ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

       Making Dankovsky drink the Panacea involved pulling open his mouth with fingers on his chin. His jaw was clenched, his teeth gritting with the horrible sound of knife-enamel blades scraping together, muffled by his heavy, wet, hoarse breathing. It felt like trying to pry a safe open with a crowbar. It felt like trying to tear the earth away from itself as it clamped itself shut like pectinidae, like a stubbornly-healing wound. 

It involved holding Dankovsky’s face still, as he convulsed febrily, so he wouldn’t spill/spit/slobber out the most-precious serum, so it wouldn’t seep out of him like blood walks the veil of bandages and cloth. It involved not looking into his eyes, the cobweb-covered wells of his dark eyes, fogged and stitched with the pale threads of death. 

It involved pressing the neck of the vial to his mouth and not thinking about the dry, sick sound his limestone-lips cracked open with when the glass met them. 

It involved tipping the vial into his lips. 
Come on, Burakh begged. Don’t make it any weirder than it has to be. 
It involved watching the liquid pool at the back of his throat, tinting the oyster-pearls of his teeth an argil-red as he didn’t swallow. Watching how blood and bile colored his spit like a sick, sour tea as it steeps. It involved holding his mouth close with a palm and, after a long, terrifying second, hearing him gulp loudly. The Bachelor’s sandy lips wrung out a pained whine as the brew trickled past the throat and its copper-like, dirty taste—Burakh knew of it, he'd made the experience—intertwined with the saltwater pools in his lungs, spit and bile and blood and spite stagnant inside.

It involved pulling the hand back, which felt like the most painful part of it.

It involved waiting.

      (The closeness was… uncomfortable. It had become uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than it had been. It was foreign, mildly unnerving as words rang through him, inside of him, invasive and alien and yet bitingly truthful in daunting, taunting ways.
Burakh wasn’t even sure what flipped that switch. He wasn’t even sure if there had been a switch to flip. The Architect had walked into his slumber with long, weird words — tenderness, out of everything! Don’t make me laugh. (Burakh was not laughing, at all.) The Architect had steeped into his sleep like bitter, brewing herbs with his weird words and now Burakh felt worse tending to the bedridden red ghost of Dankovsky. The Haruspex had been so proud to call his hands gentle, out of everything; gentle, knowledgeable, and now he couldn’t bear either the prospect of not being gentle enough, or being too gentle that it would make Dankovsky uneasy. Burakh knew gentleness, but not how to share it. To give it.
He thought that the Bachelor couldn’t be too uneasy. Well, he couldn’t be much now. Burakh thought about the Architect’s words of how he’d ask for his kindness (... that wasn’t the word he used, was it? Burakh’s head hurt too much to recall; to want to recall (he very much recalled)), and he wasn’t asking much now. (He wasn’t asking anything. He wasn’t squirming around, hollowed by fever — maybe that scared Burakh more.)

      Burakh curled on the cot. He waited. What time is it?—Two in the morning. He had done nothing but wait. Everytime he blinked, color grew back on the Bachelor’s sunken cheeks, so he blinked a lot, fast, strong, trying to tie the clopping of the clock’s hand to his rhythm in the way it had once latched on the Bachelor’s sickly eyes. He wished time would cling to his gaze in the way his gaze clung to Dankovsky’s face.
He was winning. 
He was falling asleep. 
He was approaching a door. 
The trinket in his chest pocket pierced through him, and his hand promptly dove to take it. 
The door was locked.
He levered the key inside; it bore a powdering dried film of red blood.
The door was open. 

_____________

      There was a surprising, almost painfully startling moment where Dankovsky was awake—not enough to be called awake, and yet…
He rolled from one side to his other. His restlessness had morphed into a sweaty, agitated anticipation. He was slow. He hauled himself back and forth. He wouldn't lift his head off the pillow, as if it was too heavy to carry. His hands would shake. He would look at—through Burakh. Seeing nothing, yet something beyond (or within, but Burakh didn't like to think about it that way). Sometimes, his teeth would grit powerfully, holding back a whine, a cough: Burakh's heart would sink through him, horrified again—before the Bachelor would fall back into a spasmodic, bicephalic sleep—too heavy, sinking him through the mattress, and too light, leaving him restless, jerking awake with waning gasps.

Burakh went downstairs. He took Rubin by the sleeve and pulled him closer, as if the ghosts of the Stillwater would eavesdrop on them.

