Work Text:
permit me the present tense
He slots himself into the compartment’s corner, limbs to wooden wall, folded at the joints as to take up as scant a space as possible on the dirty floor. Outside, the fields glide by like a large, undulating animal, swathes of its grassland fur jagged with moonlight’s incisions, whitened with thickening snow.
When he rests his forehead on the window, the glass burns. It is a cold burning, paradoxical, but he has become a paradoxical man.
It’s night. Night had commenced little after three o’clock and stretched, hungry, across its usual span towards a later and later morning, strangling a wintry silence out of the last dregs of autumn’s decay.
He does not remember not being cold. Not in a while. It seems that he scarcely remembers the simplicity of daylight. Boarded the train in the evening, fresh out of the cavern of his dingy hideout lodgings, slept through the day with the curtains pulled shut. Nocturnal man.
Last train out of Moscow. Then: nothing else. Then winter.
He tightens his gloved fingers on his own knee. A sour taste in his mouth, a rigid leftover wakefulness from coffee hoarded since Irkutsk before the Rubicon was crossed in earnest. And hunger. He does not remember when he had eaten last. He does not remember what. But in truth, the hunger started sometime during the plague, and never quite let up after.
Strange man; estranged from life. Lonesome.
It is snowing as Dankovsky walks into the Town-on-Gorkhon again. He’s walked this path before, back then well-trodden and bright, with the crystalline compass of the Polyhedron jutting, curved, into the sky. Now, nothing can be made out beyond the thickening onslaught of snow, regardless of the Tower’s hypothetical existence. He doesn’t let himself dwell on it too long: this absence of clear memory. It exists. It doesn’t. It exists. It doesn’t. And it is pointless regardless. He loses track even of counting his own steps.
But the path itself remembers him. Something guides his steps, and as the blizzard presses on, unyielding, his legs dutifully carry him.
And then, there it is: Burakh’s house, improbably solitary, like a hand opened into the Steppe.
His muscles grow weak and inflexible. A stiffness in the bones, arthritic, ungainly; rendering his walk stooping and rickety. He is, now, more Plague omen than man, more skeleton than body under the shabby plumage of his ragged coat.
It is still night.
He makes for the door, his footsteps dragging in the snow. The muscle inside his chest thuds weakly, arrhythmically, pitifully aroused by the perceived closeness of something in the way of comfort.
He remembers Burakh, at least. Remembers the essence of him, and the finer minutiae that by all logic he should not: the cut of his jib, pitch of voice, sleeping habits. But then—the Haruspex, too, came out of the plague. And in the mottled maze of Dankovsky’s mind, the plague nests at the centre.
Birdies, birdies…
It is still night—and suddenly its interminable density frightens him. There is no twyre to be seen under the snow, no shape of the Kin settlements, only an endless stretch of the same inky and white-blotted absence: of stars? of the Tower?
Of anything that would answer.
Would that he could remember—that he could be certain of something—
He finds himself unmoving, the bite of frost becoming something else on his skin: a strange, numbing sweetness. Drowsy, it plucks at his outer edges of him as though to pick apart the doll’s stitching and coax him down to rest, a dome of snow growing over his body like mould, entombing.
I didn’t come here to die, Daniil lies to himself, one more time.
And still, he keeps dying. His head is growing heavy. His eyelashes are stuck together with ice.
After everything, he had only had one dream: recurring and—with time—obscuring other memories, painted over them like a layer of plague grime that can’t be scrubbed off.
Take heart.
The pulsing, still-red organ glistening in his hand as he holds it out towards the Tragedians, their expressionless faces all turning towards him in measuring silence.
Like a stage direction: Take heart.
The light comes like a clean cut of a blade, splitting the world in twain: that which is stranded in the night, and that which has been touched.
“…Dankovsky? Is that you?”
Daniil’s eyes try to open. He hovers on the threshold of the two worlds: for a moment, the light is merely blinding, adding confusion to his other senses registering belated sounds of hinges, footsteps, human breath.
Someone is kneeling in front of him. “Shudkher. It is you. What are you—”
No—more than kneeling. Someone is touching him: shaking his arm, shoulder, a hand coming to slap at his rigid jaw. The touch stings, or burns, the marbled nerves confused. His vision darkens once again.
