ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

      He cannot stop hurting. He cannot, for there is not a world, there is not a story that exists where he is able to shed the feeling of touch — a touch that resonates and echoes in all the hollows of him, in every cavity.
Touch is bound to hurt. Touch is bound to him. He’s bound to hurt. And he’s bound to the rest, to everything left. 
to anything left.

(He knows why he chose. And I think you do too.

And choosing felt like splitting a ribcage in half with a letter-opener.)

_____________

       “I have made my decision,” the Inquisitor said. “Have you made yours?”
      “I’ve made a choice, but no decision.”
      “You are careful with your words, Burakh.”
      “... I am. What is your decision?”
      “The Tower is coming down.”

Burakh tries to find in her face a hint of anger, of rage, of madness, of anything — she’s determined. She’s a silver-cold, with an edge in the voice; not sharp, not dull, pressed with purpose against the jugular. 

      “What is your reasoning?”

(Burakh has his reasoning. He knows his reasoning. He knows for a fact the Inquisitor’s is not the same.)

      “The Bachelor’s love for the Tower,” she began, “overflows when he is asked about it. He knows the most intimate details of its construction — or as intimate as its creators will allow him to know.”
      “And?”
      “And he has told me what I already knew. No, let’s be fair… What I already thought of, and was simply confirmed. The Polyhedron's foundation pierces many meters into the ground beneath the Town, to its very heart.”
      “To its?”

Burakh’s hammer against his teeth and he thought it would fall out of his throat. His pulse grew stiff, loud, worried. 

      “To its heart, Burakh.” (She didn’t seem to notice how uneasy he was, and he started to think she, too, was enthralled in the Tower — in its destruction. Too enthralled to question him about his sudden pallor.) Its core, its deepest layers… Why have you turned sheet-white?”

(Nevermind, she did.)

      “Nevermind. Do go on.”
      “The… arrow, the spear it stands on, holds the blood of your ritual beasts all of these meters underground. Bringing the edifice to its knees would break that spine and finally allow the blood to flow. All that would be left to do would be to collect it.”

But the Heart? But the beasts? But the creatures? But the miracles?
Burakh kept that in. Kept-that-in. He locked all of these inside. There was light in the Inquisitor’s eyes, like suddenly the sky dawned upon her.

      “You’re not just telling me that because you think I’ll help, are you? There’s something else.”
      “There is. Tomorrow, I will die.”

Huh.

      “You seem sure of it.”
      “I am. In the shadow of every Inquisitor is an army man with orders to shoot them at point-blank range. It’s dirty work, so they find excuses. They will kill me, Burakh, but I’ll go having destroyed this forsaken thing.”
      “You are dead-set on taking it down.” 
      “I will be dead once I do, yes. I’ll go free.”

Burakh is unsure of what to do with all of her honesty. It all sounds like a suicide note — in a way, he thinks it is.

      “ And I am telling you this because I more than appreciate the unconstrained, Burakh. You’re… special in that way. Special to me.” For a modest, almost reluctant second, she bore a real, wide smile. “Free, now.” She immediately corrected: “Well, let’s not say free , let’s say… freer . It is more accurate.”
      “Am I freer,” Burakh asked, “or are the constraints of my world simply further apart than yours?”
      “How far apart?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, and continued, almost hurriedly, almost as if she wanted to say this, just this, before… before the rest: “ This is where my freedom ends.” (She gestured outside, up, to the sky, to crows circling like thunderclouds.) “I live in the shadows of the Powers That Be. Of this… damned tower. It makes my skin crawl…”

She was mad. No, not mad… scared. She was scared, wasn’t she? Burakh saw how her shoulders shook, as if trying to tear off strings. It was the first time he saw the flame on her face falter. Her mouth pinched like she was trying to hold something in. 
What was she afraid of? What could she be afraid of? It wasn’t just about the Powers That Be, was it? Was there something within that Tower that scared her so? There must have been. (There was.)
She swept that fear off her face as fast as it had overtaken it. 

      “You’re freer than I am, but we are pleasantly alike.”

(Burakh thought he had heard this before, from somebody else.)

      “You would have made a despicable Inquisitor but… I believe our likenesses would have allowed us to be good friends. It’ll make the parting that more painful. I would have… loved to weave the threads of webs with you.”
      “I appreciate the compliment,” Burakh began, (and he did,) “but, if it would help make goodbyes easier, I’ve had my thoughts on how—on where our works irreparably differ.”