      "Do you think you can get tea somewhere?" Burakh asked.
      Rubin's brows furrowed. "You're not going to find that at the bar."
      "No, I mean—" (Burakh's eyes scratched the ceiling.) "—here. For here. Do you think Lara has some… tea leaves, somewhere in her house?"
      Rubin's eyes shifted, combing through the features on Burakh's face. "Cub, you do herbalism. Surely there are herbs one can steep in hot water and drink."
      "Stakh, these things are bitter. They're medicinal plants, not treats."
      Rubin marked a pause. "Ah, so this is what this is about."
      "So, do you think she does?"
      "I know she does. Should I ask her to bring you some?"
      "Yes—yes, and a teacup too. With a saucer. If she still has milk left somewhere, I just need a dollop. Ideally honey too, but I could do without."
      "Having yourself a breakfast of kings, Cub? Isn’t it a bit early?" 
      "No, it's—" 

The bed shook. They both heard it. It scraped against the floorboards as the Bachelor became agitated — having fallen back asleep, Burakh assumed. 
Rubin's head dipped back, seeing through him.

      Rubin was back two hours later. He had the cup, the saucer, tea leaves wrapped in a tiny muslin square, milk and honey in two small bowls that one would more likely use for jewelry, the barest of barest hints of dawn trawled after him.
Burakh boiled water.
He boiled water and there was a second where he panicked, rummaging through his pockets for herbs, before he remembered what he was doing. (He was doing something he wasn't sure the Bachelor would do for him. He asked himself if he did that in the hopes of Dankovsky returning the favor, and then immediately cut himself off.)

Burakh scaled the stairs carefully, saucer in hand. The teacup balanced in it, and hot tea balanced in that too.
Dankovsky was still pale. His neck seemed thin, stork-like—Burakh realized it was because it was so strained. His hands moved erratically, flailing like hawks with a bullet in the flank. He was sweating still. 
When Burakh came to him with the tea, the light in his eyes was recognizable. Weak, drowned, smothered by the darkness that had eaten him like moths eat fine fabrics from the inside — but a light. Burakh offered him the drink, and he took it. Burakh thought he worded, or attempted to word, a thank you.
The Bachelor drank slowly, unbothered by the scorching heat of the brew—Burakh kept a hand under the saucer just in case. He closed his eyes, opened them. His grasp on the teacup handle became firmer. He lightly blew on the drink, his lungs emptying scarily fast. He closed his eyes and let the warmth roll over him like unending waves.

The elixir was working. It was working well. (The tea was helping, Burakh thought, found, told himself, realized; all at the same time.)

_____________

       Spoke the pale beast: 

“Why did you?”

       And Burakh spat it, like it would have carved its way out of him if he had tried to keep it in, like it would have torn itself from him like a sentient sharpened, crescent rib: 

BECAUSE I WANT US BOTH TO LIVE SO BAD I WOULD WASTE NIGHTS ON TRYING.
I HAVE WASTED NIGHTS ON TRYING. LIKE A FUCKING FOOL.
AND I HAVE WON!
IS THAT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?

       And the pale beast didn’t speak any more. Instead, it balanced on its legs, its bones grazing under its clay-colored skin with each move, it moved its head slowly like a sail in the wind, and it laughed. A low, almost soft kind of laugh rose from it like from the bowels of the earth. It showed its teeth. It licked its lips.

       Spoke the pale beast: 

“It is enough for me. Time will tell if it is enough for you.”

_____________

Dankovsky had a dream, and it went as such: 

       he was deep in a grave, too deep, he thought, for it to have been dug by the Kin. Congregation leaned to the hole, their heads appearing against the grey of the sky, and watched him, watched over him.

“Oh,” he croaked, “oh, do not let me be buried here.” He swallowed thickly but his mouth stayed numb, dry; he felt like he had swallowed a pebble. “Do not let me be buried here, the earth will throw me up. The earth will spit me out like a poisonous plum pit.” His voice grew weaker as his throat tightened, words wrung out of him. “The earth will reject me, see? Please… the illness will leave my body once I pass, please, could you keep me above ground, in a cold room, wherever you can keep a corpse, and send me back by train, send me back by train to the Capital once the epidemic is over… It’ll be over one day, I know it, I know Burakh will succeed where I couldn’t…” He was watched over and, under pitch-black eyes, he felt sorrow gnaw at what was left of his heart. “Send me back to the Capital, to my mother who is waiting for me… Send me back to her so she can bury me where my grandfather was, where my grandmother will be… please…”

He knew he was heard, but he wasn’t sure he was listened to. He felt himself sink into the cold dark earth. Faces withdrew from his sight, disappearing on the sides of the grave. 