“Daniil—Daniil,” the voice comes again, and his memory strains towards recognition. Yes: that was the destination. “Don’t sleep.”
His eyes open again, the sticky-stitches of ice tearing at the lashes. Artemy’s face is in front of him, outlined with muted light.
“Is it here?” Daniil asks, though barely a sound reaches past the voice box. “Did I make it?”
Burakh sits him down at the kitchen table.
Coming inside had been a slow, embarrassing affair: his limbs had stiffened so severely in the short time spent wasting away outside, he had to be half-dragged up the porch steps. Now he is thawing, peeled out of the snakeskin, feet out of his sodden shoes and clad in Burakh’s woollen socks, the kitchen air burning each revealed sliver of skin under his remaining layers.
A scratchy, threadbare blanket is draped over his shoulders.
Artemy himself wears thick blue wool, and his work trousers. His breath mists up faintly in the kitchen air, belying Dankovsky’s perceived burning.
He looks—not smaller, not in the least, but more contained inside himself. Condensed to the essence of him: a sturdy human body with no need of armour to cover it. Almost awkward, out of his bloodstained butcher’s smock as he leans over the stove to boil water for tea which Daniil did not ask for. Hesitant—as though as unpractised at merely existing as Dankovsky found himself to be.
“How did you even find a way, shudkher,” Burakh is saying, in a mumbling, distracted voice. “In this blizzard—at night—”
I do not know, Daniil thinks. I have long since stopped guessing.
“How did you know,” he asks instead, his voice still cracking, “that I was out there?” At least his tongue seems to be finding its place in his mouth again, pushing sounds into tangible shapes of words instead of failing him.
There is a pause before Artemy replies. “I heard Noukher.”
There’s something dissonant in the reply, but Dankovsky finds himself unable to dissect it. Every attempt to focus culminates in frustration. The electric yellow light swathing the kitchen of Isidor’s house is nauseating in its intensity after the monotone hours spent in the train’s persisting darkness. His eyes, too, are burning.
“Could you,” Daniil rasps out, “turn off the light.”
Then, when Artemy does not move, “Please.”
After what seems like a moment of hesitation, Burakh does. He disappears from Daniil’s view, then, momentarily—and comes back cradling something in his large hands as one would cradle a small animal. But when he comes closer, it proves to be only the flame of a simple wax candle.
Burakh sets it down at the top of the table.
The flame wavers and bends, casting a dim trembling glow over the scant perimeter of the room’s nucleus. The imprecision of it soothes Dankovsky’s strained eyes. Part of the sinus pressure on his head relents.
He blinks, managing to focus at last. Seen like this, in detail, Artemy’s face seems carved out of darkness like something excavated. A relict of past life.
Dankovsky shivers.
Artemy curses to himself, moving out of his seat again. A blink—then a second blanket is piled atop the first, weighing the man underneath down like an anchor.
“Do you feel warmer yet?” Artemy asks.
“No,” Daniil croaks out. And then he reaches.
They are both surprised, it seems, when the leather of his glove collides with the solid, yielding shape of the other man’s cheek.
A stilted moment passes, with Artemy’s open eyes simply regarding Dankovsky in anticipation of whatever will follow touch.
“Real, then,” Daniil says, at length. “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”
The Haruspex frowns at the words—and Daniil would have felt the pulling movement of the face’s muscles, were his hand not so numb.
Seemingly reading his mind, Artemy intercepts the exploratory hand and draws it away from his own face, straightening the clenched fingers.
He then peels off the glove. Dankovsky thinks he should feel some offence, at the presumptuous nature of such intrusion; or perhaps even some incredible pain, given how raw strips of skin rip off with the leather, torn from his cracked-open knuckles. But he feels nothing other than merely more burning.
Methodically, Artemy repeats the same with his other hand, then takes them both in his own, holding in place, and pointedly not rubbing.
Silence lasts only a while.
Then Artemy says, “Where the fuck have you been.”
A pause.
“The Capital.”
“Oh, yeah?” There’s something peculiar in Artemy’s voice, at the same time too familiar in its discontent with Daniil’s previous whereabouts and too allowing. “How goes it, then, at the Capital?”
“Oh, you know.” What is undeniably irritating is that Dankovsky still feels not entirely corporeal, but rather like he is hovering over the edges of his own skin, of two minds whether to inhabit it or depart from it. He tries to flex his fingers under the weight of Artemy’s hands, angling for some sort of friction—for pain, even—to tether him back in his body. But it is fruitless. “The usual. Rot and decay.”
