#daniil is trans AND autistic here and u can tell!

[silenthillmutual]

For the cliche prompts: Artemy/Daniil 4 or 23 (it could be 4 and 23 if you are feeling like mixing both. Tbh I wasn't able to choose)

(hello this is kind of silly and i’m not confident in its quality, but i am planning on writing a follow-up to this for the other number though it will probably be shorter than this! numbers here)

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Things have been getting, in a word, ridiculous. The rain hasn’t let up in this section of town in four days, setting the scene nicely for all of Daniil’s drawn-out internal monologues about the futility of fighting fate or nature or whatever. His mind continues to grumble to himself as he sits in the hospital, trying to do research and feeling more and more, as time goes on...ridiculous. There it is again. Like the whole world - or at least the Town, which may as well be a world all its own - is laughing at him.

Burakh has been getting better at sneaking up on him; the only way Daniil knows he’s entered the building is from the gentle click of the front door as it closes again. He wishes the man would announce his arrival instead of using the opportunity to always try and catch Daniil off guard. One of these days he won’t have time to build his composure back up. 

Today, he’s safe; the rain makes the other man’s shoes squeak against the floor and he listens to the low-voice swearing with a smirk on his face. “Not today, you don’t,” he mutters to himself as he turns. He takes a moment, before standing, to admire Burakh’s form, eyes softening as he watches the man’s rain-soaked  hair fall and stick to his forehead, fingers weaving between the strands as he tries to push it back. He never manages to catch Daniil watching him like this, his own eyes taking int he sick strewn all about the hospital. Daniil looks away before Burakh can manage to do so. 

Daniil’s eyes manage to land exactly where he needs them to for a plausible escape. “This one,” he says, skipping the pleasantries his colleague never engages with anyway, “Has no sign of any illness. I suspect he’s merely playing ill to get out of the house.” The man even groans, over-exaggerated, on cue, and Daniil feels a little smug, as if that’s proved his point. Burakh doesn’t respond, or even react as if he’s heard, which chips away at the dam Dankovsky has been building, though at the present he can’t see the scale of the damage or the size of the resulting fracture. He files it as distraction, as even in their arguments, Burakh has never properly ignored him, and he is busy with his vials of tinctures.

He tries to clear his throat amidst its sudden buildup without drawing attention, licking his lips as he thinks for a moment on the cadence of his voice. It’s gone down again; maybe he hadn’t readjusted to it, let his voice go out?

Daniil stands, taking a few breaths as he goes, and starts again, keeping his tone steady as he speaks. “No matter. Now that he’s here and taking up a bed, I suppose he could have caught the Pest - or else be a carrier.” The man on the bed curls up suddenly. What Daniil can see of his eyes have gone wide. “So perhaps we should keep him for observation, if nothing else. Probably a danger to let him out now -”

When he turns back around, he finds his face almost against the other man’s chest, and has to fight back the blush that starts to creep up his neck at how very close they are. Dankovsky’s never warm, but good god, this man - between the heat he radiates and the way he makes Daniil feel, suddenly all feverish and flushed - it’s a small miracle Daniil doesn’t pass out from sudden warmth shocking the system. And now he can’t stop staring either, and he really needs to - stop dawdling, stop with the rapid blinking, and continue his thought already, damn you -

“Are you alright, Burakh?” he ask instead, his voice a horrid squeak, an octave or so higher than when he last spoke.

“Look in my eyes, emshen. I want to make sure you’re not lying when you answer the question I’m about to ask you.” His tone doesn’t demonstrate anger, but he may as well have asked Daniil to change the position of the sun and the moon... Alright, while perhaps not so literally impossible, Dankovsky struggles to maintain eye contact even with people he is not so wildly attracted to that a little more than a week’s worth of interaction incurs a massive internal paradigm shift in him. So this task is not so much less Herculean in nature. Burakh, too, seems to recognize he’s perhaps asked a little too much, as Daniil’s focus falters to those lovely cheekbones and lips, where his eyes follow Burakh mumbling, “Alright, that’s good enough.” He feels rather proud of himself for managing to re-establish the contact in time for Burakh to ask him, “What are you doing with a book on local herbs?” Which is when Daniil feels his stomach plummet and panic set in.

Alright. He needn’t come up with anything elaborate for an answer. “Research,” he says simply, hoping he’s not smiling too anxiously.

