ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

      When someone dreams of someone else, it is an act of devouring. The someone else is consumed, digested. The subconscious chews thoroughly, the someone is torn to shreds, slips in the bloodstream, and is spat back out a fantasy. It is not cannibalism, as cannibalism implies human eating human; and the dreamer, through his dreaming, is not human anymore. He is inhabited by appetites man does not have. He is capable of consumption that no soul is. 
Burakh dreams and Burakh devours. Burakh realizes he has been devouring. His teeth have ground bones, flesh, dirt, herbs, flowers, clay. They spit out men and places that do not exist. It’s an act torn apart between creation and destruction. It is… a lot for him. He’s not in the processes of creating life, but merely to protect and save it, he has found, he has realized, it has dawned upon him. All births are painful, and dreams have sprung out of him like Athena sprung out of Zeus’ skull: armed, armored, tearing through. Zeus’ screams of pain tore through the skies and across the earth: Burakh has borne it, gritting teeth, panting heavily. He twisted and turned between sweat-soaked sheets. 
He is the thread. He has never felt more like the thread than sewn shut by one; held together, at last, by one — one meticulously woven by Dankovsky’s cautious, conscientious hands. 
He is wreathed in the fabric of the Town. He is wreathed in the fabric of the Steppe. He is wreathed in the black velvet that lines the overflowing cup, the dark waters of which they precariously tread.
(He is wreathed between Dankovsky’s fingers when they are bare, for he might have to hold his hand back, for he might have to hold…)
He is the binding agent. The pigments of prophecies get lodged under his lids and they itch, they itch. 

      Every ditch is a mouth and every hill is an eye. Every cave is a stomach and every cliff is a rib. Every mat of moss is symphysis, ears are tender seashells. Every cave is a stomach unless it is a mouth, and every grave left undug is one too unless it is a womb. Isthmi are spines unless they’re veins, and every spine is a vein that is a path that is also a rope that is also a rein. Every peak is a nose, busted open and bleeding, and every one of your bones is a flute waiting to be carved. Everything starts in a mouth: words, of course; silence; hunger; kisses. Everything is about devouring, except when it is about spitting out, which by deduction means it is also about devouring. Everything is about the Earth, which/who does it too.
Autumn and clay is skin and scent.

                   Do you get it now?

The olecranon is a burl. Muscle is meristem. 

                   Burakh, do you?

Cometh into view the wound, come the lips of the wound; raw, parted, pink, mouthlike. All Earth is about devouring — but this isn’t about Earth (but this is, because he is).
Stop. Stop. Wake up.
The lips of the wound; red, ready, ruby, inviting.
STOP. (He shakes his head) Think of something else. Think of something else. 
The lips—
Enough. Enough.
His to it. His to them. His to hi—
(He wakes. He falls again.)
The lips of the wound. Biblical. Bloodpink. Blood-fig. Unlike one, copper-tasting and shapeless. Stigmata. He tends to it carefully. Washing of the hands. Of the area of the wound in preparation of
(He pries an eye open, the lid curtains it again.)
The wound / biblical / his hands tending to the stigmata of it / its lips mouthlike and inviting. This is how it is settled. The wound / biblical / his lips woundlike and hesitant / its copper taste / something that grazes against Burakh’s upper lip from the inside, two sharp things flanking his row of incisors. The wound is a gateway to the heart. Whose heart. Whose Heart? It’s worse if he thinks about it. 

                   Make something of it. Make something of it, Burakh, because it is all there is.

_____________

      When he wakes, Dankovsky gestures at him to stay put. Move not, speak not, make nary a sound. He points. Outside, something. Shh. Burakh pulls the blanket on himself, as if to shield himself from view.

      “How do you feel?” Dankovsky asked, trying to keep his voice low as if the walls could snitch.
      “Like shit,” Burakh croaked — a comical understatement.

Dankovsky laughed, a restrained, ever-so-slightly sour chuckle. Burakh realized he wasn’t laughing at him, he was laughing at Burakh’s attempt to make him laugh. (It felt weird succeeding.)

      “Sticky showed up earlier. He has brought your clothes.”
      “... How did he know I was here?”
      “I doubt he knew. I think he made… an educated guess.”
      “Am I that predictable?”
      “Let’s say that there are a few things you’re very easy to foretell on.”

Burakh dragged himself upright on the bed, stretching out his arm for the clothes Dankovsky had folded and piled on a chair right by it. He tucked them under his arm and limped to the bathroom. 

In front of the mirror, he could finally get a look at his stitches. 
Not too bad, not too good… He carefully, with an index-thumb pinch, moved his skin around to see how it withstood the sutures. 

      “Can I come in?”

The Bachelor was by the door — behind it, again; standing where he did the past night, and asking the same thing too. 

      “Sure,” Burakh said, this time.