Another pause, longer this time. Artemy is staring at their clasped hands upon his own knees. His jaw has tightened. “When did you leave town?”
And there it comes.
“I … can’t remember.” The truth of it is mocking him, delivered so flippantly. But he has scarcely any energy to clothe it in a more acceptable delivery.
Artemy’s hands tighten over his, finally eliciting something like a twinge of discomforted sensation out of Daniil past the dull, ongoing burn. “How did you leave? The train?”
“I can’t remember.”
The flame casts its strange light onto the movement of Artemy’s throat as Daniil watches him from his illusory distance.
“And you took the train here now?”
“… Yes.”
Artemy’s eyes are boring into their hands like Röntgen’s rays. Perhaps that’s what burns. “Do you remember—anything? At all, past the outbreak?”
Sure—dying; on the tenth day. But he says nothing.
The kettle whistles, a sharp keening sound, and startles them both.
“Right,” Artemy says, clearing his throat, and gets up to turn off the stove.
What is strange is that he is, clearly, unsettled. No—what is strange is that he is both unsettled and grimly resigned to it. Perhaps it could be explained with Dankovsky’s unannounced arrival in the middle of a snowstorm or his only marginally thawed deep-rooted inertia—but it is not quite that.
No, it is as though something inside him had been readying itself for the horrible miracle. As though that, in itself, was merely an opening to something yet more difficult.
As Dankovsky thinks, still too slow but his thoughts finally picking up pace, axons straining to fire and carry nerve impulses, Artemy pours the hot water over tea leaves. Covers the resulting concoction with a hand-painted saucer. Places the glass, fit in an age-darkened silver holder, on the table in front of Daniil. Its walls steam up fast.
The flame at the top of the table flickers, skittish from the movement of the Haruspex’s arm as he settles in the chair opposite to Daniil once again.
“I looked for you,” he says after a beat. It sounds strained. “After … everything. There was a wind, for days. Difficult to walk anywhere … or see past it. But I’d go out and look, where I could. I never knew what became of you.”
Pointedly, Dankovsky does not ask: how did it all end? At which ragged edge of my memory that refuses to return to me and grant me peace of mind; refuses to clarify whether I ran from a victor’s mistake or gave myself unto defeat? Which of us fell, Haruspex, and which one was victorious? Did it, in the end, matter?
The absence of memory is wedged inside his chest, displaced from the mind, and he tries to carve it out with the force of his will and the equal and opposite absence of a question.
Artemy lets out a sigh. “I should’ve known it would be the damned train.”
“It’s … all that occurred to me,” Daniil said, truthfully. Of that, at least, he is more or less certain: whenever he pictured an exit, it came to him with the mechanic rattling of that hulking creature of steam and iron, racing down the steppe.
Artemy looks down. At length, he takes Daniil’s hands in his again, squeezes, then lets go. He shifts in his seat, clearly restless. And he says, almost impulsively, “I can’t believe you are here.”
He inhales sharply, as though the words revealed something hidden. Then there’s a dragging noise of a glass pulled across wood, and the glass ends up in front of Daniil. “Have some tea.”
I can’t, Daniil thinks. It’ll burn through my throat.
And his throat, at any rate, is not cooperating. “I don’t know that I am,” is what comes out of it, raspy and needling, “… here.”
But something like resolve has coagulated amid Artemy’s inexplicable restlessness. Firmly, in a voice more suited to parenting than an adult conversation, he says, “Tea, Daniil.”
“I’m not … sure that I exist anymore.”
“And were you sure, before?” Artemy asks, bitingly, with a sudden and unearned impatience. “One hundred percent?”
When Dankovsky looks at him, his light eyes are intense with the same obscure resolve. A fair gristly fuzz lines the right side of his face, two-days-unshaven, ignited by the candlelight. There seems to be a warmth lodged inside him, Daniil thinks, that must burn more than anything else would.
Almost humbled into obedience, he shakily reaches and slides the saucer off the tea glass. Condensation has made its surface warm and slippery, and oh, good, sensation must be returning to him.
Under the watchful eyes of the Haruspex, the Bachelor swallows down his tea. If it has any taste, he can’t discern it. But the burning is merely survivable.