He was light-hearted, of course. Taking it with a casualness he knew was not quite fit for his interlocutor’s fate. Lilich laid her Inquisitor eyes on him — silver and prying like a pair of scissors. She was giving him the opportunity to speak. (That was her departing present. That was… the first time she was interested in hearing it.)

      “You work openings with words. It’s not my trade. You’re covered in graphite and ink from drawing lines. Shapes. I don't want to be. I will not be. You don’t touch people, not with your hands. You move them around, you… point and you pinch and you direct crowds like pieces on a chessboard. You haven’t touched anyone — touched, with your hands.” He moved his in front of his eyes. Their shapes dawned upon him then — dawned upon him for the first time. He became aware of the delicate silk of the skin. “I don't want to draw, neither shapes nor my weapon anymore. I don't want to speak. I don't want to look with piercing eyes in the ways you do. I want to touch, do you understand? I want to feel my way around with my fingers and palms as if I was blind. As if I wandered through pitch-blackness. I want to be covered in clay and blades of grass. I stank of blood for twelve days. I want to smell of autumn leaves again — like the living sisters told me I did.”

(A marked, bulging pause between words as Lilich listened carefully.) 

      “Living sisters? Are those what you call your maidens?”
      “Brides, Inquisitor.” The title fell past his lips before he could swallow it back. He felt like his emphatic confession had shrunk him in front of her eyes. Made him smaller and dirtier with how he bent to the soil with a reverence he wasn’t sure she’d understand—no, he was sure she wouldn’t understand. “Not maidens, Brides.”
      “I would assume it would be crude and untruthful for me to assume you are staying for them… for one of them.” (There was not an inch of jealousy in her voice, and it was important to Burakh. She sounded sour nonetheless.)
      “It would be. It is.”
      “So are you staying because of filial piety? Because that’s where you were called, and where you feel you have to stay?”
      “I'm staying because… we are kindred. Kindred.”

She gauged his face. He was red, breathless. His heart hammered restlessly, aware, awake, sprung alive with his words like a watered fruit tree. What was she — curious, bitter, sad, lost? Burakh couldn’t tell.

      “... So it is about filial piety,” Lilich said. She almost sounded disappointed, but curiosity cradled her stare.     
      “It’s about so much more. So much less. I’m staying because I want to figure it out.” Lightning pulsed through him. “I could be across the world and we would still be kindred.” 

He marked a diligent pause. He caught his breath again. Something light washed over him — foreign, sea-like. He felt calm. 

      “I want to stay because I missed the smell of autumn here. I missed the whispers of the grass, that talks even with a bare wind. I will stay. And maybe one day I’ll leave because I want to leave.” (He didn’t say: … and not because my father sent me away. He didn’t say it because the word was so heavy on his tongue he felt it would puncture his throat. (He would stay to learn to speak it again.)) He wasn’t one for long, beautiful words. He didn’t know how his little speech was going to land, and he didn’t know if he would ever land. Eventually, he finished: “I will stay because the house won’t tidy itself.”

(And that was the absolute and utter truth.)

      “Do you truly believe your desires merely coincidentally match the straight road of your fate? You showed me you were free,” her voice emphatically rose, buckling on a syllable like the leg of a trapped horse, “why do you… follow what is written?”     
      “Do you believe I am written?”
      She stood there, looking at him, almost shell-shocked for a second. She swept the surprise off her face as fast as it had fallen on it, and replied: “I do. Of course I do. I… am too. Don’t you see this is what I am trying to shake off? I’m trying to find ways to escape these lines…”

The fear, again. Her voice shook like a candle in the wind, like she was already, slowly, faltering.

      “... Well, was I written well?”

She looked at him — again. Her cold gaze slowly came apart; she didn’t warm up per se, she just… leveled. 

      “That, Burakh… is not for me to judge.”

The Inquisitor stood still. The blades of her shear-eyes sought to clear Burakh’s face. 

As he didn’t budge, she laid her arms down. Her lids fell and she sighed. 

      “... You seem very resolute.”
      “I have nothing left but my resolution.”

She nodded. 

She looked at the ground. It was not out of modesty, timidity or reticence. She wanted to know what could anchor Burakh to it so bad. (Burakh couldn’t answer. And if he could, he wanted to keep it to himself. The Inquisition didn’t have to know, and Aglaya — the doomed omen, the dusk-and-disappearing friend — he thought, wouldn’t understand. Her maps were sprawls, and he, burrows.)

