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The Bachelor starts feeling a sense of connection to the man the children called his doppelgänger the first time that he…
… he gives no honorable warning when he skulks up behind a man in the night with a blood-tinged blade. (The man with the blade, the Bachelor with the blade. It’s all the same, ambiguously phrased or not.) Under the cover of darkness, he takes no chances.
If he was dressed plainly, unrecognizable as the Capital’s emissary, then Daniil Dankovsky with his red-tipped weapon would be the sort of man you wouldn’t want to take chances with either. You would instead creep up behind him, while the wind’s creaking of the tree branches covers your soft steps, and then like a biting asp, plunge your knife into the curve where his neck met his shoulder—
The body squirms on its skewer and then drops.
Daniil rifles through the pockets and finds pills, bandages, a lady’s earring. He picks up the bandit’s razor and inspects its edge. Judging by the fresh blood, it has been used recently. The unlucky souls it carved from their bodies must have been avenged.
But now Daniil is a man with pills, bandages, a lady’s earring in his pockets, and warm blood on the end of a knife. So what’s the difference?
He understands now what it’s like to be a Ripper.
Nobody righteously accosts him that night as a suspicious, dangerous renegade, and the next day he’s earned a bit of renown and spare rations from the guardsmen he shows the blades to. Always simple-minded, they appreciate someone taking over the job of dealing with criminals, no thoughts about how the abyss of violence takes you the more you reach into it. They don’t really see that as a concern. You kill a good man, you’re a bastard. You kill a bastard, and you’re a good man. That’s justice.
Daniil would like to believe in justice, but that’s not the context he knows death best. Some of his persecutors, who found Thanatica blasphemous, argued that death should not be destroyed because it had the power to reap the wicked. Without death, there could be no ultimate punishment for sin.
So Daniil by that logic must be on the side of the wicked. He’s wondered as much. He doesn’t always like to call himself ‘good’.
A little boy sprinkles a handful of bullets through dirt-smudged fingers into Daniil’s palm and, free of extra charge, tells him about Isidor Burakh’s son, unexpectedly whetting Daniil’s burning curiosity. That notorious, elusive stranger that Daniil has had to repeatedly vouch for based on mere scraps of information.
Every time he tells someone that the younger Burakh is innocent, he doubts it a little more, because he’s getting used to being a liar as well as a killer. So if he says it without conviction, it’s probably a lie, right?
“He wants to help everyone,” the child chirps. “He’s actually not a Ripper, he's a Haruspex. He’s a lot like you, honest and kind.”
The children’s idea of kindness must come from all the nuts and fishhooks they get out of him. They adore Daniil’s simple role in their little world, trading presents. Perhaps Burakh has been playing the same games with them.
“I’m not kind,” he mutters.
A few days into the outbreak, eyes burning from lack of sleep, he shoves aside a group of volunteer patrolman and tries to nick the vein of a dead body prepared for cremation. He requires a sample of infected blood, and while trying to get it he’s already wasted the lives of several of those butchers from the slaughterhouse trying to appease local customs that he still doesn’t understand the intricate rules of.
All along, he should have known he ought to attempt this himself, instead of delegating. Nobody in this town can do anything right without him breathing down their necks.
He knew pushing past those guards was a provocation but he doesn’t expect to be thrown to the ground and choked until he passes out. He’s left helplessly staring at a headstone as his vision blackens, wondering how often people die in graveyards.
When he comes to his senses, it turns out he’s been dumped at Saburov’s doorstep. Pacing and growling like a lion, the governor explains what a stupid mistake this was, to openly flaunt the town’s taboos, but he’s willing to reassign those patrolmen to an infected district and give the Bachelor a window of opportunity to collect his blood sample. Being sent to the sickened streets where the Pest lingers is a death sentence, of course.
Briefly, Daniil objects.
It’s strange because he might have killed those men himself if he’d not been surprised by their attack. But he doesn’t want the plague and back-room negotiation to take those lives. When he relents, he has to make up for that bitter taste in the back of his throat somehow.
That’s why, the next day, when…
… So, the practical facts first: he needs a certain condemned man to provide him a particular unseemly service, and to get to that man he needs to clear out a detail of guards in a jailhouse. He could do it alone, or with the aid of a local gang. In a sense it would be selfish to take it all on himself, because if he dies here, the town has no emergency administrator. That could easily spell the end of the town, and if the plague gets loose, the end of a lot of other things.
Yet he take the selfish choice. He’s not going to use anyone else’s body as a shield if he can help it. He may have a reputation of being a high and mighty authority, but he’s barely had time to give orders, with his boots wearing thin from rushing from mansion to wretched mansion, trying to untangle who knows what vital information about their situation.
Before Daniil resolves to kill, he tries to argue. He attempts reason, but the patrolmen in front of the cell are just as stupid and stubborn as all the rest. It seems to be a job requirement. Not to mention the vile shameless way they brag about terrorizing the streets, arresting anyone they can’t slaughter on sight for being visibly suspicious. Rippers, the whole lot.
There’s nothing to be done. He has to get rid of them.
The man on the other side of the iron bars leans against the wall, arms crossed, looking impassively away. Playing no part in this conversation, even though it’s about his own fate.
Look me in the eye already, damn you, Daniil angrily thinks, as he backs out of the slaughterhouse-turned-jailhouse (is it so much of a change?). After the effort it took to find you!
Look at me, Burakh!
Artemy Burakh’s gaze flicks over and finds him instantly, pierces him through.
A jolt of intense fear and intrigue courses down Daniil’s spine. It’s as if the man heard, and heeded, his thoughts.
Daniil takes a moment to prepare on the train tracks, under the square arch of pipes that links two of the factory buildings.
The bullets that the bright-eyed little boy gave Daniil in exchange for a couple of walnuts slot into the chambers of his revolver one by one.
Who was to say whether the guardsmen had sons and daughters of their own wandering the streets at this very moment, passing ammunition from hand to grubby hand?
He puts this out of his mind, remembering what he was told by the governor when he tried to weasel out of sacrificing the men guarding the corpse in the graveyard. If you don’t do this, someone else will have to do it for you.
Because of the outbreak, there is an inevitable mechanism clamped around his and other people’s lives. Invisible, but not inaudible, if he gives himself over to poetry. The mysteriously active rattling and clunking echoing throughout the Works sounds like the beating heartbeat of fate exposed for him to hear. Or its churning, hungry, nauseous stomach.
Go back inside and do what has to be done, Bachelor! demands the torture-rack of destiny. Never stand still.
He imagines that Artemy Burakh, with a single keen glance, already surmised what Daniil was preparing himself to do. A killer recognizes a killer. They were said to be so alike, doppelgängers, even brothers. If all that’s to be believed, then Burakh is expecting him. Waiting for him.
Very well. He’ll go back in and face his fate even if Burakh’s burning, deep-set eyes are watching him the whole time. Let the Haruspex judge him however he likes.
To win a fight, he knows, you’ve got to give in a little, take pleasure from it if you can. If you’re too tense, too afraid, it’s easier to get hurt.
He cocks the hammer of the revolver with his thumb. Click.
“We told you already, doctor, he’s not getting out.” The patrolman laughs. “Even if you’ve got plenty more coin to throw around, ‘cause we heard all about how generous you are—”
Daniil holds his breath, lines up the shot and gets devastatingly lucky within the first ear-splitting report and puff of smoke; the first bullet lands just off-center between the guard’s eyes and caves in the bone, blinding him in a spray of blood.
One down.
Wait, not yet! The man’s head’s been torn through by the shock of the bullet, but Daniil knows well that death is a complicated process, and just like a train that’s been derailed but hasn’t stopped yet, the guard is stumbling towards him, perhaps not feeling the pain through the shock, only remembering his purpose to attack anyone who disrupts the peace.
Daniil chokes up, drops his bag, and grabs the revolver with both hands before they start trembling, wasting two more bullets into the dying man’s chest, until he drops face down on the floor.
And precious seconds go wasted too.
Another guard swears to the high heavens as the pair of cracks ring out, and the two men standing beside Burakh’s cell charge Daniil. They’re unarmed, but they’ve made up their minds to fight.
With only three bullets left, he flinches and aims, but this angle could send his shot, if he’s not as fortunate, right into the cell.
