Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Once Sahba Usp'tae sat atop a crumbling wall in the Crude Sprawl like a queen upon a throne, for the Sprawl was her queendom, her court the dead and dying. It was Isidor the Menkhu who gave her dominion — an amputation, he called it, to save the life of the town. 

It was Isidor who asked what she would do with her life, when the plague died out. She had no answer for him. She was born from earth.

“The Kin may yet need an advocate of earth.”

Sahba-Usp’tae watched infection spread over cobblestones and crumpled bodies, and wondered.

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On one visit, Daniil deigned to read folk tales, and Murky listened with wide, solemn eyes while he spoke of Tanyushka and her casketful of jewels. Artemy listened, too, to Daniil’s smooth storytelling voice. 

“You’re good with the kids, erdem.”

Daniil scoffed. “Don’t be absurd.”

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Filin could never be a common crook. When he was coming up in the underworld he wanted to be a thief with flare, fancied himself John Rann of the railway. He admired such scoundrels, and admired the anarchoarchitect from the city who twirled knives like he never knew taboo. 

There was opportunity, too, in the Broken Heart, in the trade of twyre and flow of twyrine, in the wide warehouse store Filin half-kept. How could any up-and-coming crook ignore opportunity?

Andrey smirked when he raised the subject. "How much," he asked, "do you want it?"

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Daniil tells himself the town is just a place to hide where everyone hates him enough already — a place he can wait for the world to forget him, for the Powers That Be to pass him by. One day he'll return to civilization, he'll rebuild the Thanatica from the ashes, he'll defeat death, and his days by the Gorkhon will be like a dream.

Daniil tells himself that, but the days spin on, and he forgets what autumns are like without twyre in the air.

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The Polyhedron was a daughter to Peter, and like any daughter she soon outran her father, became a wild, laughing maiden with wonders in her hair and children chasing at her feet. Peter chose not to die in fire, but his heart was in his throat the day the cannons took aim. Blood poured from the base, ashes fell through the air, and Peter alone mourned that sweet girl whose love was ever unrequited.

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Daniil wasn't much of a cook, but he got in the habit of it, when he was founding the Thanatica and fighting death and he needed to be parsimonious with his own money and strategic with others'. Artemy really only ever cooked stews, which weren't too different from tinctures, mix an ingredient or two and leave it on boil.

"I hope ," Daniil said, "that the primary difference is in the ingredients —" Artemy laughed at him, and closed his hand over Daniil's, ostensibly to help him stir — a bright red blush spilled over Daniil's cheeks.

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“I say we will have no marriages,” Hamlet says, and he presses Ophelia’s hand until it hurts. But it’s harvest time, and the earth cries for young brides’ blood. The earth is already unhappy — it spat out Old Hamlet’s body — so she must make it tender, must dance the earth open, and be opened in turn.

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All children think they’re immortal, and Daniil Dankovsky was no exception — he’d pick fights with older, bigger boys, get lost on hours-long excursions, prod snakes and spiders in the garden in study of their warning colors. Yet the moment he first imagined death was utterly unremarkable, lying awake and unable to still his thoughts in the darkness of his childhood room, trying to picture the darkness of the grave. He didn’t know, then, that he was meeting his great enemy, but the image clung to him like a burr well into the morning.

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The Rose Bride had no heart, but Eva Yan had soul to share; she welcomed Anthy into her home, an observatory unopened to the sky. At night she lit candles, and Anthy saw the unseen stars shine to life in her eyes.

"They shine in you, too!" Eva said, and gifted her a smiling kiss.

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Grief directs his men more like a conductor than a crime boss, not that Daniil knows anything about how crime bosses operate. He knows the wave of Grief’s hand when he issues an order, like a baton sketching the shape of the music — flicking down in sharp staccato, or up and around in long, lazy legato.

When they’re alone, and Grief’s hands are on him, symphonies spill from Daniil’s lips.

