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Winter came vicious upon the Town-on-Gorkhon. 

With January growing old and hunching to a close, frost had made rigid the steppe, carpeted with snow. Thin and cutting first it fell—with grainy white flecks getting, sand-like, into the eyes, and prickling at any skin left foolishly exposed—then thickened with each passing day. The wind picked up strength, determined to hail until finish line; elevating snowfall into onslaught, strong enough to halt one’s pace and steal the breath. People closed their shutters, shut up theirs houses, stirred hearths into life; startled back into the barely thawed alertness leftover from the outbreak. Rough winter. One could die from exposure. 

On the third day, the sleet finally thinned enough to see through the white torrent.

A thin wisp of smoke curled over the chimney of Isidor Burakh’s house. 

“What did we agree on?” Artemy asked, inside it, for the third time in a row. 

A reluctant grumble: “No leaving in the storm.”

“That’s right. No leaving in the storm.” Pause. “And what did you just try to do?”

Sticky let out a frustrated breath. “Leave in the—but I didn’t—well, it’s a stupid—listen, I just wanted to warn Notkin, alright, or else he’s gonna go and get himself stuck somewhere in the snow because of stupid Jester and—and then that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Really. Over a stinking fleabag like that, but he … so, I thought—listen, Artemy, I’ve got to go!”

“Not so fast, kid.”

Artemy managed to snatch him—ducked halfway into the corridor again—by the collar of his worn flannel shirt, pulling him back by the scruff as one would do a cat, filing a task for later in his mind to try and ask Lara to sew the boy something less shabby to wear come Spring. 

He deposited Sticky back in the warmest room of Isidor’s house: with a freshly stoked hearth, and a Murky sat on a ragged blanket in front of it, entirely immobile and surrounded by a nest of strange objects, the fire reflected in her round dark eyes like an owl’s. 

Sticky bucked in the air like a colt; his ushanka fell to the floor. “Let me go! Arte-my!”

“Nah, I don’t think I will,” Artemy said. “What’s gonna happen is this: I’m going to go make sure Notkin’s not out in the snow, or better yet, bring him here. Sounds good?” 

Sticky squinted in mutinous silence. 

“You, on the other hand, are going to be a good lad and keep watch over Murky. Got it?”

Sticky’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides. “But—that’s pointless, you’ve seen her, she’s not gonna move from that stupid spot by the fire—and, and I’m faster than you, I could—”

“Thing is, son, this is not a discussion we’re having,” Artemy cuts in, sparing a brief mental wince for how much he sounds like his own late father to his own ears. Oh, well. Desperate times, desperate—whatever. “I’m going, because it’s my job to make sure everyone in town is safe and has enough food and enough wits not to go looking for Notkins in the snow on their own. You’re staying here, because that’s the rule.”

“But—isn’t it stupid if the rule is not to leave and yet you’re leaving?” 

“Nah,” Artemy said again, picking up his own ushanka and winding a blue woollen scarf over the collar of the thick moth-bitten fur coat he’d excavated out of the depths of Isidor’s wardrobe, which still reeked faintly of something sweet and musty. “Because I make the rules.” 

He swung the bag with supplies over his shoulder, feeling ridiculously like a real, live bear between all the layers of his smock and the fur. As he adjusted the cloth mask over his face, his voice came out gruff and muffled: “Now, go sit by the fire with Murky.”

With a long-suffering groan, Sticky marched off into the room. He plonked himself on the floor with all the gusto of a third-rate actor from Bolshoi Theatre. 

“... boring,” is what came floating behind him in a plaintive murmur. Artemy ignored it.

“Come back soon,” Murky piped up, her earnest voice startlingly clear. Still, she did not move from her spot by the fire.

“Aye, aye, cub,” Artemy said, and unlatched the front door. 

***

The strength of the wind nearly pushed him back indoors. 

Artemy pushed back forward, re-adjusting his mask and narrowing his eyes. In the matter of seconds, frost glued his eyelashes together, stinging where the cloth dragged past skin. Somewhat ungainly, he managed to shut the door behind him. At least the fur was solid—thick and impenetrable, making him uncomfortably heavy but nowhere near freezing. 

Bracing himself, he moved on, his boots making deep indents in the snow like the steps of a giant roaming the mythical steppes of yore. 

He spared a thought for Noukher, ensconced deep in his hay-insulated barn—but he was late as it was, and his rounds would take twice as long as usual at the pace he was going. 

I’ll check in my way back, friend, Artemy thought, before ploughing on. 

***

It was all something of a fool’s errand, he had to admit. 

By the time he made it to the Marrow, he could barely see out of his eyes, both the roads and the air thick with snow. 

He’d checked in with all the assigned resident on the way, distributing a little Zürkh here and there, some diluted twyrine solution for rubbing, against frostbite, and some pemmican, cod liver oil and lemon juice for the particularly underfed, against colds and scurvy. 

In the Marrow, he checked in with Rubin—hailing from the Warehouses and aiming towards the Spleen—who was performing the second half of the same errand and grunted a vague acknowledgement his way. They compared notes on the already covered areas.

“Birth in the Maw.”

“Gone fine?”

“Yah.” Stakh was wearing something red and yarn-like wrapped around his usually bald head. Artemy recognised Lara’s handiwork, matching his own scarf. He tried—and failed—to suppress a comment. 

“Nice hat, Stakh—”

“Fuck off, Cub, as if you don’t look fucking ridiculous. You? Any patients?”

Artemy sighed. “Kid with frostbite. Toes. Dealt with.”

“Amputated, you mean?”

“What? Shudkher, no. I meant I gave the lad wool socks, the twyrine solution and a talking to.”

“Great. Well, I’m off.”

Artemy reached out, stopping him by the elbow. “Listen. You haven’t seen Notkin, by any chance? Kid … kind of ginger, comes with a cat. Was sick a lot during the plague. Like, a lot.”

Stakh nodded, expression barely changing. His nose was a shining red against the white expanse of the town, as though to match his cap. “Yeah. At the Warehouses, with Grief. He’s fine.”

Artemy exhaled in relief. “Right. Thanks, Stakh.”

Stakh grumbled something passably charitable.

Then they went their separate ways again. 

***

He couldn’t help the feeling he was forgetting something. 

By three o’clock, he had made his way through the Marrow, and it has finally stopped snowing. In the sudden silence, the sky shifted steadily from a featureless grey to a husky, pink tone; lulling the world into a false sense of peace.

Artemy had weathered more than one harsh winter, and knew it only heralded more frost come night. 

He knew should head back soon, too, before the sky darkened and temperature fell past fifteen below zero again. Even Lara’s knitting would not help him then; and his boots were getting damper by the minute. His list of vulnerable patients had run out; the houses in the Atrium and beyond were built of sturdier stone. 

He was halfway through turning back home, when he saw something thrashing in the snow by a water pump. 

Ragged and dark, a crow with a broken wing cawed hoarsely as it sunk further in the white, its feathers stiff with rime. 

For a moment, Artemy watched it grimly, thinking, it’ll die by the morning. Then he thought of Murky’s face, should she ever find out he’d left it; then, of Sticky’s proclamation of boredom. 

Looking around, to assure himself that Stakh wasn’t watching in silent reproach, Artemy crouched in the snow and plucked the wretched thing out of its white prison, mindful of the weak twitching of its wings, before scooping it into one of the pockets of his smock under the fur.

The thing picked half-heartedly at his fingers, ineffective through the layers.

“Quit fussing, I’m helping you,” Artemy muttered. The crow thrashed some more, before settling at last, only twitching lightly as it breathed. 

Slowly, wincing at the protest his joints and tendons made, Artemy made to stand. 

The Atrium was eerily still as he walked on, suspended in the pink evening like a jar of preserve. A strange thought came over him once more, that he’d forgotten something. Idly, Artemy touched his front pocket, rewarded with another weak peck. He recited the list of names he’d covered on his rounds to himself.

Emerging from behind a tenement, he drew to a sudden halt. 

A lonesome building; circular where its neighbours were sharp-angled, its greyish blue diluted in the snow.

A lonesome thought cut through Artemy’s head: 

Always a bloody draft in that little room of his, even back in September.

He frowned. On principle, he’d made something of a vow to himself not to think too much upon that handful of inexplicable nights spent in the Stillwater’s only bed, too narrow to hold two grown men on the brink of complete exhaustion while retaining any sort of dignity. 

His thoughts, ever-unruly, returned there anyway, in the evenings when he couldn’t sleep and memories swam up to him as though by a force of some magnetism: to that very bed and the unspoken rituals which took place in it, near-nightly, under cover of dimmed light. In that austere, strange room; in that bed; where terror and delirium could justify something almost like tenderness between bitter strangers.

Almost.

Not so strange, in the end, Artemy thought, and not so bitter. For he’d wake up at times in the scant hours before dawn—before the miasma and dread settled back in his gut, pulling him out into the rotting streets—and find himself drawn and nuzzled into another body, inhaling idly that strange mixture of camphor, antiseptics and over-expensive cologne. 

He blinked. The sky had blushed further, light almost eerie now. The bird thrashed again in his breast-pocket. A detour would cost him at least twenty minutes of trudging through snow in deep darkness before he reached home.

To hell with it.

He started towards the Stillwater. 

***

Stay, Artemy had implored, impulsively, right after his victory, and just live.

Empty words; just as the look of Dankovsky’s eyes had been in response. 

Empty words, and pointless: leave though Dankovsky might want; he could not. 

***

“NO PERSONS PERMITTED ON TRAINS UNTIL WINTERS END,” the Powers-that-Be had ordered, in telegrammed missives from the Capital; not a week after the outbreak was finally curbed and last coffins buried, when the lack of train connections became apparent. “CAUTIOUS MEASURE AGAINST SPREAD.”