      “You do know what will happen to me once that cannon goes off, Burakh.”
      “I do. And you know what will happen to everything that lives on the outskirts of this town, below, inside? All the…” He couldn’t get himself to say creatures or miracles. That was bringing them to life in her eyes. She was better shielded.
      “... Do I, Burakh?”
      “It is better if you do not know.”
      “Why? Do you think I couldn’t understand?”
      (Burakh wasn’t sure she could, but he didn’t tell her that.) “I think it is not your burden to carry.”
      “... But it is yours.”
      “It is.”

Burakh’s heart ticked with the pulse of clocks as he thought about what to say next. He could say “ and mine alone” , or “ mine and my k/Kin’s” . Would he crush his k/Kin with the weight of his choice? He would regardless, he thought. But would he word it? Would he speak it into existence? He didn’t add anything. The Inquisitor — Aglaya — watched how the words came and went over his face like the silhouette of a cloud over the steppe. He didn’t add anything even as her eyes pried. 

      “Are you betraying anyone?”
      “The only choices are, I either am or I am not, really.” Burakh wasn’t sure if she was serious, but a small laugh escaped him nonetheless. “Why? Are you going to send me to the gallows?”
      “I couldn’t even if I wanted to, could I? They’ve taken them down.”
      “They have. They’ve made funeral pyres.”
      “Better than stakes.”
      “Indeed.”
      “Do not come to me tomorrow. I need to be alone. I’ll send my orders by couriers. Keep them safe, will you? The tower must come down. Mind the Bachelor. His love for it will make him mad.”
      “I’ve dealt with something like it already.”

The Inquisitor wouldn’t get the stakes — that was the fate of the poor Brides. She’d get an interrogation; and, less painful, a bullet then.
She offered him her gloved hand to shake. (Burakh laughed to himself: of course, gloved. Ah… a protective cocoon. He quite knew the ordeal.) He did and, with a last sweep of her silver cloud-eyes through his, she donned a forlorn smile; the wistful grimace of the sorely defeated. Burakh wasn’t sure what she felt she had lost against, but he was starting to get an awfully precise idea.

      “And there’s something else, isn’t there?”
      “Whatever you think that something else is,” Burakh replied, “there probably is.”
      “Mmh. Can’t win them all,” she joked, and her words grew into mist.
      “Can’t indeed.”

A last chess piece for the Inquisitor, before she peeled that name off of her, to handle in leather-clad fingers. A rook…

_____________

The Architect is this pale, stiff as if frozen-solid, cold curved spine — Burakh is not touching him, he’s just walking towards him; the Stamatin is radiating a biting frost like the sun does light. Burakh is approaching him and he sees the Architect is pinned to the ground — which is some type of soil, which is some type of tiles, which is pitch-black like a velvety oil spill. No light comes in, no light goes out. The sword/needle/spear/swordneedlespear that pierces the similarly black dome above like a heavenly dagger tears through his chest, holds him in place like a white moth. Algae seem to cling to his face—it takes Burakh a second to realize it is his wet hair. The Architect turns to him—but he cannot move, which means Burakh turned to him instead. He’s not sure if he’s standing. He was sure the Architect was on the ground, he is not sure anymore. His eyes are mist-pale, bulbous and wet like a beetle’s elytra. They catch Burakh and cling onto his face. He is sure the Architect is digging into his arm with his fingernails but all of his limbs are curved towards him — almost protectively, pitifully enough; reminding Burakh of a spider, dead on its back.

            The Tower, 

he speaks.

“I’m listening.”

            The Tower. She pierces,

he says.

Burakh looks at him. At the spear that pries his ribs apart, like a blade trying to separate conjoined bodies. (He doesn’t think “conjoined twins”, because it feels too on-the-nose. And then he thinks that he just thought about it, so why bother. Peter seems to be very bothered. He’s agitated as Burakh looks at him.)

“... Yes, I would assume she would do so.”

He’s seen. He’s seen her, if that’s what Peter prefers him to say. Peter’s arms flail towards Burakh’s face like he wants to grab him, to pull his eyes down — the rest of his head is optional. Burakh flinches and Peter flinches too. Burakh moves to the side and Peter moves too. 

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

Peter’s teeth are clattering powerfully. In the pitch-black bubble where he has trapped Burakh (and Burakh is not sure he isn’t trapped himself), the sound they make is akin to a mad clock. Burakh winches at the thought the enamel would break. It doesn’t. The Architect forces him to look at him — somehow; Burakh is not sure he has touched him. The spear—Burakh can see it, how it is lodged like a painful splinter right through the manubrium. It nudges the Architect open everytime he moves. He doesn’t move much. Burakh doesn’t see how it opens him up, it just knows it does. 