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In the days after the plague, the Bachelor disappeared to the Capital, with nothing more than his doctor's bag and the clothes on his back — he'd brought nothing else with him, had nothing else to take away. 

No one expected to hear from him again, until one day Artemy received a letter ... a strange one, riddled with fond reminisces of places they'd never been and talks they'd never had together, all in misspellings Daniil would never make. Artemy showed it to Yulia, who hummed with thought, then spent the full evening unraveling a coded message in the marginalia: they've burned down the laboratory, I cannot speak freely, there is no one else for me to reach out to, please, if you ever loved me, come find me.

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Artemy walked the streets of the Capital with an unlikely ally at his side, clear-eyed Yulia sizing up every black-suited stranger that spilled through the streets like blood through a vein. "I thought you were a fatalist," he muttered as she opened up the paper, skimming the space between headlines like a palimpsest.

"It's because I'm a fatalist that I like to test fate when I can — and besides," Yulia told him, "I'm fond of Daniil."

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Andrey should've gone down in a blaze of bloody glory, baring his teeth and flashing his blade while shellfire shattered around him like an explosion of stars. He should've gone down fighting.

But Andrey is dead as long as his brother is, and there's no fight in him anymore, only the Broken Heart to become his tomb.

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Any occupation has its own jargon, and a thief's vocabulary is vast, a vault of vociferous villainy shared betwixt rough necks and river rats all angling to cop a coin. Bad Grief takes to it like a fish to the Gorkhon, meaning he shouldn't. But he does — he spins words like a showman spins plates, like Moirai spin fates — and if he can keep them all in the air, he can keep an empire from crashing down.

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"Defeating death cannot be your only goal," explained the English doctor, who had been so interested in the Thanatica, "for if we achieve eternal life, we cannot waste it on eternal wickedness — we must not stop at transcending mortality, but transcend the greed and squandering of our mortal lives."

Daniil bristled at the implication that his life's aim was not enough , but he took the challenge: "Surely you agree that so much of our greed and squandering comes from our mortality, from our basest instincts to survive, to sleep and feed and hoard whatever resources we can for ourselves ... surely, once we are free of all that, humanity will be a better race."

"Then your cure for death is for all of humanity, not for a chosen few?" and it was on Daniil's lips to answer of course , but he was brought up short by the shine of hope in Lord Hyde's eyes, by the realization that this man was more than a mere sponsor, but a true believer in science’s power to heal the ills of the world.

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A Mistress always speaks the truth, but the truth isn’t what people think it is — it isn’t some bare-breasted woman on a hilltop with a torch, it’s something that slinks beneath the surface and only climbs out of its well to shame mankind. Clara tells a lie, but her lie becomes the truth, and the truth is just a dingy shadow of the life she’s living now. A life where her sister smiles at her, a shambling, sharp-toothed grotesque, and swears she loves no one as much as her twin.

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When Yulia asks after Commander Block, after his astute mind, vigorous imagination, and refined sense of humor, Daniil hears a hint of knowing teasing in her otherwise untroubled tone — and though he dodges her inquiries as best he can, she cannot miss the flush that creeps over his face as he recalls how the Commander came to his rescue in the Abbatoir.

"So tell me," he asks, turnabout being fair play, "are you testing the Trip Wires of Fate for science's sake, or do you simply enjoy saving damsels like Miss Ravel from their own distress?"

With a smirk, Yulia asks, "Cannot it be both?"

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"I am trying to imagine him," Daniil admits, "Alexander, before he was Commander Block — I'm well aware of your history, of the brilliance of your reforms and your victories in the field, but not of what inspired them."

"What inspired you, before you were Bachelor Dankovsky?" asks Alexander, and it's a shock Daniil's never told him when he's shared his tale of woe with every stranger on the street, but he shares it now in their intimacy — how he wanted to fight with death as a doctor, then to change how people thought about death, to challenge the fatalism of the age — and Alexander listens with reverence. "I joined the army," he says, "because I wanted to change how wars were fought ... but if I could fight one last war, to end any need for more death, I would.”

