Chapter Text
Daniil Dankovsky misses the train back to the capital.
He stands at the station and watches it like a thing of unreality, vast and black and puffing heat and smoke like something real and alive—bringing live things from other places, and taking live things back.
Is he a live thing at all? Or is he just a clockwork toy, wound wrong and balanced uneasily, waiting for his time to run out?
He watches the train through distant eyes and he can't bear to step aboard. He'll try this day again, he tells himself. Next time, he will have the courage.
The train leaves. The day does not come again.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sound registers to Daniil at first as driving spikes, lances of pain through his skull, shooting down the back of his neck and reverberating in his empty head. It is a pain both excruciatingly familiar and long distant, and for that reason his thoughts are sluggish, trailing behind as he struggles to understand, to follow...
Where is he?
He drags his eyes open, wrenching apart salt-encrusted eyelashes, squinting and blinking against the grit of sleep. Of...
Of sleep, yes. Sleep—that is what he has been doing, what happens when he collapses into bed each night. What he has been doing all his life, if never quite as much as he knows he should have.
Then why...?
"Dankovsky!" A voice he knows, though the name is slow to follow. Daniil scrapes through the sluggish ooze of his thoughts, the foul fuzz in his mouth, struggling to sort through memories that should be—
They should be sharper, shouldn't they? For all the haze and trial and blur of the last days, there was a certain clarity to his thoughts at the start of the day, a certain energy behind his tracing through the memories of scribbled notes and previous iterations. A certain purpose upon waking, even if it did always blur and muddle by the end of the day.
Upon waking. If that was what he was even doing. It never felt like this—this heavy-headed ache, the blur of his thoughts, the—unfamiliarity. A new day unspooling around him full of conversations not yet held and so many chances for everything to go wrong.
So many chances. Will he be able to right them this time? How long has it been since he woke to something new?
How long has it been since he closed his eyes? Outside the window it is dark; the air is chill with a nighttime cling that Daniil has not felt in months. When he blinks across the loft, the clock reads four in the morning.
Four... When was the last time he saw the hours past two?
The next sound is not a thud but a crash: the unmistakable sound of a door giving way. Daniil's head throbs, but clears just enough that he can push himself upright, uneasily balanced in a mess of blankets on the edge of Eva's—of his cot when thundering footsteps up the stairs to his loft shudder every fractured piece of his mind and Andrey Stamatin bursts into his space.
Andrey—in every iteration of every day, Daniil has never seen him other than sanguine. (Never, except when—no, he won't think of that; it's undone; it hardly matters.) Cheerful, provocative, taking even a deadly plague and personal persecution in stride, never without a jibe or a taunt. But now he is disheveled and thunderous, bearing down on Daniil with the feral fury that Daniil remembers in shades from drunken brawls in university... now amplified a thousandfold. He would flinch back if he had any command over his body or mind.
"Who did this?" growls Andrey. "I know you know. Tell me who it was."
This.
Of course it is no use pretending he doesn't understand; groggy and disheveled as he is, desperately untethered from any kind of stable reality, the sense of Andrey's words is the stabbing pain in his heart, the uninterrupted flow of blood from his soul. The destruction of a miracle, Peter's miracle, at Daniil's word. At his consent.
Never mind that Daniil did all he could to save everything; never mind the constant loops through day after day, the dogged cross-town hunts of Peter despite his determination—apparently—to spend his own life for the sake of nothing but waste. Never mind that there was nothing else he could do, nothing that would save as many lives. Never mind any of that—Andrey is contorted with fury, and he will kill whoever he needs to on Peter's behalf.
"I," Daniil starts, swallowing, "I don't know what you—"
"Bullshit," growls Andrey. "You could never lie to me, Dankovsky; don't start now. Was it Burakh? Tell me."
"No," Daniil manages. Despite the remembered sight of Artemy Burakh wading into a pool of blood, calmly bottling it for distribution to the people of the town, where Daniil could only stand and sway and shake—despite his urgency, his damned self-righteous assurance that it was all that could be done, his utter dismissal of any worth and beauty that could be found in the tower—despite all that, it was not at his word that the Polyhedron was toppled.
It was Daniil's. And if he tells Andrey now, Andrey will kill him. Why wouldn't he? He's killed for Peter's creations before, and this was the greatest of them all.
For a moment, Daniil contemplates just letting him do it. Even if the clock doesn't turn back, what difference would it make?
But in the end, instincts of self-preservation win out. "The Inquisitor," he says, because there's nothing Andrey can do about that now. The train is gone, and the Inquisitors with it. The capital is so far out of reach that it might as well be a mirage. He will damn no one to the fate he can hardly bring himself to avoid.
He watches the realization work its way through Andrey's expression: narrowed skeptical eyes widening as the sense of it reaches him at last; jaw tightening with fury, then softening with resignation as he realizes that Daniil is right. That his chance of stopping it was days ago, days and branching choices and Daniil's own interference—
Andrey makes a disgusted noise as he realizes. Pummels one fist against the side of Daniil's bed, then pushes himself to his feet. "Don't know why I thought you'd be any use," he grumbles. "Should have listened to everyone when they said so, shouldn't I?"
The words should hurt. Perhaps they do, somewhere deeper than Daniil can reach. Andrey is practiced enough at finding the jugular with words and blade alike, and perhaps it means that Daniil is past pain. Perhaps if Andrey had cut him open after all, Daniil would not even have bled.