“Very funny,” he says at last, a little thickly. “Yes, I suppose—that is the old problem. Scio me nihil scire. No, Burakh, I was not one hundred percent sure. But I had, at the very least, only half the doubt in the precise contents of my identity.” He trails off, weighing his words. The familiarity of their arrangement is, at last, soothing. Long-awaited. A part of him wants to linger in it, as one would linger in the warmth of a fireplace.
But there is no point delaying the inevitable. “How goes it, you ask? Well, everything ended. Thanatica … burnt.” He pauses. “I find myself stripped clean of purpose.”
Perhaps that is the feeling: the burning that’s plagued him from a moment he can no longer reliably pinpoint. Maybe it was never snow, but simply fire, eating the last vestiges of him raw, cell by cell, in unison with her demise.
Silence follows his words. He could read either sympathy or simply loss out of it. He does not look up to confirm either but sets the tea glass back down and plucks at the silver brooch pinning his ascot in place instead, undoing the clasp. Between the blanket’s wool and the herbs, under the pressure of memories, the burning has changed. Something less-numbness, more-fever. Idly, he wonders if a flush shows on his face.
“Children asleep?” he asks, inconsequential.
Artemy casts him a strange, wary look. But is such a question really so weird, Daniil wonders, or simply too obvious?
“What?” he asks, defensive, loosening the thin red silk from where it strangles. “Don’t play obtuse, Burakh—I know your heart is too soft not to take in an urchin or ten—that boy, at the very least, who played Cerberus at the entrance of your lair and nagged me for medical textbooks. The scrawny little girl, too, what was her name—”
“Mishka.”
“Mishka,” Daniil echoes. His hand falls idle as he reclines in his seat, the rigor mortis of his body giving way at last. “Well, doesn’t that answer my question.”
Artemy watches him with the same guarded expression that suggests as little as it conceals. “I’m sorry, Daniil,” is what he says at last. “About … the Thanatica.” He looks down, worrying at a cuticle. “And the rest of it.”
The despondency ruffles his usually unshaken demeanour of stubborn, virile life that clings to him like a thicker skin, warming even those merely incidentally included in his proximity.
Discomfited, Dankovsky stares down at his own hands, the criss-cross of ragged skin over his knuckles which has by now has remembered to prickle and sting him in an awakening pain. “Do you have anything … stronger than tea, Burakh?”
His eyes collide with Artemy’s gaze. For a moment, they merely measure each other, each almost instinctively defiant in stance. Something in it reminds him of the early days of the outbreak, when Artemy—Burakh—first stood at the threshold of the Stillwater: tall, hunched and deeply sceptical. Offensively sceptical of the very concept of Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky of the Capital’s finest. The memory is clear, grounding. It draws an involuntary smile out of Daniil which loosens the staunch set of Artemy’s expression in turn.
“Ah, hell,” he says. “Yeah, emshen, I do.”
He rises again. What comes out of the cupboards is a familiar unlabelled bottle of dark glass. The sight alone brings out a stinging, half-herbal, half-chemical drag over Dankovsky’s tongue and throat; almost conjures the seediest corner of the Broken Heart out of Artemy’s kitchen.
The first sip only proves memory true.
“Twyrine,” Daniil says, trying to clear his throat of the fire. “Oh, I remember—the first time I got my hands on it, stolen from Andrey and gulped down alone in the Trammel, after—a truly horrific conversation with Yulia Lyuricheva—”
A corner of Artemy’s mouth twitches. “I remember, too. You were raving mad. Something about angels.”
“Aren’t I always raving mad, dear colleague, as far as your judgement is concerned?”
To his surprise—a pleased, well-earned surprise—Artemy does laugh. The sound is a different warmth, gliding down the reawakened nerve endings. Slowly, Daniil lowers his eyes. Twyrine is potent, and fast. But neither this fast, nor this potent.
Careful, the jagged edges of missing memory whisper to him, pointing towards every one of Artemy’s evasive silences. Careful.
“Raving mad and heartless,” Daniil says, quieter. “If the glove fits …” Another mechanical motion of glass to his lips. He swallows it down.
“It doesn’t,” Artemy says curtly. He sounds newly, irrationally, agitated. “You’re neither. And if you were, then by the same logic, I am the killer. Ripper. Worst of the worst.”