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Schmowder would burn out the soul of any ordinary man, but Commander Block wore war wounds like decorations; he won the Battle of the Fords with a grenade fragment embedded deep-bone in his flesh. He was a military genius, who knew the heart of genius was nothing more than endurance. Surely (Daniil thinks, hopes, half-prays at Block's bedside) he could outlast a little thing like plague.

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It's cruel, Daniil knows, but now that they have the luxury of time, he loves to make Artemy wait for him — loves to work him up with long, lavishing kisses from his lips down his throat down the plane of his body, loves to lean between his legs and take Artemy in his mouth, and once he has Artemy groaning for release, make up some idle excuse and leave.

It’s cruel, but Artemy waits for him all the same, and he loves it when Artemy looks at him with such bright and naked need . Daniil settles on the side of their shared bed, admires Artemy with his thick arms taut and trembling and his hands clawing up the sheets, and asks, “Now, then, where were we?”

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Immortell knew the truth of the matter, that the Plague was a role passed from person to person, like the Haruspex, like the Bachelor, like the Changeling — any fool could figure it out, for when had anyone seen the Plague except in a mask, in a cloak of clattering bones or in the shrouded face of a loved one? The whole point of the play was to transcend a single body — something would always take your place — and when the last healer left the stage, from frustration or exhaustion or because they had no time for games, only Plague remained, and Plague descended on the theater.

“What’s the line — ‘we acknowledge the victory of the player’—” Immortell (who would never die, unless it were a scene) coughed a rattling cough, skin cracked and paler than ever, eyes bright as buttons — “Collect your fee on the way out.”

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Once, Daniil interrupted an execution on Commander Block’s behalf, steadying his rifle in the steppe grass, picking off the mutineers who’d been so kind as to stand in a line for him. This time should be no different, more elegant, perhaps — no bullets wasted, only bribes exchanged, so that Daniil could stand in front of Block’s cell offering freedom in the form of a ring of keys. So why (demanded Daniil in his desperation, while Block just sat there stoic and resigned) wouldn’t he take them?

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General Ashes, Hero of the Broken Front and the Karstov Fords, Commander Alexander Block sighs like a lovestruck virgin when Daniil touches him, and Daniil can’t help but be charmed. Stripped from his stoicism along with his red jacket, he comes apart so easily, eyes fluttering or fixed on Daniil with raw, wanting wonder — and Daniil wants to please, wants to impress, wants to show how much better he can make a man feel, but Block takes in every pleasure as though it were something brand-new invented for the two of them.

And Daniil wants that, too, wants it for himself, the looks and the sighs and the shuddering-soft surprise as, hands skimming over abdominal muscles well-defined as a diagram, Daniil kisses his way beneath the Commander’s waist.

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"Thank you," Daniil hears, and it's on his lips to say don't — don't thank him for a victory he played no part in, don't thank him for his efforts when it's the Haruspex who healed the town — but Peter's eyes are clear of twyrine, and they catch something in his soul before he can speak. "You tried to save her, didn't you, old boy? Only you — no one could love her the way love poured out of her, but you, you tried ."

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DANIIL DANKOVSKY, his face framed by candlelight in the Theater of Death: Even if I believed your theory about crossing the abyss over a bridge of corpses, I’d never settle for side-stepping death through some theatrical sleight-of-hand … I intend to defeat death fairly, forever and for all.

MARK IMMORTELL, loftily, to an unseen audience: Hear now, all and forever, the Bachelor proclaims he won’t clamber over a pile of corpses for a chance at immortality. Well, then, I shan’t spoil your ending for you — perhaps it can still be a surprise.

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The subject, dark-haired and solemn-eyed, looks much like Bachelor Dankovsky did when he was a boy, and would sit with hands folded while the adults around him discussed serious matters. Respice post te, the Bachelor thinks, but the resemblance can only be coincidental: the subject is an orphan presenting an anomalous affinity for gentle blindness, as it's termed in the thanatological vernacular. In common vernacular, the child has no fear of death.