He’s about to take that chance, but his vision blurs, and his stomach churns.
It feels like luck itself is twisting itself out of his favor. He is not a lucky man; he’d do well to remember that.
Burakh doesn’t cower. He should be flattening himself on the stone floor with his hands over his head, but it seems he wouldn’t bend before anyone like that; he’s either too proud, or too shocked. His eyes are rigidly fixed on Daniil, rather than moving to follow the fight.
Now, realizing he’s about to be overwhelmed, his hands are acting on their own and firing straight into the chest of one patrolman, twice because the first shot pierces the shoulder, too high up. He aims the last bullet at the other guard and it gouges out a hole in their gut.
It does get easier the more you do it… Tracking bodies moving coldly, too focused on the mechanics to care about the sensations. He’s just shutting down machines that have so many points of failure. He’s throwing a spanner in their engines, cutting their fuel lines, and clogging their clockwork. Bodies stop like broken timepieces.
The two men tackle him to the ground, and his head knocks against the hard floor, and in the span of it ringing, strangely pure, like a tuning fork, he flounders for his bag.
Daniil’s fingers curl around the handle of his beggar’s scalpel. That brutal instrument he’s become strangely fond of, despite it being so ill-fit to his hand.
He swings — the slash meets resistance — there’s a wet and awful gargle and spurt —he pushes one man off him with a strained yell and the man rolls over, clutching his throat.
Daniil’s fingers start to slip, now, with liquid between them running down the blade, but he bursts upward into a lunge that catches the last opponent in the stomach.
Now the bodies on the floor are all thrashing and hissing like a pit of snakes, and Daniil, maddened with panic, carves his way out with one furious, sloppy thrust of his knife after another.
He breaks free like he’s pulled himself out of a riptide and is struggling to shore, and then he pries his carpetbag loose of the pile once he’s standing.
Victory, a strident fanfare, trumpets in his pulse. The scent of blood is everywhere.
He staggers like a drunken man and then leans against the wall, and drops the knife; it’s dull and useless now, tip broken and blade heavily nicked. He’s taken knives out of the hands of plenty of would-be muggers, making this one amusingly disposable even at a time when every piece of garbage counts for something.
It occurs to him that his black carpetbag must look like a treasure chest in these times. He’s still got scraps of food, money, and immunity-boosting pills. Perhaps it also occurred to the patrolmen that if they had a good excuse to kill the doctor from the Capital, they could take the spoils.
They died in desperation, then. Or they’re about to. Death is a process, but what he can say for sure is that he’s set that process in motion.
Daniil nudges them over one by one with the toe of his boot until he spots the flash and hears the clatter of a metal keyring. When he pries it off the man’s belt, he hears words sputtered out through a blood-sodden throat, and chooses not to parse or remember them.
He holds out the keyring, dangling in the crook of his forefinger, to show the man in the cell.
They said Isidor’s son was young, but he’s got such a haggard appearance already. He’s got the face of a man who can bear grim sights such as these, except his eyes are weary and his frown is on the softer side. If you wanted to read heartache there, you could do so.
He comes right up to the bars of the cage and grips them.
“And so we finally meet, oynon,” he says, voice both gravelly and rich. “Just a pair of pawns on this dreadful chessboard where each square is blacker than black itself.”
Daniil is transfixed, unable to deny the shiver that goes down his spine and between his legs. As long as he doesn’t have to feel anything about the bodies on the floor, he’ll take this giddy satisfaction that Burakh is talking to him at last. This is a moment of importance, isn’t it?
“Are we friends or are we foes?” the man muses. “Will one consume the other — or will we part, each striving for his own victory?”
What?
Still dazed, with a burning flush on his cheeks and an itch to keep moving as if more assailants will come pouring out of the shadows, Daniil tries to understand what he’s hearing. He’s not being thanked for his daring rescue, apparently.
“How can we be foes if we're fighting a common enemy?”
Burakh inclines his head in careful approval. “I’m glad to hear you say that, oynon. It's a shame we aren't standing together. I lack your knowledge. I'm blindfolded and can only follow my heart and my intuition.”
Daniil already threw everything he thought of this man before now aside, particularly the fear of his brutishness and willingness to cut open living bodies. Look at what the Bachelor himself has become; that’s exactly the sort of company he should be keeping at this point.
So why is Burakh now acting like there’s some great divide between them? Aren’t they alike?
“What’s stopping us from an alliance?” he asks, flashing the key again, stepping closer to the cell door. “I’d appreciate it. Every bit of aid I’ve received has been indispensable.”
Burakh gives a thoughtful frown. “Here’s a piece of advice for you: don't trust those who volunteer to be your guides on the path to victory.”
“So you don’t intend to be one of them?”
“I can’t be. The real battle is still ahead of us both.”
“You mean the battle against the pest?” What is the fellow getting at here?
“I mean the battle against you. We may not be foes, but I have a strong feeling that we will end up opposing each other. Each of us will try to tilt the balance to his own advantage.”
Those are some high-minded words for someone who’s still on the other side of a locked cell door, but Daniil can admire the brazenness.
“I don't know what you're talking about... although I can probably guess. Whatever the outcome, I will remain true to my conscience.”
“If you're allowed to. My freedom has already been taken away from me. Do learn from my mistakes.”
So he says, but he says not to trust advice. What a paradox. “I will.”
“How did you find me, oynon?”
Daniil takes a deep, steadying breath.
He unlocks the cell.
“I need your help,” he says.
At least the part where he explains his request is brief. It turns out Burakh has already agreed to do this dirty work on Rubin’s behalf.
Daniil mentally notes a time and a place to retrieve the crucial sample of infected tissue, and the plan in case of interference — it can all be described in such clinical language if he so chooses.
It will take place later tonight, but he hasn’t got much left to do, so he envisions wandering the streets… (looking for trouble, looking for someone else to fight who deserves it)… finding somewhere to sleep… (entering the home of his least favorite confidante in case his condition worsens and the air he exhales in his troubled, bloodstained dreaming state becomes deadly — who would he choose to sacrifice? Fat Vlad, maybe).
Trapped by indecision, he doesn’t move, but neither does Burakh.
Daniil has been advising everyone he speaks with to stay indoors, for the love of all that’s holy, but those injunctions don’t apply to Burakh, so it doesn’t make sense that he’d linger in this dismal cell.
“Well? Be off with you.” Daniil keeps holding the cell door open, offering the man his freedom. When his grip shifts, there’s a faint stain of blood left behind on the iron bar.
“Be off with me? No,” says Burakh, stony-faced. “I have business here.”
“What manner, exactly?”
Though he doesn’t wonder long. Burakh is shifting, fingers curling impatiently. He means the business of snatching bodies. Daniil has left a banquet of them on the floor for Burakh’s perusal.
“Don’t look at me like that,” drawls the Ripper. “After what you asked of me.”
Daniil clicks his tongue, feeling cornered. “Getting practice in? Yes, we wouldn’t want you to slip up and let things go to waste later tonight.”
“Are you trying to stop me, oynon? You have a strange way of doing it. Angry eyes, permissive words.”
“No, no, I’m not at all trying to stop you.” Daniil clings to the cell door for dear life; he needs something, anything to ground him and stave off this buzzing in his ears, this throbbing in his throat. He waves his free hand casually. “Perhaps I should watch you work, to be sure that you’re the right man for this job.”
“I am.” Absolute certainty in his tone. But then Burakh takes a step closer. “Are you?”
Daniil doesn’t like that man’s tone; he itches to slam the door in his face, let the metal clang louder than an alarm bell. “Am I what?” he snaps.
“You’re trembling like an autumn leaf.”
The words cut through him so cleanly that he holds still in fear that the slightest movement will cause him to fall apart into neatly hewn chunks of meat.
But he eventually relaxes, slipping his fingers down from the cell door, which swings back and creaks on its hinge.
No use denying it. “Yes, I suppose I am. But don’t you dare misunderstand; I’m not afraid of you, for one thing. It should be obvious why I wouldn’t be.”
Burakh’s glare falls to the floor, and the carnage. “Too true, oynon. In fact, I ought to be shaking in my boots.”
“Maybe,” says Daniil, knowing he’s being mocked.