Then the soil was battered with heavy steps. A four-beat gait: a beast. 
A head appeared over the grave, followed by a long, thinning neck. 
A Pale Horse came forth. Its coat was bone-white clay-white sky-grey, it had pitch black pits for eyes; and it opened its mouth and it had human teeth and it spoke a human tongue, and it spoke it as such:

It’s time to wake up, Bachelor Dankovsky.

      And Bachelor Dankovsky woke with a breathless gasp, punched out of him as if he had been held underwater for hours. 
Air burned through him like lightning strikes set tree trunks ablaze from the inside and his flailing arms knocked over the — empty — bottle, vial kissed of red, that was on his bedside table. His arms were weak and they couldn’t quite hold his own weight up, and his lungs felt shrunk and each breath felt like a forest fire, and his face was clammy and white in the cheeks and purple around his eyes and red around his mouth where blood couldn’t have been wiped off completely — but he was alive, restlessly, agitatedly so, the touch of the world searing on his skin. Burakh had jumped out of the cot and to the bedside to take the basin away from the sheets, to help him sit up, to feel Dankovsky’s crushing, powerful, sweaty grasp when he took the offered hand to pull himself up; his touch was searing too.
Dankovsky looked at Burakh with wide, keen eyes: they swallowed the ghost of dawn inviting itself into the Stillwater like they were so incredibly hungry, ravenous, for the faint, ashen light.
The Bachelor brought his hand to his own throat and, when Burakh saw his surprise at touching bare skin, he brought him his cravat (and his gloves). 

      “... Burakh, what is it that I hear?”

Burakh leaned into the silence and emptiness of the attic (a way it hadn’t been for over two days, which had felt closer to two lifetimes) and listened. Footsteps scurried downstairs — small beasts scattering (he thought he recognized the Architect’s heels on the floorboards) — but he could hear more of them, fainter, further. Their rhythm was sharp, crisp. Martial. The two men looked at each other, and they both knew — and they both knew that they both knew. 

      “Give me a minute, would you,” Dankovsky said as he rose on his feet, his legs just short of buckling under his weight.
      “Right.”
      “Is… the basin clean?”
      Burakh threw it a glance. “You threw up blood in it.”

The Bachelor’s face contorted/twisted/folded/he seemed to swallow something sour. He took the basin and limped, his ankles and knees and hips sore and stiff from days of lying there–lying still–lying stiff–being agitated and coursed through by shocks of illness that made him shake and turn, to the small bathroom, out of Burakh’s sight.
Once Burakh heard the water run, echoing into the brass cradle of the basin, he stepped away, then back, then down, and he left without a sound but the loud, bursting sigh of relief that rang through him.

_____________

      The Haruspex was called, so he went: in the Cathedral, the Inquisitor waited for him to come close before she spoke: 

      “How is the Bachelor?”
      Burakh bit one side of the inside of his mouth after the other. “He’s getting back on his feet.”
      “Has he told you his lab has been destroyed?”

Her voice didn’t fall and didn’t rise. She wasn’t sad about it, nor particularly excited. Her silver eyes raked the surface of the Haruspex’s face, searching it.

      “I have been made aware.”  

(That wasn’t a lie.)

      “Have you met the Commander?”
      “I haven’t. I had assumed he would be… here.”

The Inquisitor’s mouth pinched. It wasn’t a smile and it wasn’t a grimace. It was a placid kind of sourness that cradled interested, cynical wells of stone-grey eyes. 

      “He’s looking for you.”
      Burakh read something on her face, and asked: “There’s something else you are not telling me, isn’t there?”
      “You’re in danger.” Burakh thought he could hear concern poking a hole through the roof of her thin-lipped secretive mouth. It took him aback.
      “In what ways?”
      “The Commander is looking for you. Armed. With a squad of ten men — by him. It is logical to assume he has given order to the rest of the troops to stay on the lookout for you, too.”
      “Why?!”
      “Because you’re a dangerous man, Burakh.”

Burakh wasn’t sure if she meant that — even as he assumed she had every way of knowing. She read the interrogative look on his face and continued: 

      “He’s been told you eat human hearts.”
      “I don’t—I don’t eat human hearts. Or animal, for that matter!”
      “You’ve been seen plucking some straight from corpses, from people you’ve yourself killed.”
      “I have only ever killed in self-defense,” Burakh barked through gritted teeth (trying to keep himself calm, keep himself composed, he didn’t need one more person finding him brutish).
      “He has been told you've indiscriminately killed people of your own kith to protect a friend of yours, who’s committed great crimes against the purposeful order of the town.”

