There’s a silence.
“Come with me,” Artemy says. “Think of it at least.”
Daniil is staring out of the window.
“I’ll come back,” he presses. He's careful not to sound like he is begging. “And I’ll ask you again.”
Still without looking, Daniil raises his shaking hands to his mouth, lighting a cigarette. Distant and unreadable now, only half present. He mutters, “Very well, then.”
Artemy wants to hold on to him, reel him back in. He swallows down the rising panic instead and moves to the bed, reaching for his overgarments.
“This time on Wednesday.”
No answer.
He considers kissing Dankovsky’s hand again, his cheek or the crown of his head—a memento. Anything. He touches his own forehead instead, as if to tip his hat.
And leaves into the frosty morning.
***
On Wednesday, coming back, odd thoughts crowd Artemy’s head: that he’ll find the apartment empty, a letter left behind; that he won’t find the tenement at all, having it be a mere figment of imagination after all. Would that be so strange? Another half-prophetic dream, a tendril of illusion stretching from the plague, letting him settle matters that were never to be settled at all. He’s dreamt about Dankovsky before, versions of their comings and goings, intercepting in strange ways that never quite happened at all. In a way, it’s part of what kept him so drawn to the Bachelor and their correspondence, the thrum of mutual memory and awareness. Sometimes he cannot stand it, the particular type of loneliness he carries that has to do only with knowledge, one that cannot be shared unless it has been lived; with the abundance of it. Things beyond out mundane perception, Daniil had once said. Perhaps that’s all it was, Artemy thinks, walking in the snow, just another cracked dream escaped from the dying Polyhedron and the dying Earth, bringing me you in its wake. Pawns off the chessboard, still reaching across it to each other. Foolish.
I should’ve let you kiss me.
***
When he steps across the threshold, bringing in a dusting of snow, his heart steadies in initial relief.
He finds Daniil as he’s left him. The bed is unmade, covers in disarray, same ones that Artemy had slept under.
He looks even worse for wear, like he hasn’t slept, or haven’t sheltered himself enough from the cold, making his fever worse. His clothes are rumpled, a shadow of stubble on his face.
“Artemy,” he says, too loud, standing abruptly. He catches himself, and tries to gather his composure, but his body seems beyond his control, eyes wild and burning.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” he says at last. “Wasn’t sure I hadn’t … dreamt you.”
As Artemy walks closer to him, wordlessly, he steps up, too.
“You see,” Daniil says, glass-eyed and whispering, his ungloved reddened hands reaching for the lapels of Artemy’s coat, “sometimes I think I am still trapped in a—”
“Fever dream. I know.” Artemy touches his forehead once more, and this time Daniil’s eyes fall closed at the touch near-instantly, his mouth parting. “Are you feverish still?”
Daniil shivers. “No. Yes. Perhaps. I can’t tell.”
Artemy tries to keep the touch from turning into a caress, his hand from straying lower as he withdraws it, with all his might. There will be time, for this, later, if all goes well. There will be time for—
Daniil turns his head to chase the touch, grasping Artemy hand as in some longing or desperation and leaning into it. Artemy’s movement follows on instinct, hand cradling his face, thumb touching Dankovsky’s chapped lips. It feels like the strangest irony, tracing the kiss he’s denied them both with his fingertips.
“Have you made up your mind?” Artemy asks. “My proposition—”
Dankovsky’s glassy eyes open. “I wasn’t sure I haven’t dreamt that, either.”
Artemy wants to answer, but he’s interrupted with the unmistakable clatter of footsteps on the staircase.
“Expecting more unexpected guests, oynon?” Artemy mutters. He turns, hand leaving the Bachelor’s face, bracing himself for the possibility of confrontation.
“I don’t—” Daniil begins, uncertainly.
Before he is through with the sentence, the door opens with a whine, and the shopkeep from the pharmacy—a small elderly woman, keen-faced and shrivelled like a prune—storms into the quarters with vindictive eyes.