            She pierces.

“I know.”

The Architect grabs his collar with a maddening, maddened and unexpected force, his knuckles digging into Burakh’s neck as he pulls on the wool of his sweater. 

            Don’t you dare touch her, hear? 

“...”

            She has to stand.

“Pain is making you mad.” (He tries to reason with him. He attempts compassion where the curled, curved, corpse-cold, crawling, cleaved plumb-heavy shape of the Architect inspires pity.) “‘ She has to stand’ , for what? So you can stay here, being mangled by it? Cut in half? Feel your lungs be filled with… iron and zinc and whatever else its base is made of?”

Peter’s face is suddenly close to him—so close Burakh feels its cold slithering beneath his skin, the frostbite chewing at his epidermis from the core out. 

            Pain. What’s a bit more. What’s a bit less. Don’t you dare. You wouldn’t understand. You do not. You can lie and tell me you do all you want. Don’t you dare.

“I will not lie to you. I do not understand.”

The Architect’s face seems to soften. Rage subdues for pain, and he grimaces, retching as his limited movements mold him into a spiral around the spear like thread around a spindle. 

            Don’t you dare.

“I will make the choice that I will make.”

            You will make me sad, Ripper. Oh, yes, you will rip her out of me… You will make me so sad…

Burakh watches as he curls in on himself. He’s… miserable. He’s all thin, all white, he looks like a distorted paper crane. He’s glistening with pondwater like he just drowned — or attempted to. Whatever it is. He’s in pain. Burakh knows how to deal with pain. Peter doesn’t want Burakh to do anything about his.

“Sadness… What’s a bit more, what’s a bit less?”

Peter laughs — so bitterly, harshly, this ground-grinding thing. It feels like skinning the back of a hand on roughcast, and Burakh shivers violently. Peter wails, a long, melancholic howl that rises up, rises high, high-pitched, pitch(ed)-black, that comes crashing down with the hoarse, pained cry of a child having scraped his knee. 

Burakh can think of a few things Peter will still have if the Tower comes tumbling down, but he is not sure Peter knows he has them. 
Burakh hopes Peter is asleep. Burakh hopes Peter can sleep well. He’s not mad at him, not now, he can’t be. He’s sad. He sees how Peter seeps out of himself where the spear widens the hollow over his heart. Everything can crawl inside — everything and nothing, mostly a whole lotta nothing. 

“Hey, at least you’re not filled with strawn eh? Not with straw, sand or herbs…”

            If I was filled with herbs… Say, Burakh… If I was filled with twyre, with all the water inside and outside of my body…

Burakh notices how he doesn’t seem to separate the two.

            … Do you think I could make twyrine of my own? Say… I think it would be… bitter… ineffectual, with an aftertaste of hazelnut shell.

“Well… If you were filled with twyre, it would brew… It wouldn’t make twyrine as you know it, but infusions.”

            For the better, maybe. Twyrine as I know it… Ah, I know it too well.

“Listen, I have to go.”

            Of course you do.

“Aw, would you rather I stayed?” (He tries to be playful, but the tongue-in-cheekness falls like a shot-down bird on the opaque black ground, and Peter grits his teeth like he’s trying to file the enamel down.)

            You’re despicable. You’re going to do something despicable.

“You’re in pain. That’s pain talking.”

            No. It’s me.

Burakh thinks about how neither are sure there is a clear distinction.

            It’s worse, Burakh. It’s so much worse. (There is a hint of shame, of self-awareness, perhaps even of a threat. They all brew inside of him like twyre.) I’m not in pain, I’m so angry.

“Both of these emotions are sides of a same coin… expressions of—” 

He stops himself from saying “grief”, because there is nothing to grieve. (Nothing yet. He doesn’t want to word it that way, to even think about it. The inevitability is… heavy, bitter, horrifying. But there is nothing to grieve… yet.) Peter reads the thoughts on him. The inevitability, the wait, all of that. He’s mad. His eyes are two holes in his face cut over a pale, frozen winter sky.

“Listen, we can talk about it later if you want, okay? You seem like you need to talk.”

He seems like he wants to rip Burakh’s throat off with his stare.

            I will not be there any much longer.

“Of course you won’t. You’ll be somewhere else, in another dream. I’ll have to find you.”

            Oh, because you’ll search?