Burakh’s mouth thinned in a straight, sour line. The Inquisitor’s silver-coins-for-eyes scraped the exhausted, pulled skin of his face like a plough. They seemed to squint with a sort of subdued… almost-satisfaction. Something something… “Betrayal”, is that it? Burakh thought to himself as his interlocutor seemed to think. Was murder (well… “murder”... It’s more complicated than that…) acceptable, if that means I didn’t let a friend down?  Burakh wasn’t sure of where the Inquisitor thought were set the lines of the law (he knew she didn’t draw them, merely follow), but he also wasn’t sure he was really tempted to discover.

       “Besides, it is your word against everyone else’s, isn’t it? He’s been told by the girl, who’s been told by the Mistress, that you go around with a cohort of Butchers and bloodthirsty Worms — that is, when you do not turn on them. That you stalk the streets on the prowl.”
      “What girl?! What Mistress?”
      “The two-faced one. (She paused, and Burakh could see how her face meticulously wrapped itself around her sentence. Deliberate, she answered the other half of his question.) Also the two-faced one.”
      “You have to realize how little this narrows it down, in this town, right? It doesn’t narrow it down at all.” (Burakh still very much had an idea.) “Does he plan on killing me on sight or does he want me alive?”
      “You’ll find that out.”
      “Right. So, a fifty percent chance that, if I stumble across them, one of his soldiers will shoot me like a dog… out of self-defense,” he sneered through tense, straining jaws. “Does he believe everything he is told? Does he go along with lies, with rumors?”
      “Your… for a lack of a better word, bloodstained reputation precedes you. Think of it not as being gullible, or easily persuaded by hearsay, but rather as… mental prophylaxis. The longer you avoid the Commander, the stronger this vision of you he has will be… Or, on the contrary, you could be met with bullets if you dare approach too soon, when he still thinks you’re on the prowl, ambushing his men.”

( So what you’re telling me, Burakh thought, is that I should just go fuck myself. (But he didn’t tell the Inquisitor that.))

      “The Commander has said he wants to see the Bachelor,” the Inquisitor eventually said when Burakh didn’t speak.
      “Surely, he can find him himself.”
      “You were the last person he was around,” she pointed, the spindle of her eyes caught on his blank face.
      “I’m not following him everywhere he goes like a dog. He’s feeling better, he’ll go find the Commander if he’s asked.” (Ah, well, will he? Burakh knew the Bachelor to be stubborn, and he could see him refusing. He’d already been more than reluctant to meet the Inquisitor. But then again, Burakh thought, if the Bachelor could redeem him in the Commander’s eyes like he did in the townfolk’s on the day they met… He should ask him. He should find and ask him.) “The town is not that big, surely you can run into him before the day is over.”
      “We both know we all have a long day ahead, don’t we?”
      “Goodbye, Inquisitor. The sick won’t heal themselves.”

He left the Cathedral with calm, purposeful steps. When he was sure he was out of the view of the windows, he ducked his head down and ran, weaving between souls and huddled crowds like murders of crows that he insistently dispersed for their safety.

_____________

      Burakh hurried back to the Stillwater before heading out to the Theater, needing to collect his gloves, his mask, and more material that he had left there… to be used. 

Upstairs, the Bachelor had taken his seat back at the desk. He was arranging papers on his desk, sorting through scribbled sheets — which ones were his, which ones were Burakh’s. The ends of his hair were wet, as if he had hastily washed his face. He was sloped forward, had put his vest back on, buttoned his shirt — Burakh couldn’t see if he had all the way up, and then told himself it didn’t matter.

      “Burakh?”

His voice was weak, still, a strained, ravenlike croak.

      “Yes? (Burakh walked to him.) Oynon?”
      “She wants to see me, doesn’t she?” (He spun his words in his mouth like he wanted to bleed them dry.) “The scarecrow from the Inquisition. The doomsday omen…”

Burakh decided he wasn’t… going to pick up on the second half of his line.

      “She does. She had come the… first day you were sick, to ask me to send you to her when you would get better.”
      Dankovsky turned to him. “But you didn’t.”
      “But I didn’t.”
      “Thank you, Burakh.”
       The genuine relief in his voice wrung a panicked beat out of Burakh’s heart. He tried to joke it out, quickly. “I assumed you’d go on your own, like a grownup.”

Dankovsky didn’t even smirk. 

      “I do not… look forward to it. I have nothing to show for the seven — Burakh, what day are we…? Is it seven…? — days I have spent here. I have no vaccine, no serum… I have dubious prophylaxis recipes that I can only make on the back of the dead — a constant, uninterrupted supply of dead, for nothing but the hope to protect the living.”