Andrey leaves without another word to him. Daniil sits on the edge of the bed, contemplates rising. Sinks back down, eventually, into the fog of oblivion.
Whatever comes next will come without his interference, after all. For now, anyway.
Following Andrey's intrusion into his loft, he dreams. He doesn't know what of; the memory of it drains away with the dregs of sleep, but it's another thing that shakes him with its newness—waking up in a cold sweat, mind still roiling with the not-memory of whatever it was working through while he was asleep.
While he was asleep...
It's not something he's wondered, not something he's allowed himself to wonder, for fear of being rendered utterly unable to continue with anything. For fear of being stuck in one place, unable to move forward or backward, unable even to find solace or release in the permanent ending of death.
Has he been asleep?
Has he slept at all, these ever-repeating days? Have there been dreams? Has there been rest? He remembers the bedroom in the Stillwater, yes; he remembers dragging himself out of it each morning in the untracked cycle of day after day, yesterdays and tomorrows and an ongoing, endless today. But did he ever—
Did he sleep? Did he dream? Did he ever stop?
He sits, again, on the edge of the bed. This time, swaying, he forces himself to his feet and into whatever this new day has to bring.
The clocks no longer move backwards.
If there were ever any proof, it is this. Whatever was inside him, that silver-white not-liquid-not-solid that seemed to run in his veins instead of blood, flash at the corners of his eyes or the back of his mind, is gone, as if winked out of existence... or as if it never existed in the first place. Moments pass beyond his control, the relentless sameness of a puzzle replaced by the droning monotony of never really different at all.
His notebook for the first few days following the abrupt cessation of his affinity with the clock is full of detailed notes: every interaction, every conversation, as best he can remember it, thoughts and hypotheses and hopes for what to redo if the time turns back on itself again.
Those days mark the final expense of his effort. The last of what he has to give, the last he can manage to care. The last vestiges of Bachelor Dankovsky he can show to the world... if there were any world left to show him to. Any leaders left in town who care to appreciate the scapegoat who bore the burden of their negligence, any townspeople left to see him as anything but a failed tyrant. Any companions... but no. There is only Daniil in the echoing Stillwater, empty of a woman who may never have existed and a magic that could, all the while, have been nothing but an illusion.
The clocks march steadily forwards, each second landing like a gavel. Each hour chimes out the verdict: wrong. You were wrong.
Everything is wrong.
There is pain in Daniil that he can't quantify, for which he has no frame of reference. Of course there is the familiar pain, the sort he has been regulating for days—weeks—months? How can he know how much time has passed; how can he truly know?—the burning throb of his heart in his chest; the scrape of unexpected sound against the raw meat of his brain. The heaviness dragging at the edges of his soul. That is not new; that, he knows how to mediate.
But there is only so much the morphine can do for this pain, he discovers with alarm, when he injects himself with some precious remnants from his dwindling store and the rushing of his heart continues apace. He daren't take more; that shred of sense still remains, but he can't calm down; everything about him is throbbing and oversensitive. Inside, he is all aflutter.
He walks—walking, turning to running, the only way that racing pulse might sometimes, somehow be calmed—and stumbles, lists. Doubles over himself as pain seizes him from within, gripping at his abdomen until he can only clutch it and stagger to a halt, vision blurring.
Not that it would matter if he could see. He has no idea where he is, when he is—hasn't known in days. The town, once a map he could practically see engraved onto his mind, well-trodden routes blazing urgent pathways onto the backs of his eyelids, is now a hostile kaleidoscope of disorienting fragments, memories popping up in the wrong places and overlapping each other onto his mind until what was once reality is now only a shattered mosaic of gaps and questions. Which parts of town are safe and which deadly? Who is alive and who dead? The who and where of it all slides from his grasping mind, loose-fingered and limp, and all he remembers is the end.
He fetches up against a wall, jagged stone against his shoulder, pain not enough to tear through the haze over his thoughts. His breath comes ragged, and he notices it as if from a great distance, sound trickling through the gray cobweb wrapping around his mind, the blur. Even the pain in his stomach is distant now, like a dream or a rewritten memory, distant to the whine in his ears and the flickering shadows at the edge of his vision.
He's about to pass out, he realizes, with only a vague, distant sort of curiosity. Different—this is different from death, from the many painful ways his life has ended only to restart. Different too from the sleep he's slowly, haltingly started to relearn. He wonders briefly, flickeringly, if he'll find himself again in a room full of mirrors. Wonders if there will be a masked figure waiting for him in this new oblivion.
"—kovsky?" he hears, very distantly. "—that you?"
A voice? Another person, seeing him in this state? Dimly Daniil thinks he knows it; he must know it; who in this town hasn't he spoken to in the cumulative layered overlap of a dozen infinite days—but it is too late to recognize, too late to muster even curiosity about its owner. The shadows close over his vision at last, and the world ceases to exist.
The world funnels back in like emerging from a dream. He is lying on his back, knees bent up under him, an odd crumpled position nothing like waking from sleep. The surface beneath his back and thighs is hard, too, harder even than the narrow cot in the Stillwater's loft, too hard to be anything but the cobbled street. And then the memory of his collapse is returning, dim and faded as any dream, and there are voices speaking over him.
"He's waking up." A girl's voice, knowing and self-satisfied and horribly familiar.
"Thank you; I never would have noticed." A man's, dry as dust and just as well known.