“Enough dawdling, Mister,” she thunders. “Rent has been due for two weeks—pay up now, you wretched street urchin, or say goodbye to—” she trails off, unsettled, taking note of Artemy: tall and intimidating, wearing both his woollen winter coat and what Lara laughingly calls his Mars disposition.
“Good morning,” Artemy says brightly, voice level.
Behind him, he hears Daniil scramble towards the desk, fishing out money with shaking hands. He goes forward, overtaking Artemy, and thrusts it at the woman. “There, there!” he says. “Lizaveta Ivanovna, there it is! All I have, you wretched woman! It’s enough, it must be. I’ll have more in a fortnight, after I’m paid again—”
“It’s not enough to cover the interest,” she says, “and next time, I won’t—”
“There will not be a next time,” Artemy interjects, firmly.
There’s a silence. The woman eyes him, then bristles. “You’ll vouch for him, then? Who are you, anyway—”
“Artemy Burakh. I’m a doctor,” Artemy says evenly. “A surgeon.”
“Yes, yes,” she says with barely disguised contempt. “A doctor! Just as much as he is, I’m sure, dragging in disease and filth. Next month, I won’t have this happen, and if I don’t see the rest of the—”
It’s as if something inside him has fallen finally into place, inevitably, spurred by either impatience or the sheer absurdity of the arrangement. He makes a decision, as the only person currently in power to make it, and he makes it with a strong conviction it is the only one he can make.
“As I said,” Artemy says, louder, “there won’t be a next time. Bachelor Dankovsky will not be staying here anywhere near that long,” he says.
Behind him, he can hear Daniil’s breath hitch. When Artemy turns to face him, Dankovsky's eyes search his face desperately.
“I came here to offer him a job,” Artemy goes on, unblinking, “at my clinic out of the city. I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d want to work with me, anyone else who’s opinion I’d want to know more, to agree on … and, more often than not, to dispute. And I think we both know what his answer will be.”
For a long moment, there’s silence. Then, suddenly and strikingly, Daniil smiles.
It’s looks odd on him, genuine, making him seem younger somehow with the dimples it brings out in his thin face. Artemy can’t help but mirror it.
“That’s right,” Dankovsky says. “That’s right. I won’t be staying here.”
Lizaveta Ivanovna counts the money, casts a long, calculating look at Artemy, then withdraws, as abruptly as she’s entered.
And they are left alone.
“It’s settled, then,” Artemy says, breaking the silence. He turns to face Daniil, who isn’t looking at him, eyes fixed on the lapel of his coat instead. “Let us pack you up, nookherni, before the train sets out in the morning. There’s a long way ahead of us.”
Daniil doesn’t move, but the corner of his mouth quirks up, lightly. “Well played. Very well played. Did you get her to come up here, as well? It’s all quite—”
He bursts out laughing. “I’m not so Machiavellian, Daniil.”
At that, Daniil finally looks up. Up close like this, he looks so tired, exhausted with illness. But there is clarity in his eyes, and sudden, burning hope.
He says, “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure.”
***
The morning is cold and clear.
Dankovsky fastens the brooch on his ascot and smooths out the cuffs of his coat.
“There he is,” Artemy says. “The dandy from the capital.”
Dankovsky bows to him foppishly. Then he reaches for his carpet bag with one hand, a suitcase with another.
“On we go, then,” he says, “Per aspera ad Gorkhon.”
***
They get to the Yaroslavsky station in the cold mist, struggling with the many items of Artemy’s luggage. Daniil’s cough marks the way, harsher out of his den somehow, in the bitingly cold Moscow air.
“Perhaps you were right—perhaps this is consumption,” he rasps out, scowling back at other travellers who seem put off by his presence. In a strange way, his public hostility is almost soothing to watch—reminiscent of his past self Artemy used to consider insufferable.
“Somehow I doubt it, with your fondness of vaccines. Breathe slowly,” Artemy tells him, putting a firm hand to the small of his back to usher him forward. “And hold on. In three days, we’ll be in Gorkhon, and I’ll treat you properly.”