Dankovsky walked in. His step was hesitant, as if walking into unknown territory ( — which this was). Burakh moved a bit as if it would make him feel more welcome; it did, somewhat, and the Bachelor got to his side. 

      “Can I take a good look at your stitches?”
      “They’re your work, are they not?” Burakh laughed — hoarse and tired. 

One of the Bachelor’s gloved hands cupped the underside of his upper arm. His eyes thinned into two smoky slits as his brows furrowed. 

      “Well,” he said, “they do look worse in daylight.”
      “Hey,” Burakh protested, “they’re sturdy. They’re clean. They’ll hold; that’s all they need to do.”

Dankovsky didn’t speak, his mouth shaping itself into an unsure grimace. 
He took off one of his gloves. Hesitant, again — Burakh saw the restraint in his tense wrist and the way his fingers twitch with a search for composure. He brushed a thumb across the clean line of a stitched cut, careful that his nail didn’t scrape the fresh suture thread. Burakh shivered — Dankovsky took his hand away, and the cold that settled where its warmth once was made Burakh shiver some more. 

      “If you’re fine with them,” Dankovsky said, “I won’t try to change your mind.”
      “Thank you, by the way.”
      “Don't mention it. You’d have done the same for me.” 

They shared a laugh then — Burakh’s half was barky and dry from the events of the past evening, and Dankovsky’s was sapped and refined, almost polite; with a real, if feeble, smile tugging at his lips. (How new. How foreign of a feeling. How strange was it to find this laughter to not be the first time.)
Burakh would — and he had already. 

Eventually, Burakh grabbed his undershirt and painstakingly, painfully tried to stretch himself up to put it on. 

      “Do you want help?”
      “I should be able to dress myself up.”
      “Should,” Dankovsky opined, and nodded when Burakh let out a startled yelp of pain when he moved too fast.
      “I’ll manage.”

The other option felt a tad too… unduly familiar, even with the events of the previous night (or maybe… because of the events of the previous night).
Dankovsky excused himself and left. Burakh laughed to himself, and thought about the Bachelor finding seeing him get dressed more awkward than seeing him bare-chested. (Then, he didn’t laugh at all as something foreign and febrile stirred under his ribs.)

_____________

      “Bachelor, could I ask you something?"
      “Surely, General.”
      “Why are there only women among your… comedians?”

Dankovsky turned his gaze to the Tragedians that stood by the door — well, not quite stood; one was crouching, her long legs sprawled like spider limbs. Their heads moved slowly like a leaf in the breeze. The two dots of their hole-eyes were pinned on Block.

      “For the same reason there are only women amongst the Brides, I imagine.” 
      “... The Brides?”
      “Herb Brides. They’re… herbalists, of sorts. Dancers. Midwives.” He marked a pause. “Witches, if you use the word without negative connotations. Haven’t you met any of them?”
      “Not that I remember.”
      “You will soon, then. They roam.”
      “... Dangerous?”

Dankovsky thought about it. 

      “... I do not think this depends on them. Leave them be, will you? Tell your men to leave them be. The townsfolk have already hunted them down thinking they were plague-carriers.”
      “Well, are they?”
      “If they were, they’d be shockingly ineffective. You have a better chance of catching the disease touching a door handle… or the back of a chair.”

The Commander lifted his hands from the seat he was holding.

      “Bachelor, could I ask you something?”
      “Surely, General.”
      “Can I trust you? Well, more importantly: can I trust him?”

Dankovsky pondered the voice. He swished his in his mouth from one hollow of his cheek to the other.

      “I don’t think trust can be forced. Whether or not you trust me is up to you — even if I hope I have made myself trustworthy enough. Similarly, I cannot make your mistrust of Burakh yield to him by pure strength of words… Even if I wish I could.”
      The General’s lips twitched with the semblance of a smile. (It was working.) “If I am to listen to you, he was a precious ally.”
      “Is, General. Yes. I would venture to say...” (For a moment there, he didn’t venture. The word felt amorphous, foreign — it rolled on his tongue with edges and planes he struggled to fathom, but could grasp nonetheless.) “… A friend. Yes, I would.”

Block nodded.

      “It is still, Bachelor, your words against the townsfolk. Even among them, his reputation is quite… polarized.”
      “I know this, General. Please, let him see you. Let me bring him here, and tell your men to lay off his trail.”
      “Very well.”