How exactly can he tell Burakh that he needs to take a moment to collapse to the floor and scream into his hands until his throat is even more sore and hoarse than it already is? That he can’t leave the building until his head stops throbbing, and his hands stop twitching in their eagerness to swing a weapon and carve open anyone who gets in his way? How can he explain without making a mockery of himself?
Could he say all that and then insist this isn’t him, he’s not usually like this at all, he’s a man of dignity and class…? If he wanted to play the role of comedian for a moment, sure.
Burakh still has a deep furrow in his brow. “You look unwell…”
“Keen eye,” Daniil says, without much emotion. “I am.”
When he says it so flatly, there can be no mistaking what he means. Burakh reacts with subtle alarm, then shakes his head, rueing the hand fate has dealt.
The crawling and prickling sensation on Daniil’s skin isn’t just because he’s under scrutiny and on edge.
It happened the day before. What a brave and chivalrous choice the Bachelor had made, flaring up with indignation when he’d heard three of the young women he’d come to know volunteered to test medicine on themselves!
Unacceptable risk! He’d do the job himself. And if all it took to prove his point to these superstitious folk was to sit in a contaminated house for an hour and emerge unscathed, then he’d take precaution, not touch anything, exercise common sense, and go on with his duties afterwards.
The beak-masked orderly acting as referee unnerved him with their tone of wry amusement, but what he found inside would have frayed his sanity even if all he had to do was grimly observe it.
The furniture in the house had been overturned, as if the agonized death throes of the former inhabitants caused them to go into a frenzy. The walls, floors, drapes, boarded-up windows, were all covered in a residue of grime and mildew, like architectural pus. This was the interior perspective of those scabby, streaked buildings he’d seen appearing in blighted districts.
Logic gave him nothing, but instinct told him he was in the gullet of a creature in septic shock, gasping its last breaths. (The Pest doesn’t linger without living flesh, he later learned. But it was very much alive in these homes. A looser mind would have called the whole house a living, dying thing.)
The plague came to him shaped like the ghosts of the dead that had lost all form and personhood in limbo, a fog of screaming empty faces, condemning his failures, howling silently as they pursued him.
His senses utterly abandoned him, and the most flattering thing he could say in his favor was that no one had witnessed his panic.
After many minutes he was finally pressed all the way back to the door, scratching and clawing at it and furiously shaking the locked handle, with all those spectres crowded together before him, fighting each other for the chance to force a kiss upon his clammy, tear-streaked face.
He remembers holding his breath until he nearly fainted. In the end it made no difference.
Of course it’s possible to erase that entire affair with the little box of powder he was graciously gifted when he stumbled out. However, he’s had some concerns it would completely incapacitate him… he could wait a little longer, when he had enough time to spare for such a risk. If he uses the cure too hastily, and is promptly infected the next day, he would need another, and would have wasted the first.
He has every reason to be economical with his cures, when tasked with preserving a mysterious list of important people around the town. He might argue as well that documenting the Pest’s progression from within could prove useful to understanding it.
Daniil explains all this swiftly and dispassionately to Burakh, sparing the lurid details. “—So don’t get too close,” he concludes.
Burakh is dryly chuckling. He’s laughing; the man’s laughing at Daniil’s woeful situation. It’s a dark sort of laugh without the light of a smile. “Really?” he asks.
“Yes, I really am infected! Of course I am, it was bound to happen eventually, in these horrendous, unsanitary conditions.”
Burakh shakes his head and holds up a hand. “What if I told you that an hour ago, one of those dreadful vapor clouds cornered me in this very cell?”
He’s infected too.
Yes, now that Daniil has reason to look for the signs, there’s a telltale reddening in the eyes, sallow undertones in his cheeks, and drying, peeling skin around the corners of his lips.
Daniil is quiet, but it’s a calm before the storm. “I would regret not arriving an hour sooner.”
This is his own mistake. Considering what happened to the rest of the prisoners rounded up earlier today, considering Burakh’s guards outright admitting they expected their prisoner might catch the Pest…
With the box of powder in his bag, it ought to be more of a biting annoyance than horror. Burakh is lucky that Daniil needs him. But he has every right to be incensed. The ultimate blame for everything the governor has done would be on the shoulders of the man who arranged for the transfer of power.
“I’ve seen enough of Saburov’s negligence,” Daniil growls. “You wouldn’t be the only one to catch it rotting away in his jails. Why did I ever…? How was I supposed to know he’d be captivated by the mumblings of his mad wife, and some insane girl!”
Daniil’s fingers are clenching tighter and tighter. He stares at the droplet of blood that pools out of his fist and trembles under his pinky finger, then breaks and splashes onto the floor, a little red splotch by his boots.
Actions have intentions and consequences. It used to be such a logical way to think. But even though he would never have denied, in the past, that a person can lose control of themselves, or that intentions and consequences cannot agree, he used to find it such a poor excuse for negligent and disgraceful behavior.
If the consequences of your actions fail to remain in concordance with their intentions, is that not a kind of madness? Is that not a kind of disturbance between the mind and reality, no matter how sane you insist you are? Isn’t it a kind of wickedness to act without assurance that you’re in control of what you’re doing?
Nothing he’s done since he came to this town has come out the way he meant it to. Is the situation out of control, or is he just insane?
“I can’t do this,” he blurts out. “I can’t leave this godforsaken warehouse; I think I’m going to kill someone else, the first person who gets in my way!”
He spins on his heel, addressing an invisible audience with a grand gesture as his voice rings off the gray concrete walls.
“What difference would it make? You’re all dying in droves, blundering off this cliff like a herd of lemmings, dragging each other as you go down! It doesn’t matter what I do, does it?”
Daniil swings a fist out behind him, aiming to slam it against the iron bars of the cell, but it stops with a heavy thud on something softer, but still unyielding.
Mortified, he realizes he’s struck Burakh square in the chest as the man was stepping towards him.
“Oof,” the man grunts.
Daniil’s hand freezes against the rough fabric. The Haruspex is staring him down with a thinly restrained threat gleaming in his eyes.
“That hurt,” Burakh says, with nothing but a twitch in his eye to show it. “You know, I was recently stabbed just a few centimeters below…”
“I didn’t know that— I didn’t mean to—”
He never means to do it.
Burakh has already caught his wrist and yanked him into the cell.
It’s at this point that Daniil comes fully unhinged, behind the closed doors of his mind, because despite that stern and forbidding scowl on Burakh’s face, he feels no fear or even apprehension, just a wild bubbling spring within his soul that wants to take this as far as he possibly can.
“Stop, Burakh. I don’t have any quarrel with you but I’m not in a…” He forces it out with his last gasp of honor. “I’m not in a very sound state of mind. If you want to fight then damn you, I’ll fight.”
“You’re full of hate, oynon. And you’re already slipping. Listen to me.”
Burakh grips his shoulders, giving him an admonishing but still steadying squeeze. He’s saying, I could be your friend if you let me, but you won’t like the other option.
“The sooner you do this, the sooner you sink into that abyss, the sooner Suok will have you in her clutches. I know you came here to fight Death, didn’t you? You’re going to reach too far into that darkness and become the thing you hate. You’ll kill the town; I haven’t got my father’s skills in foresight yet but even I can see that much.”
He’s almost pleading.
But Daniil doesn’t like to hear what he’s been afraid of spelled out so openly. His lips twist into a sneer.
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to take advice, oy— whatever you keep calling me! And don’t lump me in with your nonsense, myths and fairy tales… I’m tired of prophesies.”
“If you don’t believe in prophesies, you must believe in your own free will. If you have it, use it.” Burakh has a shifty look in his eye, and he bites down his words. “That’s all I can say…”
And if I don’t have it? What then?
Daniil doesn’t get the impression at all that Burakh wants to be cagey, any more than he wants to be caged. But he’s offering nothing useful here; how is Daniil supposed to act freely when he doesn’t know what will come of his decisions? An uninformed choice is not a free one, is it?
So he spits out instead, “Hasn’t this town tried to get you executed? I saved you, you…! I risked my life for you! But I’m your enemy? How’s that for gratitude!”
“I’ll pay you back later.” Burakh is practically half ignoring him now, staring off into the distance. Reevaluating his approach?
“Let me go,” says Daniil, just to see what will happen.
“Not yet. I think I’ll decide when we stop talking. You’re bound by your need to uncover the truth, aren’t you? What if you miss something important?”
