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A Long, Long Way to Go to Die

Summary:

“I want to see you and speak to you. I know you don’t listen or at least pretend you don’t listen, but I shall bang on your door until you open, and if you don’t open... if you don’t open your door, I shall break it down!” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

While Dema frantically tries to figure out how to retrieve Julian from the mess he’s gotten himself into, Asra must confront his own mistakes and his past relationship with Julian. The present problems of the three interweave with original backstory and additional development of secondary characters.

Picks up from where Whatever I’ve Done left off.

Notes:

Work title from LP. "Long Way to Go to Die."

Chapter one and coda title from Mumford and Sons, "Winter Winds."

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Pestilence is Won When You are Lost and I am Gone

Chapter Text

cover image

Four years before the beginning of the game. 

First, the rule was that the bodies of the dead had to be sent for cremation on the Lazaret.  Wagons did the rounds of the city each morning - voices muffled by masks calling for the dead to be brought out and taken away like so much rubbish.  Next, all licensed medical professionals in the city were ordered to the palace to research possible cures for the plague in mass. A few still ventured out into the city, Julian among them, but by and large, caring for the sick fell to less official helpers: apothecaries, midwives, and herbalists.

I fell into the last category.  Someone who knew something about treating diseases - at least, the symptoms thereof.  My aunt had known more. Much, much more. But she was gone a year, and I had done my best with what she had taught me, and the books left behind, and Julian’s more systematic knowledge.  It wasn’t enough.

It was never enough. 

But we tried anyway.  Tried to help the ones we could.  Tried to keep ourselves from giving in entirely to despair and despondency.

Artemis, a friend of mine and a midwife who had stayed in the city instead of leaving with her wife and child, Julian and I met about once a week at my shop to pack kits we could hand out to the sick:  charms, herbal teas, and whatever medicines Julian had managed to procure from his various connections. Pack kits and play cards, because gambling with friends over strong beer and small change was reassuringly normal in the midst of everything that was not normal.

Then a new proclamation was issued.  The dead were no longer the only bodies to be sent to the Lazaret; the bodies of the soon to be dead would join them.  Anyone showing signs of the plague was to be reported to the bird masked doctors, so they could be quarantined. Quarantine - a convenient euphemism for sent to die.

That night we played a few rounds before giving up on the pretense of levity.  Julian sprawled across the table, spinning the corks from bottles of beer that had long been drunk up.  

“I guess, um, I mean maybe it’ll help contain the spread.  To separate the sick and the well.” He quit spinning the corks and started stacking them into a miniature wall that he promptly flicked over.     

“Bullshit, dear boy.”  Artemis reaches across the table to pat his shoulder.  Julian is a couple of years older than she is, but she’s referred to him as “boy” or “the boy” since they were introduced.  But in all fairness, she is the most mature of the three of us sitting around the table. “No one has figured out how this damned thing spreads.  And it seems far more likely to be the water than personal contact. Might as well let people die at home with at least some human comfort and dignity.  Don’t need a fucking medical education to know that.”

“I know.  I know. I think all three of us would be dead by now if proximity was the main vector.”  Julian sat up long enough to take another drink, then slumped back down on the table, arms folded under his head.  “And I’m not even sure Valdemar is human, to be honest.” Next to him, I leaned against him, resting my head on his shoulder and playing with his hair.

“Why are they sending some of the sick to the palace instead of the docks?”  Artemis sips her beer. “Certainly that interloping peacock doesn’t want plebeian plague germs.”  

Julian sits up straight, eyes wide.  “Whatever you do, do not - do not - let people get sent to the palace.  Bribe the plague doctors - any kind of liquor should do, gods know we need it.  Take people to the docks yourself if you have to. The Lazaret . . . the Lazaret is the better option.”

“Julian.”  I rubbed his shoulder, worried by the sudden fervor in his voice.  Every time he came back from the palace, the circles around his eyes were darker and the tension in his body tighter.  The past few times he had stayed the night with me, he had woken up before the sun, sobbing from nightmares. But I’d never heard him sound this harrowed by whatever it was that happened there.

Artemis looked from Julian to me, and then back again, worry in her deep-set eyes.  “Well, on that ominous note -” She touched his hand, then pressed the back of her own against his forehead.

“No.  I know I exaggerate - sometimes - but not, not now.”  He sat up and pinched the bridge of his nose, seeping his hand back through his hair and sending it tumbling around his face in unruly waves.

“I believe you, Julian.”  Her voice was quiet, serious.  She brushed her fingers over his hand again and pushed his hair back from his face, the way a mother might try to comfort a child.  She stood up and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. “The docks then. I’ll figure something out. I’ll lock up behind myself, Dema.”  She nodded at me and headed downstairs. I heard the bell ring as she let herself out of the shop.