Them. What are the odds—both of them here with him now, both of them peering over him, surely glorying in his vulnerability, in this incapacity that has come for him at last? Perhaps he should be mortified, defensive. Days ago (or whatever that bastardized version of them means anymore), he would have been drawing himself up, pulling as much dignity back around himself as he could muster. Now...
Now, he simply can't bring himself to care.
He contemplates opening his eyes, but decides it would be too much bother.
"Bachelor?" Artemy Burakh's voice again, deep as the foundations of the earth. Does the ground rumble beneath Daniil when he speaks? Or is he just delirious? "Can you hear me?"
There is something soft under his head. Not as soft as a pillow, but softer than the ground—unevenly thick and lumpy, like someone's folded-up jacket. A kind thought, he thinks. And—the back of his head is not sore, not the way it would be if it had struck the stone.
Did Burakh catch him? Is his head resting on Burakh's own jacket? No, it must be something of Clara's... that heavy smock he wears is too thick to be what cushions Daniil's head now.
Kind of them. Why would they bother with such kindness?
"Dankovsky." Burakh's voice is sharper now, commanding. "Talk to me."
The faintest, scratchiest laugh sands from Daniil's throat and between his lips. Talk to him? Surely this is the first time Burakh has ever wanted him to say more rather than less. What could Daniil possibly have to say that he would care to listen to?
A scoff, higher and lighter. Clara, again. "Rat got your tongue, Bachelor? Or just your brain?"
Perhaps she knows what she's doing after all, because Daniil suddenly feels inspired to open his eyes just to roll them at her.
When he does, his blurry surroundings come slowly into focus. Burakh and Clara are indeed both leaning over him, Burakh's hand hovering uncertainly over him as if withdrawing from an aborted effort to check his pulse. The frown between his brows is still pronounced—what must he have endured, Daniil has wondered more than once, to etch such an expression so deeply into a young face—but softer, oddly, than Daniil has ever seen it. As if—
Well. There is no as if, is there? It is only right that victory would ease his burdens.
"There you are," he says to Daniil, and Daniil could almost imagine he looks pleased. "Want to tell me what just happened?"
"Shouldn't," Daniil's mouth is dry. He licks his lips and tries again, "shouldn't you be the one telling me?"
A tic in the jaw, a flickered deepening in that frown line. "I turned the corner just in time to watch you collapse. Care to explain why that was?"
Again, Daniil almost laughs. Why? How should he know why? The workings of his own body are more mysterious than they ever have been, since living out the same days for months on end, immune to death, silvery time replacing the very blood in his veins. How is he to know how it works now, or to remember how it ever worked before?
Burakh waits another moment longer, and when Daniil makes no effort to reply, he sighs. That sound at least is familiar, for how often it greeted Daniil's most basic of inquiries: deep and heavy and grating, the sound of a man wishing he could, just for once, ignore the call of his conscience and swat the useless insect buzzing in his ear. Daniil has heard it often enough that it has almost ceased to sting. "Do I need to look you over?"
"No," Daniil rasps. If nothing else, let Burakh at least be free of that duty. Whatever his body has decided to betray him with this time, it's hardly worth taking up anyone else's time. Burakh might as well just leave him here and let the looters at him. Daniil can't bring himself to so much as mind the thought.
Clara giggles. "Convincing."
Another sigh. At least, perhaps, Daniil is not the only unwanted presence in Burakh's life. "Why are you still here?"
Clara makes a disgusted little sound—as above them both, or so she thinks, as they consider themselves above her. "If you don't understand by now, you're never going to."
"Do what you want, then," grumbles Burakh. "Just don't get in the way. Dankovsky. Can you stand?"
"Of course I can," huffs Daniil, though he makes no move to try. Weakness throbs at the core of him, thrills of bone-loosening exhaustion radiating out from the pit of his stomach into every limb. Still—
Still, it won't do to have Burakh too close to him. With his faculties at least partly returned to him, he remembers anew the necessity of his layers, of his careful distance from others here. Especially now, especially when there is no chance of undoing what might be found out, he dares not let anyone too near—dares not let Burakh put those hands on him, discover something he isn't expecting to find. There is no going back. The clocks will continue their relentless march forward, and so will the consequences.
Daniil wonders sometimes—now and then—if there was any reality in which they found him out. Any time they discovered him with his brains splattered across the back of a building, any man who let Daniil's broken form fall and looted his body to find something other than riches hidden under his clothes. Would they have done anything different with his corpse? Whispered about the witch who'd been wandering among them all the while, evading their flames? Would it have been kinder to the women of this town, had his body been revealed for what it is?
Or would they simply have tossed him aside, no need to peel away his disguise to see what lay beneath?
That is the one question, in all his realities, to which Daniil could never find the answer. Perhaps it is better that no one knows.
Anyway, all the might-have-beens are a moot point now, when it is imperative that whatever scrap of mystery he might still have remain intact.
"Prove it, then," says Burakh, and Daniil is about to snarl back at him—
—when there is a horrible rending screech from beside them, followed by a rattle that jolts Daniil to his very bones, a claw to raw nerves. The sound of it forces him upright almost despite himself, jolting to a sitting position against the swimming in his head.
Burakh curses, though more mildly than Daniil would if he weren't too busy gasping for air. "What the—"
The worst of the haze clears from Daniil's vision to reveal Clara standing beside an unlidded trash can. The lid—the screech would have been it being lifted away, the rattling clang its cascade to the ground. When Daniil fixes his gaze on her, prepared to unleash worse, she just raises her eyebrows.