He brought his hands to his face, digging the heels of his palms into his sunken eyes like he wanted to put out once and for all the pyres of images haunting him. He continued:

       “I’ve failed to protect people, and I’ve failed to protect myself.” (A heavy, guilty pause.) “To protect them from myself.” (Another one.) “I have nothing to appease the emissary with. Going to the Cathedral would be going to the gallows — but for this day… this day at least… I’ll go to the gallows with my head high.”
      “Oynon, what are you talking about? The Inquisitor has no reason to kill you. It would be counterproductive. We need you here.” (That was Burakh’s reasoning for having spent the past two — or three? was it three? — days at his side. Because they needed him. That was a truth.)
      “This is not about her.” 
      “Pray tell, what then?”
      “Burakh, my work here has been nothing but a catastrophic, delirious failure.”

Silence just fell into the room like an oil spill. Suffocating, pitch-black.

      “I have nothing to show for my stay here, and I have nothing left to return to.” Burakh tensed, and Dankovsky noticed it. “Has she told you? Does she know? Of course she’d know. The Powers That Be have done nothing but hinder my research — and now that my life’s work has gone in flames, I might as well never go home.”

His voice, having trembled with a subdued, bleak and biting rage, had fallen back. He was calm, cold, as flat as an undisturbed sea. Burakh could see how his depths boiled.

      “If I am not to go back victorious, I would rather blow my brains out with this very revolver. I'm cornered. I have nothing to fall back on to beg for good graces — because I did, I had to beg like a dog for the most minute of things, the… protective shell of my lab—the one thing that gave me the smallest bit of repose, of argumentative weight against those who sought to pull everything from under me.” 

There is a sharp, breathless — as he was exhausted — second that hung from his mouth. Burakh saw his face distort. It was bitten by grief like linens by moths; then sorrow; then fear; then a bitter, horrifying acceptance. Eventually, a graceful gratefulness seeped into his desperate eyes, and that scared Burakh shitless.

      “Burakh, I am glad we didn’t get to become enemies.”

Burakh was frozen in place. 

      “... I would say that’s a little light of a statement, oynon.” 

(He didn’t elaborate. He couldn’t elaborate.)
Dankovsky laughed: a bitter viper bark that punched through him.

      “I am unspeakably thankful, Burakh, I am. I owe you my life… but I am not sure it was worth saving.” 

Dankovsky’s words punched Burakh through the chest and he felt his ribs cave in. They caved in and they pierced the wet red bag of words he had tucked between his lungs like a bulging spleen and the pulp of his next sentence tore through him like a broken bone does flesh: 

      “Oh don’t you fucking dare, asshole.”

Dankovsky turned to him and looked at him with wide, wild nutshell eyes. Burakh immediately added, trying to play the banter card again (and he was starting to get a sleeve-full of it): 

      “Do you know how many blades of herbs heroically gave their lives for you? Do you know how much clear spring water gave itself to your cause? Come on, oynon. You have to think about them… and live.”

The Bachelor’s lips slithered in the sliver of a smile, taunt and tense. Burakh had managed to pull that from him, but he could see in his dark, pitted eyes that he thought about it still. He was thinking about it still. 

      “What did you… give me?” he eventually asked. 

Burakh thought about his answer for a while. 

      “A medicine that worked. I’ve… found a blood. A blood that works.”

Dankovsky’s eyes were on him, peering, interested, eager. 

      “I needed to make sure I could find more before giving it to you.”
      “So it is scarce.”
      “I had the belief it could be,” Burakh promptly corrected.
      “And you gave it to me.”

The pause was heavy, cumbersome. Accusatory, almost, and Burakh detested it. 

      “I did.”

And he doesn’t say because I thought it was worth it. And he doesn’t say and I’d do it again.

      “I could. I could so you would have… an opportunity to share your own discoveries.” When Dankovsky sighed, he insisted: “Go see the Inquisitor… Erdem, please. Go see her. She won’t bite you… She hasn’t bitten me!”

A little laugh scraped through the Bachelor’s teeth. He said: 

      “You’re a way more lovable person than I am, Burakh.”

Burakh was too stunned to speak.
Eventually, he did, because the silence was getting awkward:

      “The uh?”

(Well. He tried to.) 

      “Oh, you’ve heard me,” the Bachelor almost-snapped back at him. (He was too tired to truly have bite to his hoarse bark. He sounded almost irritated with… something else that Burakh couldn’t decipher. A wordless aftertaste that lingered when Burakh wasn’t looking, avoiding him.)