_____________

      Lara almost fucked this all up. Burakh knew it was grief — grief that makes one do erratic, thoughtless, desperate things, but for a split second he truly thought the bullet wouldn’t miss; well, her bullet wouldn’t miss, and the General’s guards’ would be fired. The gunshot tore through the Town Hall with an overpowering, deafening sound, and Burakh was almost knocked off his feet.
He begged for the guards’ weapons to be lowered — he saw then in the unfolding second how Lara would fall backward, dead. Dankovsky’s voice burst in the mayhem, and that got the General to give a no-fire order.
Then, it took Burakh having to unravel all the threads of Lara Ravel’s wounded mind for the Commander to empathize, it took Dankovsky vouching for him, it took Yulia and Aysa (who Burakh learned only now, only then, as his heartbeat hammered at his ears, knew Lara well — she came to the Trammel often, how come she never told us anything about it?!) exaggerating the terrible impact of the plague on the psyches of the women of the Town — and Burakh could see how they grimaced when Block was not looking, disgusted in themselves for having to denigrate their own. It took Rubin who, having been summoned, had to speak, too, about the agony that had wrecked their friend, pushing her over the edge.
(Block seemed to recognize him — he either didn’t, or didn’t want to show him that he did.)
It took the General himself who, in spite of it all, was good-hearted and a tad naive to women’s affairs. When he said, with a smile, “I know how women can be… You know too, I assume, Bachelor,” Dankovsky threw him a wide, if crooked-at-the-corners smile back, and replied: “I truly do not, General, but I will trust your judgment on it,” Burakh’s eyes instinctively scraped the side of his face.

When they were finally allowed to see Lara in jail, where she had been locked “for her own good”, Stanislav scolded her immediately.

      “Whose rifle is that?” he aggressively asked.
      “Yours,” she hissed.
      “Do you even know how to use it?”
      “Dad taught me to shoot.” She sounded piqued.
      “Okay, but did he teach you how to shoot well?”
      “Are you saying you wish I didn’t miss?”
      “It would have been funn—” Burakh cut in.
      “No, absolutely not, this is not what I’m saying,” Rubin shut him up immediately.

_____________

      Things are thinning. Burakh is fully awake — he thinks he is. He is walking somewhere. He is walking into something—through something: he carefully peers through curtains that wouldn’t have yielded to him, were he anyone else. Their fabric is light — again, it has thinned. They almost recoil at his touch. They’re closer to silk than velvet.
He walks into the open, milk-white-light and darkness-shrouded theater like he has once walked to the blazing colossus of Thanatica — uninvited, but let in.

The Inquisitor Lilich — Solid bodies drown in water; it's a Law. Life breaks into particles and is reborn again; it is a Law. 
The Thistle, Mullein, and Mulberries Brides — Tell, what is Law?
The Inquisitor Lilich — It is… Equilibrium. It is Balance. The Knowable Forward.
The Thistle Bride (to a sister) — Kheerkhen, say, do you think the Suok-coat woman knows of equilibrium?
The Mullein Bride (to a sister) — Her back is straight, her shoulders are perfectly level. 
The Mulberries Bride — No good dance comes from a straight line. It is the way of concrete and plumbed thread. 
The Thistle Bride (between the three of them) — She holds herself square as a brick. 
The Mullein Bride (between the three of them) — She is so balanced that raindrops will hit her and bounce back into the sky…
The Mulberries Bride (between the three of them) — … and the soil will go thirsty.
The Thistle and Mullein Brides — Yes… dry and cracking like winter lips.
The Thistle Bride — She fits the light-eyes constellations into stiff sky-squares—
The Mullein Bride (cutting in) — —like matchsticks in their box. 
The Thistle, Mullein, and Mulberries Brides — Yes. 
The Mulberries Bride — Stars move, and they reach across the dark blue belly-hide of Suok to hold hands, to entwine fingers so they can withstand her devouring.
The Thistle and Mullein Brides — So they can be never separated.
The Thistle, Mullein, and Mulberries Brides — Yes. 
The Mulberries Bride — They grow apart, then rejoin. 
The Mullein Bride — Like spited lovers coming together. 
The Thistle, Mullein, and Mulberries Brides — Yes. It is the way of the Wheel. 
The Mulberries Bride — No good dance comes from a straight line. 
The Thistle Bride (to a sister) — Souvilag'sh, watch her well. Her feet are so small…
The Mullein Bride (to a sister) — … They are bound in corseted leather…
The Mulberries Bride — She hovers above the Earth like a September breeze.
The Thistle Bride (to a sister) — Watch… her stork-legs-heels dig into the earth.
The Mulberries Bride (loudly, and moving violently) — I am pierced!
The Mullein Bride (loudly, and moving violently) — I am carved through!
The Question-blade Bride (to the Inquisitor) —  Ekhene! Say, what is Law? 
The Inquisitor Lilich — It is Equilibrium. 
The Question-blade Bride (to the Inquisitor) — The bird-tower stands perched the neck of Bos Turokh, straight like a wasp balancing on its stinger. Isn’t she in equilibrium? 
The Inquisitor Lilich — … 

(Something is trembling. It seems to be coming from below. A tensile, tectonic friction spreads through the scene like a whisper (like a disease).)

The Question-blade Bride (to the Inquisitor, insisting ) — Ekhene, is she Law?
The Inquisitor Wordless — … She is her own.
The Ropewalker Bride (to the Inquisitor) — If it is so, whose do you bring in?
Aglaya — …
The Red Bride — Thorn-footsteps, say, towards which star does the river of blood flow?
Aglaya — …
The Red, Ropewalker, and Question-blade Brides — Forsake your voice. We will love you in its wake.