“I’ll manage. Also, I found you here. You called me.”

            I didn’t. You walked in… which is my thing, Burakh.

“Hey, maybe I’m learning from you!” (Play it playful. Extend a hand… hope he doesn’t bite it off.)

            Don’t. There’s nothing to learn. Not anymore…

He means: there’s nothing [...] anymore. 

_____________

      Burakh didn’t know if Lilich was dead already. He believed she asked him to not come on the day so they could part as friends; and they did. He wasn’t sure what he and Dankovsky parted as; and he wasn’t… nervous about it, but he would love guidance. Dankovsky’s guidance. He wasn’t sure if he knew much more, but he hoped they’d figure it out together. 
Yeah. 
Together, huh…

_____________

       Dankovsky fucks it all up.
And of course, it’s grief again.
And his own is a fantastic pit into which are swallowed composure and poise; from which are spat the mephitises of an unbridled protective rage, a hunger so potent he thinks of nothing but tearing things to shreds, even that means he makes himself sick with it.
He makes himself sick with it.
As he sits by the ashes, his face is pale, his eyes bloodshot and black. The gaze he sustains from under the dry bushes of his brows could set his face on fire. Oh, he’ll guard his miracle like a starved dog does his bone.
Dankovsky will not yield to Burakh , and he will not yield to Dankovsky. They’re blade to blade.

“Are we not men?” Dankovsky hisses — no. He is no man. He is a crushing serpent-coil. Burakh feels how he tightens around his wrist.

Burakh thinks about how he should have embraced him before he fucked it all up.

_____________

      The evening was heavy. Suffocating, tense, tall, torn open as it hung/hanged over the Town, smothering it in the smell of gunpowder. The wide-open carcass of the alit sky swallowed the head of the Tower in low guts-clouds, shades of sick greys, pinks and reds. It was so low it could bite Burakh’s fingers off. It was so low it scraped the mouth of the filled barrel of the railway gun that straddled, this behemothic, rust and silver beast, the tracks from which was swept off the smell of herbs. When the shell was fired, the sky was set ablaze. The clouds parted swiftly like a shoal of fish escaping the jaws of a predator, like curtains torn wide — bowing along the way to the Tower. 
The shell hit it right beneath its (her) topmost rib, avoiding a paper sail to burst her open with the fullest force. She retracted on herself like a goliathic, burning spider. Her stairway-legs curved towards her body as if to hold herself back in as she spilled, as she tumbled down, as she poured ink and spat enkindled paper shreds. Burakh heard her scream in agony, bellowing and deep, raven-like in the croak of her voice — it took him a second to realize that was the Architect’s and, right by the banks of the Gorkhon, he had fallen to his knees. He had folded himself in two as the Tower folded itself (herself) in three, four, five, then seven-ten-twelve like she was nothing more than a paper garland. Then (twelve-twenty-innumerable), she was nothing but an unrecognizable carcass of paper and ink, the flames tearing at her swallowed by the icy waters of the river, her tomb. She lay still and bent like an impaled bull. 
The river-Cornucopia overflowed copiously like an abscess bursting.

“I love red things, spoke the pale beast.
And you do too. That is why you’re here. 
And you love tearing things apart. (Butcher.)” 

Oh, you’re tearing me apart…

(Savior.) (Yargachin.) (Emshem.) (Loser.) (Lover.)
(Artemy…))

Burakh came forth (vivisector, come forth — at the altar of dying embers — paper-organ-shapes torn open like eaten carcasses — riverwater has turned inkblack) until the blood of the Earth washed into the dent of his footsteps. It ate the soles of his beaten, dirty boots, bit into it meanly. He brought his hand to it, let it flow into his palm, then brought it to his mouth. He drank loudly, as if it was hot (it was lukewarm at most, nutty and sour like smoked meat). A long, loud cry died somewhere in the streets, four to seven voices dipping into the cooling soil like clay cliffs disappearing in the sea. Brides; melancholic, eulogizing, bewailing in the cradles of the sound of bells. Burakh swallowed the blood. It scraped him down with a fading anger, the last scratch of arms being laid down. 
He walked back, taking backward steps at first, as if not wanting to let (what was left of) the tower out of his sight (as if expecting it to rise again), down the debris-punctured street. Past the Kains’, past the Cathedral. The houses seemed to avert their gazes as he went by, the wide eyes of their windows clouding themselves with pulled curtains. A window in the Stillwater was shut in front of his eyes. He deciphered the Bachelor’s profile in the low light, turning away. He read the twisting of his mouth, the wrinkles on his chin as his lips pinched and twitched and grew so full of sorrow. The Bachelor’s face slipped out of view. Burakh managed to catch how his spine bent, how his head dipped. He had sat at his desk. He had bent under the weight of the evening-becoming-night, losing his composure in the growing darkness. 
Burakh came to a halt. He stood. He turned on his heels, strode back to the river banks and, balancing on the wet grass, approached the corpse of the T/tower. Here, right at the end of his reach, he could grasp a mangled piece of her skin; the paper stuck out above the water like a single rose thorn, only slightly burned in a corner, as if eaten by rodents. With two careful hands, he tore the papyrus-like sheet alongside an as-straight-as-he-could-manage line, and took the piece with him. 
He walked to the Stillwater.