As they step onto the train, Daniil bats away his helping hand. “No, no, away with you,” he says, waving off the frowning Artemy. “Oh, don’t you look at me like this! Stay away, lest you were right and you—catch it.” He coughs again, still making his vague gesture meant probably to repel, turning out like a faint parody of the royal wave.
Quite nonsensically, Artemy feels he wants to be close to him more than ever now. “Too late for that,” he says meekly. “By now, I’ve probably already caught it.”
But Daniil insists they take cots at opposite ends of their compartment, though he lets Artemy wrap him up in a blanket and fetch him tea from the samovar.
In the lingering dimming hours after the train’s left Moscow far behind, Artemy recounts everything he is taking with him, both to keep them occupied, and to keep himself from wishing he could warm up Dankovsky who sits across from him, half-reclined, stiff and hunched in his many layers.
“… And that’s all for Andrey. He’s supposed to pick, then, which wine he’ll keep importing … to the bar, supposedly. For Yulia, the essay … Goddard’s or something, a theorem of Incompleteness.”
“Gödel’s. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.”
Artemy pauses, sceptical, “What, you keep up with mathematics now?”
“…No. I keep up with the press.” Impatient gesture. “Go on.”
“Well, for the children … pralines for Taya and the kids, they wanted pastila and ptichye moloko … this wooden toy for Murky, I picked it myself … reminded me of her weird little dolls. My old textbooks and equipment for Sticky. They live with me now, you see—”
Daniil blinks, drowsy, on the brink of sleep. “What, all of them?”
“No ... just two, I told you.” He hesitates. “Though Notkin comes by often.”
“Just two,” Daniil mutters, echoing. Then, quite indistinctly, he adds, “And a third dependant now.”
Artemy laughs. “I was gonna bring candy from the Capital, I’ll bring a dandy.”
Dankovsky snorts, turning his face into the collar of his coat, and looking out of the window. “Terrible.”
Overtaking Dankovsky’s ridiculous no-closeness rule, Artemy kicks lightly at his neatly crossed ankles, “No, they’ll be happy,” he counters. “Well, actually, Sticky … hold on. He wrote you a letter. I almost forgot …”
He searches his pockets, then hands Daniil the creased and rumpled letter.
He reads it carefully, twice, before folding it precisely and hiding in his coat. He looks oddly moved.
***
In Irkutsk, they switch to the freight train.
It is too cold for Daniil who keeps coughing and shivering, then cursing loudly, his teeth rattling. Ignoring his protests, Artemy wraps him in the blankets, then holds him through the most of it.
“You’ll catch it,” Dankovsky says, in weak discontent. “You idiot, I tell you you’ll catch it.”
“If it really is contagious, I probably already have it, emshen,” Artemy tells him patiently. “Quit worrying, it can’t be worse than the Sand Pest. And worst comes to worst, there’s always Stakh.”
Dankovsky scoffs, fixing his ascot around his mouth anyway.
He drifts off soon after, head resting against Artemy’s collarbone.
***
Artemy dozes when the train rolls into Gorkhon.
Daniil rouses him from sleep with hoarse words and a weak shake to his shoulder. He’s stayed huddled close to him, and looks exhausted but present of mind.
Artemy gathers himself from the cot and walks up to the entrance, looking out as the train gradually slows.
There are people on the station, both adults and children, waiting for the food supplies and shipments. He recognises Sticky and Murky hovering close to someone who might be Lara.
Smiling wide, Artemy swings himself outside the train and waves. Then he jumps down to the grass by the railway, opening his arms to catch the running children into an embrace.
“You’re back,” Murky mutters, in her perpetually-sullen voice, belied by the way she wraps her arms, tightly, around his neck.
He kisses the top of her head. “I told you I would.”
“Yeah.”
Sticky, recovering from the inherent embarrassment of displaying emotion, kicks at a stone. “Did you bring books?” he asks casually.