Daniil hangs his head. “No, no. Of course not, I know.” Half-to-himself, he muses, “We love you, yargachin.”
He senses—or predicts—the responding tension in Artemy rather than sees it. The Haruspex’s next question comes out even more strained: “How do you know that line?”
“How do I know anything.” He can’t help the reckless, loosened drawl to his words, goading and stoked by twyrine, despite best intentions. Despite deep down wanting nothing more than the improbable softness they offered each other at the worst of it, in the Stillwater’s sanctuary, under cover of night. A paradoxical softness, borne out of spite, out of their presumed rivalry. You can rest here. When have you last slept? Take my bed. Dankovsky leans forward, elbows on his knees, smirking. “How did you know I was out in the snow? There’s no bull out there. There was no sound.”
And in response he sees only Artemy’s frown and ardent eyes, severe and beautiful, given by the fickle light the depth of a Caravaggio. “Tenegh,” he says, “you are insufferable.”
And that is all it takes.
Daniil strikes forward, predatory, clasping a hand to Artemy’s neck to bring him down to a kiss. The wool blanket falls off his shoulders like a discarded Executor’s cloak.
There is a heartbeat of pause—firelight rattled with the force of his movement, breath hitched, the only distance between them filled to the brim by the pulse at the core of Dankovsky’s ribs, still pumping blood through his veins. Then Artemy tilts his head, granting access. It’s open and hungry, claiming back. His hand grasps Dankovsky’s face, strong, and forces it to a better angle. Each point of contact radiates dendrites of warmth, coursing downwards.
They break apart for breath. Artemy goes after him, noses at his nose, exhales low and heavy as he hovers over. “Well, I can work with this.”
“Work, then,” Daniil says, his own mouth never quite sealed back shut before Artemy’s is back on him. Perfectly reactive, an instant full response to Daniil’s precipitating opening. As always, since the beginning.Mere seconds, then, before Artemy stands and lifts him up, hips snug and firm between Daniil’s parted legs, pushing him onto the table. Then down.
The back of his head hits the wood, and he breathes out harshly, chest straining for air, face bracketed between Artemy’s elbows. The Haruspex’s own breath warms the skin of his mouth. Next to their faces, the flame flickers.
A pause, hair’s breadth between them.
“Get on with it, then,” Daniil whispers, and Artemy licks into his mouth again, pressing down.
He hikes a leg up, pressing them closer still, arching up so that his body comes flush with the other body. His skin is warm now, attuned to a different burning, pulse rabbiting under the puncture of Artemy’s teeth at his neck, the rip of the waistcoats’ buttons and cloth to expose willing skin. Artemy’s tongue drags a salt-line down his clavicle; then drags lower down. “Fuck.”
“Language, oynon.”
“I told you,” he pants. “I am not one to—mind my tongue.”
Artemy laughs again, second time now, and it tickles at the hair on Dankovsky’s exposed navel, right above the waistband of his trousers. He exhales, shaky. Then—there are hands undoing more clasps and buttons, and Daniil’s hands go to the short wheat-brown hair at the crown of Artemy’s head and pull hard, even as his own head falls back. “Fuck.”
He cannot withstand it for long, the absence of ful contact and weight, even as pleasure blurs the edges of desperation into an all-encompassing wave of keening for simply more—more. So he pulls at Artemy’s hair, then his shoulders, and breathes out, “Up, up, come here, now,” and tastes himself on his lips as his useless hands yank at blue wool—and at least it’s not the belts and fastenings of that goddamned smock, “take this off.”
Artemy’s teeth pinch the exposed skin again. “Bossy.”
“Yes,” Daniil says, “but that’s hardly—shocking, is it—”
And Artemy silences him again, pressed mouth-to-mouth as he speaks: “I missed you.” His words are vibration more than sound; felt rather than heard. “What took you so goddamned long.”
There is something—something about the question—but Daniil refuses the unease of it, shudders under it.
For it is finally it: skin to skin, the frozen body’s demand to be shocked back into living, completed like the jolt of electricity he’d administer at Thanatica. He lets himself go under completely, held down and buried under the Haruspex’s strong body, nails digging ridges in skin as he buries his face in Artemy’s shoulder to bite down a sound.
And then it is over.