It’s hard to tell from the way Burakh is looking at him. He guesses his answer can’t have been too believable, because Burakh presses Daniil. “Research into what?”

“Local herbs, obviously!” Daniil smiles, but he can’t feel his face.

He’s still holding out skepticism about some of the truly bizarre things that people here believe, but a few more shoves in the right direction and he might even start to believe in some form of precognition; there’s nothing specific he can pinpoint in Burakh’s manner or expression to warn him that this answer will not be well-received, and yet he feels it somewhere in his stomach. His chest flips before the scowl sharpens and Burakh speaks. “You don’t trust me,” he accuses.

Daniil is back to rapid blinking - though thankfully this time it’s in confusion, as opposed to flustered cornering. He focuses more clearly on Burakh’s eyes, on his pupils, trying to determine what could have inspired this sudden agitation - though of course, Daniil is far from being am ind-reader. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. It’s another chip, another scrape he doesn’t inspect.

“Then why do you keep asking other people about me?”

This, this is probably the suspicious look that Burakh is searching him for. He can imagine his face must have gone pale now, because the heat from earlier is gone. But it’s from a different reason to whatever Burakh is surely thinking, though Daniil is a terrible liar and all he can say is, “Excuse me?”

And not even, Excuse me? like ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ But Excuse me? like ‘I didn’t hear you.’

“Capella says you talk a lot about me. Her brother says you’ve been asking about me, and the culture. And he’s not the only one -” But whatever Burakh says next is cut off in Daniil’s mind by panic. He has not, apparently, been as subtle as he’d thought or else pleasantries as exchanged in the Capital were as lost on everyone else as they were on Burakh. Which would have been excuse enough have  Daniil not waited so long to execute it. Stupid, stupid move, Dankovsky, because now it’ll just look flimsy if you try to say your preoccupation with your colleague was intended to be polite.

Burakh’s stopped speaking now, and Daniil doesn’t know for how many minutes he’s been done. It’s enough that he looks perplexed, and suspicious. Daniil scrambles, mentally, to find a response that’s one-size-fits-all, and lands with blurting out, “I’m just interested.”

“And why couldn’t you just ask me?”

“Because you’re busy,” Daniil says, working a calm facade back in place. “As we all are. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

The look on Burakh’s face is disbelief, but until he says something of note, Daniil can’t possibly judge how much damage has been done. “Because I’m busy.”

“Yes.”

“We’re all busy.”

“Aren’t we?”

He looks genuinely upset now, though. Daniil can’t fathom what in his words could have possibly inspired that look. “Right. You’re so busy asking Yulia for books on panacea and Vlad for resources on local lore you can’t ask me,  your actual colleague about these things. Right.” Oh. Oh dear god no. “I thought perhaps we were friends, oynon, but looking for this without telling me? Asking my friends about me behind my back -”

“I just wanted to know if I could help you,” Daniil says. Which is much more honest than he intended to be, but now that this entire attempt to - what, impress him? Is going up in smoke, Daniil’s starting to realize how very bad at subterfuge he is, and that he never exactly thought this plan through. If he had, he might have come to the conclusion that his shift in priorities and ideology was never going to come without some humility and a significant amount of self-humbling. But now he’s stuck in t his fiasco where Burakh thinks - 

Well, he doesn’t actually know what Burakh thinks outside of there being some sort of betrayal of trust. And he does seem upset about it, so maybe there’s still a way for Daniil to get himself out of this mess. “You suck at lying,” Burakh tells him. “So you may as well tell me the truth. What did you do all that for?”

Right. Right! He can do this. “I changed my mind,” Daniil says evenly. 

“But why would you?”

“You’ve proved your panacea idea has ground to walk on.” Yes. This is going smoothly.

“And what changed your mind on that?”

“I fell in love with you.” 

He hears the words fall out of his mouth and listens to his brain scream afterward. It’s not what he wanted to say, not what he was telling himself to say and he’s not even sure how the words managed to come out against his permission or his knowledge like that. He could have, and should have, just said he’d heard it from Aglaya, or one of the children. There’s complete silence for a moment or two, an entire minute or so, until Artemy starts to ask, “What did you just say?” at the same time Daniil laughs a little too loudly, half shouting the words “Would you look at that, my shift is over!” tripping over himself to run out of the theatre.