Artemy straightens from his crouch, picking up Mishka on the way. “Yes. And I brought something more,” he says, turning to look at the car.
As if on cue, Daniil steps out, wavering like a moth forced into sunlight.
He can barely find his bearings before Sticky shouts, “The Bachelor!” and flings himself towards him, arms wrapping around the startled Daniil’s middle.
“Enough of that, get away from him,” Artemy says, peeling him off. “The Bachelor’s ill, no hugs allowed.”
“Can’t be worse than the Pest,” Sticky says dismissively, bizarrely echoing Artemy.
Daniil remains oddly quiet, as though overwhelmed with something. Uncertainly, he pats Sticky’s fair hair.
Artemy thinks back, once again, to the way they parted after the plague—the children had hugged him then as well, alongside Artemy’s parting embrace. He remembers the conflicted expression of Daniil’s eyes, some grim dejection in them Artemy didn’t understand, as if he was facing a false direction, a dead end, wilfully and out of some sense of inevitability.
Well, he understands, now. Holding on to Mishka, he wraps an arm around Dankovsky’s shoulders to usher him forward.
***
The house is changed. Warmer, fuller, rid of most of the dreary old furniture and dark curtains Isidor’s left behind.
The room they find themselves in is one he’s never spent much time in, before or after his departure.
“It used to belong to my brother. It will be yours now,” Artemy says, pouring the Zürkh into a vial. “My room is just down the corridor.” He shakes the vial gingerly, not specifying the reason for sharing this particular tidbit of information. “Alright. Drink up.”
Giving him an unimpressed look as he holds the vial between two fingers, Dankovsky does.
And instantly winces, his entire face scrunching up in disgust as the back of his hand goes to his mouth. “Oh,” he says, muffled, “oh, Lord, this is foul. What did you put in it—or dare I even ask?”
“Shush. You’re worse than Murky,” Artemy mutters, screwing the rest of the bottle back tight. “She took the panacea without fussing.”
“She eats bugs,” Daniil retorts. “And frankly, I detest the implication that—”
“Alright, that’s enough,” Artemy cuts him off. “To bed, now.”
Dankovsky throws him a dark look, undermined with how drowsy he looks, and how he stumbles and sways on the way to the bed. Artemy takes him by the elbow, grinning.
“Is this how you think this will be?” Daniil demands, words slurred a little. “You, bossing me around? No, no, dear friend, not at all. You’ll find it will be quite the opposite—”
“I want to find,” Artemy cuts in, “you in bed right now.”
Dankovsky sends him another look, a strange expression as though he wants to say something but holds off, or perhaps can’t find the words in his exhaustion. He gets into bed instead, and lets Artemy pull the covers over him.
“You’ll sleep, now,” Artemy says. “Long and deep. And hopefully wake up a little better off.”
“And you?” Daniil demands, that expression again like he is saying something meant as challenging. Artemy brushes the hair out of his eyes.
“I’ll be just down the corridor,” he says. “Sleep now, kheerken.”
Daniil’s mouth opens, as if to say something, and his eyes fall shut. “Quite right,” he sighs. “I …”
He drifts off.
***
And he does get better, slowly, over the course of the next days, gaining some energy and losing first the cough, then the rattling wheeze of his breath between the long-winded anecdotes he takes to sharing at breakfast and supper, dawdling past the time the children go to bed, till they are left with one of Andrey’s wine bottles and the dim light of the candles.
Like now, on a Tuesday evening, as he sits tilting his glass in one hand and tracing the fingers of the other across the budget of the clinic spread in front of him, a light flush on his face brought on by alcohol and quite different from the fevered look he’d had at the Capital.
So,
“Come on,” says Artemy at last, interrupting him, wiping his hands on the washcloth.
Daniil blinks, broken out of his half-muttered soliloquy. “Where to?” he asks. “Do we have a new curfew? Am I included in the one for the children? Because—”
“Time for a patient checkup,” Artemy says, and gestures at the door in false cordiality.