Somewhere in the space between Artemy’s sweaty forehead falling to Dankovsky’s sternum and the shallow breaths they each draw, it strikes him that the candle has gone out. What surrounds them now is proper darkness, all-consuming. As he breathes in, he inhales the thin smoke, his eyes drifting up languidly to the twisted shapes of the ceiling above.
For a moment, everything is still. Perfectly still. Perfectly comforted, and quiet. His eyes fall heavily shut.
A piercing twinge of the tailbone, then, and lower vertebrae. He thinks of the coffin; winces. “Damn it, Burakh—what is it with you and your—predilection for imitating dissection? Have you no more comfortable bed than this?”
Artemy snorts. It tickles Daniil’s skin again. “I do,” he mutters. “I also have this strange sense of urgency, when it comes to you.”
“Strange urgency.”
“Yeah. To shut you up.”
Dankovsky lets out a sigh, “Of course.”
But Artemy is not done. He moves his head, nuzzling his gristly face slowly across Daniil’s chest like a cat. “Especially when you come here like this.”
“Stupid? Hypothermic?”
“Adamant. Like you are not going to stop, if I don’t let you.”
Daniil shuts his mouth.
Above him, in the dense, bluish darkness, his now-accommodated eyes pick out the edges of a bizarre construction. For a moment, he lets himself watch it idly, thoughts going on instinct to the companionable memory of the vaults and cradles of Thanatica’s ceiling—until the question, innocuous as it is, becomes too pressing not to broach it.
“What on earth is that, on your ceiling?” Dankovsky asks. “A catwalk?”
Perhaps most bizarre is that Artemy does not answer. His face is laid at the centre of Dankovsky’s sternum, completely still. He gives no reaction.
Dankovsky strains, squinting. “Has it always looked like this?”
A mutter: “And now he finds the decor wanting—”
“It looks like … like. Oh, I don’t know, an extension of Immortell’s Theatre. What is this, is it meant to be a—medical auditorium—making spectacle of surgery once again? Was it your father’s idea?”
A sigh, before Artemy moves at last, lifting himself up from Daniil’s body. An acute, instant loss: his oversensitive skin stung raw with the room’s cool draft. But Artemy, being Artemy, pulls him up as well, and dutifully drapes the woollen blanket back over Dankovsky’s bare shoulders before even lacing back the front of his trousers.
“More tea?” he then asks, maddening.
“God damn your tea, Artemy Burakh.”
Another pause, then. Unnerved again, perhaps even more so in the sudden clarity that follows the intensity of feeling, Dankovsky draws the blanket tighter over his exposed skin. The chill grows more pervasive, no longer containable by any simple cover.
The second you were gone, Dankovsky thinks, incongruously, all that remained was entropy.
“It is the theatre,” Artemy finally says, when there is nothing else left to fill the silence, his words a gruff, reluctant confession. It sounds wrangled out of him despite his will. His shoulders sag, as if weighed down again.
Jolted alert, Dankovsky searches his face. But Artemy—for the first time—is fixedly avoiding his eyes.
A slow and horrible grief comes to him, then: gradually, by chilling degrees. His breathing grows ragged, the hands numb again. Each subsequent thought is strangling, as the long-denied realisation pierces the unwilling mind like the curved, jagged spine of the Polyhedron once violated the earth.
No memory of leaving, no memory of winning or losing. Only the vast, pervasive defeat, the detached and growing sense of … loss surrounding him, until there was nowhere to head, nowhere to seek solace, but—
His voice echoes strangely in the kitchen: “So this isn’t real.”
And yet he finds no pity in Artemy’s eyes, nor matching despair. Instead, his face has pulled into a frown again, as he folds forward, half-undressed and leaning his forearms on the back of his chair.
He says, “… I don’t know.”
Daniil watches him, rigid and waiting.
Artemy draws a steadying breath. “Sometimes I think it’s the opposite. That this is more real, in a sense … than the rest of it.”
Dankovsky blinks, thrown off. “What do you mean?”
The silence is strange. Almost awkward. Artemy grimaces, rubs his neck, the back of his head. All such painfully human, corporal gestures. “You don’t remember being here before.”
Not quite a question.
“No,” Daniil begins saying. But it is not quite a truth.