(Close the curtains. Hurry. Hurry!)

       The Earth comes to beg. The Plague does not.

“Why can’t I take, but you can? You take. You take. You take. You take. You take. You take. You take. Then once more: you take.”

And so it took (it took, it took, it took, it took, it took, it took, it took).
It scythed all seven children like tall blades of grass; it devoured them like wildfires do the dry bark of pine.

_____________

       What he did then — was crawl to the Stillwater, and ask for anything Dankovsky could have left.  (It felt like a pathetic, pitiful beg. Burakh didn’t look at him in the eyes — the pain was darting, nagging, obsessive through his shoulders and arms, dissolving into his wrists and fingertips like poison in tea; it gnawed at his insides as he thought of the kids, the damn kids, and the crushing maw of the illness on their white bird-bones.)
Dankovsky hurried him upstairs. He rummaged through his bag, through the piles of papers and candlesticks. 
He found painkillers, mostly — some spare pills that threatened to roll, some he had ground into powder to stretch their use, and mixed with whatever he could find to make them easier to swallow. 
Then, phials.

      “This,” he said, putting it flat in Burakh’s hands like a silver coin, “Rubin has compounded for me. And this (he put one more) … I have.”
      Burakh stared at the vials like they were lodes of gold. “... Would he be okay with you giving it to me?”
      “Whatever I do with it is out of his hands, now. That’s part of the deal.” Dankovsky closed Burakh’s fingers on the ampoules like he was terrified he would drop them. Burakh’s knuckles thrilled at the touch. “Have this, too.”

The Bachelor put on his other hand a closed razor, three safety pins, and a beetle. 

      “I would have loved to keep it,” he said, pointing at the insect; his face was sober with a genuine yearning for the crawling thing. When he noted Burakh’s perplexed eyes on him, he explained: “Bartering material. Don’t waste it.”

Burakh took them — took the two vials, the four barter scraps: four leaves of this clover. Halfway to halfway to grace; stones on the path regardless. 
Something stupid overcame him — the urge to squeeze the Bachelor in his arms as a thank. He didn’t do it; he managed to hold himself back from it; he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t crush him in a hug (Ha… hadn’t he said something like this before?). He wasn’t sure Dankovsky wasn’t going to shove him back, either. He bowed, then; an emphatic, over-reverent obeisance that Dankovsky grimaced at. 

      “Oh, don’t do that, Burakh,” he huffed, audibly irked, almost hurt. “Please, don’t do that.”

Burakh immediately straightened his spine as he found himself completely dumbfounded at what the fuck he had just done. 
Dankovsky followed him down the stairs and to the door. 
Before it, he grabbed Burakh’s elbow — he yelped, and Dankovsky’s hand flew off immediately. 

      “You tell me if there is anything you need, Burakh,” he ordered with pinning, sharp eyes. “I… don’t have much to give you, but I’m sure I would know where to take them.”
       “Thank you, oynon.”

He was out in a gust. His arms were shaking from the weight of the Bachelor’s offerings, and from the force he had to use to hold back his limbs from looping around Dankovsky and messing up his prim white shirt. 

_____________

How fucking painful was it, then, to be told he was loved.
Over, and over, and over, each in a different way.
How fucking painful it was to hear the croaks in their voices like so-tiny crows and magpies, to watch how their little hands reached to him and then were taken back, coursed through by the instinctive knowledge of contagion. Even Notkin, even Khan, whose voices they tried to hold strong and stoic like marble giants, were friable and fearful.
How fucking painful was it to want to hold, and to want to be held, and to find nothing but a great pit between the two.
No matter how fucking painful it was, Burakh knew it was worse for them.
When all of this would be over, because all of this would be over, he knew it, he felt it, he would hug them. (He was not sure he was particularly good at it. He tried to tell himself it only mattered that he would try.)

_____________

      The Earth begged. Time did not. It was slicing through him like a meat cleaver — and, swung from one side of the Town to the other, he truly did feel like meat.
A crooked smile tore through his face — almost reminded him of being cannon fodder. (He thought about it and the dregs of the disease bit at his lungs; just to make sure he didn’t forget what he had been through, what the kids had been through.
Burakh didn’t know if he was sad.
Burakh didn’t know if he could even be sad.
He was angry. He was so angry.
All the rage from being begged, and bent, and spun, and made to run, pooled in his empty stomach — where he kept all of his grief too.
He wanted this to end.
It had to come to an end.)