Giving him a suspicious look of narrowed eyes, Daniil gets up and follows.
***
Inside Isidor’s medical room, Artemy points to the examination table. Daniil raises his eyebrows but perches himself at the edge of it, quite nonchalantly for a patient, arms crossed and head cocked to one side.
Sighing, Artemy stands in front of him. “Take off your clothes,” he says.
Another raised eyebrow. “Oh?”
Artemy gives him a look, and Daniil smirks. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll try to behave.”
Picking at the sharp edge of his brooch first, and setting it aside, he starts unwinding his ascot with infuriating, slow precision.
“You must be happy, though,” he says, voice dropping to a murmur, “to see me in good form again. No, doctor?”
Quite despite himself—despite his firm dedication to both the present task and his modus operandi in the past days—Artemy can feel a warm flush rise in his face. He sets his jaw, nettled, unsettled with Dankovsky’s voice and the vague implication in it, like he knows more than he should.
Like he knows that—
“You talk too much,” Artemy says, gruffly.
To his irritation, Dankovsky laughs. He tilts his head again, undoing the top buttons of his shirt now. “Ah, well—how did you put it, back then?” he asks, smiling sweetly. “Oh, right. Familiarity breeds fondness.”
Damn you, Artemy thinks, gritting his teeth and withstanding Dankovsky’s eyes unflinchingly.
And in such manner—meticulous, deliberate, infuriatingly slow but never quite dawdling—the Bachelor strips out of his vest and shirt, layer by layer.
God, Artemy thinks, why am I doing this to myself.
Trying to clear his head and focus, he gets out the stethoscope, puts a hand to Dankovsky’s chest and listens to his lungs and heart.
“Inhale. Deeply,” he instructs him, and watches the movement of Daniil’s ribs under the pale skin. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Mm.” He does not meet his eyes. “Cough, now.”
“Ah, so conscientious—”
“Shh,” Artemy says, raising a finger to his lips. Daniil obediently purses his mouth, but he seems to be straining not to smile. It’s a little—
Contagious, Artemy thinks. Then forces himself to focus.
“Very well,” he says, eventually, and lowers the stethoscope.
He is acutely aware, by now, of every point of contact where his hand meets Daniil’s warm skin, of every movement of his body underneath the touch.
“What’s the diagnosis?” Dankovsky asks, and Artemy feels the question in his fingertips. “Will the patient live?”
Artemy draws in a breath, suddenly caught up in some overwhelming indecision. Without looking up, he says, “He will.”
Daniil reaches up to his own chest, hand ghosting over Artemy’s where it rests atop his heart. It’s light, unassuming, an odd contradiction to both his disorienting coyness earlier and his rigid demeanour at the Capital. Chest suddenly tight, Artemy bows his head. He wants to bury his face in Daniil’s neck and hide it.
He wants—
And Dankovsky must sense it, somehow. His other hand moves up to cradle the back of Artemy’s head and pull him closer.
He gives in, forehead falling to rest on Dankovsky’s collarbone. He is disoriented with the warmth of his body, the closeness and physicality of it. The scent of his skin.
“Will you let me, now?” Daniil mutters, into his ear.
Artemy opens his eyes, leaning away just enough to look into his face, “Let you?”
But Daniil says nothing more, only tilts Artemy’s head up by the chin and kisses him on the mouth, warm and deep. His hands move, steadier now, and determined, to cradle both sides of his face, thumbs tracing the jut of his cheekbones. Warmth blooming inside him, Artemy tilts his body toward him. His hips slot in place between Dankovsky’s parted thighs, his own hands mapping out his chest, his ribs, and shoulder blades. Daniil leans closer, forward, draws an arm around his neck, pressing them close without ever breaking for air. Artemy can feel his heartbeat, loud and thrumming, in his own body.
Then, “Do this,” Daniil murmurs, kindly elucidating, as he tilts his head to kiss at Artemy’s jaw.
“Do with me,” Artemy says, “what you want.”
Then he adds, “Your move.”