When he knocked, nobody answered. He knocked again, finding himself met with the same silence, before pushing the door open. The downstairs was still, empty. Stuffy and nervous. Tense at feeling him walk in, moving away as he stepped forward. He spotted the corner into which he had nights prior backed himself in, still splattered with his own blood that the Bachelor had apparently tried to scrub off, at least a little bit. A light was on upstairs. Burakh climbed the steps slowly. 

He knocked on the first wooden surface his hand could reach — a folding screen that swayed on its base even under the lightest of touch —, peering into the loft. He saw Dankovsky, and Dankovsky saw him. He had sat at the desk, he had buried his head in his arms, and his hair stuck out when he pulled himself out of them. They were bare — he had rolled his sleeves up. Burakh found him looking drawn, harried. His shoulders sloped low, as if caving down; the wells of his eyes swept clean of their rust and brass hints to drill nothing but two ink-black holes into his pale, tired face, evading the light of the lantern, of almost-discarded candles.  
Burakh stood in the doorway, his hand nervously, tightly clenched around the tower paper-skin he had peeled out of the rubble. 

      “Have you had a look at yourself?” the Bachelor’s voice sliced clean through the silence — not particularly accusatory, not acerb nor irate; sharp, tall and clean, stripped of all pride. A pinch of sorrow fought its way past his lips regardless.

Burakh hadn’t had a look at himself. For a long, particularly loud and heavy second, he slowly became aware of the tacky, drying blood across his mouth and chin that cracked when he spoke, of the soot and debris on his cheek and sleeves — of the piece of paper he held onto with a maniacal force as if it would try to escape (and he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t try to escape).
Burakh took a step forward, expecting Dankovsky to jolt, to flinch, to lean away. He didn’t. He watched the newcomer come to him and hand out folded paper. The gesture was a bit crude, almost childlike. 

      “... Did Peter tell you to give it to me?”
      “He didn’t.” (Marked an unwieldy, awkward pause.) “It was my own choice.”

Dankovsky took the paper with an almost-reverence that made Burakh’s heart sink. He lacked the scrupulous pickiness of deft hands and difficult mind as he did so, and Burakh realized he hadn’t shown it in a while. Shown it to him, at least.

      “I’m sorry, Burakh. For earlier today.” He fiddled with the paper, folding it back and forth along already-folded lines. Burakh wondered if he was going to tear pieces off cleanly.

The Bachelor’s lips twitched to hold sourness in. His wrists, the cuffs and creases of his sleeves were still a sickly pink even after he had tried to wash the blood off. Burakh hadn’t had a “look at himself”: he was his eyes, he was his body, so he could only look at Dankovsky. And Dankovsky — he couldn’t look at himself, so he looked at Burakh; he was his body, he was his eyes—these two pensive carrion-crow-feathers marbles that Burakh wanted to borrow so he could wipe the wetness off. Burakh read on him that he was very much aware his “sorry” was light of a word. That it wouldn’t bring anything, anyone back. And Burakh read within himself he’d have to live with this very same feeling, too. They’d be two halves of a single nutshell around the same putrid, foul fruit of guilt. A shell—a very breakable one. 
Burakh thought about how, when the Bachelor would leave, he would take this home with him. He’d also take a piece of Burakh, that Burakh was not happy came off of him, and yet would have hated to keep. Too rotten for him — but even more for anyone else to carry. 
He thinks about how, had they met in any other circumstances, they would have both kept their pieces — and, likely, torn each other to them.

      “Oh,” Burakh suddenly remembered, “I never gave you your cigarette back.”