_____________

       Night came. It came and everything crawled to a still.
Burakh reveled in it.
In the dense clouds of smoke rising from the pyres, upon which the army had resorted to burning the dead, the clothes of the sick, infected sheets and rags, he could almost, oh, he could almost feel peace. Swirls of infectious miasma waltzed with the spirals of this smoke, and all Burakh had to do was avoid them — simple, he didn’t know how to dance, so he wouldn’t.
Everything moved. Nothing moved. The world stood still like an angel on a pin — the Tower seemed to move, slowly, in the dance of a star-pin pricked in the coat of the sky.
He walked to the Stillwater, and the Bachelor let him wash his face in the sink.

At the window, Burakh tended to his wounds. The Bachelor had kept the lights off, and the few, now stubby candles didn’t help Burakh distinguish between one end and the other of the roll of gauze; the streetlights, the rising moon, and the soft, ethereal glow of the Tower did. 
In the silence, Dankovsky was biting at the wooden end of a matchstick — so he didn’t bite his nails, Burakh could guess. He was writing. Burakh didn’t know what he was writing. He kept his nose out of his affairs. 

      “Calm night, I take it,” Burakh said, holding gauze between his teeth as he cleaned the stitches. 
      “You could call it that.” Burakh heard the soft crackle of wood giving out under the Bachelor’s bite. Then whispered, hushed, as if his breath could put out the last of the candles: “Enjoying the view.”

Burakh turned to him. Following his gaze, he found it going through him, and out of the window — to the Tower across the river. He took a step back to look at it better. 

      “I guess it is a pretty view,” he said. 

Behind him, the Bachelor started writing again. The scratches of the nib of his fountain pen grew louder, clawing harder at the paper; they covered the sound of his voice as he mumbled something that Burakh didn’t catch. 

(And I will tell you what: he mumbled

“nevermind”.)

The light emanating from the Tower was a pulsating ochre-lilac-gold-ochre again. That pulse was slow, steady — mesmerizing. 

      “You like the Tower, don’t you?” Burakh asked — it took finding Dankovsky’s raised eyebrow and the puzzled look on his face to realize he had asked like one would ask about a friend, or a secretive lover. 

Dankovsky brought his gaze back down, pensive, sober, wistful almost. Thankfully, he understood what Burakh meant, and replied appropriately.

      “I do. Oh, Burakh, I do.” The mumble had left his voice, and it was growing emphatically reverent. “It is fascinating. I must have said it before. Fascinating.” He twirled his pen, aligning words in his thoughtful mouth. “A… vessel of sorts. Vessel of some kind — of its kind.” 

He brought his gaze on Burakh’s face, and he could see how the blackcurrant pearls of his eyes shone — from the dancing candlelights, yes; from the pulse-light of the Tower, yes; and from something else entirely. 

      “Say, Burakh, your udurgh… Your… body-that-contains-the-world …” (He pointed at the window — at what could be seen from the window.) “Is this not a body? Does this not contain a world?”
      “It could be. It could.”

Where the Tower’s heart would be if it was a living bird, shadows danced, shaped around the children that ran there, shaped by them, dancing with— and alongside them. 

      “It could…”

A body feather-light, translucent like glass, like water, or a slice of moon. 
A body plumb-heavy, dense like iridium, iridescent like an oil spill, unwieldy like a sun just born. 
A body-world that stood atop a world-body like a parasite. That stood beside it like half of an offered waltz. 

      Burakh eventually cleaned the last of blood, set the last of gauze. He put undershirt and sweater back on. The roughness of knitted wool scraped the stitched cuts on his shoulders and arms, and a pained “tch!” flicked past his teeth. 

      “Burakh?”
      “It’s nothing. Skin’s a bit… raw, that’s all.”

It was raw, and it hurt when he moved. It hurt when he pointed to the bed with a finger and asked if he could take it. It hurt when he walked to it after Dankovsky had told him to help himself. It hurt when he sat on the mattress to kick off his boots and when he lay down. 

      “Good night, Burakh,” Dankovsky said — and there was a low, lighthearted hint in his voice, as if he was laughing at the propinquity of the situation. 
      “G’night, oynon,” Burakh replied. 

He replied, but he didn’t fall asleep. 
He didn’t want to fall asleep. 

Silence had shifted shapes — he wasn’t sure when. He wasn’t sure why. Slowly, something somber and heavy overtook him, cloaked him with his heft. Burakh heard the tick of his pen hitting the desk. He heard the chair creak as he leaned back. He heard a sigh. Long, hushed, secretive, as if he feared it could wake Burakh up. 

The opening had to be made.

_____________
(Like so.)

      “... I dreamed I cut you open.”

Burakh’s voice sliced clean through the heavy, stuffy silence. The cut caught Dankovsky’s attention who, sitting at his desk slumped, arms heavy at his sides, turned to him.

      “It’s been a few nights already.” He wasn’t really sure of that. He wasn’t really sure of much. “I didn’t tell you before; I didn’t have…” He stopped. The time–the courage–the guts. (Ha. Dankovsky didn’t have guts either. In the dream, Burakh means.) The strength–the grit—the heart. (The Heart. It all comes back to it, really.) Burakh decided to not finish his sentence. “I didn’t tell you before.”