"Sorry," she says, unrepentant.
And—and damn it if that sound didn't give Daniil some strength, enough of a jolt back to consciousness that he feels able to struggle to his feet. Was she—could it be possible that Clara was—helping him?
Surely she couldn't be. What reason would she have? But then—there were other times, at least as often as the times when she got in his way, when she would show up just when he needed advice. When she genuinely seemed to be looking after him.
He doesn't dare thank her, not with Burakh here and clearly curious. But he pushes himself further upright, and then, wobbling, to his feet.
"Steady," says Burakh, catching his arm as he rises. "Don't push yourself."
"I'm hardly incapacitated," Daniil growls at him. "Let go of me. I can walk."
"Fine," Burakh sighs. He lets go—
—and immediately catches Daniil when his legs buckle, the world wavering around him again. Those hands around his waist, too powerful, too close—Daniil nearly panics again, and then all thought is swept from his mind entirely when Burakh bends down, a stoop-and-toss motion too fast to follow, and throws Daniil over his shoulder.
He yelps, clinging helplessly, giddy with the zing of this much contact—how long has it been since anyone has touched him, anyone at all?—and the fear of what might be discovered... and the vertigo of being suddenly, helplessly, upside down. Completely at Burakh's mercy as he strides off, Daniil swinging over his shoulder, in the direction of his home.
The fact that he makes it all the way to the Burakh house without vomiting is as close to a triumph as Daniil has experienced in longer than he cares to remember. That cramp in his abdomen is back, squeezing cruelly from inside even as his equilibrium wheels and sways outside. The world is no longer right side up; time is gone; even up and down no longer exist as he knew them, and he is gasping for air by the time Burakh shoulders the door open and carries Daniil inside.
As soon as he's deposited on a table—the examination table after all, he can barely note—Daniil swings forward, head between his knees, curled around himself as he breathes in desperate gasps and fights to keep the contents of his stomach where they belong.
He couldn't say how long he spends like that, bent over himself, before a hand comes to rest on his back and sends another shock down his spine. "Still dizzy?" asks Burakh.
Dizzy, yes—dizzy from his undignified journey here, from the rush of blood to his head, and perhaps most of all, from the realization—still a shock, every time it strikes him—that this is new. That this is an interaction with Burakh he's never had, outside those days of begging for help and then begging for that help to be rescinded, discovering layers and shades of the man that could only be uncovered in the same few moments, lived over and over again the same finite number of ways. The man as he sat by the river in mourning, as he strode into the town hall or knelt over a dying man, as he walked away from a gallows victorious or swung brokenly from the end of a noose, cradled a woman in a lover's embrace as he cut out her heart—
Daniil retches. He can't suppress the reflex quickly enough, lost in memory. Nothing comes up, thankfully, but the spasm seizes him in the crushing grip of a vice, leaving him gasping and grasping, flailing for whatever is nearest to catch hold of.
Unfortunately, that is Burakh's shoulder. He makes a surprised noise as Daniil's hand catches him, then recovers himself quickly—Daniil could swear his muscles firm beneath his touch, as though making his own body into a bulwark for his support.
Always a physician, he thinks woozily, and sways.
"Hold on," says Burakh. "Here, wait, just—" He vanishes from Daniil's grip, but barely long enough for him to lose his balance, returning with a basin that must have been within easy reach. "Do you need this?"
He’d like to say no, to withdraw and pretend to at least some scattered shreds of dignity. Instead he bends and retches again, head spinning and body wracking around that cramp in his gut, another painful convulsion that brings up only saliva and a scant mouthful of sour bile. He coughs over the basin, eyes and nose flooding, empty of dignity or even the desire to strive for it. What use is there in trying any longer? What use was there ever? Did dignity ever gain him anything, in any fragment of any reality?
The hand is on his back again, moving up and down in slow strokes—and when his heaving has subsided for long enough, the other moves into his field of vision, offering a cup.
Water. Daniil sips cautiously, swishes and spits, clearing some of the acrid taste from his mouth and throat. Hangs there as long as he can, recovering some pretense of equilibrium even as the pressure of Burakh's gaze increases until Daniil can practically feel it, a second presence ghosting beside the hand still on his back.
Finally, he can bear it no longer. He lifts himself upright, gritting his teeth against the dizzying drain of blood from his head, leaning into Burakh's hand when he recognizes Daniil's motion and changes his grip to accommodate it. Daniil closes his eyes—rather that than meet Burakh's gaze—and breathes slowly, head empty and light as floating.
Empty... For a moment, Daniil allows himself to be just that. Empty in body as he has been in soul, empty of expectation and burden and passion alike. There are philosophers who preach this as the best way to be. Perhaps it is what he should be striving for.
Or maybe there is no need to strive at all. Maybe he is already empty. Maybe he always has been.
Even in that state, though, there is only so long Daniil can bear the silence. Burakh is still holding him up, hand still braced on his back, but the tension in that hand can change and Daniil can practically feel the vibrating quality to the air: the expectancy.
He opens his eyes at last, and Burakh's accusing stare is right there.
His shoulders hunch reflexively, but there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide from that relentless, stripping gaze. Nowhere to turn, no clock to whisk him away from whatever actions must have led him to this moment. Only himself, laid bare and mortified, and Burakh, waiting.