...

“Are you afraid to die?” the subject asks, without inflection or challenge, but of course the emotion of ‘fear’ is irrelevant — death is humanity’s ever-circling enemy, a hunter not unbeknownst to its prey, and a doctor’s work is the adventure of outwitting it.

“Most men are,” the Bachelor answers, because he’s never seen the purpose in talking down to children, “but most men accept that death is inevitable ... I do not, so it makes little difference if I consider the risk of dying tomorrow, or dying at eighty.”

Those solemn eyes widen and the subject says, soft, “Like me.”

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"I'm not like you, I'm good, I'm good ," Clara swears, Clara screams , and Aspity only regards her with pity. There is no good, there is no evil, there is the Earth that bore them both, and the Earth that takes us all to our graves.

The more the little changeling denies herself, the more the shadows will swarm and swallow the town, and Aspity will laugh with it — but it isn't the ending she craved.

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In the days hidden in the Prosecutium, Sezja Rubin finds a kind of freedom — no one looks at her, no one defines her with their looks, no one decides for her whether she's a half-Kin cast-off or inheritrix of the Menkhu's ways, but she cannot hide forever.

The Kin touch her with their eyes, and the touch has claws. It carves into the soul of her, but what (in the end) does it matter?

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Daniil can't shake the feeling that he and Artemy have only been extras in this act, rushing in and out of scene with scraps of information. But who would be the protagonist, if not either of them? Clara? The Three Families? The Inquisitor or Commander?

Or is it the Town itself?

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As it always did, it came back to blood. Blood and love, blood and rhetoric, all three concurrent or consecutive. "We must be," Dankovsky said, "under un-, sub- or supernatural forces."

"You listen to Mark too much," Burakh grumbled, and spun a boatman's coin between his fingers.

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Daniil scoffed once that if Grief was offering twyrine he wasn't interested in the hangover, but Grief wasn't offering twyrine. Now he watches Grief stretch in the morning after, and his tongue feels numb, his chest feels tight. He never wants to leave. This (he thinks) is worse.

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When Babel fell, it made many languages, and when the Polyhedron fell it made many worlds, spinning out like shards of dropped glass. "If I'm to occupy this world," Daniil pleaded, "I want you to occupy it with me. It isn't real, but ... you help make it real, do you understand?"

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“See, you're a man of sense. If this plague is a punishment for man's hubris, then why should children suffer it? And only some children, but never bulls."

At this point, Crowley doesn't know if he's tempting the doctor or simply letting off steam, but he agrees. "Bulls? Really?"

(bonus!)

“You're saving lives with the Bachelor? How positively good-hearted of you," Aziraphale beams.

"Breaking local taboos. It's all very transgressive. How're things going with the murderous little saint?"

"She isn't murderous. She has a great gift."

"For murdering?"

"Only partly."

“You know she's also partly the plague. Does that make her yours or ours, do you think?"

"It's, ah. All been very ineffable."

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Grief used to laugh that someday Artemy'd get something named after him, some new discovery; as for him, he'd make a name for himself 'in backstreets and allies, if not academies.' Now both their names are bloodied (ripper, rabble-rouser) but by the fire they remember each other.

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It never occurred to the Bachelor that he could break quarantine, or better yet, never set it in the Stoneyard at all, let the plague loose while he took off through the countryside and left this hellhole of a town behind. It was never his town, and if its leaders wouldn't set aside their squabbles long enough to lead, it shouldn't have been his business, or his blame to bear.

"He didn't have to," Sticky said, choked, after Shrew went one word too far, and even she stepped back from the force of his grief.

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Daniil didn't speak the secret ambition of his heart from his first day at university — he was sharp enough to reserve his opinions for himself, until he knew how they'd be received —  but Henry Clerval, with his heart ever open, had no such reservations, and spoke long through the night his dreams of passing into history as a benefactor of humankind, of changing the world for the better.