Nothing left to spread, Artemy had thought, besides all the leftover misery.

He had glanced at Dankovsky, then: the one most poignantly targeted by the directive; most eager to leave. But Dankovsky’s face remained inscrutable, his demeanour stand-offish and rigid.

In fact, he had seemed almost unnaturally unaffected by the news; apathetic.

***

After the outbreak, people said, Bachelor Dankovsky … faded.

It happened gradually: at first, he was still visible, interspersed between the remaining Utopians; hovering in the shadow of Maria, by Andrey’s side, hunched over Peter to catch his mumbled words. An attempt at collaboration was made, between him, Artemy and Rubin; converged to document the plague and set up a provisional Clinic. The Bachelor took up infrequent shifts, working in silence at contrasting hours to Artemy’s own, their points of intersection scant, and drowned out by the loud and demanding noise of Artemy’s busy beehive of a new life.

Week by week, less and less of the Bachelor remained. 

Until he seemed all but gone from the public eye: quietly, uncharacteristically without fuss.

Disturbing, Artemy thought. Odd to just let happen. Not for the lack of trying, at least on his part: damn his proclivity to seek the damned and pry them out of doom’s jaws, against any logic; he tried.

He did try.

He saw Dankovsky, outside of duty, perhaps a handful of times; rare and thorny-edged. He avoided eye contact, his face hidden in his upturned collar, and did not speak save for uttering bland platitudes which struck Artemy as more jarring and unpleasant than his most foul-mouthed blaspheming had been. 

“Oynon,” Artemy would acknowledge him, lowly, with reverence he took painstaking care to divorce of any irony.

A tension in Daniil’s shoulders. No glance, no backwards look, only that shying and stilling. “Haruspex.”

And that was that.

He tried. To pull at whatever vestiges of the Bachelor were still within reach. But what was in reach became less and less, and it wasn’t long before Daniil Dankovsky seemed to slip away from Artemy’s grasp entirely.

“… back to the Capital,” Artemy heard Andrey saying, once, in hushed tones. To someone—Yulia, probably, for who else of them was upright and lucid enough to ask after the Bachelor. “First train in Spring, I’ll bet.”

A clink of glasses, rustle of something, muffling Lyuricheva’s response. “… impossible. Won’t they kill him?”

“If this place doesn’t kill him first.”

***

Faded inwards, into himself, and into the Stillwater where he could be heard, at times, having a one-sided conversation with what could only be the ghost of Eva Yahn, haunting the spherical rooms in perpetuum, conjured from the fumes of twyrine. 

That’s what Artemy heard, in bits and pieces, at the Broken Heart or from the few children who dared climb the Stillwater’s windowsills and try to peer inside. 

At some point, mid-December, he realised he’d stopped seeing the Bachelor at all. 

He wrote him a letter, then: a bad one, overthought and frustrated with itself, torn between neutrality and candour in Artemy’s untrained attempt at extending the sort of olive branch the Bachelor would recognise as one. 

He did not think his attempt succeeded: no response ever came. 

Deep down, Artemy understood the very attempt had been futile.

Something had spoilt between them, after the Polyhedron fell—no, earlier than that. Sometime after Dankovsky contracted the Sand Pest; after he patched Artemy up after the Abattoir with an air of impatience but shockingly thorough care. Somewhere between—well. 

Shame settled in Artemy’s stomach as he walked. Somewhere between the shared bed at the Stillwater and the shmowder forced into Daniil’s rasping mouth by Artemy’s own hand; between the mirrored fear they found in each other’s eyes after being shown a glimpse of the Theatre, of the strings above, holding them all up; after things happened to them too impossible to voice, ever, afterwards. 

At some point, in the middle of it all, the lines between us began to blur, Artemy didn’t write to him. And then you faded entirely.

And left me alone.

***

As he approached the Stillwater, a strange dread sank slowly upon him. The bird inside his chest-pocket writhed, tremulously, as though attuned to his unease.

Something was wrong in the air here. Something was off, by miles, and Artemy found himself inspecting the building fruitlessly for outward signs of aberration. Nothing obvious showed. Until—

There. Artemy stiffened. 

On the top floor, a circular window: pulled ajar, just so. In and of itself, nothing out of the ordinary. But inside, under a frothy covering of coagulated snow, one could only just make out the shape of a cup, frozen stiff.

Artemy’s blood ran cold.

Multiple possible and likelier explanations could account for this, he thought frantically, even as he broke into a run. That Dankovsky went to stay with either of the Stamatins: slept over at Andrey’s, in the warmth of the Broken Heart’s underbelly; or at Peter’s, tucked into the bathtub in the loft, lulled further into that joint, distant wistfulness Artemy had seen them share more than once. 

And yet. 

He banged on the door, past caring for any decorum. “Oynon?”

No answer. The fear did not budge. 

“Dankovsky!”

Nothing. Artemy pounded at the door once again. 

“Daniil? Are you in? I—ah, fuck it.”

He tried to force the door; it gave way easily. 

Artemy all but fell inside. 

***

Inside greeted him with a dull, stale silence.

All windows downstairs were shut, curtains drawn. To keep away the prying eyes, Artemy thought. Keep away witnesses.

He dragged the mask down, breathing harshly. The ice limning the fabric had melted under his quickened breaths, the now-soaked cloth doing little but irritating his already frost-roughened skin. 

“Oynon?” Artemy tried again.

The answering silence seemed to mock him.

He climbed up the stairs, taking three at a time, with a sick feeling in his gut; a route well-travelled. At the top, he stood facing the closed, well-known door.

He tried the knob: locked.

Another twist in the chest. Somebody had closed the door.

From the inside or from the outside? a voice in his head asked mockingly, sounding strangely like Clara’s. Toss the coin! Heads or tails! 

Inside? Outside?

Artemy drew a deep breath, stepped back, and then prised the door open. 

***

He fell into Dankovsky’s room like a launched missile and barely managed to right himself not to fall to his knees from impact.

For one blissful moment, all he felt was relief: the room was cold, still, empty.

Until his eyes fell on the bed, and the relief turned to sour panic.

In the bed, bundled in rags, unmoving—a body.

By the bed, a bottle of twyrine; empty. On the nightstand, a note. 

“No. No.”

Artemy threw himself towards the bed, tugging at the threadbare covers. 

“Dankovsky,” he called out, insistently, shaking him. “Dankovsky. Can you hear me? Daniil.”

The Bachelor was wrapped in all his fastidious layers like a bespoke burial shroud; from gloves and ascot to snakeskin coat and a cloth mask fitted conscientiously around his face. Artemy pried it roughly off him, to listen for his breath; but his own was too loud. He took his own glove off with his teeth, hand feeling blindly for any sign of a pulse between the layers of leather and snakeskin. The man was cold in touch, and rigid—like the room itself.

“Please,” Artemy barked out, without knowing who he’s speaking to. “I can’t—you—”

His fingers found the inside of Dankovsky’s collar—and there, yes, a pulse, slow but steady yet under the blue-veined skin. The faintest whistle of a breath. 

“Fuck,” Artemy breathed out.

Dimly, he realised he was shaking; it had little to do with the cold.

He cast a desperate look across the room. It seemed hollowed-out, save for the Bachelor’s carpet bag and a bizarre array of empty bottles: not alcohol; or not merely alcohol, but rather an almost eclectic collection of all manner of substance collectible in town. He recognised some as missing from the Clinic supplies: things he’d written off as Grief’s men jonesing for kicks, or kids stealing things to barter with. 

His eyes skittered to the bedside, again: that wretched note. Something like a letter draft, at a glance, scrawled and barely legible; and Artemy found that couldn’t bear to look at it directly. 

To the desk, then. The carved cherrywood medicine cabinet, the one lovingly taken from the Capital, stood there. Its main drawer was emptied as well. 

Led by an impulse, Artemy bent down to smell the twyrine bottle by the bed; only to note that the cloying twyre-scent was sticky and recent, and embittered by the tang of meradorm dissolved in it. An amplified painkiller, a sedative. 

The concoction hardly lethal on its own but with hypothermia, and prolonged exposure—

“Fuck,” Artemy whispered again, allowing himself another half-moment of panic. Not good.

Then he heaved himself up, unclasped his fur coat, and gathered Dankovsky’s body inside it like a rag-doll, pulling it up from that offensive place of rest. Artemy heaved him up from the bed, slung over his shoulder, and started his faltering ways downstairs. 

Mentally, he scanned his options. There was the Lair—less of a walk, for sure—but there no ready fire there, little wood. Some supplies, but he couldn’t remember which. Couldn’t count on his ability to shoulder the door open if it had frozen shut. 

Trek to Isidor’s house it was. 

***

“Oh my God. You’re such a liar, you said you’d be back ages ago, I had to make dinner for her again and you know I suck at chopping bloody car—”

Sticky’s voice cut off abruptly, stunned into silence by the frightful sight of Artemy barrelling inside coatless, red from exertion and frost, and almost collapsing under the the weight of an unconscious Dankovsky in the fur and rags. 

“… Is that the Bachelor?” Sticky said quietly, faintly. “Is he—”

Fear made something very young of his previously annoyed face: a wide-eyed child.  

“Sticky,” Artemy said, as evenly as he could, though his own skin was prickling in the oppressive warmth of the house, muscles burning from effort and head swimming. “I’m going to need your help. Alright? We’ll need to work fast. We need to get the Bachelor into the front room and put him up by the fire, and then I’m going to give him an injection. Murky, I’m sorry, sunshine—you’re going to have to move—”

Murky was, likewise, staring at Daniil with her owlish eyes, frozen at the room’s threshold. “What’s wrong with him?”

Artemy hesitated. “The … the cold got to him.”

“Is he going to die?” Sticky asked, still just as quietly.