He patted around in his pockets for the tin box and, even as Dankovsky extended a hand to say “keep it”, he insistently offered it back. 
Dankovsky took it, snapped the lid open, and poked (what was left of) the cigarette into his mouth. He didn’t comment on the fact it was half-burned already; maybe he expected it. (Maybe he preferred it this way.)
His nonchalance betrayed fatigue; the looseness in his arms, exhaustion more than relaxation. Sitting on his chair, turned to Burakh, legs sprawled in an apathetic, dispassionate unraveling, he probed his own pockets for something — before he had even registered it as an unspoken request, Burakh had pulled a matchbox and stick out of his, cracked it ablaze, and offered it to Dankovsky.   
The flame danced pietersite sparks in the Bachelor’s eyes on it, then on Burakh, then it again. Burakh didn’t expect him to accept the offer — then, as an unbelievably loud second passed, he expected him to take the cigarette out of his mouth and, from his seat, reach his arm out for the matchstick. Instead, Dankovsky got up, balancing on his tired legs with a hand on the desk, and leaned into the flame. 
Burakh moved the matchstick slowly, bringing the fire to lick up and down the already-half-consumed tobacco rod as Dankovsky’s lips tightened around it to keep it still.

Oh, Burakh thought. (That didn’t have anything to do with how Dankovsky’s lips tightened around the cigarette. He thought…)

      “I have this of yours too…”

He had felt it against his fingertips when fishing for the cigarette case, as if it had snaked to the aperture of his pocket to meet him. Dankovsky watched him pull on the chain intently; his face lit up, as much as it could light, with a dulled sort of surprised wonder. Burakh handed him the locket, and he took it. 

      “Well,” Dankovsky spoke, “that, I won’t let you keep.”
      “So I figured.”
      “Did I lose this?”
      “... You gave it to me to keep.”

That wasn’t a lie. 

      “I figured I did.” There was softness in his voice. Softness. It hit Burakh in the jaw like a brick.
      “Thank you,” Dankovsky eventually said, “for the…”

He waved the paper around like a white flag.

      “No problem. I’m… going to get some rest.”
      “Do you want me to move my coat?”

Burakh laughed — it just escaped him, really, it just slipped out. (Not a good time, buddy… Not a good time, he told himself. People are dead. Yes, well, he laughed nonetheless.)

      “Persistent, are you?”

The Bachelor grimaced but Burakh could see he was amused too. His face distorted as sorrow chipped at the smile that fought its way out, the mixture reminiscent of muddling elixir tints.

      “I can’t stay. I have to… collect the ingredients. Bring them back, start a brew… I’ll rest there.”
      “I see.”

Burakh wanted to invite him, to ask him to come, but didn’t. He just hoped thinking it very hard would make him come.
(It didn’t.

When Burakh approached the workshop, a crowd had gathered. The red of army coats mingled with the leathers and rags of huddled townsfolk. They held bottles in their hands; some, as many as their arms could carry. All red. They were all red. (The bottles. If he squinted, Burakh would think the people were, too.))

Burakh didn’t sleep right away; it is not that he meant to lie to Dankovsky but, seeing him not come, Burakh grew increasingly irritated with the bubbling and cracking of the preparations in the brewery. They scratched at his ears and cheeks like they wanted to dig inside of him. He noted the time on a paper he shoved in his pocket and walked home. 
Oh , home. 
He crawled — he crawled for the first time in six years into his bed, his own bed. It was cold from a half-decade of ghosts tending to the sheets. The wood all around smelled dusty, dully of earth overtaking it (taking it back).

_____________

Burakh dreamed he was grass; a welcome change from… the rest. Burakh dreamed he was grass. His body went through the dirt-stained sheets on his bed like blood goes through a bandage, and he was filled with an expansive, tranquil breath imbued into him, with a wind so light and clung onto by waning scents of twyre and herbs. 
He was grass, which meant he was nowhere and everywhere at once. His spine swayed inside of him with the barest kiss of the air and yet he was anchored so deeply, his arms, his legs, each of the notches of his vertebrae hooked into the warming soil as he was—everywhere, and nowhere at once. He traveled miles to find a soul, and yet he didn’t move at all. 

He found Dankovsky, lying still — closed mouth, but bare head, stretched on the grass, amidst twyre and herbs instead of gladiolas and watercress. He smiled not, and did not seem to be cold. Maybe dead, crossed Burakh’s mind, before he shook the thought of him with a force that sent the ground shivering. Don’t think about it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about thinking about it. 
Burakh — grass, herbs — approached him, slowly, as one would approach a sleeping snake. 
Burakh — grass, herbs — bent to his face, to his chin, his exposed throat, his full-of-strings wrists. Dankovsky was not wearing his gloves, and the raised nervures of Burakh’s blades, leaves and florets brushed against the scarring scratches that etched, thread-thin tributaries of a deep, dark river, the back of the Bachelor’s hands. Dankovsky sighed deeply, and Burakh was reassured he was not dead. 