"What?" he asks at last: edgy, defensive, rasped in a raw throat.
Another sigh. Do they have different cadence, different tenor? Daniil never felt he had the chance to learn them—all that time, all those repeated days, and he still couldn't manage to study Artemy Burakh. But at least this time, Burakh does him the kindness of elaborating. "Dankovsky," he says, relentless, still glaring. "When did you last eat?"
It is Daniil's turn to stare.
When did he—what—what sort of a question is that? "I fail to see what that has to do with anything," he says, though his voice is weak as he begins to see, indeed.
"Just answer the question."
But he can't answer it, because the truth is that he doesn't know. He's eaten—he must have. He couldn't have survived months of twelve days without—
But he couldn't have survived months of twelve days if something else weren't at play, could he? That silver-white amalgam of time in his veins instead of blood, nourished by clocks and stimulants instead of food. There must have been moments—must have, except none of them were important enough for him to remember.
Daniil has been a habitual meal-skipper for most of his life, prioritizing work over food until someone—Serafima, in later years—has come to him to outright force something into his hand and watch while he eats. In this last, repeating twelve days, when all natural laws ceased to matter to him and every errand or decision meant the lives of dozens, if not hundreds, when everyone in town was looking to him for problems vast and small alike, who would have come to him to put bread in his hand and demand he eat it? Eva? The woman he may have somehow, unconsciously twisted into a figment of his own wishes, the servant to his every whim, caring for him when no one else—
His throat closes, mouth flooding again with sour saliva. With all his effort, he squeezes his eyes shut and swallows down the renewed urge to vomit. When it passes, he reaches up to wipe cold sweat from his forehead and notices that his hand is shaking.
"Here." Burakh releases him for a moment from accusing glare and steadying hand alike. Daniil grips the edges of the table to hold himself upright as Burakh crosses the room to wet a cloth. He presses it into Daniil's hand, his own returning wordlessly to Daniil's back in a steadying brace as he gratefully wipes his clammy forehead, dabs the corners of his mouth.
"I don't know," he says at last, into the cloth still held to his face. It's easier to confess to when he doesn't have to meet Burakh's eyes.
But Burakh makes a disgusted sound, enough that Daniil peers up again to bear witness to the lines of derision carved into his face. "Don't give me that bullshit, Dankovsky. How can you not know?"
The challenge is enough to bring back more of Daniil's faculties—at least those that always respond to such a tone. "Has your Russian deteriorated enough to forget the meaning of the words?"
"No," Burakh says. "I just know they don't make any sense." His face is still frozen in that scornful expression, but there's something else behind his eyes now, something wide and fearful. He's gone pale, some of the color draining from his face. "How can you not know where your last meal came from? Why can't you just give me an answer?"
His voice is louder with every word, and Daniil lowers the cloth into his lap, hands still shaking, helpless to respond in the right way. "I don't—I don't remember."
"You don't remember?" Burakh's hands shoot out to seize Daniil's shoulders, gentleness gone, all furious intensity now. "Dankovsky. Daniil. Why don't you remember?"
The shock of his given name roots Daniil in place more thoroughly than the vice grip of Burakh's—Artemy's?—hands. "I—Burakh?" he stammers. "Artemy? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." Artemy's pallor is dead white; his eyes dart back and forth across Daniil's face as if avoiding his eyes. "Have you been short of food? I thought the hospital rations—is it money you need? Why didn't you tell someone?"
"It's not like that." He should be indignant, perhaps; should be reluctant to reveal such things to someone demanding answers, but it seems this has nothing to do with him anymore and everything to do with Artemy. "I was never short. At least, I—I don't think I was."
Was he? He can conjure up no clear memory of food, no; but nor can he remember ever being desperate for it. No one was inviting him into their home for sit-down meals, but if he had asked, surely he wouldn't have been turned down. If the emergency fund could provide rations for others, surely there would have been supplies available for him, too. He simply can't—
Can't remember ever needing it. Ever wanting it or asking for it. If he ate, it was in those pockets of time that have disappeared into the void of his memory, the in-between moments that vanished between each repeating loop. Amidst the many demands on his attention and time, the concerns that kept him awake, food—just like sleep—was never one of them.
...Well. At least the circumstances leading to his collapse make a bit more sense now.
"Tell me," Artemy demands, still holding him too tight, still staring at him. "When was the last time you ate?"
"The last time I remember eating," Daniil stresses, "was on the train here from the capital."
Silence. Artemy is still dead white, his eyes blank and staring. Daniil's uneasy stomach tightens with regret.
"Burakh?" he ventures one last time. "Artemy."
And Artemy releases him, so abrupt Daniil sways again. He pushes a pillow to the edge of the examination table, pushes Daniil down to lie on it with equally minimal effort. "Stay," he orders. "Don't you dare leave. I'll be right back."
Of course, such a command should make Daniil want to leave immediately—to rise from the table and flee this scene of mortification and the man who demands he remain in it. Only the weakness in his limbs keeps him there as Artemy strides out of the room without a glance back.
Well, that and the look in Artemy's eyes—that haunted horror, the memory of nightmarish days of his own that Daniil doesn't understand. The wondering—he knows food was scarce; he knows people were starving. How did he never live the reality of it himself? How could he not have noticed how many others were truly suffering?
Was that just another of his quiet failures? And, if so, will he ever have the chance to go back and try it again?