Burakh is playing at something very peculiar, but it’s taking hold of Daniil and casting its wicked spell over him.
Essentially, he’s bluffing, and quite openly. He’s saying that if Daniil leaves now, he’ll fail to grasp something important that will undo him in the long term. There’s no proof that this is true, and yet if Daniil fails to pick up on this obvious warning, he’ll deserve the fall he takes.
Because maybe the situation has been slipping through his fingers because he doesn’t have all the facts.
Is this what Burakh meant by not trusting anyone who offered to guide him? He might think he’s got the freedom to act while they’re merely advising, but he has no choice but to be drawn down whatever path they lay out for him, for fear of being left in the dark.
He feels thwarted. Rather like a piece on that damned chessboard Burakh spoke of, thinking there was an opening that seemed to lead to a favorable set of moves, but realizing a trap was lurking.
He must think outside of the box. Or… is the right thing to do to think inside the box?
What is the way to untangle yourself from a sticky situation in chess if you can’t escape? Move in and occupy the same space as an aggressing piece.
He plants his hands on Burakh’s shoulders and gets on his tiptoes, glaring daggers.
“You’re right, I don’t need advice. I know what must happen, I just need things to go my way. I’ll drag your town kicking and screaming behind me if I have to.”
“I’ve seen how you like to negotiate, oynon,” Burakh says. “Is that what you have in mind? I hope you’re not that sort of man.”
Daniil’s gut twists at the reminder, and yet he has the temptation to fit his hands around that neck of Burakh’s just to stain his skin with crimson fingerprints.
“You don’t know what sort of man I am,” he cautions. “Which is my final warning to you.”
Burakh just rolls his eyes. “If you want to kill me, you’d better find someone else to collect your sample.”
“If I killed you I wouldn’t have to find someone else, I’d do it myself! I'd have my sample. And if you weren’t already infected, I’d kiss you square on the mouth and see how you like the taste of the Sand Pest.”
Fingers fist into the hair on the back of his head. “Well—!” Burakh snaps. “You little plague rat. If that’s how it is, I’d do the same to you.”
The whip-crack sharpness of their raised voices rings in the hall in the sudden silence.
Staring into Burakh’s eyes is like being wrapped in a warm blanket of thorns; there’s something stabbing into every part of Daniil’s body, encasing him tightly no matter how he might struggle to escape.
He imagines the Haruspex throwing him to the floor and pinning him down and slowly, methodically, opening up his chest cavity and prying back his ribs to start nicking the arteries around his heart.
He imagines the Haruspex leaning down in a rush of impassioned indignation and pressing their lips together, forcing particles of pestilence onto his tongue.
Daniil, as he has already noted, has come unhinged. So it doesn’t even shock him that his mouth takes over and throws caution to the wind.
“I wouldn’t object,” he retorts. “You’re a striking type. You wear your features well. And you have a kind of allure… Yes, yes, I can see it. Like a bed of coals that might rise up in flames if the wind hits right. I think I’d enjoy that…”
Apparently frank flirtation might be what stalls the Haruspex after all. His jaw hangs open, and then steps away, raising his eyes to the ceiling and his hands up in mock defeat — or maybe the real thing?
“Well, Bachelor, you’ve surprised me after all,” he says.
“Good, good,” Daniil grits out, as it starts to dawn on him that he’s really gone a little too far this time. He shuffles back a few steps towards the door. “So do you still want to play these stupid games with me, or…?”
“I’m surprised you’d leave yourself open.”
Burakh’s hand shoots out and catches Daniil’s chin, turns him and walks him backwards towards the cell wall, and then pushes him against it with deliberate intent.
Daniil knows he could have wrenched himself free but his heart is choking in his throat.
“Is this what you want?” Burakh demands.
Briefly, Daniil shuts his eyes, and finds he’s on the verge of laughter. That sinful swell of adrenaline that aided him in the fight earlier is singing in his ears again.
“Why not? Why not indeed… Look, if you’re going to hold me here because you… what’s your excuse again, you don’t think I’m fit to go out? Well, anyway, you might as well make it pleasant for me.”
He cracks one eye open, thinking, too narrow-mindedly, that it would start — and possibly end — with a kiss.
But, with a look of deep concentration, Burakh lays his hands against Daniil’s collar and slides them down, down, down…
Daniil doesn’t object in time.
“Oh? Oh.” Burakh’s hand freezes as he cups Daniil’s crotch. His eyes widen, first with doubt, then with bitter amusement. “Any sort, indeed. This explains a lot, doesn’t it? You’re a w—”
Daniil brings the heel of his boot down fiercely on Burakh’s toe.
“Don’t.” He catches his breath while Burakh, not expecting such a vehement reaction, stops altogether. “Don’t… All right, fine, go ahead, I won’t judge ignorance. You don’t understand, but you hardly gave me the chance to explain.”
There’s room for one more rash, idiotic decision in Bachelor Dankovsky’s likely to be shortened life. Gripping Burakh’s wrist, he forces the hand back between his legs. He doesn’t appreciate the idea of having to stop now, just because some aspects of his body need explaining.
“Ignorant, am I?” Burakh presses his fingers harder against Daniil’s crotch, and begins rubbing tight, quick circles against his bud of a cock. “What am I touching right now? Are my hands lying to me?”
Daniil hisses through a grin of bared teeth, “You wouldn’t touch me like that if I wasn’t a man. Like you’re challenging a rival.”
Burakh’s probing fingers slow. “How do you know me so well, to say I wouldn’t…?” he growls.
“Well, I know myself better than you.” Affecting calm, he rests his shoulders against the wall, looks away as if modestly as he spreads his legs further open. “I’m sure you’re very confused, but let your hands learn if they can.”
By the shine in Burakh’s eyes, the man is now viscerally intrigued. He props one forearm against the wall over Daniil’s head, and roves the pads of his fingers all over Daniil’s mound, groping through his trousers for answers. Pinching, squeezing, kneading. He’s not delicate.
The rough treatment sends pulse after pulse of pleasure into Daniil’s core; he bites down a moan and cants his hips forward into Burakh’s palm.
He doesn’t really care if he can convince Burakh or not. What does it matter, what does a backwoods shaman know better than him about the groundbreaking theories of human transformation penned in secret by Daniil D. Dankovsky? All Daniil intends to concern himself with is how Burakh is holding him tighter and tighter, breathing deep while his fingers flex, barely concealing how this is exciting him too. His brow is knotted, his pupils blown out, his nostrils flared.
He’s attracted to me. He’s attracted to this. Good. Let him be.
Daniil’s trembling fingers flatten against Burakh’s chest, bracing himself.
What is he? Daniil’s fated opposite, if the babbling of oracles are to be believed. A shadow looming behind him ever since this course of events was set in motion. Haruspex, he who opens up bodies without fearing judgement.
“What do you think?” Daniil shudders, as a thumb swipes back and forth over the fabric. “Do you agree with my conclusions or not?”
“Conclusions?”
“That I’m a man,” he snaps.
Still a curving, skeptical brow. “I thought you were more learned than me. An acolyte of cold, hard, science… So you deny your sex? That’s a very imprecise way of thought, almost superstitious.”
Daniil dismisses this with a harsh jerking shake of his head. “This is all a matter of science, clearly. Can’t you hear my voice? Touch my throat if you need another sense to verify it. Just so, Burakh. J-just so. Ahh…!”
The Haruspex is all too willing to touch in the most impudent way possible: by hunching over and aggressively sealing his lips against Daniil’s voice box.
Daniil clings to Burakh’s shoulders and forces out the rest of what he’d meant to say. “You can hear— You can hear how it’s changed… It’s not a ventriloquy trick, is it? It’s an affair born of chemicals, manufactured to precision to command the body… But if you want to talk about superstition, you can tell me more about that clay maneater, mara, shabnak thing everyone has been frightened of. If you can believe in something like that, you can believe in me.”
They said that thing took the form of a woman, but the muttering recluse Aspity said it could be a man… Why, if the town knew Bachelor Dankovsky better, they’d probably be burning him at the stake!
But Burakh’s tongue darts out, interrupts his babbling, laps up a bead of sweat under Daniil’s jaw, and carries on up to the slightly roughened skin of his cheeks, prickling from a few days of trading every spare razor he got his hands on for sleeping draughts. More proof of Daniil’s accomplishment, if Burakh needs it.