“He looks dead,” Murky said.

“He’s not dead,” Artemy said, calmly. His hands were shaking. Yet. 

A moment of pause.

“C’mon,” Sticky spoke at last, with admirable composure, and then picked Murky up, carrying her to the kitchen table. With some effort, he deposited her on one of the chairs and patted her on the shoulder, before reaching over with slightly trembling hands and lighting one candle. “There. You can, uh … watch this fire, here.”

Despite his nerves, Artemy felt a deep wave of affection at Sticky’s efforts. Still, Murky’s wide eyes remained fixed dead on Dankovsky.

Remembering, Artemy reached into his smock, and drew out the bird. It looked half-dead and unwell, too, but stirred weakly and limply flapped the one good wing. Carefully, Artemy laid it out on the table in front of the kids. 

“There’s him, too,” he said awkwardly. “He’ll, uh … need some water, and you can put some honey in it,” Artemy told Mishka. “After I’m done helping the Bachelor, we’ll fix up his wing. Okay?”

Murky looked from Daniil to the bird, at last.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

***

Wordlessly, Sticky followed Artemy to the front room, and overtook him in quick strides to stoke the fire; then tug down all the blankets from the sofa and drag them to on the floor.

Artemy nodded his assent, before peeling Dankovsky out of the fur and laying him out on it, in front of the fire.

Sticky watched his movements in silence.

“Is he …?” he tried again, after a while. “She’s right, I mean—he looks—”

Blue, Artemy thought. Dankovsky was blue in the face.

He considered lying, and found himself unable to justify it in the face of Sticky’s wide eyes. There was something futile, anyhow, in trying to shield from horror the very children who played games and bartered with death.

“It’s too early to tell,” he said at last. “But we have a chance.”

He hesitated. “Bring me the syringe, alright? And boiled water, and the emergency kit from the pantry.”

Silently, Sticky nodded. He ran.

***

An injection: a solution of ten-percent distilled swevery extract, ashen swish and yas. 

Never before administered this way.

Never tested on a patient; never by shaking hands in front of Sticky’s eyes. To counteract …

Meradorm and twyrine. 

Empty bottles. Empty vials.

Suicide. Evidently.

Or—not. Or simply looking for comfort; any comfort at the point of sheer desperation.

The brasier seemed broken—maybe it had given way. 

But why the open window?

Why the letter?

The letter—

Something hurt sharply inside Artemy’s chest, the sort of pain panic induces, making a home for itself between the ribs as he undid the many buttons and clasps of Dankovsky’s coat, getting rid of it; undid his gloves, vest, ascot, shoes; discarded all. He rubbed circulation into Dankovsky’s hands and feet, before covering him in the woollen blankets and another fur.

***

“… And? How is he?”

Artemy sighed. “Go check on Murky, Sticky. You’ll both sleep in my room. It’s going to be a very cold night. Coldest yet. You’ll need to tuck her in, and get the brasier going, so the fire doesn’t stop overnight.”

“What about you? Where will you sleep?”

“I won’t be sleeping,” Artemy said curtly. “I need to watch him.”

Sticky’s eyes were pale and wide in the firelight. “Why? Is he gonna get worse?”

“He might.”

“Will he die?” Sticky asked, voice uneasy. 

Once again, Artemy considered all that lying would entail.

“He might not wake up,” he admitted, quietly. 

Sticky said nothing. 

“But I meant it when I said—there is a chance.”

At length, Sticky nodded.

***

After Sticky’s departure and administering the first dose, Artemy set aside the syringe and continued undressing Dankovsky, down to his underthings. 

The crackling fire carved strange hollows in of Dankovsky’s face, making every its shadow more pronounced: dark lashes on sunken cheeks, an old cut under the cheekbone, the bruises under his eyes.

If not for the gaunt hollowness of him; he’d look merely asleep. Almost relieved, but for the silence. Wrong kind of silence.

Why, Daniil?

It occurred to Artemy he might never hear the delivery of any sort of response or defence from him; and he was suddenly desolate.

Dankovsky was still cold to the touch; not as morbidly as he had been at the Stillwater, but too cold anyhow.

Left him there too long. 

By now, he was done unwrapping the Bachelor from his damp, rigid garments and rewrapping him in wool and fur. Pausing for only a moment, to brace himself, Artemy moved on to the next stage, and began stripping out of his own many layers. 

He slid under the furs. Drew an arm around Daniil.

“Stay,” he muttered into the short hair at the back of his head. “Live.”

Please.

***

It’s a strange fever dream.

In furs—Shekhen? could it be?—he lies, entombed. It’s very dim, what little light there is coming from the fire. His whole body is on fire, too, so hot he feels like his blood will evaporate from the veins.

Is this it?

For some reason he didn’t expect such heat.

Not while sinking into frigid unconsciousness at the Stillwater, though he had heard, yes, he’d heard; when freezing you stop feeling the cold, after a point, stop feeling anything—only sleep.

But this isn’t sleep; this is burning. His chest hurts, his heart hurts. All muscles burn, straining. He can hear his own breath, rattled and fast. His brain is burning brightest; he thinks it might be coming out of him with each breath; out of his eye sockets, like radiation. His body tries to fight it, to rise, arch up from the suffocation. But each movement hurts, burns; burns—

“Help—” he whispers, but the sound is strangled.

There is a body next to his body. A mass grave?  Somebody leaning over him, swallowing the light with his shadow.

A large, coarse, gentle hand, pressed to where his skull must be split open, gushing particle poison. Sealing it shut, for a moment.

“Don’t touch,” Daniil warns, keening. “Don’t—”

The touch recedes. 

He manages: “—You’ll burn yourself.” You’ll—what happens to radiation victims? Crumbled to flakes, to ashes. Like Thanatica, but slow, a slow burning until death. Like Maria Skłodowska. Gone only a year back; he’d never got to meet her. Shame.

He goes on, “Radiation damage—lasts years, lasts till death.”

Something comes, a short sound, huffed like fire in the wind. 

A laugh. 

“You’re not radioactive, oynon.”

“I am,” he says. “I feel it in me.”

He tries to keep his eyes open; keep them somehow seeing. Past the threshold. What lies there? He’d thought—darkness. Now, the fire seems to have blinded him, and phosphenes disturb the main image. A pair of eyes staring back at him. Light eyes, light-irises. Light scruff on the face, ignited by firelight.

“What do you feel?” The voice is familiar, too.

What does he—oh yes, back to it.

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

“—burning.”

The hand returns. “Yes, you have a fever. But it’s a good sign. The body is fighting.”

“Like they all burnt. At Thanatica.”

The hand twitches, lightly. But remains. 

Daniil’s eyes slide heavy-shut. “… Came for me, too.”

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

“No—don’t sleep,” the voice says, and the hand moves, grasping him by the chin instead, turning his head from where it’s lolled back. A thumb presses to the jaw, index finger by the corner of his mouth. His name, then: “Stay with me. Hey. Daniil.”

Daniil slits his eyes open again, obedient. 

Light eyes. 

This has happened before, a voice supplies a fact, from somewhere deep in his mind, beneath the fever. Again and again and again. 

Birdies, birdies, gather round the Marble Nest—

A flash of realisation: a new pain in the chest. Endless Saturday. I guess it never ended; in the end. All of it, all the sorry rest, months and months of silent decay—only a hypothesis. A dream within a dream.

None of it real. Except here and now, in the boarded-up house, in a coffin. 

It’s some relief, at last. He’ll waste no more time. 

“Daniil.”

“You’ve come for me,” he mumbles. “D’you break the door down?” The procession outside, the coffins stacked against the door. So that it doesn’t spread. 

Artemy’s eyes—it’s him, Artemy, and Daniil had been calling him that in his head for months—no, days. One endless day. Artemy, alive yet, and with those worried eyes. Daniil wants to reach for him, touch him. Just this once, touch him, before it all goes to hell again, and the day starts anew, ruining his progress. 

“It was open,” Artemy says. His brows are furrowed; that severe expression which lends his face gravity beyond his years. “Your window, too. I thought—shudkher, oynon, I thought—”

“You’re here,” Daniil says, far too gone to try and parse any input. His naked hand has managed what he willed it to do, and gone up to the Haruspex’s face, cradling it. Warm under his fingers; coarse hair, blood vessels under the skin. The cheek reddened from fire, perhaps. “I—”

It doesn’t matter, anyway. All of it in his head, in this house. None of it will ever leave it. Least of all him. Such is the nature of Hell. Purgatory, if he’s lucky.

Make it worth it, then. Why not.

“—can’t help myself this time.”

“What?” Artemy’s eyes are on him, uncomprehending. “What are you saying?”

“Forgive me.”

His hand finds purchase on the nape of the Haruspex’s neck; he’s warm, there, too. Not burning, not like Daniil; he isn’t poisoned. But alive, blood pumping life through his veins. What a happy coincidence, that he should live long enough, in this turn, to have found him. 

“Daniil—”

With uncanny strength, he pulls.

Down, to himself, until fever-warm lips meet lips, until he’s dragged Artemy down into the heart of the fever with him. His body trembles and aches but this, finally, is what it wants, what it’s always wanted. He kisses Artemy through his shock, nudging open his mouth, getting in. 

I’ll poison you. This once, I’ll poison you. 

Artemy gasps for breath, breaking apart.

“Daniil—what—”

He manages: “… please.”

But volition is leaving him, everything weakened after the one burst of strength; his head falls back, fingers loosen, limp and useless at the collar of Artemy’s shirt. He tries to hold on. But his vision is blurring, face suddenly wet. Please. Artemy. He can’t tell if he’s speaking. Something convulses in him, strained.

The voice returns, soothing. “Alright. Shh. Lay back. It’s alright.”