Dankovsky observed stillness, immobile and mute, eyes heavy-lidded as if he was squinting.

      “I cut you open and you were… incomprehensible. Unfathomable. I looked in your ribcage and nothing I saw made sense. I felt mocked and so, so lost. Your organs were… not organs. They were red, wet, wounded birds, which I had no idea what to do with. I had nowhere to hide them away, to keep them safe, if I pulled them out of you. They were small enough that I could have cradled them in my hand but I was so afraid I’d crush them like too-ripe fruits.”

And this, he couldn’t explain; he couldn’t reason to himself or to anyone else… Dankovsky’s foreignness had been gracious to him in ways unspoken (and, more than that, unspeakable). It had made itself hollow around him out of what Burakh felt was… a certain deference — and thinking of Dankovsky being deferent towards him was unthinkable (well, it wasn’t, he was thinking about it this instant. Let’s rather say… he wouldn’t let himself think about thinking about it too much). Dankovsky’s foreignness had felt… welcoming. He wasn’t going to tell Dankovsky that. Like hell he was going to tell him that. Burakh couldn’t explain. Burakh wouldn’t explain. Burakh didn’t want to explain. The snake that had crawled his arm, languidly—the snake that Burakh wasn’t sure wasn’t the Bachelor’s heart, that had slithered out/that he had let climb his arms/wrap around his neck—had looked at him with a placidity he hadn’t found anywhere else. Not even in the Bachelor’s eyes. 
(Not yet.)
Dankovsky didn’t speak. His titled head dropped barely one more notch and, in the candlelight that washed over his cheek and neck, Burakh could see the two black pebbles of his eyes looking for his face.

      “... You didn’t even have a heart.”

The words pulled a laugh out of the Bachelor—a single, cutting cough that punched through his teeth and through the lune of a smile-sliver. Then, his face fell and something clouded his eyes. Burakh could see this fog even as he didn’t tear his eyes away. They both could rationalize this as exhaustion, as the fatigue Dankovsky had to power through after days in the depths of a restless, febrile sleep. They could. They tried to. They didn’t manage to.

      “Oh, Burakh, I do.”

Almost as if to convince himself, he brought fingers to the pulse point on his throat before grimacing, looking disgusted by what he found. Burakh thought he could hear Dankovsky’s heart pound against the walls, below the floorboards. Be loud and erratic like it wanted to make up for having disappeared so long. Dankovsky turned to him.

      “You don’t seem convinced.”

There was a fleeting hint of playfulness in his voice, but it tumbled flat in his lap with his soundless words. Burakh couldn’t see the look on his own face, but he could guess from the Bachelor’s eyes on him that he must’ve looked confused. Dankovsky spoke, and Burakh thought he had dreamed it:

      “... Would it soothe your mind to check?”

Burakh jolted upwards on an elbow, alert as if stabbed, and turned to Dankovsky. The Bachelor sat, collected, hands on knees; a waiting man.
Silence hung-hanged between them, balanced on the tightrope of their shared gaze, moved around them like ink in water pulled and pushed by their steady breathing. Burakh scooted closer to the wall. A split/splitted second of stillness ensued and Burakh feared he had sent the entirely wrong message, had looked like he wanted to run away — then, Dankovsky got up, dragged the chair after him and settled it by the bed. He sat down. He crossed his wrists on his lap. He leaned in—not by much, just barely, just enough, with the bend of a tree withstanding a storm. Burakh didn’t move, frozen. Dankovsky hesitated, then undid his cravat. The gums-blood-heart red silk slithered around his pale, taut neck like a snake. He folded it carefully and placed it atop the books pile of his nightstand. Burakh felt his hands ready to betray him—knuckles hot, wrists straining, ready to cross the threshold of infinite/insurmountable/insignificant space left between them with the strength of a lightning strike. He watched as the pale machineries of Dankovsky’s wrists, bone-gears under his skin, crawled to his collar and undid a button. His gloved hands hesitated on the one below, retracting then. That was an invitation.
Burakh sat up and leaned in. He saw how the nervous birds of his hands flapped and flailed, amateurish, dilettante. Dankovsky’s heart had risen to his mouth as if he was getting ready to spit it out, esophagus alit with the burning embers of this wayward, worrisome, raucous thing. Burakh watched as his Adam’s apple climbed up and down the white-walled tower of his throat, agitated, nosy as the Bachelor gulped. Burakh’s hands treaded restless grounds and Dankovsky’s skin felt like it could burn his fingerprints off. That didn’t happen. He undid button after button, he could see where the shirt, days before, had been mended, (his fingers grazed the white thread of the stitches,) and Dankovsky watched. He watched dutifully.