With a groan, Julian laid back down on the table.  I shuffled my fingers through his hair and experimentally pulled it up into a loose bun.  He hadn’t cut it in a while, and it was threatening to reach his shoulders. I liked it. Then again, I would like his hair any way he chose to wear it.  “Ilyusha -” I didn’t usually use his given name, much less the very familiar diminutive. “Tell me what’s going on.”

He sat up again and pulled me into his lap and burying his face in my hair.  “I can’t. It’s forbidden. And anyway, I don’t, I don’t want you touched by that.  I don’t want that here.”

I snuggled against his chest for a minute, then reluctantly stood up, tugging on his hand.  “Come on, darling. Let’s go to bed.” With a little shove in the right direction, he stumbled to the bedroom.  I poured us both a mug of lukewarm tea - second steeping, so it shouldn’t keep us awake. There were enough other things in the world to induce insomnia.

When I push past the curtain that serves as a door, Julian was sitting on the edge of the bed, boots already off and his head in his hands   I nudged his arm, pushing the mug into his hands. “Drink that. You need something other than alcohol in you.”

He drank the tea in a couple of utilitarian gulps and set the empty mug aside before leaning over to nuzzle my neck.  Not so much sexual, not right now, more of a desperate seeking of human contact in the midst of a world that seemed to be burning down around us.  I tilted my head to the side, indulging myself for a moment in the pleasurable touch before turning toward him and undoing the one or two buttons that remained fastened on his shirt.  Cupping his face in my hands, I ran my thumbs along the dark circles under his eyes then pulled his face down to mine and kissed him: forehead, nose, soft lips. He groaned and leaned into my embrace as I ran my to the back of his neck, over the tense muscles there then further down his back.   “Okay, love, shirt off, on your stomach.”

He hesitated, started touching my face.  “Dema, let me, what do you -”

“Don’t argue.”  I recognized what he was trying to do.  Focus on someone else, so that he didn’t have to experience his own feelings.  “Right now, I want to take care of you.”  

His hands stay on my face, but his eyes drop behind long, dark lashes.  “Please.” It’s a breath more than a word.

He pressed his forehead against mine then shrugged out of his shirt, laid back on the bed and rolled over.  I climbed onto the bed, straddling his waist, and dragged my hands down either side of his spine, then worked back up his back to knead his shoulders, leaning forward to kiss the back of his neck.

“I worry about you.”

“Why?”

“Because you're a kind man in what sounds more and more like a deeply unkind place.”

He was quiet for a moment, then sighed heavily.  “Oh, solnishka , I’m not so sure I can be called kind anymore.  Or ever again. Not after all this.”

 

Coda: And No Hope, No Hope will Overcome

She wasn’t ready when they came for her.  Denial, not surprise. She knew they’d come.  Knew that the glamour would have failed at some point and someone would have seen the telltale red in her eyes and reported it to the authorities.  After all, that was what everyone had been told to do, and no one knew what they should do, so they would do as they were told. Easier. Understandable.  An order is a comfort in a way, when there is no rhyme nor reason by which to divine what one actually should do. 

But she had just convinced herself that she had a little more time.  An hour. A few minutes. A half-minute more. If the time between two moments can be divided into infinitely smaller fractions, it must be infinite.  Yes?

They forced the door - the people in the bird masks.  Light from her lamps glints red off the polished glass hiding their eyes.  One grabbed her roughly by the shoulder. People think that masks let you become someone else for a time.  Once she thought that too. But she knew better now, much better. The anonymity of masks revealed who people really are.  That was the real function of wearing a mask.  

“It’s better if you cooperate,” a second one said.

A minute - just a minute.  She jerked free of the hands on her shoulders.  The shop, colored lamps and jars and a thousand subtly different smells spun around her as she groped behind the counter for paper, a stub of a pencil.  Just a minute. She kicked back hard. Caught a leg, heard a curse. Just a moment. Then she would cooperate. Need to leave something. Anything for him - either him - to find.

Having to leave was an awful enough thought.  Being gone with no trace was even worse.

“Let her.”  It’s the second one.  The one whose mask didn’t reveal cruelty.

She twisted Asra’s ring off her finger and steadied her shaking hands long enough to scrawl artlessly across the scrap paper.  Not what she wanted to say, but she doesn’t have enough time to put words to all that she did want to say. Weighted the paper down with the ring and drew a quick sigil about them so that there were only two sets of hands that could touch either object.  She shuddered when she looked back at the bird masks, but she nodded to the kinder one and took her cloak down from the hook by the door. It’s better if you cooperate.

 

J - I love you. I love you. I love you.

You are good, and I love you.

Tell him I didn’t take his ring off until now.

I’m sorry. -D