He doesn’t leave. But the sensations muddle: A bite of something cold, to the vein. Another brush of wet cloth on the forehead. A strange numbness overcoming him slowly.

But before, Daniil thinks he can feel Artemy kiss the side of his face. Jaw.

Hesitantly.

All of it is hesitant. Strange. He wouldn’t have guessed.

Then it’s dark, again. Dark.

burning

***

As soon as Dankovsky’s murderous fever went down and he sank into his medicated sleep, Artemy got hastily dressed and got the fuck out of the room. 

Stifling, feverish room.

Stumbling almost blindly, getting the ushanka and battered army jacket on, he burst out onto the porch. It was not unlike how bursting from inside an oven might be, so shockingly brutal was the outside. The night was frigid, the air itself stinging his blood-warm cheeks to the point of pain. 

Good, he thought, punishingly.

A half-finished packet of Western cigarettes had fallen out of Dankovsky’s snakeskin coat while Artemy was undressing him. Unceremoniously, now, he wrenched one out and lit it. 

He smoked the whole thing, fast, faster than he’d smoked anything since getting high off ground twyre with Grief and Lara by the river, in school; and then lit another. They were probably expensive, probably ridiculously so, and probably impossible to import anymore. He probably would never be able to replace them. Damn it. Fuck. 

Please, Artemy.

Fuck.

***

It’s not like any of this is even any surprise, Artemy thought, the melody of his own thinking bordering on hysteria. No, not at all. 

His thoughts were wrenched back to the Stillwater again; to the very things he took such good care not to remember of the Stillwater: when their bed-alternating arrangement progressed into a bed-sharing one and comments ceased to be made about it. Necessity dictated: they were both dead on their feet. Nobody would do the work for them. There was one bed.

At some point it just happened: as Artemy lay weary in that exhausted misery where even sleep itself was not possible anymore, staring at the Stillwater’s circular ceiling, the Bachelor rose stiffly from his hunch at the table, cracked his joints, winced—and then began removing his clothes.

Methodically. Tiredly. There was no undertone to it; aside from Artemy’s exhaustion dumbing down his sense of common decency enough that all he could do was stare dumbly. 

Waistcoat, belt, ascot, that funny little brooch: so many layers. Unending. Annoying. But to his own chagrin, even then, Artemy was transfixed on the performance. 

Luckily, the Bachelor had seemed so distracted by his own bad mood that he paid him no mind, fully-focused on the buttons and increasingly clumsy fingers. By the time he was down to his shirtsleeves, Artemy had managed to look away. Ceiling, again. Dankovsky stumbled as he approached the bed in his underclothes and pulled the cover stiffly over himself, shivering, turning as far away from Artemy as he physically could.

Out of the eye’s corner, Artemy watched the sable-dark hair at the back of his neck.

I see, he thought heavily, his own interest communicating itself to him suddenly and damningly. Lucky thing he was functionally a dead man walking: exhaustion would make ignoring it very easy. 

In a way, it was typical of him: the worst timing, the strangest viable direction. Most destructive possible outcome. 

He shut his eyes, willing himself to sleep.

***

Now, on the porch, Artemy cursed again. The second cigarette burnt down to a stub in his fingers. He stared ahead into the inky, horrible night which nearly murdered Dankovsky in his sleep; perhaps at his own behest.

Something inside Artemy coiled in terror again. 

Please, Artemy.

God.

This sort of thing sent him straight back in time, to a time when everything was an embarrassing discovery, including who he reacted to and how. It all evened out in the end, somewhat, and he learned the cues of what could be followed where; whatever they had with Lara back in the day, whatever he had with Grief, all his inexpert fumbling in smoke-filled dim rooms at Capital, with people—just, people—and finally, the brother-and-arms silent companionship of army comrades. 

Then there was whatever the hell even went on at the Stillwater. 

Nothing went on, he thinks. Not really. Until now. 

And now—

One could only guess at who Daniil thought was there with him in his delirium, or what he truly wanted, beyond finding some sort of relief in his evident agony. The invocation of Artemy’s name before the undeniably filthy, meradorm-bitter and twyre-sweet kiss was unfortunate—mainly to Artemy, who would never fucking get the sound of it out of his head until his dying day, probably. 

“… Did the Bachelor die?”

Artemy nearly burnt himself with his cigarette. 

Sticky, bundled up in some huge jacket that could not be his own, but wasn’t Artemy’s either—Ersher’s, Artemy thought, and if any thought could make him feel worse, that one did. 

“Shudkher, kid. You scared me.”

“Sorry.” Sticky’s face was pinched and pale. Immobile. “Please, tell me. Is he dead?”

He likes Dankovsky, Artemy remembered with a twist of the heart. Mentioned him timidly a few times, his “impressive knowledge” and how he’d treat Sticky like an adult when he approached him with questions. It was Sticky who’d told Artemy the Bachelor had contracted the Pest, back then. 

And Artemy almost let it happen again. 

“He’s fine,” he said. “He’ll be fine. The worst is over now.”

Sticky stared at him. “You’re not just saying that, right? I’m not Murky, you know. I’m not eight. I can take it.”

Artemy weathered his accusing gaze. “Have I ever lied to you?”

At length, Sticky shook his head. Looking immensely relieved—so much that even his teenage swagger failed to conceal it—he came up to Artemy and perched on the porch next to him.

They both stared out at the cavernous night ahead.

“Shit! I forgot. Notkin’s with Bad Grief,” Artemy said suddenly, remembering. “Sorry, I completely forgot to—he’s fine. Stakh checked on him.”

“Oh,” Sticky said, sounding studiously unconcerned in a way that signalled even more relief. “Neat.”

There was a moment of silence. 

“What happened to him?” Sticky then asked, in a low voice. “The Bachelor, I mean. Did he … You gave him that stuff, an injection. Did he take something? Did he want to …”

Damn a perceptive teenager with a grand future plan of becoming a doctor, Artemy thought. 

He sighed again. “I don’t know, Sticky. This is a question only the Bachelor can answer.” Then, as he caught Sticky’s mouth opening. “But you will not be asking him that.”

Sticky’s mouth shut, twisting mutinously.

Artemy sighed again. “Right,” he said. “That’s my cue. Let’s go inside, before we both freeze as well.” 

“Can I go to the Warehouses to play dice with Notkin, if it’s not snowing tomorrow?”

“Guess we’ll see tomorrow.”

“That’s a rubbish answer.”

“Yeah. But it’s all you’re getting today.” Artemy tossed the cigarette out into the snow and herded Sticky inside.

***

His body hurt, insides hurt, head, eyes, even skin.

He swallowed and it was like swallowing a dead thing. Something had died inside him and what remained was but a crumbled, humbled exoskeleton. 

The oppressive delirium—the burning—was gone, and what followed was the usual shame of awakening to face another morning. 

Alive, then. No joy to the thought. 

Dimly, as through a veil, he remembered his terrors. Night after night of self-exile, of solitarily withstanding the Voices—Eva’s the loudest, the most recent, but far from being only—and all of them whispering, howling themselves into his mind. 

All the voices of Thanatica, merged together in a guttural threnody of burnt vocal cords, accompanying his each waking thought like a Greek chorus. Join us, join us, join us. 

Our killer, executor, master—

And yet, there he was, awake once more. 

Alive, for his discomfort was too mundane to belong in any afterlife. A sharp needling pain in the vertebrae, from the way he had slept, presumably; nausea filling his stomach and chest; shortness of breath spurred on by stabbing aches on each uptake of air—a leftover gift from contracting the Pest. The grand nightmare was over, it seemed, giving way momentarily to the other nightmare of a body keeping itself alive past its projected survival. 

His eyes had come open at some point, crusted over and sore, and he found himself watching the ceiling, too spent to move. A spider web spanned the entire hypotenuse of the room’s corner, thickened with dust like raw fleece. 

Something curdled in Daniil’s gut. His idle misery skidded to a ragged halt, flinching to awareness.

There was a corner to the room. 

A corner. Un-rounded. And the ceiling was simple, damp-stained, unfamiliar. The light, too, was unfamiliar, muted and less assaulting than he was used to in the mornings. No streetcars rattled outside, no voices whispered from the walls to torment him—

He was not at the Stillwater, or at his apartment in Moscow, or at the Thanatica. He was not even at the Theatre, or inside a coffin. 

Daniil’s heart took up hammering, as though it had been merely idling thus far. Tense head-to-toe, he turned his head. 

Artemy Burakh lay sprawled to his right. They were laid out, both of them, upon the hide of some animal, stretched over the wooden floor by a hearth, covered by a number of threadbare wool blankets. The Haruspex’s gristly cheek was smushed into his forearm, his wheat-blonde hair ruffled. Exhaustion stained his face even in sleep.

With his left arm tucked under himself, his right remained outstretched, reaching as far as Dankovsky’s own chest—accounting for the added weight there. It looked as if he had been checking on Dankovsky’s heartbeat even while he succumbed to sleep. 

Daniil’s heart didn’t calm; it doubled its efforts instead. How should it not wake Artemy, thrashing like this under his palm, was beyond him. His breathing came quick now, panicked, an impulse to wrench himself away and run warring with a new and potent wave of dizziness. 

He remembered—nothing. 

Nothing, at least, that would have led him here. 

Here? To Isidor’s house, presumably. How did he find his way here? Did he come begging, delirious with mania and driven to sanity’s brink, sliding to his knees on Burakh’s doorstep to beg him for clemency? He remembered nothing of the sort, nothing in the oppressive dreams he’d resurfaced from even resembling a trek to the house or any sort of confrontation. 

Is it still the Plague? Did I dream the rest of it?

Maybe there had been no end to it, no respite; maybe it’s still only days after something finally gave way—maybe the Haruspex had found him raving mad and infected and nursed him back to health. Maybe all the wretched months that followed never really happened. 