He turned on his chair, almost sulking. Burakh pinched the base of his thumb just in case he had fallen asleep without realizing it.

      “Well… Maybe you could let her decide this, oynon?”
      “So you are sending me to her.”
      “I’m… firmly nudging you.”

The Bachelor sighed deeply, bringing pinched fingers to the bridge of his nose, and Burakh saw on him this pompous, important finickiness he had come to him with when they first met — and Burakh was overjoyed to witness it again. And Burakh was not to think about it (like this) again.

      “I’ll go. I’ll be quick. I won’t let her try to… surround me. I’ll leave for the Hospital as soon as I can.”
      “Yes,” Burakh nodded, “that’s a good excuse. She can’t keep you from it.”
      “That’s not just an excuse, Burakh. I have… missed out on my duties quite a bit.”
      “Oynon, you were sick.”
      “I was. I was, and I was never supposed to be. That was a failure on my part.”

Burakh balanced from one foot to the other. Think of something, quickly.

      “You were, and you’re not anymore, which is why you need me around.”

The Bachelor’s peach-pit-bitter umber eyes overflowed with a wordless, shapeless “thank you” that hit Burakh like a gust of wind does a stem of rye. 
The Haruspex was promptly on his way, like he couldn’t bear any more of this amorphous weight.

_____________

      Burakh met the Bachelor again, late in the afternoon — he had left the theater-hospital holding his flank, as if nursing a stitch in the side, unstable on his legs but not pale, and he had refused any help getting home. Burakh had left not long after, having taken the time to clean his tools, his hands, and discarded his gloves. The sky was low, gray, crushing, and was heavy atop the Bachelor’s lain-down, stretched out, still body. Fear almost slapped Burakh’s head right off his shoulders seeing him immobile in the grass before he noticed how he swayed one of his feet, moving it back and forth to the tune of an imaginary song. His hands were joined on his chest. 
The Bachelor heard Burakh approach, and turned his head to him, not making a move to get up.

      “You left the hospital early,” Burakh immediately said, trying to make it look like he had come with something to say and not just because his own steps brought him here.
      “I did.”
      A pause, through which Burakh swam fast. “How are you holding up?” He would be lying if he said this wasn’t an excuse to look like he hadn’t just come to hang out. He’d also be lying if he said he wasn’t asking in earnest. So, after that, he kept his mouth shut.
      “I’ve been better,” Dankovsky said, and Burakh caught his self-deprecating smile. He was back at looking at the sky, waving his foot, scratching his own palm with an absent thumb.
      “I can imagine.”

Dankovsky scooted to the side, herbs clinging to his coat. Burakh needed a second to register the offer, and only sat down when Dankovsky gestured at the space next to him with a loose hitch of his chin. Burakh sat with knees raised, feet firmly planted in the ground as if the soft breeze could make him sway, hands joined at his shins.

      “Your women,” Dankovsky eventually spoke, a hand barely rising from his chest to wave at Brides, in the distance, who sang and danced as their usual, “they’ve gotten… agitated.”
      “Don’t call them that,” Burakh huffed, “they’re not mine. They’re no one’s. They’re… the Earth’s.” He hesitated. “... And each other’s, sometimes.”

He didn’t catch Dankovsky’s sidelong glance at him, but it was thrown nonetheless. Dankovsky nodded. (Burakh didn’t catch how his mouth thinned in something… well, Burakh wouldn’t have known.)

      “But, yes, they’ve… gotten themselves busy, this past week.” Burakh nodded. “Yeah. busy.”

Burakh looked at Dankovsky (not straight on — rather with a side-eye that would have been painfully obvious, were Dankovsky not staring at the sky still, gaze scratching the dark underbellies of the clouds). His eyes were still a bit sunken, lids heavy, mouth still dry and each word struggling past cracking lips. Still, red had risen back to his cheeks, and the lower part of his face was the faint mist-shrub-blue of a pronounced five o’clock shadow. Burakh didn’t know if he looked more peaceful or drained. A bit of both, he thought. Relieved, too, not that it showed a lot. Burakh noted his loosely-knotted cravat, and the untucked folds of his shirt collar that stuck out like paper wings.

      “Have you lost your—” (Burakh brought his fingers to his neck, gesturing vaguely above his throat until the word came back to him) “—your pin?”
      “Not lost,” Dankovsky replied, his voice a sore, breathless, yet calm whistle. “I’ve just left it on my desk.” He turned to Burakh (just his head, almost lazily). “Do you miss it that much?”