The Haruspex’s own voice, rich and deep as if it comes from within the Earth, purrs in Daniil’s ear. “You… you taste… different…” he says in wonder.
This is something he’s never been told before. It’s sufficient distraction.
“Do I?” Daniil savors the thought and clutches Burakh’s stained leather smock tighter so his weakening knees won’t send crumpling him to the floor.
Burakh holds him up by pinning him to the wall, crushing their bodies together, but he’s still so precise and deliberate with his motions. He’s a relatively strong man, but it’s not his strength that contains Daniil.
It’s his keen attention; unknowable intentions, but rapt all the same, taking in every part of Daniil without reservation. There’s something scholarly about his manner, whether that’s how he would intend to come off or not.
When he presses his brow to Daniil’s and peers right into his soul, Daniil squeezes up from head to toe, eyes wide, anticipating the eventual touch of Burakh’s mouth against his own. They’re both breathing hard from their noses into a shared space that’s bound to shrink when they give in to the magnetic pull between them.
But they don’t kiss.
Burakh breaks first, averts his eyes, glaring aside while his ears, Daniil notices, have flushed red at their tips.
He runs his tongue behind his lower lip, agitated and quick, possessed by an insatiable hunger. His hands pull at the buttons of Daniil’s trousers and then he’s fighting with the waistband, tugging it down.
The air’s cold and he’s not been bared in front of someone else for a while. Daniil swallows the butterflies in his throat. He’s successfully seduced the Haruspex, and there’s no question about Burakh’s intentions. This is the point where he opens up and relaxes into it, just like when he was carving open those men’s necks.
He watches for a rising bulge in Burakh’s pants. He can’t tell yet… how big should he be expecting?
But now Burakh’s squatting, he’s got a hand under one of Daniil’s knees, elevating it, and is slipping a trouser leg that would otherwise trap Daniil’s ankles together, down over one boot.
Daniil realizes Burakh’s intentions when his freed leg is bent up and slung over a broad shoulder.
The head of his cock twitches when Burakh wets his lips again. Burakh’s staring at it, watching it rise; whether admiring or gawking, he’s thinking hard, subtle expressions tangling together.
“Does this manhood of yours feel the same as any other?”
“It used to be my clitoris. So take a wild guess if it’s… sensitive or not…”
“It enlarged?”
“Hormone injections.” A tone of scientific authority as if he isn’t partly naked and waiting to be ravished. “The chemicals secreted by a usual pair of testes confer physical masculinity, and can be isolated… In effect, a reverse castration.”
“All right, I’ll ask the obvious: Why become a man? For the sake of a medical career?”
“To prove the supremacy of the brain over the body, I suppose,” Daniil mutters.
Most people who learned of what he did also assumed it was practical. Some even believed he’d made a tragic sacrifice, so his thanatology, that he truly believed would better humankind, would be taken more seriously. It seemed in character for him, didn’t it? These educated guesses came from people who already knew him well.
He has written and revised countless unpublished tracts that tell everything in sweeping, glorious detail, citing hard science and philosophy and even art, but more often than not they end up in the fire, ritually burned to cleanse himself of the temptation to rock his precarious scientific standing.
But the Powers That Be probably already know, and they’ve sent him here on what his colleagues believe is a doomed mission. They’re not impressed.
He’s not going to revolutionize the scientific community with this. He won’t be getting applause or accolades. That foolish dream of waiting for the right moment to reveal his genius withers. Might as well dust off the words yet unburned in his mind and say them here.
“It began in the mind. I perceived myself male… I was relentless in pursuing a reality that realized this perception. And one day I finally saw my true face in the mirror… A thing I’d never thought possible before. That recognition was proof of my theory; I always knew who I was. I wouldn’t lie about that. I am Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky. Do you agree?”
Burakh blinks up at him with wide eyes, almost innocent but dilated with fascination.
“You willed it, then.”
“… I thought you’d be quicker to please yourself,” Daniil says, dropping the subject. “Still curious about taste?”
Burakh’s breath warms the inside of his thighs. “What makes you think I want you tight and dry when I have you, oynon?”
So assertive. No doubts. “Then you will have me.”
“I will have you,” Burakh agrees, and surprises Daniil with a small, self-satisfied smirk. “Until you’re too wrung out to cause trouble for me, you got it? You have a crazed look in your eye. I want it gone.”
Well done to Burakh; quick on the uptake, that one. He understands what he needs to do. Daniil, as well, knows he shouldn’t be let out of this factory building before he’s been neutralized, although he’s being to kind to himself with such a term. He needs to be fucked into submission — he thinks this almost dispassionately.
“That makes sense.” Although, Burakh isn’t exactly pinching his nose and forcing himself into this. “Or is that all? Your tongue is watering.”
“Yours is too chatty.”
Hands grip Daniil’s hips, fingers digging into flesh, cupping his rear. His heart thuds loudly as Burakh closes in.
Instead of a wet tongue, he feels the firm pinch of teeth. Teeth that tug and grasp the outer flesh, then the folds, exhaling hot condensation into them. They’re not biting hard but they’re squeezing and dragging and slowly scraping up his entrance.
Daniil shies away up on his toes, though it’s no escape. “Wh-what kind of… brutality is this—!? Ah—!”
Burakh’s incisors have gently nipped at Daniil’s cock where it protrudes from its hood. He holds it in place, and raises his eyes. He lifts one eyebrow, daring Daniil to move. The tip of his nose is pressed into Daniil’s pubic hair.
Daniil trembles, but he still won’t back down, even if Burakh has the most vulnerable part of him trapped in his jaws.
It could be a warning, especially with the piercing, expectant gaze, Burakh telling him to brace himself, or to back out now that he’s had his momentary thrill.
Down on his knees like this before Daniil, Burakh affects chivalry, and yet he drags teeth over the flesh he pretends to worship.
Daniil curves his back against the wall, gasping, “Wh-what do you think of it now…?”
“You’re different,” Burakh mutters against Daniil’s labia, while Daniil tries not to shake from holding his balance, “but I’ve seen stranger things.”
He raises his arm to spread Daniil’s legs a little wider and finally kisses, open-mouthed.
The texture of miserably cracked, peeling lips is surprisingly erotic. Not comforting, not reassuring, it’s unsanitary, raw flesh against flesh, and still as Daniil feels it dragging against him, he’s thrilled.
Burakh eats him out slowly, tormenting him with pressure and suction against his cock while his lower jaw rubs the folds below it.
Even before he’s coated in a sheen of the man’s spit, Daniil feels his own slick building up from within, and he hasn’t been wet like this in a long time.
And then the tip of Burakh’s tongue pushes inside and curls up and Daniil feels like he must be made of honeycomb from how Burakh’s savoring him with every lick.
Daniil’s back slides down the wall a centimeter at a time; he juts his hips out to meet the wet warmth, the lips devouring, the tongue thrusting into him. He flushes and squirms as he realizes what he’s gotten himself into. He’s about to be fucked by someone who knows how to fuck. Burakh will make this easy for him. He’ll work Daniil’s flesh until it’s soft and pliant and gushing slick, and then slip inside like a hand into a familiar glove.
How perverse of him to do something like that right next to a scattered pile of bloody corpses! This isn’t the place for gentleness or romantic notions.
When Daniil turns his eyes towards the bodies lying outside cell bars, he expects the sight to repulse him, and reawaken that bitter desire to turn the act of violent intrusion upon himself. If he can’t ask Burakh to open him up with a knife because other people are counting on his efforts, this is the next best thing.
But Burakh is suckling insistently on the head of Daniil’s cock, and while he’s dizzy with sensation he can’t help looking at those empty husks that once held human life and feel a degree of dispassion towards them. His passion is occupied elsewhere.
Innocent lives were taken because of those brutes. Daniil heard all about it; volunteers distributing water accused of destroying the pipes, people locked up for arming themselves against the bandits, grieving family members branded as looters for taking personal affects off loved one’s bodies.
What Daniil did here was ugly, but it was begat by ugliness.
So he succumbs, he tips his head back and groans loudly and gets an eager reaction from the man kneeling between his legs, tongue pushing at the same spot over and over until Daniil is panting and struggling to stay standing, pressing his softened, tender slit down against ravaging lips just to balance. There’s no escape, and he doesn’t want one.