The thoughts drift in and out, hazy and confused like clouds across the sky of his mind. The room still seems to be rotating very gently around him, though he is almost sure he's lying still. The motion teeters between soothing and nauseating, and Daniil half-closes his eyes, letting his vision blur in the hopes that the resulting confusion will settle his uneasy stomach.
He couldn't say how long he drifts before Artemy returns, red around the eyes and with a bowl clutched in one hand. "Here," he says, thrusting it towards Daniil. "Eat this."
The desperation in his face is such that Daniil can't refuse.
Artemy sets the bowl aside, though, when Daniil struggles to push himself up and can't even manage that under his own power. How did he not notice this weakness creeping in, settling into every muscle and limb and blood vessel? It is as though now that his body has finally given up, all possibility of returning to its previous state has left him, and he is entirely at Artemy's mercy as he slides a hand behind Daniil's back and guides him upright, propping him against the wall before pushing the bowl into his hands again.
Broth, of course. The classic treatment for an uneasy stomach, and doubtless readily on hand for a man with such close ties to the butchers and herdsmen of this place. Daniil settles the bowl in his lap and takes up the spoon with that damned trembling hand.
The broth is salty and lukewarm. Daniil shudders as the first sip sloshes into his empty stomach, which turns over again and threatens to rebel. Strange that the body should do this—reject the very sustenance whose absence it has been protesting—but then, what about the human body is not a contradiction? And what about Daniil's, especially, has ever known what is good for it?
He perseveres through another few sips, mindful of Artemy's pleading eyes, his ferocious grip on the edge of the table. Closes his eyes and breathes slowly through his nose, begging his stomach to settle, to accept the kindness that has been offered to it, not to humiliate him still further.
And then... somewhere between those slow, cautious sips, something changes. Wakes up inside him, dormant need roaring to ravenous life, and he is not sipping but gulping, desperate for more. That deprivation violently asserting itself and demanding satisfaction.
"Easy," says Artemy's voice, and there is a hand around his wrist, stopping his frenzied motion. "Take it slow."
And it's good advice, it is; Daniil would give it himself, but his stomach cramps again in protest, practically wailing to be filled. The sound that escapes between his teeth is small, muffled, but impossible to pretend away—like an animal denied its sustenance. He would flush, if he hadn't been wrung so completely dry.
"I know." Is this the sympathy Artemy reserves for his patients? It has never been directed at Daniil like this before. The hand squeezes his wrist, gentling him like the animal he has become. "I know it hurts, but you don't want to be sick again. Eat slow so you can keep it down."
In this moment it is hard to imagine his body could fail to hold onto the nutrients it has been craving so desperately, the cries he has somehow utterly failed to hear. But he is still a rational being, Daniil reminds himself. Still with power over his body, even if that power has felt entirely absent for longer than he can even remember. Even if everything else has been stripped away from him.
He lowers the spoon, forces himself to take long, slow breaths. Lifts another sedate spoonful to his lips, and turns his gaze down into the bowl to avoid Artemy's relentless stare.
Of course, Artemy's caution is proven right before Daniil has so much as finished the bowl. His body, unpracticed in accepting nourishment after however long it has gone without, begins to protest with a few sips of broth remaining, and he manages only one more spoonful before his stomach tightens in refusal and he lowers the bowl into his lap with regret.
Artemy gives him a pained smile, though disapproval still tightens the corners of his mouth and eyes. "Thank you," he says, and takes the bowl from Daniil in a grip halfway to a snatch, jerky desperation restrained only with iron control.
"I ought to thank you," Daniil says stiffly. "I didn't—that is, I wasn't aware—"
He closes his mouth before he can say anything more, for fear either of revealing more than he should or of resurfacing whatever horror is still clearly so alive in Artemy's body and mind. Whatever it was—Simon Kain's spiritual bequest or his own fractured memories—that protected Daniil from the starvation that ravaged the town during those infinite twelve days, Artemy was not safe from it. How then can Daniil confess any of that to him now?
"Thank you," he finishes, and seals his mouth shut before he can say anything else.
Artemy shakes his head, lips pressed together. Denying the thanks, or still simply registering his disapproval? "I'd still like to examine you," he says at last. "Make sure there haven't been any lasting consequences."
A bolt of cold fear flashes through Daniil at those words, that thought. No matter what, Artemy cannot be allowed to examine him—to strip him of his clothing the way Daniil was forced to do to so many people, look for the secrets their bodies would reveal that their words kept hidden. Daniil's body will reveal too much if Artemy sees it, too much that has nothing to do with the malnutrition they have already successfully diagnosed, too much that he has lost the ability to undo.
There is no protection now. No chance to take risks, learn consequences, and do it again a better way. If Artemy strips him bare, it will be a fixed event.
Everything is fixed now. Shivers break out over Daniil's arms as the hair rises, prickling against the fabric of his shirt; he crosses them over his chest and fancies he can feel the lines of his scars erupt into tingling.
"I'm a perfectly competent diagnostician," he reminds Artemy instead, pressing down on the tremble seeking to emerge in his voice.
Artemy raises his eyebrows.
"Yes, I may have missed the problem for some time," Daniil concedes, "but I know what it is now. I believe your work has been more than sufficient. Please, I'd like to go home now." The weakness is still there; he knows well enough (whatever Artemy's incredulous expression may suggest) that a single bowl of broth is not enough to fix days' worth of deprivation, but some of the trembling has steadied, and the rest and food has cleared his head enough that he should be able to walk back to the Stillwater. Even calling it home is a slip of the tongue he should never have made, but never mind that.