The Bachelor’s eyes bore a heavy, weary playfulness, pushing out against the boulder of exhaustion—and the lighthearted tone punched a reflexive, nervous laugh out of Burakh’s tight-lipped mouth. Where the hell did that come from, Burakh asked himself. He seemed to have shed every fang of the crushing, piercing, predatory despair he had fallen into the jaws of a few hours earlier. Had he gotten to have a conversation with the Inquisitor and had it gone way better than he had thought it would? Did surviving the Plague make someone frisky? It sure didn’t make him . 

      “It’s not about missing it,” Burakh justified himself before following the offered lead of Dankovsky’s tone, and adding: “you just look so much more unkempt without it! Naked, almost!”
      He regretted the words almost immediately, even as the Bachelor barked out a throaty laugh and replied, wrapped in a numb ease: “Oh, it can’t be that much of a shock to you. If I believe your colleague, you’ve seen me in worst states—and worst states of undress.” 

Burakh, through gritted teeth as the past days—the past dream—came back crawling up his spine, scaling him with wet, sharp spider legs, pushing between his eyes the memory-needle of having to take off Dankovsky’s cravat as he coughed until his lungs sounded like they’d collapse, of peeling the shroud from his stiff, mist-pale corpse, replied: “I have. I sure have.” 

They both fell into a silence Burakh felt like he had awkwardly stumbled into. Dankovsky didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were on the sky still. Burakh found him pensive, not particularly melancholic.

      “Do you still have the cigarettes I gave you?” the Bachelor eventually asked. “Well, cigarette.”
      “I do. Do you want it back?”

Burakh didn’t tell Dankovsky it was half-smoked. That he had kept it for when Dankovsky would… wake up. He wasn’t sure if it was weirder to imply he had smoked the cigarettes of a man on Death-borrowed time, or if he had saved some in the hopes/in the wish/in the unspoken prayer of having him finish it.

      “No,” Dankovsky said. “Not yet, at least. Not with the lungs I have now.” And, as if to drive his point home, he let out two dry, airy coughs—more a formality than anything else. “Maybe later.” He turned to Burakh and Burakh saw a smile on his face, and his spine tensed, as if struck by lightning. “Keep it for me.”
      “Right.” (The word escaped him swiftly and he tried to rein his voice back into light-heartedness.) “I’ll think about it. Can’t promise it’ll survive my stress.”

The Bachelor croaked out another laugh. 
He disjoined his hands and let his arms frame his flanks. Burakh tensed with the eerie, creepingly familiar feeling of feeling him slip away. Let his head loll to one side, to the other. Dankovsky eventually tucked his chin against his throat as the breeze picked up — as Burakh stared. 

      “What?”
      “Nothing. You just look funny with your head all flattened against your throat like that. Like a lizard.”

Dankovsky huffed out a chuckle.

      “And with a bit of luck,” he said, “I can look like one even more!” He tilted his head in some more and a cough hammered out of him. “Ah, no. Bad idea.”
      “Does your throat hurt?”
      “It’s pretty sore.” (He brought his hand to his neck, past the paper mouth of his flapping collar, under his loosely-tied cravat.)
      “You coughed a lot. You coughed a whole lot…”
      “I can feel it. I can feel it everywhere. From my lungs to my tongue.” (He sighed.) “I’d need a hot tea with milk and honey…”

His voice had slipped back into the jokingly whining grumble Burakh had only heard him use when drunk (or not-quite drunk. Or whatever his excuse was for that one time at the Architect’s). It dawned upon Burakh that the Bachelor didn’t seem to… recall the one he’d offered him in the morning. Something in his chest stung with the bitter realization that he had done it for nothing — no , he promptly interrupted himself. It helped. It had helped. (He wasn’t going to tell Rubin he had been sent across town for something the one concerned would never remember to thank him for.) Something else fought for ground in Burakh’s chest: a sigh of unmeasurable relief. It almost punched through him, the weight of the uncomfortable, foreign closeness washing off with the realization, and he laughed too:

      “You won’t let that go, will you?”
      “I won’t until I get it.” (There was a pause where silence stepped back in, breathing in the crisp, cooling air, and continuing its way over the sprawling yellow grass. Then, Dankovsky scratched one of his cheeks, the sound of stubble against leather making Burakh’s hair stand up.) “Another thing I need to get is a good shave...”
      (Burakh thought in a blink about how he let his facial hair get this way. He remembered his clammy, ghostly, agitated body sunken into the Stillwater bed. Burakh thought about what he could have done. Burakh stopped thinking immediately.) “Do you have a good razor?”
      “I’ll find one, even if that means haggling every child in town for one that will not give me tetanus.”
      “Can’t be too careful…”
      “At this point I’m probably immune to most diseases known to man… Maybe even some unknown.”