"I want to change 'history' as we know it," murmured Daniil one such night, "by changing the course of human life," and Clerval smiled his brazen, boyish smile, and took Daniil's hand.

“You will, my friend you will."

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And Block doesn't understand (how could he) that Daniil would start a revolution for his sake, that he would stir the people in the streets to protest and storm the execution grounds so one just man doesn't have to die for disobeying an unjust order. But his head reels with frustration, the way it reeled at the bottom of the Polyhedron when he shut his eyes, when the figures in the garden loomed large above him, three, four, five ...

"None of this is real," he blurts out, "the Powers That Be are overgrown children playing at authority, the Law is something they made up to keep the game going and so they can cast aside disobedient dolls that don't play along — they threatened to leave me in their grandfather's funeral wreaths, but you don't deserve this —" And he knows how he sounds, and he shuts himself up before he can go any further, bites his tongue until it bleeds.

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Victor puts the samovar on for when Dankovsky visits every morning, more harried and sleepless by the day. Often, the doctor is out the door before he finishes a cup, but hospitality is a tradition among the ruling families, and Victor coaxes him to sit; often, Victor will have news for him, rumors to pass on and to emphasize, and it's easy (too easy) to work Dankovsky into a righteous passion as furious as Wild Nina's.

It's easy to see what Dankovsky is thinking, the considering tilt of his head, his lashes lowering as he looks across the desk at Victor and thanks him, pointedly, for his continued help and benevolence — his eyes linger on Victor's lips, his fingers brush Victor's wrist, and the boy thinks he's found an angle (and Victor is inclined to let him have it ).

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Artemy refuses sacrifice, and cedes to miracles, or so he consoles himself — he has sacrificed neither Aglaya, nor Daniil, nor what Daniil loves. Yet he finds Daniil at the Broken Heart, amid the butt-ends of spent cigarettes and empty twyrine bottles, and sees a mind spiraling, struggling to trust after a series of betrayals — ranting what have you done, how can you know, what if it’s all been the Changeling’s trick — 

“I’m not thinking about that, and neither should you,” Artemy says, and he sits beside Daniil, taking his shoulder. “Just think about what we’re going to do next.”

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"Death," proclaimed the so-called Player King, "is but an inevitable ending. It's what all drama tends toward."

"In tragedies of yore, perhaps," drawled Immortell. "I find death much more intriguing as a beginning. Start at death and overcome it, there's the real drama."

"There's no overcoming death, only restaging it. Everything comes back to the old school: love, blood, and rhetoric." 

"Oh, don't think I've given up on blood. But I'm quite finished with the old school." He forestalled another word. "I won't be needing you, just the set."

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The garden was less a place than an ideal to Miki — it was his sister's small hands upon black and white keys, a butterfly that landed on the rim of their milkshakes, the other two twin prodigies his parents let them play with, sprawling and sketching in the afternoon sun.

It was a quality of light, which Peter spoke of once, lying in the tall grass, looking at the sky. Peter, for whom places and ideals intertwined, and who spoke wistfully of one day bringing life to something shining — something that could catch the light, and make it last.

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What do people eat? Grace lives like a shade, low to the earth and undemanding. She takes what scraps of bread and sips of milk the dead leave for her, and even then, thanks them for sharing — they've so little of their own, after all. She sustains herself to sing for them.

Peter's little better. Up in his loft, he forgets what mortal flesh is heir to; Andrey brings food he picks at without thinking. But he sets a table — more of a picnic, blanket spread on the floor piled with plates — for himself and his Grace. He remembers.

This is living.

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Daniil wanted to be a soldier, once, when he believed the old lie of pro patria mori , as if any death could be sweet or decorous. 

Ksenia shifts in her sleep, brow furrowed by nightmare, stars and blood and burrowing eyes, and he thinks it better to be a doctor at her bedside.