Suddenly the warmth leaves his nether regions and Burakh lets out a dry wheeze that isn’t quite a cough. He’s looking away again and his forehead’s tight with consternation.
Daniil lays the backs of two fingers against the man’s forehead. Under the skin there’s telltale feverish heat, stronger than the flush of lust.
Well familiar with the sensation at this point, Daniil hardly needs to imagine the squeezing in the sinuses, the aches and suppressed shivers, the moments of respite followed by flareups of needling pain in the lungs.
They’re both fighting for life, although they’re both fighting with life. A form of life is seething within them, and it might be killing them but at the same time it can’t survive without them. When their flesh goes cold, so will the microbes. The Pest turned out to be a needy, vulnerable thing.
So when Daniil cards his fingers through Burakh’s hair, saying sharply, “Enough delay, we don’t have much time,” they both know what he really means.
Two infected hearts are beating fast in this cell. And they’re well aware they've wickedly schemed against a kindred victim.
Daniil pulls Burakh back to his feet and takes one of the man’s hands and silently presses it against his chest, under his coat, so he can detect the flutter of Daniil’s pulse.
By no means is he saying do it, but he is saying you could.
Maybe his heart isn’t sick enough yet to be good for running tests on. Just fuck me first and then decide.
Burakh might have picked up on the implications, because he asks cautiously, “What is it, oynon?”
Daniil doesn’t answer and reaches under the front of the man’s smock and cups his genitals. He feels a stiff and bulging shaft pressing against the front of those trousers, betraying a lot more desire than the reserved Haruspex has let on. Of course Daniil likes this about him; he likes that he’s holding back and giving in at the same time, as if it’s a sacred duty he’s performing.
“… Oynon,” the man repeats evenly. “Talk to me.”
“Why would I answer to that? I don’t even know what that word means.”
Instead of clarifying, Burakh rolls his eyes. “Bachelor Dankovsky, then. Be honest with me, Dankovsky. I’ve done a lot for you, haven’t I?” — Daniil reluctantly laughs at this — “Tell me what you really want.”
“I want to be fucked,” Daniil forces out. His tongue slips; “I want you inside me. Now.”
Burakh stares for a long moment and then, in a very telling gesture for how pitying it is, smooths a lock of hair away from Daniil’s face.
Daniil’s breathing grows irregular; he kneads his palm against Burakh’s crotch and starts pulling on the fastening at the waistband.
“It certainly seems like you want me in return, Burakh,” he strains the words through a thin-lipped grin, “and I… well, look at what you’ve done for me… to me…”
He spreads open his legs invitingly, showing off the glistening and flush of his slit.
“Or maybe you’re unsure if a man with a woman’s entrance is a bad omen. Around these parts, I can imagine it would be, because what isn’t a bad omen? Crows gather, the air burns itself to soot, the walls of houses scab and bleed, the grass puts you to sleep…”
Burakh grabs him by his cheeks and tilts his head up. “Reading omens isn’t your area of expertise, I don’t think,” he reminds the Bachelor.
More than ever, because he was denied last time, Daniil wants Burakh to pull him up by his face and kiss him.
He still doesn’t do it. Instead, he folds the smock up and frees up a thick, reddened, precome-streaked cock from his trousers.
Without thinking, Daniil starts reaching out to touch it, but Burakh catches his wrists and looks askance. Daniil remembers how filthy his gloves are and winces at his amateurish mistake. He would take them off, but Burakh doesn’t let go to give him the opportunity.
Instead the man bends down enough so his glans can prod and nudge against Daniil’s swollen erection. The heads kiss gently, rosy pink on pink.
Daniil gulps and turns away towards the far cell wall, biting his lip and enduring this treatment with fire in his cheeks. What, is Burakh trying to humiliate him with the difference in size?
Fine, if he’s so enamored by it, Daniil can oblige, just to keep him entertained. When Burakh moves closer and pushes their hips together, Daniil meets him more than halfway and rubs himself along Burakh’s length, dragging his cockhead over the veins and ridges.
“You like that?” Daniil grits out.
Fingers curl in the hair behind his head and clutch him tighter, pressing his cheek to Burakh’s buckled collar. He does.
So Daniil doesn’t stop. They rut against each other, eating more precious seconds like gluttons, leaving the Town to keep on decaying and going to hell outside these walls.
“Bachelor,” Burakh eventually murmurs, a preamble to what sounds like a question.
“I thought it was ‘oynon’?”
“What, you prefer that again? Don’t be difficult. Anyway, you’re going to make me a promise.”
“I am?”
Burakh takes him by his shoulders and spins him around, planting him firmly against the wall.
Daniil’s spine tingles and he bends over, getting into position. The back of his coat is swept to one side, baring his ass, and something slick and rigid — well, what else but the obvious could it be? — touches his entrance. But then it retreats and Daniil hears an unfolding leather pocket and a glass bottle clinks by his ear against the stone wall to get his attention.
It’s swirling full of some bizarre, foul, foreboding stuff, liquid that’s cloudy and stringy with organic molecules.
“You’re going to accept treatment,” says the Haruspex.
“What’s that swill?” Daniil nervously asks.
“A prototype antibiotic. I was locked up for trying to make more of it. You understand?”
He was locked up because he was dissecting bodies. My god, he’s going to screw me into the wall and then feed me a slurry of human remains and if I don’t regain my senses soon I’m going to like it.
“Well, does it work?” Daniil grunts, at a loss for words.
“It’s made to the same specifications as my father’s notes…”
“Isidor made these!?”
The absurdity of Burakh stroking Daniil’s bare hips reassuringly while preparing to fuck him and still talking about this! “Sorry if that tarnishes his reputation… I heard you were on good terms with him. He did have results with this… dead gruel, in the first outbreak.”
“All right, stuff it, you! I don’t want you invoking your father’s name to convince me to drink human ‘gruel’ during post-coitus… That’s a little much!”
Burakh presses against him, his prick hot against the cleft of Daniil’s ass.
“So,” he says smugly, in a way that makes Daniil’s chest swell and tickle, “Bachelor Dankovsky has his limits after all. Hm… You’d better tell me what else you’d object to. I don’t want to offend you, or anything…”
“Oh, fuck you!” Daniil squawks, as a dam breaks inside him and overflows. “And fuck me, already! I’m not getting any younger here—”
“Hold this, then.” And the bottle of unseemly contents is pressed into Daniil’s hands before he can object; he can’t exactly drop it and waste it if it shatters on the floor, so he’s clutching it in shock and waiting for his cunt to be breached.
And that’s exactly what happens. He feels the head nudge into him and his eyes go wide, and then it’s just…
… it’s everything.
He moans loudly.
It does occur to him that Artemy Burakh is at least to some extent humoring him in everything, because he genuinely thinks it’s funny. There’s not a lot to laugh at these days, and they’ve both done the unspeakable several times over, so something like this is practically a crude joke in comparison. No one’s going to get properly hurt as long as they’re tangled together, trapping each other in this cell.
But it’s more than that, he feels… vital, invigorated, just for a moment. Burakh’s not long but he’s got girth, and Daniil’s being strained open just enough by it even though his walls are still quite soft. The right amount of slickness, the right amount of friction. The ridge rubbing into him as Burakh starts to really move.
Cradling that bottle to his chest and leaning into the wall, Daniil is vindicated. It almost feels like he’s spited the inevitable, and changed his fate.
“Yes!” he urges, without a shred of dignity left. “Ah, god, yes, Artemy…!”
“Well, I didn’t know we were on such close terms…” Diffidence and modesty in his tone, while he adjusts his hips and wriggles his member into Daniil a little more firmly.
The man absolutely is laughing at him, and it’s horrible, but it’s understandable.
“I’m not very polite, I know.” Daniil bites the knuckles of his fist that he’s got pressed against the wall and whines around it, insistently until Burakh keeps moving faster and faster, finally setting an appropriate pace. “I’m a wretch. Are you going to tell everyone about how you fucked the Capital doctor, Burakh? Y-You should tell them… Tell them about how wet and willing I was…”
“Wasn’t… wasn’t planning on it.”