Sweat stood out on his neck. Unable to stay still anymore, he groped for Artemy’s wrist with a trembling hand and pulled it off himself, depositing it carefully on the floor as one would perhaps do with a lizard.

Artemy did not wake. He seemed, to Dankovsky, tired beyond measure.

Daniil launched himself to an upright position, eyes scanning the room frantically. 

Around them, evidence abounded: the stockpiled blankets, a stoked hearth, a water basin and cloth. A used syringe. His own outer garments, tossed haphazardly onto the back of a chair, presumably to further conserve warmth—so maybe I did come crawling here, pitiful, and pity he did take—

His throat closed up again. Picking himself off the floor, the grabbed his shirt and trousers with violently trembling hands, trying to force his rigid limbs inside them. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember.

Oh, I am Peter, he thought; I am become Peter.

Like Andrey used to say: It’ll catch up to you, Danya. Pride won’t save you from it. 

He stumbled to the door almost blindly, consumed with a rising, choking panic, mind set upon only one imperative: to get away from the warm body of the Haruspex—a body not dead, for once, not condemned as it tended to be in Daniil’s nightmares. 

He escaped into the corridor. 

 ***

In the corridor, he drew a shaky breath. A hush hung about the place. It was not yet dawn. 

After a moment’s pause, he managed to stagger to a bathroom. 

He shut the door. Braced himself on the edge of the sink, almost wheezing. Covering this short distance cost him a ridiculous amount of effort. His heart thrummed wildly in his chest, dark spots dancing on the edges of vision. Sweat stood out against the skin down his back and neck. His legs trembled.

All this—all the more evidence! That the Plague never left him, never expelled from the body. That the miraculous salvation of the town and his pitiful existence in it had been only another fantasy his sickness-addled mind came up with in his coffin, with the Orderlies ordering him to die, ad nauseam.

His own reflection stared back at him, spooked. He looked the same as always; that is, bad. Haunted.

Resolving to examine all the evidence readily available, he unbuttoned his shirt again: there. The gunshot wound. 

Sewn up. No dressing; and the scarring was pale and raised, signalling a passage of time which contradicted his earlier diagnosis. How long since it happened? How long can one dream one nightmare?

Exhaling shakily, he turned on the tap and leaned down to splash his face with some water, wiping down some of the sweat at his neck. 

When he straightened, he hit his head on the cabinet; hard. His vision clouded; the cabinet’s little door came open.  As he stumbled left-wise, something fell out into the basin and shattered.

Daniil wavered in place and leaned on the basin, as not to topple over. One of the shards cut right his hand. Blood trickled down.

He stared into the whole sorry mess of it in stupefied silence, his ears ringing.  

More spots. Dancing.

Get a grip, he thought weakly. But gripping the sink only produced more blood. 

 ***

Another noise; from the outside now. Daniil startled, turning.

In the sliver of the newly-ajar door, he saw a child’s face: drawn and owl-eyed.

She stared at him. 

“Don’t—” Daniil began, raising a placating hand towards her on instinct. He belatedly realised blood still gushed between its digits.

The girl dashed off like a spooked rabbit.

“Shit,” Daniil exhaled. 

Wiping his hand on his shirt absent-mindedly, he tried to follow her, but got even dizzier and stumbled, catching himself on the doorframe. He managed only a few more steps before his knees did give way.

The extent of his nausea and dizziness was embarrassing, given his background. He never fainted. Never—not even during his first dissection, when the floor of the hospital morgue was covered with the overwhelmed student body like a carpet. He had stood his ground. He’d had his dignity.

Evidently, not anymore. He cursed profusely under his breath, catching himself on the railing of what seemed like a wooden staircase. Heavily, he sat down on the bottom step. 

And then—just as he sat there, bleeding into his own shirt and trying to stave off the spots and the ringing in his ears—then, as fate would have it, Burakh appeared like a spirit of Christmas past, staring at him.

Inwardly, Daniil cursed again.

Burakh looked dazed and only barely awake: unshaven, with his hair sticking up at an odd angle and bleary eyes. Without his smock and the viscera he wore in the outbreak like armour, he also looked disarmingly human. Touchable.

“What happened,” he demanded, voice sleep-hoarse, quieter than expected.

Daniil could only stare back.

Quick fast footsteps: the child flung herself out from within the adjoining room, clinging to Artemy’s leg like a limpet. Absently, Artemy patted her hair. 

“Mishka, go wake Sticky, tell him I said he’s in charge of breakfast. Alright?”

“Alright.” But she did not move, staring at Daniil instead.

Oddly, Artemy did not rush her. “What is it? The bird? I’ll—we’ll look into his wing, after I—later today. Alright?”

The girl said nothing. 

At length, still stubbornly glaring into Daniil’s eyes, she detached herself from Burakh’s leg and came up to the step he was seated on. Almost ceremoniously, she put a hand on his forehead. 

“He’s not dead,” she proclaimed, seemingly addressing Artemy.

Then she dashed away, faster than it seemed possible. 

Daniil stared after her. 

“…ynon? Can you stand?”

Burakh was towering over him, closer now. Snapping out, Dankovsky met his concerned eyes.

“Yes,” he said. Then, “No. My legs …”

The earlier panic set in again: what if the numbness was some paralysis? Some unknown consequence—of whatever even happened to him—

Artemy seemed to read his mind. “Your system is weakened, oynon. You took quite a hit—this weakness is merely the fallout. It’ll pass.”

“A hit—of what?” Daniil asked, somewhat hysterically.

Did he imagine the slight hesitation before Artemy spoke? Unlike him, to mince his words, conceal things. Suspicious. 

“Of hypothermia,” he said at last. “And sickness from something you took. I gave you treatment, to take it out of you, which seems to have worked. But the body took a toll.”

Take what out of me? What did I take? What day is it?

Artemy, ever-practical, seemed already preoccupied with something else. “C’mon, oynon, lean on me.”

And, after he failed to cooperate, Daniil was heaved upright like a puppet, anchored on Artemy’s broad shoulder, and led upstairs.

“Do you remember anything?”

Silence.  

“Alright. Sit down.”

No more furs on the floor. Instead, Daniil was walked to the edge of a clean bed, then eased into the woolly, coarse texture of what seemed to be an old housecoat, smelling faintly musty. Daniil blinked, realising that he was being bundled in rags like a child.

Silly as it was, he had no strength to protest.

What came out of him was no less childish. “How did I … get here.” Petulant.

Silence. Then a mug of something thick and herbal was thrust into his left hand. Artemy picked up the right one and wiped it down roughly with an anti-septic, before beginning to wrap it in strips of gauze.

“A miracle, honestly,” he then said, sounding frustrated. “Pure … rotten luck.” Bitter. “I was—I almost didn’t check on you. I didn’t want to disturb or cross you, or … whatever. I almost—”

Daniil blinked. Data. Evidence.

“So, you found me, then? Somewhere … at the Stillwater?”

“Yes.”

“And I was …”

“Unconscious, and out of your mind on meradorm dissolved in twyrine.”

A horrible shudder travelled down Daniil’s spine. 

Peter, Peter. I’m chasing after you. 

“Thank you,” he managed all the same, mechanically. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d likely be dead.”

A strange silence followed his words. When Daniil looked up, Artemy was watching him with a tight look in his eyes. 

“Is that not what you intended?” he asked, quietly.

He was tense, very tense. Daniil took stock of all the evidence, again: his ragged memories, the only barely quieted howl of the Nightmare, the meradorm and twyrine.

He said, “I’m not sure.”

 ***

He slept through most of the day, afterwards, surfacing from time to time from shallow, confusing dreams. Not nightmares—not quite; but odd, insistent dreams which were either feverish themselves or conjured  detailed memories of fever. 

He woke from them sticky from sweat, and disoriented. 

Warm.

 ***

In the late afternoon, he came to at last to Artemy sitting on a stool by his bedside, chin in his hand like a Rodin, a stack of crumpled papers in his lap. Thinker, Daniil thought blearily, opening his eyes slowly to drag them past the tense, wool-clad lines of Artemy’s posture. 

“What’re you thinking about?” he croaked out, unwittingly.

Artemy twitched, caught unawares. His eyes flicked to Daniil’s. 

“You’re awake.”

“Seems so,” Daniil mumbled. He felt less horrible by far than he had in the morning, if still sore and weary. But the burning was gone, as was most of the pain. Only his head remained muddled.

“Here—drink this.”

Artemy helped him up to a half-reclined slouch, before feeding him more of that strange herbal swill. Its consistency was peculiar; thick and almost mucous. It reeked of something organic.

“All of it. Drink up, oynon.”

He tried not to grimace; then winced all the more viscerally in the attempt’s aftermath.

For a moment, there was silence between them; in it, Daniil busied himself with trying not to retch and studying the frayed edges of his bedding.

“I read your notes,” Artemy then said.

Daniil blinked up at him. He felt oddly unmoored, set adrift in unknown waters. The long sleep and the herbs made him feel loose and pliant, a combination by any measure dangerous for someone like him: a transgressing heretic with a list of crimes hanging over his head which needed no addendum. Still, he had little fight left in him to counter the inertia. 

“What notes?” he mused. 

Wordlessly, Artemy lifted the papers from his lap. Daniil blinked again, recognising his own handwriting.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember writing this,” he admitted.

“I’d not have read them,” Artemy said, with a sigh. “But you left them at your nightstand, addressed to me. A …  farewell message, I’d thought. Truth is, I don’t know if you intended to post them or—or for someone to find them there, after … well.”

Daniil kept silent.

Burakh cleared his throat. “Anyway. You seemed unsure as to what happened. I wanted to see if this would help … clarify things.”

Daniil raised his eyebrows. In a clipped voice, he asked, “And did it?”