Burakh was expecting an undershirt, the familiar brush of wool or cotton — he instead found the foreign skim of hair, ink-black stipa pennata he felt his fingers graze through. He curled his hand in a fist like the touch had scorched him. Dankovsky hadn’t even budged. Burakh almost—almost—let himself think that, maybe, he was expecting such a reaction. Burakh undid more buttons — with one hand, because it felt more nonchalant, more casual, more detached—scared to death, that’s what it truly was.  

Burakh brought his hand down the groove of Dankovsky’s sternum, slowly, with the restraint of one approaching a wounded bird. He settled it where the pad of his thumb fit in the hollow between his diaphragm and the curve of his coastal arch, where his digits found room in the notches between his ribs like fingers intertwined. The Bachelor’s (living, beating) heart rang loud and crazed against his palm, with each pulse seeking contact with abandon and promptly retracting with a terror unspoken; and then doing that again. With this hold, Burakh felt like he could nudge the Bachelor’s ribcage open with the barest of pressure, like it would open to him like an ajar door — inviting him, he thought, felt, then promptly chased the idea out of his mind.

      “Your heart is loud,” Burakh spoke, and he spoke so unbelievably low. “Your heart is fast.” He raised his eyes to the Bachelor’s face. His gaze evaded Burakh’s for the hint of a second, then held it back firmly. “Scared?”

Dankovsky didn’t speak. He didn’t nod nor shake his head. He exhaled slowly through the nose and Burakh heard how the breath faltered like candlelight in the wind.

Burakh adjusted his seat to lift his weight off his other hand, and brought it to skin. His fingers slipped into the partition of the open shirt, cleaving it slowly at the front like one peeks between curtains. Cloth seemed to yield to his hands, not unlike herbs.
It felt
     like he barely had to pry it open.
     Like the lapel-tear over Dankovsky’s white throat and chest was of those that appear on their own.
     Like the open mouth of his shirt collar offered way to his touch as do the florets of white whip.

 Burakh thought everything dawned on him—no, everything did dawn on him.
            The secrecy. The pinched thin mouth — pinched thin mouth that Burakh had looked at,  had watched. The company he kept. The overwrought touch; the reaction to the touch. (His skin was a bit clammy and hot. A drop of sweat blossomed beneath one of his clavicles and it ran into the hollow of Burakh’s hand, frenzied, boundless, warm.)

Burakh had two hands on the Bachelor’s chest and his heart in the cradle of his palms. He had a heart. It hammered restlessly into the hold. Burakh was leaning in—he felt Dankovsky’s breathing into his hair. Burakh was leaning over—he towered the red heart. Burakh was leaning into—he peeked through the white curtains of the Bachelor’s shirt, he approached the red pulp, the dissonant dark fruit, the scattered-pomegranate-seeds of the organ and its pulse.
How terrified was the first man to lay his head on another’s chest and to hear this loud, this deep, this scared/sacred, this untamed/untamable deaf drumming? How did he reconcile centuries of taboo of the flesh, of curse upon he who cuts open, of anathema of cannibalism— because when you cut, it’s to eat, isn’t it? would you eat a human heart? — with the bellowing babel of the blood, with this mystical, unspoken song? Burakh knew of the mechanisms of the heart, of its intricate, biological gearing, he had studied, he had seen, he had sliced open and held. He knew of the superior vena cava–the pulmonary vein–the tricuspid valve–the inferior vena cava–the aorta–the pulmonary artery–the mitral valve–the aortic valve
he knew of the chambers
right chambers–small ventricle–big atrium left chambers–small atrium–big ventricle
(good fucking god, did he know about the Chambers)
he knew of
he knew that
Dankovsky’s heart was roughly the size of an orange

which itself was the size of a fist.

He knew that it was red and wet and tangy like the former

— and hardened and closed like the latter.

He knew he couldn’t peel the Bachelor’s heart in the hopes of finding something sweet beneath (that would kill him!), he knew he couldn’t pry pieces of it apart, they wouldn’t taste tart—   
or would they?
Burakh hitched his head up as if he had been hailed.
Dankovsky’s gaze was on him. A restlessness agitated the ink-lakes of his eyes. Their axis-core-pupils traced Burakh’s face fretfully. Their endocarp-irises caught fleeting follicles of bronze candlelight. Dankovsky was guarding his heart like a lame dog does his meat-covered bones. His mouth was pulled in a straight, thin furrow; a tightrope that Burakh’s eyes followed.
       What was this about it? what was this about him?
       about… vague images of pulled wire, of silk stitch-thread, of border/ contour/ crease/ boundary/
edge.
       Right, of lines.
       That Burakh followed/follows.
       Right.
       Of those that tear on their own.
And the line/Line of the Bachelor’s lips did just that; it parted. Burakh didn’t quite realize he had pushed himself up — he had leaned in — leaned over — leaned into — he had found it, maybe he had opened it, maybe it had torn on its own. He was really close. He was really careful. They were each on a side of the depths-dent, gust/guts-silence, skin-pale clay-red stillness that kept their faces apart. Burakh found that if he stepped forward, Daniil followed. So he did. He brushed against the hollow of his mouth, he didn’t let their lips meet, he wished for Daniil to bridge the gap, to make the connection (for once/again/one more time/just like he had shown him he could when he first offered his help/when he first let him sleep here), and he did, and he was going to, and then the downstairs erupted with foreign voices and bangs and shouts and an ash-grey voice that rose up the stairs calling Dankovsky’s name.
Dankovsky tore himself from Burakh fiercely, furiously, in the way one would tear his own limb off. His face soured, mouth crumpling as if bitter venom had filled the dome below his palate.