No—but he does, in a way he cannot account for in any terms of logic. Nothing inside the present moment is strictly unfamiliar; nihil novi. But strange is this memory: stuck at the peripheries of his conscious thought the way a repressed, long-buried dream would be. A marriage of thrill and fright.
“Yes,” Daniil relents, and Artemy’s eyes flash—in vindication or relief, he is not sure. “Well—I knew where to go. I knew I would find you…” he breaks off, trying to come up with any specifics preceding his arrival, and coming up short.
Instead, his memory goes back mercilessly to where there is clarity.
“Right before I—” And still, it won’t get past his throat; the details of what had to have occurred in the Stillwater’s wood-barred, plague-ridden walls, in the coffin where his last strands of consciousness gave way to delirium at last. “The tragedians asked me to take heart.” He pauses. “So—to the heart I went.”
There is a silence.
Then Artemy says, “We take turns.”
Cryptic statement, by all means, but Daniil can suddenly easily picture it, or maybe he simply remembers: sitting rigid and stuck in some semi-defined place, trapped in the liminal function of waiting for Artemy to catch up with him.
“So I was right,” is what he says instead, a ridiculous thrill of vindication prickling at his skin. “The left and right hand. I was right.”
Unexpectedly, Artemy smiles at that. “In the strangest terms possible—and delivered at the weirdest of times … yes, oynon. You were right. We are.”
Daniil’s—heart, damn it, for lack of a better vernacular—thrashes in his chest, trapped. His face tightens.
Artemy must notice it, even in the lowlight, for his own softens in turn.
“And where do we go from here?” Daniil demands, stubborn till the end, though something begs him, desperate, to turn away.
Nothing short of the look in Artemy’s eyes, waterlogged with a hope past its expiry date, hope tested and tried to the cinders. He seems suddenly unbearably old—worn down, to something bare and ragged—in his prescient exhaustion. In his ill-fitting bones of a young man.
“Where … are we?” Daniil asks again. “When is it—”
“I don’t know.”
“Dead, then. We are dead.” His head is suddenly full, thoughts ringing. It ended. I lost.
The simple way: I lost, and I died. And so did he. The grief returns, weighing down on him.
“No,” Artemy says, bizarrely. He looks down. “No, Danya, I don’t think … it’s nothing as simple as that.”
“Well—what else?” He is cold to bone’s marrow now. What if not death?
Another pause. “Some … stasis. Purgatory. Or what have you.” Artemy is still not meeting his eye. “I’m no good with names. The way I see it, it’s—well, waiting.”
“For … after?” And words seem to fail Daniil, too, at the border of either damnation or discovery, after a lifetime of liberally abusing them.
To his surprise, Artemy laughs. Softly, “No.” Then he looks up, his eyes a well-known, crooked merge of resignation and humour. “Only until it all starts again.”
Until what starts, Daniil almost asks, withstanding Artemy’s eyes. But he doesn’t want the answer. He knows it already, on a level beyond cognition, the level his synapses are straining so doggedly against, memory reverting elsewhere in sheer desperation. He doesn’t want the answer, he doesn’t want it spoken or otherwise codified; does not want it any more substantial than it already is.
Again, the absence of memory carves itself into the hollow in his chest. Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect—By your eyes’ anguish.
Very quietly, Artemy says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The silence stretches between them: the Haruspex waiting for the Bachelor to pick up the thrown glove.
And he does.
“I am here,” Daniil says, straining past his vocal cords. “I made it.” He folds his bare fingers into a fist against the wood of the table, the bodily memory of being thrown back against it still fresh in the papillary lines of his fingertips. For a moment, his body longs for it, keening for more relief as simple as touch and affection, for lips to meet lips again. Underneath the rubble, something, dimly, still burns.
Hoarsely, he asks, “How long do we have?”
Artemy doesn’t respond. His face has grown dimmer, pulled taut and tight with exhaustion that cannot be dislodged. “Not long.”
“And you have—tested it? We—”
A nod. Short, definitive.
“And no way around it?”
“Not for the lack of trying.” And Artemy is smiling now, again, in that unbearable way. “You think—you?You, Thanatician, Dankovsky? Would go gently?”
He tries to respond, and again, words fail him. There’s a sudden and intolerable hollow inside him that has nothing to do with lacking heart, and everything to do with something else—something pitifully like wanting a heart to keep beating.