Burakh’s voice does waver. His composure is cracking. He wraps his arms around Daniil’s chest, clutching him tighter. Of course he’s subtly, but unmistakably groping. Maybe without really thinking about it. Daniil barks out a short but piercing laugh.
“Are you aware I cut my breasts off too? Would that break your taboos? You tell me, Kin man.”
Burakh doesn’t say anything at first; he grabs Daniil’s hips and yanks them closer to his own; Daniil’s back arches and he chokes out a cry as Burakh shoves himself further inside, all the way to the hilt.
The man leans in close and puts his lips right against Daniil’s ear. “Quiet, oynon. Unless you’re moaning.”
Hearing a burr of warning, Daniil unthinkingly obeys, tongue-tied.
But then Burakh adds, a bit lower, “Sorry about that.”
Sorry? Daniil processes this slowly. Burakh’s apologizing for touching him wrong, or for taking offense?
“What are you playing nice for?” he whimpers.
What Burakh says next sounds so private, it’s like he’s whispered it right into his head, one mind touching another. It’s gentle and frighteningly sincere.
“I’m sorry — you can tell me no. Even rudely.”
Daniil shuts up entirely.
He wipes his eyes on his sleeve; they keep leaking as they mistake the scratchy, gritty sensation caused by the Pest for real grains of sand.
It makes him feel a lot less scandalous or adventurous to admit it, but he’d had a feeling Burakh wouldn’t actually hurt him.
“So can you,” Daniil says just as quietly, secretively. “You’ve been a bit permissive in this whole affair, I think…”
Burakh’s hands shift around Daniil’s middle, and then one wrestles with the other to remove a dark glove and let it fall to the floor.
His bare hand is paler, like it’s usually hidden, and his fingers are long and slightly crooked, like an old tree’s knobby branches, but there’s a surprising delicacy to them.
Those fingers curl around Daniil’s prick and stroke him, exploring different rhythms, all of them stirring and unfamiliar, as if he’s speaking another language through touch, but somehow Daniil understands it. They’re so different but they seem to match, almost perfect opposites…
“I don’t regret a thing,” Burakh hums in his ear, still rolling his hips and affirming their intimate connection. “You see, I’m going to save my town like this.”
Daniil’s heart thuds louder and louder as Burakh leans back enough to try a new angle and devastate him with it.
He knows this has been a gambit, it’s been so obvious from the start. The whole time Daniil thought he’d been in control while feigning submission… Well, he was in control. What Burakh said about having lost his freedom already was true, fundamentally so. It wasn’t going to be him who eventually determined the fate of the town, it was going to be Bachelor Dankovsky.
And Burakh was a Haruspex, they said. He saw the future in entrails, and perhaps he’d seen the future of the town in the spilled blood of the three guards. He saw what Daniil was capable of and prepared himself to intervene however he could.
But this wasn’t about defeating an opponent; it never was. It was about the Town. Of course it was. Burakh wasn’t trying to win, just… help.
Daniil draws in a slow wheezing breath as his body burns with embarrassment, continued lust, and then… it just burns.
It’s as if the Pest in their bloodstreams has become very aware of what’s happening between them, and is relishing it.
Crawling black lines are filling his vision; they’re criss-crossing and knotting and twining together in a low and simple form of intercourse, and then parting. They’re unraveling and then thickening into new shapes, and they seem to be constantly, ceaselessly proliferating.
They float in front of his eyes and darken his sight until he’s sure he’s going truly blind, and his unblinking eyes water and spill over.
His ears fill with a ringing whine that builds up in stridency until it softly pops and recedes.
And then it’s back to the pleasure. Burakh’s in deep and he stays deep, quickly thrusting so only the very base of his cock ever leaves its sheath. It’s like he’s searching inside Daniil, trying to get to know him. Strong, diligent fingers keep testing his cock, squeezing it this way or that until Daniil’s trembling enough for Burakh to be satisfied with his work.
Finally, it’s enough for Daniil as well.
He wails and comes with bright flashes like cannon fire behind his eyelids. Spasms helplessly around the shaft inside him, sinking forwards against the wall and pressing a cheek to cool brick while the rest of him is bathed in heat.
The climax takes away his inhibitions for a shining moment. He is allowed to fully understand this is about more than him and his obvious lapse of sanity; he’s with a man who will do whatever it takes to win for the sake of those in his care, even when his hands are tied by fate.
It’s not too late for Daniil to be such a man either. He’s sick and hoarding a cure in his bag on the chance that maybe someone else will need it more than him. He understands self-sacrifice, but he must act justly…
Burakh keeps moving, and Daniil’s overstimulated body can’t keep up with it. He’s forgotten long before that he was holding that bottle of… dubious concoction, but his fingers uncurl and it drops to the floor and that sharp noise when it hits jolts him halfway out of his orgasmic haze.
The bottle doesn’t shatter, thank goodness; he doesn’t need that stuff spilling all over his trousers that are currently bunched around one ankle.
But speaking of a mess—
Then Burakh pulls out, without needing to be asked. Of course he wasn’t going to ejaculate directly into a stranger’s womb; even Daniil doesn’t know for sure if that could have unintended consequences. Not enough data points gathered on the effects of his treatment.
It nevertheless leaves Daniil feeling hollow. He presses his shuddering knees together, pulling the bottom half of his coat back over his bare ass.
Beside him, Burakh has leaned his back up against the wall and has his eyes shut tight as he pumps his cock with his fist. He’s straining and gasping, but now it’s like he’s in a world of his own.
Daniil holds his tongue so that he doesn’t disrupt this moment; who knows how many more chances he’ll get to admire those handsome features — the shape of his jaw, curving cheekbones, the fullness of his lips.
“Oynon…” the man mumbles, with a twitch in his face like he’s internally fighting with something.
Does the man want him, truly desire him — besides wanting to contain him and knot their fates together so that there’s no chance the Bachelor will destroy everything the Haruspex is working to achieve? Daniil reaches out to him, unsure.
Burakh exhales a tense, quiet sound and abruptly spills over his hand onto the floor.
That’s not good enough, Daniil immediately thinks, his appetite burning in his throat. He wants to see Burakh undone, moaning and helplessly shaking, past the point of resisting pleasure… He wants to press this man into soft bedsheets and take him apart.
Well, that’s a stupid thing to want.
Daniil averts his eyes and quickly pulls up his trousers, fighting to squeeze his boot back into one leg.
Burakh is also composing himself, flattening out his folded clothes, fastening himself up, until he’s indistinguishable from how he was before.
“… That’s that, then. Are you satisfied?” he asks, glancing in Daniil’s direction.
What does satisfaction mean here? Of course his body enjoyed it; his thoughts are a little clearer, and he thinks he can approach the next person he speaks to with a calmer mask. The boiling pot has been brought down to a simmer, and if he leaves now and steps outside it will start to grow cold. That’s good; that’s giving him a little more mental fortitude to carry on.
Daniil also detects ease in his muscles that is somewhat akin to the times he’s injected painkillers before sleep, but he isn’t blank-headed and numb.
“It might have been an unconventional treatment, but these are unconventional times…”
Quite understandably, they’re at the stage where they’re making excuses for themselves. Burakh is nodding at this statement as if it’s sage advice, and Daniil is willingly taking comfort from his assent. They’re avoiding looking at each other directly.
“In that case, how do you feel about treating your condition with something unconventional…?” Burakh adds, gesturing towards the fallen bottle.
Daniil picks it up with two fingers, delicately, and rationalizes aloud through the distaste. It’s true that he used the last of his medicine earlier this morning, and he kept promising everyone that he’d distribute the pills in stock fairly.
“So in your opinion this antibiotic works to a marginal degree when prepared from recently deceased tissue. Hence the suggestion that living tissue is an even more viable option.”
Burakh gives a little shrug. “Exactly.”
I’ve already crossed an unforgivable threshold. I’ll tend to my needs and stay sharp and do what I must.
Daniil has tested stale old pills on himself because he’d be damned if he let anyone else do it, so he’s willing to take it one step further. He pulls off the cap; it’s held in by a strong suction, suggesting the contents within have been undergoing a chemical process. Fermentation, perhaps.
“God help me,” he mutters and swallows the slurry without complaining, even while it burns the back of his throat. It’s got this bitter alcoholic sting, along with an exacerbated sweetness from rot.