 Dankovsky rolled on his side, and the earth dipped against his weight, hollowing itself around his protruding shoulders, his bent elbow, his bonier-than-when-they-first-met knees. He rolled on his side and Burakh tended to his silhouette, drew its shape, drew his shape, bent his blade-spine(s) to him, not out of submission or servility, not as bereavement or eulogy, simply in the way one watches over a sleeping beloved. 

_____________

       Burakh rummaged through his possessions for a clear razor — well, a not-too-rusty one — and shaved very close to the skin. The stubble that fell in the basin below was a rusty brown with swallowed blood. It diluted the water pink. He looked younger without it, of course he did. Face-to-face with what the mirror threw back at him, his heart sank: that was a young boy. He felt infinitely small. He felt like crawling back to dad. (He felt like crawling back to the Earth (and saying he was sorry).)

(All his thoughts were parentheses, now; suspended, verbose, heavy in-betweens and nothingnesses that filled the silence as he swam with the motions. The Earth below rang hollow (see, like this: (   )). Punctuating, clearer images washed over him, sometimes, meeting a shell-shocked mutism. They meant little, except that he could still think (like, see, this).)

(He waited. He was sometimes interrupted by Sticky, having followed him home, who peeked (like so) through loose wooden doors.)

An… immeasurable, immense, deafening calm fell on Burakh. Nothing seemed to move, not even himself. He became… aware of all the aches, all the pains, all the minute needles of discomfort that stuck and tore and punctured through him. The long, snaking cuts that Dankovsky had helped him stitch up—that Dankovsky had stitched up. The gnawing, growling ache of an empty stomach. The dull burn that set his knuckles ablaze; even clean of blood, the sores of fistfighting tugged at his taut skin like they wanted to pull his flesh off. His neck was growing stiff. He looked again in the mirror and saw then: his cuspids were sharp and pointed. (He blinked, and they were not anymore.)
Oh, Burakh, hey.
You can’t feel your toothaches anymore…

_____________

       Night had brewed, and night had brewed well. It was the beginning.
He went back to the workshop and collected the panaceas, still warm, still ink-liquid. A crowd had gathered back to receive the elixirs, but he insisted on administering them himself — when he walked to the Theater, there stood Dankovsky. He had donned his coat again, the lapel of his shirt was sorted, his cravat folded neatly. His gaze was sustained and formal. He looked like himself again—the self Burakh had met and seen unfold. 

Burakh wasn’t sure if he had slept, and if he had, if he had slept well. He couldn’t help but think that the guilt was probably eating the Bachelor inside — in a twisted way, maybe, he hoped it did. This hope, somehow, he wasn’t sure how, didn’t feel incompatible with the gratitude he felt at seeing Dankovsky here. Burakh hoped he hurt, because he hurt too. He was thankful the Bachelor had come. (To the Theater, he meant.) (Who was he kidding, something hung over his head. It was damn heavy.)

      “How can I help?”

Burakh allowed him to pick four vials out of his arms without resistance. 

      “You need to prop them up first, if you can. It’s important they swallow, and we have to be careful that they do not choke on it. It’s too precious to let it go down the wrong pipe.” (He had tried to chuckle, there, tried to nudge Dankovsky with an elbow — but didn’t, because he would have dropped something.)

Dankovsky was diligent. His hold on the living was shockingly gentle and Burakh felt his arms and shoulders itch. 

Burakh went back to the workshop. He dropped the blood, he gathered, or had people fetch him, more water. He brewed, and brought the vials to those who needed it. Burakh went back to the damn workshop. He dropped the blood, he gathered, or had people fetch him, more fucking water until the cling of the vials and bottles rang purposefully and longly between his ears. 
The river of blood, cradled in bottles like precious wine, felt boundless. Burakh thought he would have drowned by now. His lungs were heavy, yet dry. The spillage, industrial in proportions, stacked on the shelves interminably. 

When he started to see the end of it, Burakh began to feel dizzy. He walked home. The early afternoon sun seemed to shiver overhead, its coat of fog-clouds through which it pierced blurring its silhouette like a slowly-vanishing ghost.