A small crease formed between Artemy’s eyebrows. “Yes and no.” He drew a bracing breath. “They’re not a farewell message, they’re … research notes. Of a sort.”

Daniil listened to his explanation—choppy, and long-winded all the same—in silence. His thought trickled slowly, thickly. 

At length, he surmised: “So what you’re saying is—I still carry the Pest.”

Artemy shook his head. “No. I said that’s what you seem to have thought. Based on your notes, which are not  … entirely coherent, oynon. You go on about the need to quarantine yourself, study the mutation of the virus inside you—about donating post-mortem tissue to research, should you not make it—”

Daniil huffed out a sound of assent. “Alright, I get the picture.” 

He looked down, at his one, pitifully bandaged hand. “I mean, it’s a possibility,” he acknowledged. “I took the shmowder very late. Did I draw my own blood?” 

Artemy hollowed out one cheek. “Yes,” he said, somewhat curtly. “Repeatedly. Too much of it.” 

Daniil cut in, before he could go on, “And?”

“Trace amounts of the virus present,” Artemy admitted, wincing, “but frankly—”

“… it could be the vaccine,” Daniil finished for him, feeling suddenly nauseated—by the freshly ingested herbs or the conversation, he was not sure— “or old antibodies leftover from the first infection, I know. I know.”

Artemy grit out, “Do you.”

Pause.

In truth, he could easily picture it: himself, succumbing slowly to a fixation increasing in its intensity the more he was left to it, in utter solitude, drawing phials and phials of his own blood as he medicated the ill-effects of such loss with cigarettes and twyrine, for want of anything more suitable.

He tried not to wince, again. He managed a half-hearted shrug.

“There’s something else,” Artemy said heavily. “You’re going to hate it. You might already suspect it. But it is what it is. In my view, oynon, all points to twyre poisoning.” 

Dankovsky closed his eyes. Aha! There it is. 

He said nothing. 

“… You’re not used to it,” Artemy continued, almost apologetically. That smug—well, not smug. That polite, gentle, bastard. “Not the air content, and certainly not prolonged consumption.”

“Peter—”

“Peter is a late-stage alcoholic. Symptoms would present differently in him. And anyway, he’s spent much more time here, prior to the outbreak, inhaling and ingesting enough twyre pollen to gain the sort of baseline immunity others have. You came here when it was in full bloom, highest concentration, then got very sick with the Pest, lost most your immunity, and then started consuming it in high dosage. While daily divesting yourself of blood samples.” Artemy hesitated. “And the meradorm—”

Daniil pinched the bridge of his nose. “Meradorm?”

And then he remembered, dim words from the morning: out of your mind on meradorm dissolved in twyrine. He cursed, inwardly. 

An attempt at justification burst out of him, unbidden: “I wasn’t—that is, I didn’t—” 

He broke off. I wasn’t trying to run. 

No? a voice in his head asked, almost tiredly. It sounded horribly like Eva’s. Are you sure?

Not run, but he had been trying to escape: flee the growing horror of his present moment somewhere. Flee his own persisting and intolerable company, in absence of others. This much he was beginning to remember: the stifling fright of what he came to see as his circular tomb, surrounding him, among the rising wail of lament, louder and louder in his mind, inescapable, even if only conjured. 

Join us, join us—

Killer, executor, master—

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” Artemy’s voice was pinched, tight.

It brought him back to reality, anyhow.

Daniil’s eyes drifted involuntarily down to the other man’s leg, to a different dim memory: of his anguished face at the Stillwater, during the Pest. The fearsome Ripper, Haruspex, curled in on himself like a big, wounded animal in need of a quiet place to lick his wounds in. 

“… Perhaps not,” Daniil acquiesced, feeling suddenly uncertain of anything. His eyes were glazing over again.

“Twyre poisoning can induce hallucinations,” Artemy said quietly. Bile rose inside Daniil’s throat not unlike shame. 

No, this cannot be borne.

“Burakh,” he began, tightly.

“What I mean is you’re not—”

“What? Crazy?” Daniil cut in. Sharply. With a nasty sort of saccharine smile. “Raving mad? Are you s—”

“—going to get any worse.” Artemy remained unruffled. His jaw was set in determination. “You’re already much better. Lucid. Healthy, save for the exhaustion. Your memory will sort itself. I’ve been giving you ashen swish, it ought to neutralise the twyre.”

Dankovsky swallowed.

“So that’s it, then,” he bit out. His voice sounded, to himself, wounded and weak, and he resented himself for it. “That’s what became of me. I shut myself away from the world in the wake of my damning failure, awaiting a train that would deign to carry me to my execution and put an end to my shame in this world. I tried to finish one last job and study my last available specimen, one I could poke and prod without ethical concerns: myself. Only, I made a farce of that, too, and poisoned myself, poisoned my mind—more than it’s already been poisoned, that is, after months and months without medication, without—I poisoned myself, and went mad. And then I tried to speed the train along, evidently, and dispose of the specimen altogether. That’s it. That’s all there was to it.”

He shut his eyes, overcome. “Goddamn it, Artemy, the plague would have been more dignified. You should have let me die back then.”

There was a heavy silence.

When Daniil forced himself to open his eyes, Artemy was watching him with that unreadable expression. 

“I couldn’t,” he said at last, curtly, a weight to it.

The silence settled back over the room. The idle pliancy from earlier morphed into lethargy. At the very least, it dulled the edge of shame. Dankovsky felt too tired to think. And yet—still, there were questions to be asked. More shame to uncover. 

“I still can’t fathom how you even found me in the first place,” he said with a sigh, shaking his head. Then he remembered something. “Was it—my letter, is that why you came?”

Artemy frowned. “What letter? You mean these notes?”

“No. I had sent you a letter.”

Silence.

For a long, lingering moment, Artemy merely regarded him: thoroughly, and in almost unnatural stillness.

“Daniil, I never got—when was this?” he then demanded, almost abruptly.

When indeed? It all seemed inconceivably distant now. Unreal. “Oh, some weeks ago. I think.” He waved a dismissive hand. “It is not important.”

“I never got a letter from you,” Artemy insisted, a strange sharpness to the words. 

“Well …” Daniil trailed off, unable to think of what to say. The importance of such details eluded him, given the grand sorry picture. 

But Artemy proved exceptionally stubborn about the thing. “Are you sure you posted it?”

Daniil huffed out something like a laugh. “Sure? No.”

“So—you thought I received it and—”

“I assumed you chose not to humour me, after all the hell I gave you while working together,” Daniil said lightly. He let his head fall back against the wall, his eyes slide shut. Instantly, he found himself swallowing. His exposed throat felt strangely vulnerable without the usual fastenings holding him intact. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I was never delusional enough to blame you for it. My conduct during our stint as plague doctors was honestly … beyond excuse. I’m not above acknowledging that, either.”

When he looked down again, Artemy was back to staring at him with that unnerving intensity; something almost like anger to it, but not quite. 

With uncharacteristic urgency, he asked, “What was in the letter?”

Dankovsky felt dizzy again. Perhaps that, that strange cloudiness of mind, was to blame for the truth which followed out of his idle mouth: “Oh. I asked you to come visit me.”

Pause.

“Because I was … lonely.” An understatement, really, in the wake of all the wretched evidence his subsequent and erratic deeds yielded. An understatement unfit to describe the state of growing hysteria and despair he’d ensconced himself within that one endless wall, in hollering silence: lonely.

“I was afraid,” he said tersely. “My head was … beginning to scare me. I thought you … might not judge. If I got through to you at all … You wrote to me, once. A friendly letter, friendlier than I deserved. I did not know what to say to you. I did not know how to respond without revealing the state of me. So I didn’t. But then, once it got … bad, I thought you might—” he trailed off. Weary, his eyes slid shut again. “Well, it’s no matter now.”

There was a harsh scrape of wood on wood, and his eyes were startled back open again. 

Abruptly, Artemy moved closer, having dragged his chair to the very edge of the bed, his knees bumping into Daniil’s own. To Dankovsky’s surprise, he reached forward, and grasp both his hands. He squeezed them, tightly; mindless of the bandaged cut. 

“Listen to me,” Burakh said, with the same thick urgency. “I’d have come. Shudkher, Daniil. Of course I’d have come.”

Daniil opened his mouth; closed it. Artemy’s eyes were bright and unbearably present, insistent on his own. A strange image, an scrap of improbable memory, tugged at the edge of Daniil’s mind; something close and heady and impossible.

Warm, disorienting fever.

He looked down.

“You did come,” he said, straining for neutrality. “I suppose, in the end, I was … lucky.”

Artemy did not let go of his hands for a while.

When he did, with seeming reluctance, Daniil brought himself to look up at the window. Rime and snow covered a solid third of it. It was dark outside, again. He’d slept through most of the day; and yet all he wanted was to keep sleeping.

“I should be off, soon,” he said instead, thinking idly of the Stillwater. Things were coming back to him, yes, image by nonsensical image: such as a coffee cup frozen still to the windowsill. I should really deal with that. What a scene.

Artemy’s voice was nothing short of incredulous. “Off where?”

Daniil glanced at him. “Back to whence I came,” he said, half-mockingly. “I’d say home but we both know how absurd that would make me sound. I shan’t embarrass myself any further, if I can help it.”

Artemy was frowning at him. “Don’t be stupid, Dankovsky,” he snapped. “You’re staying here. Until you’re well. Until the frost is over. Longer, if need be.”

The way he said it; as if it was a threat, rather than an act of charity.

“Very well then,” Daniil said, feeling like a war was lost to him that he can hardly remember fighting. “If you’re ever in the area—could I trouble you to fetch some of my things?”

 ***

Artemy left the house at dawn and thundered through his rounds.

