#as someone holds your face with cold skin bitten fingernails but warm intent

[melit0n]

I will never stop talking about how comforting the line "Oh, but worry not" followed by that gorgeous ass piano in Missing Limbs is.

Like whatever you say man; mind is cleared, I'm in my lane, I'm unbothered and moisturized like tf

[thesouthernpansy]

your hand, my hand (to hold it)

artemy burakh/daniil dankovsky

2,556 words

(here on ao3)

Dankovsky stands at the top of the staircase in his shirtsleeves. He's changed, again, from the last time you saw him, his eyes darker and his jaw weaker, but he takes your hands in his cool, gloved palms and tuts in that same distant, put-upon way he has.

“When was the last time you cleaned your fingernails?”

Even in pitch darkness, with your eyes closed, you could find your way back to him by his scolding.

“I think I have a few crumbs under there, I was saving them for later.”

Dankovsky tsks, not without humor. “I expect you'll try to convince me it's economical. Are you hungry? I have some bread and—well, I've been told it's trout, but who can tell these days. Some kind of smoked fish. It's yours if you'll wash up. Quid pro quo.”

Are you hungry? You wonder at his formality; you've been hungry for days.

His back is to you while he digs through his doctor's bag, the blades of his shoulders, the knife of his spine. Your fingers itch with the urge to touch, to run the pad of your thumb against his angles like it could draw blood.

“The townspeople are finally rubbing off on you, huh?”

Distracted thought creases a line between Dankovsky's brows. “Ah, the local bartering custom. You'll have to more fully explain the precise mechanics of the process to me at some point.”

It's heartening and unexpected progress, from him, the admission—the interest—though you refrain from saying as much.

True to his word, he sets out a generous heel of bread and paper-wrapped package bleeding fish-smelling oil. Leans his hip against the edge of the desk, crossing his arms across his narrow chest. The fine visible bones of his wrist, the pale exposed forearm, you could close your whole fist around them with space to spare.

“Where did all this come from, anyway? The Kains?”

Dankovsky stills, a sudden subtle tenseness, his gloves drawn tight across the knuckles.

“The doctor's fund,” he says shortly.

“Ah.” Guilt seeps through to tangle with the warmer sensation rising in your chest.

Dankovsky gestures dismissively, turning away. “Don't give me that martyred expression. You come to the hospital or you don't, all that's important is that progress is being made on the vaccine.”

“The panacea,” you correct him.

“Suum cuique. Do we have a deal or don't we?”

“The healer's hands are always bloodiest,” you say, half teasing.

Dankovsky satisfies it with a long-suffering sigh. “Don't you mean muddiest? By the looks of it you've been up to your elbows looking for your steppe herbs all morning.”

Always your herbs, an arrogant dismissal as if he doesn't by now have ample first-hand experience with the effectiveness of your painkillers, at least. It frustrates him doubly, you've gathered in time, that you insist on wasting your time with flowers rather than focus on the infinitely more practical and productive collection of infected human samples that Dankovsky continues to find himself unanimously denied.

Silence settles between you with gauzy tangibility, like the pest-thick air of the infected Bridge Square, grey-green and swimming-still.

An idea comes to you. Against the growing distance you lift your grime-streaked hands, palms open, up.

“With this I give you company. The road you walk is dangerous, but you don't walk it alone. I go with you, my help and my guidance.”

“Your guidance,” says Dankovsky, mostly to himself.

“What do you give me, oynon?”

Movement at the corner of his mouth. “Food. I had thought I made that clear.”

“A thing can be more than it is, more than an object to take up space in your hand. To give and take is to connect, a feeling or intention, or...” you falter, trying to remember. “Warmth. Kindness.”

Dankovsky bites out a laugh at that, harsh and short. “Kindness? In this town?”

“Comfort,” you persist. “Joy.”

“Nothing anyone has given me in this town has brought me joy.” He stops to look at you, then, though, to truly look. “I ought to give you rest, if I thought that you would take it.”

“You'd have to have it, first, to give it away.” Both of you well aware that this is the closest to rest you're likely to get today, and even that more than either of you can really afford.

Dankovsky turns towards the window, his jawline a taut cord of tension. His profile backlit with sickly light, casting him angular, severe, the unexpected stranger in the near-dark of Rubin's rooms. Near the hollow of his throat, the shadow of dark unshaven stubble, like a bruise.

“For all that it matters. What's the actual purpose of this asinine exercise?”

“I told you—” You reach out; his hair curls damply by his ear, the pulse quickening beneath your fingertips. “It's about connection.”