Artemy opens his mouth, closes it again. Sighs once more, long and heavy. "Fine," he says at last, "but not alone. I'll walk you back."
Daniil contemplates arguing only for a moment. He can tell already that Artemy will be intractable on this, and if it is the compromise he must accept in exchange for his privacy, he'll take it.
Artemy makes him wait while he bustles elsewhere in the house, and Daniil does, both out of the enforced courtesy that only awkward gratitude can bring and out of his own remaining uncertainty of how well his legs will carry him. He'll do anything to avoid the shoulder carry again, and slumping to the floor in Burakh's own home seems nearly guaranteed to bring it about.
When Artemy returns, he has a satchel slung over his shoulder. He ignores Daniil's pointed questions, takes him by the arm, and helps him to his feet.
The help is more welcome than Daniil could have wished, but he is pleased all the same that his feet find firm purchase on the floor and he leans only some of his weight on Artemy's steadying form. He casts his gaze down to the floor, manages half a nod when Artemy asks if he is ready, and they make their way across town together.
Daniil keeps his head lowered as they walk, leaning more heavily on Artemy with every step and with his breath coming short far sooner than it ought. He doesn't dare look up to see who must be seeing him—who recognizes the town's onetime emergency commander so humbled, leaning this way on their healer, savior, Warden. What does it mean, even, that title? He never understood it even across multiple iterations of the same conversations; he can't bring himself to ask now. He can only stare at the ground, ignoring the burning sensation of imagined ogling on the back of his neck, and let his feet (and Artemy's support) carry him towards the Stillwater.
He is lightheaded again when they arrive, panting heavily. Artemy helps him to a seat on the bench inside, the place where too often people would be waiting for him with bad news, where even Khorkhoy has departed—clearly having studied Daniil enough to satisfy his curiosity. (There is only so much despondency one can study before one has enough research, surely.) Then, without a word, Artemy hefts his satchel and makes his way towards the kitchen.
Daniil pushes himself to his feet and leans against the wall, trailing Artemy just in time to watch him finish packing the last of a loaf of bread onto the dusty, empty cabinets. When he turns back to Daniil, his face is displeased.
"This is enough for tonight and tomorrow," he says. "After that, you'll have to go out and buy some more." That stare is direct and unwavering. "Do you have the money to do it?"
The truthful answer, of course, is that he doesn't know. How far will money carry him in this town with its fluctuating economy, with the food that must surely still be scarce and unevenly distributed? What resources does he even have available to him, now that the emergency command is dissolved and his own name has surely met the same fate?
But he can't say any of that to Artemy, not after all the help he's already given Daniil. "Yes," he says, and hopes it's convincing.
Artemy stares at him another moment longer, eyes narrowed. "Fine," he says. "And you'll come see me if there are any further complications, or if you need anything?"
The question-lilt in his voice is at odds with the burning intensity in his eyes, and Daniil nods. "Yes," he says again, and does not ask himself if he means it.
"Fine," says Artemy one last time. "Until next time, Daniil."
First names still... The shock of it sends Daniil newly off balance—something too exposed, too vulnerable, in Artemy's use of his first name. Like Artemy’s arm around his waist or his hand at his back—too close, yet slaking something he hadn’t realized was parched. A craving his soul cries out for, an emptiness grasping to be filled.
"Until next time," he says, and shivers at the realization that he doesn't know what that next time will bring.
The first child arrives on his doorstep two days later.
Artemy doesn't trust him. It is the only reason Daniil can think of to explain the fact that he stumbles downstairs far too late in the morning (why bother even trying to get up, after all?) to find the scrawny, white-blond Sticky (self-declared right-hand man to both Burakhs) waiting impatiently in the entryway.
"You slept late," he informs Daniil, as if he's been kept waiting.
Daniil blinks at him.
"It's, what, noon already?" Sticky says. "Do you always sleep this late? Bear gets up with the sun."
"I'm sure he does," Daniil grumbles. He's fairly sure already that in the eyes of most anyone in this town, but especially the children, there is no metric along which he could possibly be compared favorably to Artemy Burakh. "What do you want? Did he send you?"
Sticky doesn't bother to deny it, at least. He thrusts the sack in his hand forward, chest thrust out in turn. "I'm supposed to bring this to you."
Daniil knows what is inside before he even takes the thing, but of course he looks anyway. A loaf of bread, a wedge wrapped in cheesecloth. A selection of nuts and dried meats.
This is enough for tonight and tomorrow... After that you'll have to go buy more. Did he know that Daniil only picked at the food he brought yesterday, ignoring the well-earned lesson of two days before in the hopes of stretching it out longer and not showing his face in the streets? Did he ask around to learn that Daniil has been to none of the groceries in town?
Or did he simply know even as he passed Daniil the food that Daniil was in no state to take the care Artemy as good as begged him to?
Which is more humiliating—to accept food from a child, or to deny it? "I don't have anything to trade for it," Daniil hedges instead, as if that might somehow bargain him an escape from the duty.
Sticky scoffs. "Bear already paid me," he informs Daniil. "Lucky you—this is free."
Of course it is. Daniil sighs heavily and accepts his fate. "Thank you," he says. "And pass my thanks along to him as well."