The newborn in Maw started crying at the sight of him; the visit ended with the mother timidly requesting the bald doctor next time. 

Artemy grunted his assent.

 ***

He cut his usual route in half to get to the Stillwater faster.

Inside, Artemy’s anger got the best of him. 

In the evening, Daniil’s had fever returned. Amidst general mumbling, he mentioned something about a mug. Artemy saw the wretched thing and tried to pry it off the windowsill but it was frozen stuck; instead, the handle came off in his hand.

He cursed, and tossed it aside. The clatter echoed menacingly in the circular room.

Afterwards, he shoved things into the carpet bag and Dankovsky’s one suitcase haphazardly, trying not to spend too much time dwelling on garters or underwear or the label of the cologne bottle, or anything at all personal.

Too late.

Tried not to see the lonely bed, the wasteland of despondence around him. 

Tried not to imagine—

The very idea that the Bachelor—that Daniil—had sent him a letter, either lost or stolen, never delivered—

That he was waiting in misery and silence for weeks, plagued by symptoms of a condition he had no knowledge of,  lightheaded from blood loss, thinking that Artemy chose to leave him to it, due to whatever imagined slights he’d dealt him in the Plague— 

Drove Artemy mad, indeed.

He shut the frozen window with the sheer force of his anger.

 ***

When he limped into the kitchen, midday, wrapped in Artemy’s musty bathrobe, the little girl—Mishka—was already there, perched on a stool and feeding what seemed to be a crow spoonfuls of watered down honey with an air of quiet ceremony.

For a moment, Daniil hovered on the threshold, transfixed on the careful ministrations of her little hands. 

He felt much more lucid by now; if still not quite well, then at least no longer so unwell it threatened to override reason.

Mostly, he felt tired. He’d never have thought—back at the plague’s beginnings, or back when threats of closure loomed over Thanatica and he worked ceaselessly to try and get somewhere before it all crumbled—that he’d ever welcome exhaustion gladly. But there it was; after all that shrieking horror and daze, the tired quiet of his mind. A comfort.

Burakh’s house, was quiet, too. An anomaly, likely; a fluke of being inside midday, with everybody dispatched elsewhere. Whenever he’d picture it, Artemy’s life was a racket of life and merriment; people coming and going at intervals, exchanging kisses and gifts. All the things that real people did, settled into their lives without the need to analyse them: the sort of lives Daniil would only glimpse through misted-up windows, at times, on his restless walks through night-time Moscow.

A strange feeling would come over him, then: a sort of gnawing hollow. Paradoxical. A nothing so pronounced it made itself known: there, at the centre. In the chest. Staring through the window glass, a shadow on the street, unseen against the light inside. My nothing. 

Then he would walk back to his Thanatica, and forget it all.

What am I doing here? 

Murky raised her eyes from the bird and stared at him.

“Artemy found him,” she said in her quiet, grave voice. 

“He’s got a knack for that,” Daniil said. His voice was hoarse, like a lifelong smoker’s. 

Murky continued measuring him with an owlish look. 

“You’re not dying anymore?” she asked.

“It seems that I’m not,” he responded. It struck him that the entire exchange had a somewhat surreal quality to it; not unlike those glimpses of other lives in street windows.

Murky looked down at last, seemingly satisfied with his words. At length, she offered, “Sticky’s not allowed to leave in the snow, but it’s not snowing today. So he’s gone to the Warehouses to look for Notkin. Artemy is also outside. But we are inside, so it’s fine.”

Despite himself, Daniil found himself drawn into the kitchen. His eyes caught on the alluring shape of a tin can labelled as coffee. Artemy had stowed his coat away somewhere, perhaps in a ploy to prevent him from dashing out into the frost again; but with it went his nicotine stash. Daniil’s enjoyment of his tiredness had its limits: any stimulants were in nigh demand. 

“Does the house need people in it?” he asked, thinking to humour the girl.

“In the frost, it does,” she said. “To mind the fire inside. So it doesn’t freeze, like yours did.”

Daniil tried not to stiffen. Suppose I deserved that, he thought, though the child’s voice carried no mockery. 

“Don’t worry,” he said, at length, reaching for the coffee tin. “I won’t make your house freeze over.”

“I know.” Then, without looking up from the bird: “Artemy has cigarettes, too. On that high shelf there. So that Sticky can’t reach them.”

 ***

Artemy’s anger did not quite abate by midday, when he met Stakh in the Marrow.

Stakh was watching him strangely. He was wearing his ridiculous cap crooked, almost inviting a mocking comment he could shut down. Artemy was too busy gritting his teeth to take notice.

“Going somewhere?” Stakh grunted at him, eyeing the polished leather suitcase engraved with the letters D. D. in ridiculous cursive.

“No,” Artemy said curtly.

“Hm. You doing alright today?” 

“What do you mean?” Artemy snapped. 

“The rounds. All going fine?”

“Oh. Yes. Crying baby in the Maw.”

“And was it you,” Stakh asked, after a pause, “that made it cry?”

“What?” Artemy snapped again. It wasn’t like Stakh to waste time on talking nonsense on the clock. “No. Latching issues. Though maybe you should visit them tomorrow.”

“Hm,” Stakh said. “Alright. Because I’m trying to think of a reason why you’re acting like somebody pissed in your breakfast.”

“I’m just—” Artemy gritted out, eyes cutting to the snow encroaching upon the town as thought it had personally slighted him. “Frustrated, is all.”

Stakh gave him a long look. “Yes, I can see that,” he said at last. “You in any trouble, Cub?”

Artemy breathed out through his nose. At length, he said. “No. But I … fucked something up.”

Stakh’s eyebrows rose. “A surgery? Diagnosis?”

Artemy startled. “What? No, no. Neither.”

“So nobody died?”

Artemy looked up, sharply. Stanislav was looking at him with impassive, dark eyes; face stoic. Cap ridiculous.

“No,” he said, with less heat now.

“Then it’s not too late to unfuck it, is it?” Stakh said. “Now get back to work, Cub. And get a grip, before you scare away any more mothers.”

 ***

Despite Artemy’s grim expectations, Dankovsky was not languishing lifelessly in bed and desolation when he returned home. Instead, he was in the kitchen, wearing the loaned bathrobe and smoking a mysteriously acquired cigarette over an cup of black coffee.

He was watching Murky fuss over the injured bird, narrating everything she did. 

What was more, he seemed somewhat amused by the show, eyes half-lidded but alert despite the shadows under them and the hint of stubble lining his pale face.  

“HELLO,” Murky said loudly, without looking up. “You’re early. And Sticky ran off. Said he won’t be back at night. I don’t think you let him, but lied to me and said you did. He always does that.”

Dankovsky’s dark eyes travelled from the bird and towards Artemy. They crinkled at the corners, briefly, merrily, before he schooled his expression back into something more habitual.

“… yes,” Artemy assented, feeling slightly dazed. “I am … early. And what did I tell you about snitching, Mishka?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Dunno.”

“I said not to do it.”

“Oh.”

There was a pause.

“… I’d say good morning,” Dankovsky said at length, a little hoarsely, “but I’m afraid I’ve lost track of the time. Good  … something, Haruspex.”

“Afternoon. You look—” Artemy began, and broke off. He felt as though he’d misjudged the atmosphere that would await him somehow, and lost his footing. 

“Yes? What ghoulish thing do I resemble today?” Daniil blew out some smoke, staring pensively ahead. “A striga, perhaps.”

“—better,” Artemy finished. “Less like you’d gone already, and are only haunting me.”

That shut Daniil’s mouth. 

In the resulting silence, Artemy cringed inwardly. Even Murky seemed to have nothing to add.

With a sigh, Daniil snuffed out his cigarette inside his coffee cup. “Alas, I don’t feel that much better,” he announced, taking pity on the conversation. “In fact, I feel filthy. I probably reek. I’m half-convinced it was me that drove Sticky to run away.”

“No, he just wanted to play dice with Notkin,” Murky said. Then she added, “I don’t get dice.”

“Neither do I,” Daniil told her, earnestly.

“Murky,” Artemy said, after another somewhat disorienting pause, “would you like to go to Lara’s for the evening? I spoke to her on my rounds—she’ll be teaching Grace how to knit. She’d love to have you as well. You could fix your doll.”

“Alright,” Murky said, unfazed. “Will you take me there?”

“No, you’ll … go with Lara. She’s, uh, waiting outside.”

He could swear one of Dankovsky’s eyebrows rose about half an inch, but he blessedly said nothing. 

“I’m taking the bird with me,” Murky addressed Daniil, apologetically, before cradling the crow to herself and making for the hallway, where Artemy still hovered.

“I wouldn’t dream of stopping you,” Dankovsky responded.

Artemy found himself avoiding his eyes as he helped Murky get dressed. 

He avoided Lara’s, too. 

 ***

Not ten minutes later, after the door clicked shut behind Murky, Artemy stood still in sudden and oppressive silence. Somewhat numbly, he began removing his outer layers. He still felt strangely awkward, apprehensive, for no discernible reason other than—well. 

Whatever came next.

He turned, bracing himself, and cursed out loud in alarm. 

Dankovsky was standing at the threshold like a vampire, having seemingly materialised from thin air.

“Well,” he said, as though reading Artemy’s mind. “What now?”

Artemy cast him a somewhat wary look.

“You said something about feeling filthy,” he said at last. “I thought you might want a bath.”

In truth, Dankovsky mostly smelled thickly of Artemy’s secret stash of cigarettes, the herbs and the musty mothball scent that pervaded most of the clothes in Isidor’s wardrobes; albeit underneath, there was a detectable, stale undertone of sweat and fever.

All of it oddly comforting, not that Artemy would admit to thinking so under the pain of death. 

Corpses don’t sweat.

Dankovsky’s eyebrows rose again. “You needed her gone for that?”