Artemy draws a breath. “But I do it too.” He turns his face towards the stagnant darkness outside of the window. “It is always night here. It must be just the way is, this place. Dark.” He pauses, and Daniil waits. “And yet I find myself thinking, every damn time: one day, the clock will move again, and I’ll look out and it’ll brighten.” Pause. “And then we’ll just—go on.” He sounds strangled.
Dankovsky’s eyes are accustomed to the darkness by now. Or maybe he simply knows this room, this floor, knows the closeness of Burakh by virtue of so long seeking it, the shape of his body from so long reaching for it. And so, he reaches once again, pressing himself closer. He brings their foreheads together and caresses his hands down the sides of Artemy’s face in a touch which masquerades for simply soothing; which simultaneously learns something he does not want to forget.
“How long have we got?” Daniil asks.
How strange, that Artemy’s eyes are so bright even where light does not get in. “Until you fall asleep.”
His eyes open to an assault of bright light. It spills, lush and almost obscene in its abundance, into the room.
He is not in a coffin.
A bed, instead, with relatively clean bedding.
He feels desiccated and sticky by halves. A foul coating of miasma seems to have become stuck to his skin in his illness, and in the room’s stripping brightness, even while clothed and bundled in rags, he is a naked, ugly innard pulled outwith its place, oozing grime. He draws a sharp breath and feels it in needles down the length of his oesophagus. His mouth tastes of rat poison. He winces and blinks.
“What—” he manages, voice like rusty nails upon metal.
“Oynon?”
Shuffling, familiar footsteps, and—yes, there is Burakh at his bedside, smock-clad and blood-splattered, with insomnia’s purple shadows lining his tired eyes and a criss-cross of bruising down the right side of his jaw.
Dankovsky takes in the sight with hungry eyes. There is something about this image of the Haruspex that strikes him as discordant. Discordantly innocent. He frowns.
“Oynon?” Artemy repeats, with tired, beat-down, unwavering hope.
“Burakh,” Daniil acknowledges in a rasp. “As the French say—bonjour.”
“You lived,” Artemy says flatly. Dankovsky is not sure who the declaration is meant for: whether to soothe him and ascertain it is not a mere next phase of delirium; or whether the flat delivery is a by-product of Artemy’s tiredness, and the statement was meant to signal his contentment with Daniil’s continued existence.
“As did you,” Daniil notes, recalling briefly his own conjured and recurrently re-experienced scenario of Artemy’s cold body laid to its premature rest in his Lair. “Well. Good.”
“Yes, good. I don’t think I was ready for you to go yet,” Burakh says, with disarming plainness. Exhaustion makes him almost entrancingly blunt. “Glad you made it. It was the shmowder. I’m making progress on the panacea, but—”
But Daniil is no longer hearing him. There is something about the way light catches on the side of his head, a thin smudge igniting the scruff of his cheekbone; something about the light indeed—that pushes his memory into a sharp, frenzied overdrive.
Something atypical emerges: a flame and the feeling of wood under his shoulder blades, infinitely sweeter than the coffin’s carious casing. A taste: salt.
He almost licks his lips. He’s speaking without thinking, “I dreamt I’ve returned to you.”
Burakh trails off, perhaps thrown off balance by the strange content of Daniil’s admission. His face is more distant than in the memory but still illogically well-known for the scant few days they have known each other. Compelling Dankovsky, once more, towards impulsive words, seeking some sort of confirmation.
“You have,” Artemy says simply, meanwhile.
“It was like a memory. It was over. I returned after it was all over. The plague, the … play, it all ended. And you had been … waiting.”
Something changes in Artemy’s face: a momentary shift. His brow furrows, just so. Daniil has a thought, throwaway and inexcusably tender, of wanting to press his mouth to the frown line, bring their foreheads together.
At length, Artemy says, “You scared me, oynon.”
He blinks, re-surfacing from the thinning memory. “Me? You? Nonsense.”
Artemy gives a wary, reluctant smile. “It took a while to bring you back. You seemed a little … too ready to depart.”
“Ah,” Daniil says. And then he grins, for a moment almost fully himself again, sharp-minded and once again poised to drive forward into the game, a devout player till the last die is cast. “Never.”
In the solid, abundant light filtering inside, the last of the memory clears into present tense.
On the wall, the clock strikes a new hour.