He was joking—he was, he laughed about it, and Burakh joined in, but they both were heavy in the chest, tense in the neck up, knotted in the guts with a fear shared, anchored within, hanging over like a blade.

      “Did you… see anything?” Burakh asked.
      Dankovsky looked at him kind of sideways and half of his face furrowed in questioning, as if the other part was too weak to. “What do you mean?”
     “You seemed to have the worst nightmares. Anything… usable from them?”
      Dankovsky squinted, seemingly racking his brain. “I don’t remember anything from them.”

This, Burakh didn’t know, but that was a lie. He remembered the grave—he remembered himself in the grave. From the grave. Of the grave, with the grave. Surrounded and completely alone. Very cold. Burning hot. He remembered the feeling of the thorns going through him like blades through the throat. The… lungs-bursting, biblical feeling of holding lightning in his hands, and it going through him/him going through it—jaws to jaws. (He didn’t tell Burakh any of this.)

      “All I remember was waking up.” (A plain lie. 
Here was another thing Dankovsky was not going to tell Burakh: he remembered his hands on him. Not day by day, not hour by hour—rather like a pit of snakes, every touch at once coiling around him and squeezing – like a swarm of bees flocking to his face and neck and chest and gathering each of his sweat drops like nectar – like a plain of prickly grass rising around him like meadows do once freed from the suffocating cap of winter snow. He was not going to tell Burakh. 
It wasn’t trickery, it was silence.) “And before that… I remember falling down. On my knees, then face into the ground.” The Bachelor pushed himself on his elbows and, emphasizing on his point, pointed west, towards the end of the track that licked the roots of the Crowstone rocks. “There. I had wandered. I remember the feeling of the haze, of the… twisting mind maze. Couldn’t make a sentence. Couldn’t call out when I thought I saw people. Then nothing. A great big nothing…”

He lay back down, as if recalling the events had drained him. Burakh spoke, and he couldn’t quite shake the wreathing, wringing vine of sorrow and guilt that closed around his throat:

      “... Then Herb Brides picked you up.” (Burakh saw how Dankovsky turned to him.) “They found you, and picked you up. Carried you. They must have come from the Crow, maybe from the cemetery or the Barrow. Maybe they followed you.” (He fidgeted—picked at his nails.) “They carried you. Five of them at least, and three that followed, singing, chanting… making a ruckus in the town. They brought you to the Stillwater, where I just was, and I helped them carry you upstairs.” (That was a lie, and you know it.)

Burakh saw how Dankovsky’s brows furrowed, slightly at first, then deeply; how his mouth pinched in a long, straight line. He was thinking of something. He was thinking of saying something.

      “Did any of them… fall ill after carrying me?”

And for a second, Burakh didn’t speak. The words hung between them, growing heavy with heady twyre. It was dawning on him—or, more precisely, it had dawned for days before, and now more of the sun was tearing its way through a thick cover of daybreak clouds. (Metaphorical clouds—the steppe was, in front of their eyes, growing darker as evening came crawling like a heavy, foggy spider.)

      “No,” he eventually said. “None of them have.” To Dankovsky’s prying eyes, he added: “And I’m finding out why tonight.”

Dankovsky nodded. 
Burakh read on him, clear as day—as day can be—a bitterness scientifically proper; his words were greeted by the sour pinch of a mouth which wanted truths, and even more: truths for itself.

      “You keep me updated, Burakh.”
      “Oynon, you know that I will.”

_____________

      Walking back to the lair, Burakh found his shoulders sore with effort and yet relieved, his footsteps light as if a great weight had been torn from him — and they were, and it had. 
He stopped in his tracks and suddenly realized that, son of a bitch, he had forgotten to tell Dankovsky about the Commander, forgotten to ask him to cover for him once again. He had forgotten most of their discussion, and found himself gritting his teeth when the only ghost of it still haunting him was Dankovsky’s silhouette as he laid, placid and composed for once, mindlessly fidgeting with the collar of his open shirt. It superimposed itself on that of him lying agitated and restless, fever tearing him to pieces with his burning teeth. Burakh shook his head violently — he would have let one of these two linger, and he chose the one of Dankovsky not on the verge of death, thank you very much.
When the air became heavy and dense with the cover of evening, Burakh lay low and walked in the shadows of walls, skirting around tightly-packed groups of soldiers. They were agitated and restless like cornered buzzards.