Prickling, “Warmth, yes, I remember. Here—”

He takes your wrist. Then, from the little shaving kit on the windowsill, a thin wedge of soap, soft from use. Presses it into your hand.

“Take...care.”

You have held human hearts in your hands, before—hot, and with the echo of beating still in them. Maybe this is nothing like that, but it echoes all the same.

“Thank you, oynon.”

“You're welcome...emshen.” At your smirk, “What? Didn't I pronounce it correctly?”

You shake your head, laughter on your tongue. “It's the vowels. They're tricky, if you didn't grow up with the language.”

“Don't you patronize me.” He swats you away and goes, muttering the word under his breath, to collect a washbasin and pitcher from beneath the bed. They're a matched set, not poor quality but plainly in disrepair, the enamel pattern chipped and cloudy. Dankovsky sloshes the basin half-full, notices your watching.

“Concerns, Burakh?”

“No, it looks clean.”

“Of course it's clean. I saw to its collection personally. Eva has been surprisingly diligent about boiling all the water she can gets her hands on, as well, for whatever good it does.”

“Cholera dies in boiled water,” you say absently. For a brief, suspended moment in Dankovsky's place you see the frightened woman in the Flank, her flat terrified eyes, her trembling fists.

Dankovsky frowns in dim recognition. “Someone else told me that recently. I can't recall who it was.”

“Maybe it was a dream.” Quick, careful efficiency as you strip away enough of your soiled smock to bare your arms.

“I have been having the strangest dreams,” he admits, voice soft. “Ever since I arrived here. I dream about walking, mostly, out across the steppe. I'm up to my knees in water and trying to reach something on the very edge of the horizon, or perhaps it's the horizon itself? And the sky is always red, dark red like blood, and I can feel in my bones that something is missing, as though the moon might not be there if I could think to look for it.”

Frown deepening, he shakes his head as if to clear the image. “In any case, perhaps it was a dream, then. I've been experiencing a great deal of déjàvu lately.”

The basin water murkies like a pre-storm dawn, greying lather sloughed away with the days' mud and blood and sweat. Like peeling back dead skin to see something fresh and pink underneath, new nerve endings, raw and receptive. It feels wrong, somehow. Dark water, clean hands.

“How do you imagine the Town will think of you when this is all over, after you're gone?”

“I don't,” says Dankovsky, clipped. “There are far more consequential matters that call for my attention. Who has time to worry about the opinions of small minds, with so much to do?”

Sanctimonious bastard.

“I do.” Gripping the edges of the washbasin like you could snap it in two, satisfying in the imagined sound of shattering, Dankovsky's startled expression, a rush of movement across the Stillwater's floorboards.

“Well, it's different for you, obviously. Being a local.”

You step away, scrubbing wet hands across your face. “I'm glad at least someone thinks that of me.”

Anger ebbs away in the ensuing silence. Then, the staccato click of Dankovsky's polished shoes accompanied by the faint sough of cloth. A towel, threadbare and yellowed, held like a surrender. You acquiesce, and Dankovsky pointedly avoids your gaze as he dries your hands with studious care.

“If you're...unsatisfied, here, you could always come to the Capital with me, when I return. Thanatica, or whatever's left of it, could benefit from your...unique perspective.”

His right hand in your left, points of articulation lined up—palm, wrist, knuckle, rib—and a warm thrum under your skin, heady and thick, like twyre bloom.

“That's a generous offer, oynon. You're right, though, I am a local. My place is here.”

“Yes,” he says. “well. I won't try to change your mind, if you're—”

“You could stay.”

Sudden, startled offense and dazed uncomprehending, Dankovsky's expression caught halfway between a sneer and something terrified. Defensive, cornered.

“I—here? No, what would I even—? No, no, I can't.”

“If you say so. I'll probably try to change your mind. Not right now. Later, when it matters.”

Dankovsky's eyes are sharp when they meet yours, lit with keen, unmasked curiosity. The full weight of his attention pierces like a pin punched through a beetle's jeweled carapace for display. A bright spot of pain in your chest, velvet at your back.

“You won't,” he says, weight in his words so you could almost see them falling out, bitten clean.

Fondness blooms in you at the thawing unease with which he holds himself, like a man who has forgotten how to be warm coming in from the cold. Reticent in a reluctant, guarded way you recognize, of all people, from Murky.

“I'll try anyway.”

A thin, unsteady laugh, reedy and nasal, and thenhe softens, all at once, deflating slightly, like a weight borne across his shoulders has been lifted free from him.