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Clara and her sister share a heart. She feels it pull on her like a prickling thorn, and she cannot be at ease until she sees her sister again. Once Clara railed at her, at that hated, familiar face for keeping it from her, tormenting her. Her twin looked back in innocence.

"I don't have it anymore," she said, and Clara cannot feel at ease. 

"Don't you remember?" Capella asks, confused.

Capella pulls open a drawer, and in that drawer is a box, and in that box crushed paper, and a red and pulsing jewel. "You asked me to keep it safe for you."

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It's not the waiting Sticky minds — he knows how to wait, how to slide himself in the cracks of a house and breathe with the floorboards so no one notices. He can keep his head busy, with tricks and formulas and stories to tell Taya, until the house exhales and he can move.

But there's less twyre every year. What's the use of mastering the Old Man's mixtures, if he can't use any of it?

Artemy gives Sticky that look of his, like he's about to tousle Sticky's hair and say it's not his problem, so stop worrying and stay out of it, little imp —

Instead, he explains. All things die, and are renewed in the earth. When the Earth itself dies, it'll take a little time. Twyre will return, like before, or it won't. But there'll be new herbs, new connections, new concoctions to brew. "And that'll be our job. You and me."

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"When I was a child, I wanted to become a commander, like you," Daniil confesses. He looks away, leaning his chin upon his palm, rather than read Block's reaction. "It's to be expected. My father was a military man who everyone respected, and I hoped to follow in his footsteps."

"But you chose your own path. For that, you're just as worthy of respect," Block says, and what's more, seems to believe it. Even if Daniil can't see his face, his voice is soft. "I respect you."

Daniil laughs, grateful and bitter and chokingly sad. "You may be the only one left.”

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"I believe you, but I don't understand. If the town was nothing but a children's game, how are we here?"

"Have you ever lost a favorite toy, as a child? You drive yourself sick with worry wondering how you lost it, where it's gone to, whether it will make its way back to you. Eventually, you console yourself with stories. You tell yourself another nice child has found it, or that it's having adventures in the world, befriending wild birds and beetles. There's a freedom there, the freedom in the spaces off the edge of the map. It's a theory, at least."

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It was a waste, but Artemy couldn't be mad at Murky for looking for ghosts in the twyre — he heard ghosts, too, when he was a child. He'd been no Grace, to hear them speak or understand it, but he'd hear the creaking of the swingset in the yard, and he'd know it was Ersher.

Sometimes he'd hear the soft rustle of his mother's skirts on the stairway, and if he shut his eyes tight, he could hear her pause in the hall, in front of his door. It was almost midnight, well past bedtime. He pretended to be asleep, because ... he wanted her to be proud.

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Block never asked to bear the world upon his shoulders. Or perhaps he did, perhaps that's what it means to make a reform: to overturn the old order and take responsibility for the new. He didn't want to be indispensable . He wanted a world that would march on without him. He wanted armies who fought for the people's sake, not the war's, and soldiers who could be trusted with moral choices. It would’ve been easy, in his captivity, to let that choice pass to another. Let this cup pass away from me.

No longer. “We leave,” he said, "at 2200.”

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Peter explained it to her, once, over drafts and twyrine: a building could house a soul the way it housed a person, the trick (he said) was to cross the threshhold. Even Farkhad …

And here he took another pull of twyrine. Eva gazed at the Cathedral, and wondered where to cross.

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Grief cradles the sackcloth doll, hung heavy in its oversized coat.

"That's Grigoriy," the bright-eyed boy says, eager to explain their game, "but we call him 'Bad Grief' for fun. Sometimes he's a clockmaker, sometimes he's a storekeeper, and sometimes he's a thief and a clown."

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Pointless, all of it. Once he cared about the arc of history, but history was for human beings, and he was nothing but a straw-stuffed doll. Yet a higher meaning moved in him, and said

"I will stay with him till the end. His words shall be my words. His deeds shall be my deeds."