Holding a hand over his throat, Daniil slumps against the wall and shuts his eyes. “Foul, as I expected,” he says.
“That was certainly brave of you.”
“Stop, you’ll make me blush.”
Daniil takes out a threadbare cloth from his breast pocket — it was in much better condition about a week ago when he packed it in his suitcase — so he can wipe the sweat collecting on his brow.
“You’re shockingly pragmatic, Burakh,” he mutters. “I’m impressed with you. You didn’t back down when you saw an opportunity to play this game in your favor. Even a pawn can checkmate, eh?”
“Your game’s not over.”
“Hah. What do you say that makes this, then? You’ve crossed the board to become a queen?”
Burakh’s cheeks tinge properly pink.
Daniil would say more, but the dose of unsound medicine he just drank soaks into his body as it goes down his esophagus and he’s already vividly experiencing, through every throbbing bone in his body, the raging battle between it and the plague. Such an immediate reaction is promising for the gory cocktail’s efficaciousness, but it’s also deeply unpleasant to endure.
It’s almost like a twisted form of the pleasure of his climax. Chills that are neither hot nor cold course over his skin. His pulse flutters. Pressure mounts within him.
“Just tell me…” he mumbles. “Is it supposed to be this… strong…”
His ankles give out, and he drops.
Before he hits the floor he’s engulfed by strong arms holding him up, cradling him as his chest heaves.
“Hold it down,” Burakh is telling him. “Don’t throw up. The feeling passes.”
Daniil leans into the tangy scent of blood and burned dry leaves clinging to the Haruspex’s outer garments. “Unless you’ve poisoned me,” he points out. “It’ll pass, all right, and so will I.”
Burakh sounds vaguely irritated when he says, “If you still think I’m a dishonorable butcher, why go through all this? You’re as strange as they come, Bachelor.”
Because I asked you to cut out someone’s heart. So I showed you mine.
Dizzy rambling spills forth from within him. “The cost… the cost of what I need is always impossibly steep, and I don’t know how to give enough in return without disabling my ability to act. Shall I pay in installments; my secrets, my dignity? Perhaps my life, later, if it comes to that, but not yet…”
Rather than pitying, Burakh’s voice is level and detached. “So it’s all about you? Whether you can be forgiven or not? Your self-image?”
How could Burakh say that? To suggest he’s overly concerned with his image, when his choices, even the ones he’s starting to regret, have constantly involved the lives of others! He’s been trying, hasn’t he, from the moment he found himself in this abominable situation!
And he is being destroyed, piece by piece.
Daniil pushes away from Burakh, but finds the man still holding his wrist, not letting him go too far.
“Whether I win or lose this battle with the plague, I will have been changed. Utterly, profoundly. Without my consent. I resent this, because it’s in my nature to do so. Does that make any sense?”
Burakh sighs and puts an arm around him, tries to turn him back around so they’re face to face again, but Daniil resists, hunching his shoulders and eventually wriggling free altogether.
He retrieves his bag and rummages through all the shamefully hoarded trash and knick-knacks and wrapped bits of food and bottles of painkillers that he’s managed to cram into it. There’s one last thing he has to take care of.
“You should have this.” Daniil holds out the patterned box of powder. “You’re going to be working in close quarters with the infected… I suggest you wait until after you’ve finished your work.”
“First of all,” Burakh says stormily, fists curling, “I don’t accept payment for this sort of thing.”
Daniil flinches. “It’s not payment! You gave me medicine too! Consider this an exchange for that. And it’s protecting a valuable…” Asset? Pawn? “Ally.”
“If I cure myself now, I’ll probably be infected later. No, this will all end when I create a cure, and if I can’t do that… Don’t waste this.”
The same logic Daniil himself used — I’ll be infected again later, I don’t deserve to cure myself if I can’t finish my work — is thrown back in his face, and he recognizes how idiotic and idealistic it sounds. Both of them need to be healthy enough to do their work, after all!
But if he challenges Burakh, he’ll be challenged in return, and they won’t get anywhere.
He drops the worn powder box back into his bag. “You’ll be a carrier,” he says sharply. “You have to take special precautions from now on. Cover your mouth and nose, wash your hands with soap if you can find it, take a dose of antibiotics at least twice a day. I can confirm they’re somewhat effective. Keep the disease down before the point where your skin cracks and flakes, as that seems to be the most infectious stage—”
It all sounds so foolish, as if this disease can be fought with practical measures like it was the flu or common cold, as if it hasn’t been tearing through the population.
His throat is clogging up. He isn’t entirely sure if Burakh will survive the night, if he’s caught in the act. Earlier, Daniil tried to delegate work to a group of butchers who’d escaped whatever horrible conditions they’d been under in the Termitary and found them all slaughtered in the bloody, moldy grass.
Daniil wants to confess this to Burakh. He wants to warn him, that the choices Daniil makes always have some kind of unforeseeable consequence.
But Daniil isn’t a prophet. He couldn’t say it with Maria Kaina’s proud, whimsical confidence, or Katerina Saburova’s dreary insistence.
“Be careful,” he mutters.
“Go,” Burakh tells him, but kindly. “I need to be alone for a while. I need time to collect my tools.”
Inevitably, night falls.
The Blind Backyard is horribly placid. Only the wind judges him. Cold, colder still, it numbs Daniil’s cheeks.
He’s late, and not a soul is around. He hasn’t caught a single glimpse of the leather-clad Ripper fleeing the scene of the crime. Would he have liked to? Does he even want to see Artemy Burakh again in his life?
It was inevitable that Daniil would have to see this through himself. His freedom, his responsibility, his burden.
Daniil arrived expecting to find the body wreathed in brown bandages, just like all the diseased wretches staggering through the streets looking for someone to ease their pain. But this isn’t a faceless stranger. He knows this girl. Of course he does. It was always going to be a familiar face blankly staring at him. Not a friend, not one of his adherents, but someone he’d promised to protect.
Earlier today he’d taken her aside and told her that she wasn’t going back to her broken-backed father — her kidnapper, in fact, and by the lascivious glint in those wide eyes when the man told Daniil how precious his Willow was to him, far worse than that.
Did it have to be her? Did it have to be this girl whose body had never been treated as her own, who could only feel in control of herself dancing half naked in the Broken Heart?
He gets down on his knees beside the body and gently removes a strand of hair from the girl’s staring eyes. He moves to shut her eyelids as well.
Her pupils twitch and contract, visible in the light of the streetlamp. There’s a fleck of wetness in the corners.
Daniil does not stoop so low as to apologize for what he’s done, if there’s a chance she can hear him.
That wound in her chest will be burned into his mind forever. When he looks at a blank space, like a wall, the sky, the surface of a still lake, he will see this gaping red diamond of flesh opening before him.
He reaches in, finds the ribcage cracked and flung open like a pair of windows. The chest cavity is fully exposed, but the cuts to loosen the heart are incomplete. Some are mere nicks.
Daniil takes out the scalpel from the interior pocket over his coat — just over his heart, and it painfully, guiltily thuds — and finishes severing the right pulmonary veins and the interior vena cava.
Wipes the scalpel on a scrap of fabric from her tattered outfit. Puts it back inside his coat.
His fingers curl around the heart and pry it loose from its nestled spot. Inspecting it even in this dim light reveals unhealthy streaks and discoloration.
Maybe he’s imagining it’s still twitching in his hands, or maybe the teeming life inside it is trying desperately to make it beat; perhaps the Pest itself is unclear of what it wants, whether that’s to kill or preserve its host.
She was doomed, but couldn’t she have had one day of freedom?
He must run, now, he must be quick, before the heart goes cold. But his skin is crawling, crawling, writhing, writhing… alive.
Just like when he’d been so close to another infected body, and hadn’t pulled away, had welcomed it closer still, and let it join with his own.
The culture in his body is stirring up a wild frenzy. It’s sensing and trying to make contact with its kindred creatures inside the heart. His fingers throb painfully as the bacteria travel from his heart to his capillaries, together in their furious microscopic dance.
Daniil’s ragged breaths exhale condensation in the chilly air. Rust red mist. It clouds around him, clinging to him, embracing him tightly.
Then finally, it spreads its arms like wings and ascends into the sky, reaching ever upwards in longing towards the stars.