"I will," says Sticky, and doesn't move.
Daniil raises his eyebrows.
"I'm supposed to watch you eat it," says Sticky helpfully. "He gave me half up front, the other half when I come back."
Is there anything in this world the man hasn't anticipated? "Fine," Daniil says, and begins to unwrap the cheese. "At least share it with me, then. I can't eat all this by myself."
It's not even untrue. His days of unknown self-starving, following on the heels of however long without need for food at all, seem to have shrunk the capacity of his stomach, made it easy for him to ration what Artemy gave him. Quite the opposite of an adolescent boy with a streetwise approach to food—and at least in that, he has read Sticky right. They settle down in the kitchen of the Stillwater as Daniil slices the cheese with a hand he strives not to let tremble, piling slices on bread and passing them to Sticky.
"You first," says Sticky with narrowed eyes that could have been inherited from Burakh, lack of blood relation aside.
Daniil forces down one bite, then another, pushing back the nausea that still lingers around every mealtime, especially so soon after hauling himself out of bed. Only once he has eaten half a slice of bread does that challenging expression of Sticky's relent, and he takes his own first bite.
They eat in quiet for perhaps thirty seconds before Sticky says, "So, why are you still in town?"
Daniil's stomach constricts again. He places his bread back onto the table. "What do you mean?" he says carefully.
"Just wondering," says Sticky, mouth full. "You're from the capital, and you don't like it here. Why didn't you go back?"
Why didn't he go back? Trust a child to ask the very question Daniil has been avoiding as much as possible, as much as he's been avoiding the rest of the world. He can't stay in this town, can't leave the Stillwater, can't show his face to anyone in town, can't bear to sort through the mixed-up memories to try to find one stable line. Can't bear to face everything he... everything he couldn't...
"I just didn't," he says stiffly, hands curling around the edges of the table until his palms burn.
"Fair enough," Sticky shrugs. He doesn't seem to notice the impact he's had, taking another massive bite and chewing ostentatiously. "You can keep doing science here anyway, right? You came here to study."
Came here to study Simon Kain. Came here to study immortality. Came here to have his mind torn asunder, to be placed opposite Death as a foe in a battle Daniil would never, in infinite lifetimes, have won. To be dragged into a twisted immortality, a fractured, fragmented self, that has left him less himself than ever.
"Yes," he croaks, and squeezes the table harder.
"Good," says Sticky. "Can I see your microscope?"
The words thud into the hollow of Daniil's gut. His microscope, which he hasn't touched since nearly that final day—which he last saw removed from the hospital along with all the others, along with that final batch of unfortunates he could not save. His microscope, last used not by himself but by Yakov Little, in a final unsung act of heroism that he can't—that he can't—
That Daniil can't undo. The realization strikes him again and differently every time, this time as a blade to the chest, a gut-punching, wind-stealing blow that doubles him over the edge of the table. If the clocks no longer respond to him, then all chances he might have had to save Yakov—to go back earlier to before his illness, beg him to rest, to stay home for just one day, to find someone else to relieve him—are gone. He can do nothing about Yakov or the dozens who died along with him, the hospital patients whom maybe Artemy could have saved, or the women blamed for something Daniil could have stopped—
He can't go back. Perhaps that was why he did not get on the train when it came—the thought that there might still be a chance to go back and undo it all, a perfect formula through the twelve days still waiting to be found, with enough exploration. Even if he would always be too late, maybe there was just that one more person he could save, that one undeserved death he could prevent. One more thing he could do, one way he could win that impossible chess match after all, one more blow he could strike against Death itself—
And he won't. Of course he won't. All his mistakes have been made for the final time, and there is nothing more he can do.
Dimly, distantly, something is vying for his attention. Somewhere past the hollow, high-pitched whine in his ears, Sticky is calling for him.
“Bachelor?” The word is a faint buzz, barely audible through the crackle of static in Daniil’s head. “Are you okay?”
"Fine," Daniil grits. He's leaned forward at some point, his cheek against the smooth chill of the table, his breath a slow, cold rush in his ears. Even the words are too hard to find, and before long, Sticky's voice fades into a blur as well.
His revolver is too far away. He doesn't remember where it is, but it is not in his pocket. Shame. Maybe if he had it, that would allow him to restart, go back to one of those earlier days, take what he knows now back. Or maybe it would be of no use either way. What good could he possibly do? What good has he ever done for anyone?
Sticky's hands are on his shoulders, shaking him. Daniil closes his eyes. Maybe if he ignores the boy, he'll go away. Maybe if he ignores the world, it will all fade away as well.
But the world is loud and present and won't be ignored, even this still and quiet corner that Daniil has tried to cultivate for himself. A crash intrudes on the fog of his thoughts, a horrible screech, and Daniil manages to open his eyes to see that Sticky, in rushing off for help, has managed to knock over a bar stool. A mercy, really, as it gives him at least the strength to push himself partly up, drag his own chair across the floor, use the responding grate of metal to return some of the color and sound to the world.
"I'm all right," he says, and though Sticky stares at him in disbelief, he at least doesn't fight. "I'm fine. I just—I don't know where my microscope went."
Sticky gives him an incredulous look, but beneath it, his face has gone pale. He makes his excuses and leaves as soon as he possibly can, leaving his half-eaten food behind.
The children keep coming after that, but Daniil doesn't invite them to stay anymore.