      “Just a second,” he spoke loudly, a blade away from barking. “It’s a mess up here, stay downstairs, I’ll come meet you.”

He then was on his feet. He grabbed his cravat that he fastened hurriedly, buttoned his shirt back up, and slithered into his waistcoat one arm after the other.

      “Stay here,” he told Burakh over his shoulder. “Do not make any noise. The General might be a little unnerved after your friend tried to kill him.”
      “I know,” Burakh mumbled.
      “You can take my coat to cover yourself.”
      “Thank you.”

His steps tumble down the stairs, Burakh couldn’t make out a word of what was said. The Commander spoke like he had pebbles in his mouth. Dankovsky’s voice was sour and strung as he tried to wring his poison out of it and slip unnoticed. Burakh pulled on Dankovsky’s coat until it fell off the folding screen. The snakeskin was heavy and stiff with blood(s). Pulling it on him, Burakh thought the sleeve threw itself on him, like a ghost alive with the memory of arms. With the memory of his 
(enigmatically-standing) silhouette.

(Dankovsky walked up the stairs some time later; Burakh didn’t see, Burakh didn’t hear. He had fallen asleep. He had fallen asleep with the snakeskin upon him. Dankovsky, then, didn’t take it away. He… adjusted it on Burakh’s shoulders, tucked the collar under his chin to keep it from moving. He let himself be a little cold in the busy, full attic, so Artemy could be a little warm.)
It comes to him.
It takes him, rather. It swallows the space left in his mind where, Burakh realizes, he had been brewing. He finds his hands hot with the realization, with the relief; with the memory of the graze, of grace. They come uninvited like the dream that follows.

      It takes a foreign body to understand a foreign body. It takes foreign hands to understand a foreign body ( — it takes a foreign body to understand foreign hands). It takes hands to understand a body — and then, they are foreign no more. 
It takes Burakh to understand Dankovsky. 

Burakh’s. Dankovsky’s. Daniil(’s).

_____________

THE SERPENT        
I am… afraid you will eat me.

THE HARUSPEX
(looking quite lost) I… am not going to eat you. I cannot eat you. You’re more likely to eat me.

THE SERPENT 
(grave) But this is a lie, isn’t it? You’ve eaten bigger. You’ve eaten bitter. You’ve devoured entire towns, and all I’ve done was devour entire bulls.

THE HARUSPEX
(still dumbfounded) Bulls... ? You’ve eaten bulls? (raising voice) Serpent, what have you done?

THE SERPENT
I’ve done what had to be done. I’ve made my choice. This is what this was about, wasn’t it? Making a choice. Making it willed. I’ve eaten bulls. Their flesh was tangy and sweet. Closer to fig or apple. Eyes like pomegranate seeds.

THE HARUSPEX
(furious) You…!

(THE HARUSPEX throws himself after THE SERPENT and falls on his knees attempting to grab him. THE SERPENT slithers effortlessly out of his grip and crawls across the stage before exiting stage right. THE HARUSPEX watches him disappear, immobile where he fell. The lights linger on him for three seconds before going off. We do not see him leaving the stage. He hadn’t made a choice yet.)

Stand there, Artemy Isidorovich, son of your father, will you? Tether-body of fraying things — of nerves, thread and fabric. Things are coming to a close: you’ll be able to sew them shut, or to tear them apart.

_____________

That heart. That precious, unyielding thing. That cumbersome apple of plumb. That tart, pulsating hollow. 
Burakh feared he could crush it. Burakh feared he would. 
Burakh swallowed for himself the resolution that he would. For this, he would have to.

(That heart, that thing that Dankovsky had (en)trusted him with. / That thing that, oh, not just Dankovsky had (en)trusted him with.
That heart, that thing that the Earth had (en)trusted him with. / That thing that, oh, not just the Earth had (en)trusted him with. 
Here lay the wound bleeding. 
Here lay his hands. 

His? Whose?
Observe the shape of the fingernails. Observe the ribbed plains of the back and look for signs of scratches or cuts; follow the shape of the middle finger for a callus at the topmost knuckle. 
Whose?
Burakh wants to hold, and all he will do is crush.)

A cut for a cut and the world aligns. 

a cut
for a cut.

_____________
(like
_____________
so.)

A heart for a heart.
Worse, worse: a heart to a heart.