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It happened in Burakh's lair. They were tired, running on fumes, waiting for a tincture to brew. It happened again after the Polyhedron fell; Daniil went to him at his father's house and ended up spending the night.
He found it surprising that Burakh wasn't surprised by him: "Grief's the same way," he told Daniil, and that was that.
Daniil had been so careful until then-- his whole life he had been careful. At the time, he had been more worried about the plague: when they kissed and their breath mingled, when teeth found skin and sweat and blood, when Artemy's fingers pressed his tongue down while they fucked.
Something else found its way into his body instead, and grew.
He knows before the second month, when he wakes up ill several days in a row, his stomach churning, his body tender. When he stops being sick, he is hungry. He trades the townspeople needles and hooks for dried meat and fish and eats until his tongue feels like cloth in his mouth.
--
Daniil lets himself into the Burakh house, which doubles as a clinic during the day. Artemy has done some work to repair it, and it's easy to spot the fresh paint and patched-over furniture. He might not have done half as much, Daniil muses, if it weren't for his no-longer-orphans.
The door to the exam room is closed, but the children are waiting outside on the stair landing: the girl sprawled out coloring a picture, Sticky repairing a doll with a needle and thread, his tongue poking out between his teeth. When Daniil approaches, he lays the doll aside.
"You look sick," Sticky says. He seems thrilled about it.
"I'm not."
"Artemy is teaching me to brew tinctures." Without the doll in his hands, his fingers tug at the sleeves of his shirt. "So I can help you."
"Sticky."
"First is diagnosis. I have some bottles downstairs..."
"I know what the problem is."
Sticky looks crestfallen. "Well, if you're sure."
He picks up his sewing again. The little girl shoots Daniil a glare before returning to her picture.
Daniil's hand drifts to his abdomen, then quickly drops back to his side as the door to the exam room opens and Artemy emerges.
"Oynon? You look like hell."
"Yes, thank you. Can we talk?"
Artemy beckons him into the exam room, warm and bright with the mid-morning sun streaming through the windows. Daniil opts to stand rather than sit on the cot for patients. He can feel his courage draining as Artemy watches him.
"How are you doing?" he asks.
"Fine,” Daniil lies. He holds Artemy’s gaze, challenging him to disagree, but Artemy just looks back with a soft expression that makes Daniil’s skin crawl. "I wanted to tell you I've decided to spend the winter here. That's all. If you'd like to work more together on studying the sand pest, I would be amenable."
"But your Thanatica--"
"Burned." Oh, how he wanted to leave. There's no room for his kind in the town Artemy built, no place for men of science, of ambition beyond what their fathers imagined for them.
But he cannot leave, either. Beyond the stage lights is a sea of darkness.
The pity on Artemy’s face is poorly disguised, and Daniil can't bear it, so he turns to face the window, folding his arms across his chest. Out in the yard, there are more children: playing in the grass, trading baubles, climbing the trees. Daniil thinks: This is your immortality, not mine .
“Call on me at Eva’s,” he says, “if you must.”
--
The theater has yet to be converted back from a hospital. There are still some townspeople recovering, and no one can quite stomach the thought of going to a play-- all that crowding and proximity, Daniil assumes, though it’s hard to imagine Mark’s players ever performed to a full house.
Rubin is wrist-deep in a corpse when Daniil pulls him into a curtain cubicle to ask for an examination. He wipes his hands on his apron.
"You took this in stride," says Daniil afterward. He doesn't make eye contact, instead concentrating on adjusting his belt.
"Grief is--"
"The same way. So I've heard."
"I take it there's a reason you asked me to do this and not Cub."
Daniil clears his throat. "It's his."
"If you need help getting rid of it…"
Is it that he’d failed in everything else and this is the one thing he could still do? Or had some part of him always wanted this: a husband, a warm home, what passes for life in towns like this one?
Daniil considers, for a moment, the irony of becoming a vessel for another soul.
“I’ll let you know,” he says.
--
Daniil goes out into the steppe, sits in the long grass and thinks pointlessly about the reproduction of twyre. There was one species, he was told, that could only propagate when the earth was drenched with blood.
The child would be born in the spring. He cannot imagine, now, the steppe transformed from dull brown to tender green.
He thinks of his own parents fondly but distantly and with only a twinge of regret for what amounted to faking his own death. It was probably easier to think him dead than run off with a man-- strange, withdrawn girl that he was, buried in books or pinning beetles to boards. No one thought to look for him at university wearing a different name and a new coat. How typical. _____, the village shame, having a child out of wedlock.
So yes, Daniil often ruminates on what goes into the creation of men, although his research is primarily concerned with their deaths. He already knows it takes an enormous sacrifice to change your fate, one most people can't begin to comprehend.
He lies down in the field, and when he wakes, he is on a stone table in a dark cavern and Artemy stands over him with a knife.
"Don't be afraid," he says. His hands, arranging Daniil's limbs, are gentle.
Daniil doesn't feel the knife going in. Artemy told him he knew where to cut.
Daniil opens his eyes.
"Good Eva is packing her things. Will you go with her across the river?" Clara frowns down at him. "The Stillwater is no place for children."
"Eva is practically a child herself." Daniil pushes himself up, his body sore from where a stone dug into his side. "What did Rubin tell you?"
She plucks at a piece of steppe grass, popping the head of the stalk off with her thumbnail. "I read his journal. Do you want me to bless her?"
"Eva?"
"No, your baby! I bet it's going to be a girl. I could teach her to be a Mistress."
"No, thank you."
"Clara?"
"What, demon?"
"Don't tell Artemy."
--
Isidor’s house is far from the desolate building Daniil locked up last fall-- buried in the year’s first snowfall, the lights from the windows shine with a welcoming orange glow, and smoke issues from the chimney. The path up to the front door is already packed down with footprints from visiting townspeople.
“Oynon. Come in, come in.”
Daniil does not offer Artemy his coat, brushing past him into the entry hall. He had to let out his shirts, but so far no one has noticed, wrapped as he is in layers to protect himself from the cold.
Murky plays in the twyre cellar beneath the stairs, and she peers at them as they pass, her eyes round. Daniil nods to her, and she smiles tentatively back.
When the door to the exam room closes behind them, Artemy finally speaks.
“Is something wrong?”
“Yes. No. I need to show you something.”
The glass on the windows is frosted with ice, but Daniil has a faint recollection of seeing the Polyhedron from them, and afterwards, the column of smoke. That night, Artemy had dragged him away and kissed him.
Now, Artemy watches him with open curiosity as he slides out of his coat and unbuttons his vest. Despite himself, Daniil's cheeks warm under his gaze. He folds his clothes neatly and places them over the back of a chair before Artemy speaks.
"I wondered when you were going to tell me."
Daniil swallows around the knot in his throat. “You knew?”
“I had a dream. And I am still a doctor.”
Daniil studies his features. Tries to recall what he's read of inheritance and heredity, imagining what shape their child will take: tall, curly hair, Daniil's restless mind, Artemy's soft heart.
"You could stay here."
"We have known each other," Daniil says, closing his eyes, "for two months."
"So? Murky and Sticky live here now, and they're already family. Besides--"
Daniil can hear him bite his tongue. "I know," he says, sighing. "It feels as though it's been longer."
"Maybe we should get married," says Artemy seriously. Daniil laughs, the sound bitter like an unripe fruit, but when Artemy draws close and presses his lips to Daniil's hair, Daniil lets him.
This town is a place that cares for children. The Haruspex decided that.
"Artemy," he says, "tell me about spring.”