Artemy bristled, nettled. A sure sign the Bachelor was coming back to the land of the living was the degree of irritability he induced in Artemy by merely existing.  “You want a bath or not?” he barked.

Raising his bandaged hand in a mollifying gesture that was also somehow insulting, Dankovsky inclined his head. “I’d gladly take even a bucket.”

“Right,” Artemy grumbled. “Good. One bucket, coming up.” 

He pushed past Dankovsky and stomped inside the house. 

 ***

Something inside the bathroom broke with a sharp clatter, followed by a sharper curse.

Artemy, hovering in Sticky’s room—strategically close to the bathroom, its door left conspicuously ajar—stilled as  if on cue. “Oynon?”

At length, there followed an acerbic, if strained: “I’m not trying to off myself in here, Artemy, rest assured.”

“Insolent fucker,” Artemy muttered under his breath.

Another clang. Another curse, though more stymied now.

Artemy dropped the flannel he was folding. “Alright, I’m coming in.”

“No—damn it, no.”

Leaving enough pause for decency, Artemy let himself into the bathroom.

The mirror was steamed over, entirely. Dankovsky’s clothes, including the bathrobe, were piled up on the floor, half-drenched with whatever spilled over from inside the tub. 

Daniil himself sat in the tub, a cigarette stuck between his teeth, wet hair in his eyes. He seemed to be attempting to hold up his injured hand over the waterline while shaking out the viscous contents of a shampooing solution onto the other.

A second bottle lay smashed on the floor behind the tub in a puddle of goo.

On pure instinct, Artemy went towards him. The whole picture was too—well. Too much to dwell on, or remain motionless by.

“I’ll help you.”

Dankovsky dodged his outstretched hand, waving him away with his own bandaged one. “You’ll do no such thing, I’m not an invalid. Or a charity case.”

Impatience reared its head again. “Dankovsky—”

“No!” The cigarette made everything that Daniil uttered sound as though he said it through viciously clenched teeth. “You’ve done enough! I won’t let you act like my nursemaid, too.”

For a moment, Artemy managed to stand still, watching the Bachelor try and toss out the hair from his face without losing his cigarette to the water, and wrestle with the bottle-cap again.

Then, unable to possibly withstand either continuing to stand by or leaving, he heard himself say, “I’ll join you, then.”

“What?”

But Artemy was already removing his clothes; all save for his undergarments.

“I need a wash,” he went on, idiotically, determined to persevere with his chosen solution before rational thought intervened, as it was surely wont to do. Muffled, over the wool of the jumper he was tugging over his head: “Why not two birds with one stone … conserve water. Yeah.”

When he turned to face the bathtub, Daniil was staring at him, his mouth slightly open, flabbergasted. He’d given up on the shampoo bottle, hand sticky with it, unlit cigarette was still stuck between his teeth, now dangerously close to falling out. His cheeks and chest were flushed from the hot water.

The picture was still somewhat more than Artemy could currently afford to focus on, so instead he stepped gingerly into the tub and lowered himself opposite to Daniil. 

Some of the water sloshed over the rim. Dankovsky’s dark eyes were plastered to Artemy.

“I’d ask,” he managed, at last, in a falsely serene voice, “what the hell do you think you’re are doing, but—”

“I’m bathing,” Artemy said stubbornly. “Sharing resources. Haven’t you ever had need of conserving water, at the Capital? Never shared? In the army—”

“No, of course, you’re right,” Dankovsky cut in, sarcastically. “This is just like the army. I should’ve thought of that,  really, before telling my father I’d rather die than enlist.”

Ignoring both his tone and whatever his sentence implied, Artemy snagged a lighter from the pocket of his own discarded trousers and extended it somewhat ungainly towards the man in front of him.

There was a momentary, lingering, pause, during which he thought, in startling clarity: Yeah, I’ve gone too far.

Then Daniil huffed a disbelieving breath and leaned forward, angling the cigarette up with his teeth. A flush was still high in his cheeks as Artemy lit it for him. 

Well, he looks jolly alive, good job, doctor! a taunting voice in Artemy’s head piped up. 

Daniil leaned back, holding the cigarette between two bandaged fingers and exhaling. The skin on his biceps and forearms was soapy and wet as he spread them against the wood.

For a moment, they merely stared at each other. Artemy tried to appear resolved and unperturbed.

Dankovsky burst laughing. 

“Have you gone mad?” he asked at last, merrily. “Have I infected you somehow, with my madness?”

Relieved, Artemy cracked a smile. “You may have. But if that’s the case, it happened a long time ago.”

Daniil shook his head, as though still in disbelief. His eyes were glinting strangely. He had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, a fact Artemy had learned and catalogued a long time ago, and had scarce chance to see ever since. 

He cleared his throat. “You feel more on equal ground?”

“Perhaps too equal,” Daniil said, but a smile hid in his voice.

“Well, can I lend you a hand, now?”

The Bachelor’s eyes crinkled further. “By all means, help yourself.” Sticking the cigarette back between his teeth, Dankovsky made to lean forward obediently, and closed his eyes.

With only a slight lag, and a brief thought of, What the hell am I doing to myself, Artemy picked up the shampoo bottle and went to work. 

 ***

Dankovsky’s eyes followed his movements carefully as he left the bath and wrapped a towel around his hips.

“I trust you’ll—manage with this part,” Artemy said, gesturing vaguely at the other towel.

“I just might,” Dankovsky said, in a strange voice.

“Mhm,” Artemy said. “Well, I’ll see you downstairs.”

He left the steamed-up bathroom without looking back.

 ***

Some twenty minutes later, Daniil appeared in the living room with wet hair, more or less shaved, and dressed somewhat haphazardly into his own spare clothes under the loaned bathrobe. 

Artemy himself was sunk into the sagging sofa, one leg bouncing up and down, minutely, agitated. In front of him, on the coffee table, a teapot of zavarka stood innocuously next to the samovar and a bowl of sugar cubes. 

In the hearth, fire was stoked high.

Languidly, Dankovsky meandered into the room. He silently bypassed the armchair and lowered himself instead onto the other edge of the sofa.

After a prolonged moment, feeling strangely dissected by the eyes to his right side, Artemy remembered to move; he leaned forward, filled a glass with tea and diluted it, before pushing it towards Daniil.

Dankovsky picked up a sugar cube, stuck it between his teeth, and took a sip.

He had a towel slung over his shoulders like an undone ascot. His hair was dripping onto it. He had replaced one glove, leaving the other hand wrapped snugly in new bandage.

The musty scent was mostly gone; replaced with Artemy’s soap and his cologne. 

“Well, this is cosy,” he murmured at length.

Artemy ignored it; tried to ignore him altogether, which he acknowledged as somewhat internally contradictory after orchestrating the whole thing. More or less. He poured himself some zavarka, barely diluting it, and took a bracing, bitter sip. 

Winced.

“I found your letter,” he said, bluntly. “Sealed. Unsent. It was on your desk.”

Dankovsky tensed, minutely, but otherwise gave no outward reaction.

Quietly, he asked, “Have you read it, then?”

“No.”

Pause. A long, slow exhalation, then Dankovsky shook his head. “Best not, then,” he said. “Clearly, I was not well.”

Artemy nodded. Tensely, he said, “You seem better now.”

Daniil glanced at him sideways, with a tinge of something like amusement. “Yes, well, I’ve had plenty of rest. Too much, perhaps.” He paused, then licked his lips clean of the remaining sugar. “I even had a dream about you.”

Artemy swallowed.

Something in Dankovsky’s tone, perfectly unassuming but just vague enough, made him suddenly certain—as he had scarcely been certain of anything, ever—that he knew exactly what he was referring to. 

The Bachelor went on, in a low voice, “It’s all getting confused, see. In the dream, I was also running a fever, and you were doing your best to bring it down. And then I—”

“You didn’t.”

A pause. 

Then, “I didn’t?” Dankovsky asked, almost politely, but not at all.

“Dream that.”

Silence fell. Artemy could hear the crackle of fire, somewhere underneath the close sound of Dankovsky’s breathing.

“Ah,” he said at last, softly. “Seems that I add to the list of things they could hang me for every day, even unconsciously.”

Artemy was staring at his knee. The air between them seemed dense like a surface frozen solid. Paradoxically, because Artemy felt like it was him who was burning up, now. An impasse. He could not fathom how to overcome it. 

“… Are you sure I didn’t dream that?” Dankovsky said at length. His gloved had somehow travelled the length of the back of the sofa, and fingers brushed idly past Artemy’s shoulder, as though picking off lint. “It wouldn’t be the first time that I—”

That was all he did say, however, for it was all Artemy could take from him. He interrupted him by shoving him into the couch and kissing the living daylights out of him.

“Oh, what a bad, bad idea,” Daniil managed between kissing, even as he wound himself closer and closer, pushing one thigh between Artemy’s legs and moving against him.

“Yeah,” Artemy breathed. Neither of them stopped.

“They’ll hang me in Spring, when the trains are running,” Dankovsky kept whispering, contrary to the end. “For all of it, every—”

Artemy grabbed his face, a little roughly, and turned towards him. “No, they won’t. They fucking won’t.”

“Not if you can help it.” A weight to the sentence, implied; a weight to his half-lidded eyes. There was levity in it, insolence, in the thrown gauntlet of invoking a dream; so much that it belied something frightful beneath the surface. Artemy could read between Dankovsky’s lines like a second language by now. Under the words, he was taut like a rope, trembling. 

He said: “Something like that, yes.”

He untied the bathrobe, got his hands under it, on him. Dankovsky kept grinning afterwards, almost too widely for his thin face to contain, as though he could not help it—a nervous thing, perhaps, a thing of relief; and it made kissing him that much harder.

But Artemy always liked a challenge.