“Just so. Dum spiro, spero.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“I think you know,” he says carefully, “enough.”

Clearly, like a memory in your mind's eyes you see yourself kissing him, again and again, harsh and then tender, then tenderer still—the copper of blood on your teeth, the hazy, cooling steppe at dusk, the terrible sweet fever smell you know so well—a rush, like wind, like falling from a height, and here, constant, the place where the parallel nets of your lives snag and tangle.

Which is to say: what follows flows with the ease of the inevitable.

Dankovsky looks up, you look down.

The two of you meet in the middle.

The kiss starts slow, chaste and unsure and so nice; a pleased, helpless little sound escapes from you before you can think to stop it, and you feel Dankovsky's lips part slightly to form some wry response. You take it as an invitation, licking into the heat of his mouth, fingers threaded in the short hair at the nape of his neck. He shudders against you and moans, hitched breath and a deep, dreamy sigh that resonates like struck steel, pools low in your gut, molten and dark. Grasping, his hands find your waist, slide upwards to reel you close and keep you there.

Against your palm, the rabbit-pace of his pulse. Yours, sheltered against it. Dankovsky kisses you in the dim, stale Stillwater, and you think, the left and right hand. You think, yes.

Understanding: you are separate things like two hairs on a bull's back are separate, his heartbeat ending where yours begins without distinction. In the shared breaths caught between you, it's easy to believe that you could choose this—one vast, drumming heartbeat, one fast, endless line, strung through you soft and whole, tying indelibly together what you've feared would be inevitably torn apart. That after loss, losing, knowing what might still be lost, you could carve a harbor in the quiet and keep it shielded because you wanted it enough.

Behind you, the clock chimes the new hour. The adrenaline pumping in your blood start to sour.

“Fuck,” says Dankovsky, teeth scraping your lip.

You swallow thickly. “Is it two already?”

“Three, I think.” Focused on a point past your shoulder, his hands still under your shirt and his eyes already terribly far away.

“Shudkher.”

“You have somewhere else need to be.”

“I—yes.”

He nods, stepping away. His warmth goes with him. Clearing his throat, righting his clothes, you watch his expression shutter closed and feel like a limb that has been too long in a cast, pallid and shriveled and weak. Regret twists its clammy thorns around your heart, but there's nothing you can apologize for, nothing that it would fix.

“I'm sorry,” you say anyway.

Dankovsky shakes his head. “What for? Unless you're responsible for this whole wretched plague I can't accept that from you. And if you are responsible I wouldn't accept it it anyway, my reaction would be the furthest thing from forgiveness. Besides, it isn't as though I don't have work of my own to do.”

He recovers your discarded smock from the floor, gives it a vigorous shake. You take it from him, and he promptly busies himself elsewhere while you redress, the conspicuous return to silence aching in your joints like the promise of rain.

Dankovsky breaks it first. “Here, can you carry this?”

A hastily-wrapped parcel of waxed canvas, secured with a pair of safety pins that recently-acquired instinct hones in on immediately—that girl by the Trammel had been looking for pins, and she'd had a fingernail coin she was willing to trade—so that full focus returns with the thing in your hands and a stiff, dour set to Dankovsky's shoulders, the pull of his mouth. Unreachable, resigned.

“What is it?”

“My side of our bargain.” Hesitant, almost amused. “You didn't think I'd try to rescind our deal just because you can't stay for tea. Tell me you'll remember to eat it before it spoils.”

“I'll do my best.” Shifting aside bundles of twyre to tuck the food into your bag, as if you won't be tearing it open again as soon as you're outside.

“See that you do. I...be careful out there, Burakh.”

“You too, oynon.”

A fluid moment, blood pulled through the chambers of a heart, singing and open like the bare vein of Mother Boddho at the base of a tree. Pregnant with the promise of movement, the exposed unspoken, a restlessness that settles, itching, into the red of your marrow.

You wonder if Dankovsky would let you kiss him goodbye.

“Did you need something else, or are you just going to stand there hulking behind me while I work?”

The skin of tension splits, relief trickling out in a thin line.

“I'm going, I'm going, no need to force me out.”

“As if I could.” The formality of irritation over unmistakable affection.

You reach out and take his hand. Dankovsky watches warily, frowning as you peel back the edge of the clean black glove, but makes no move to stop you. The bare cradle of his palm still smells faintly of leather when you curve towards it, pressing your lips against the skin.

Dankovsky's eyes don't leave you even after you release him, fingers curling closed.

“Warmth,” he says softly, “yes, I see.”