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Daniil's fist slammed against the warehouse wall so that he didn't hit something else, and if it ached, so much better — the pain woke him, focused him, and he could bear to turn and face the source of his frustration. "Damn it, Rubin. Do you think I have enough allies, true allies, in this town, that I can afford to let you walk yourself to the slaughter? We're closer than ever before. You created a vaccine ... I can hold it in my hands. Right now I need you to work for me, work with me, so we can defeat this damn plague together."
"Work with Burakh, then," Rubin said, and his voice was only weary. "He's becoming his father's heir now. You don't have to settle for the apprentice."
"You've mistaken me for someone who cares about the politics of Isidor's apprentices."
"Then care about this. I know Burakh, and he's someone who will fight with you to the last. I can't fight any longer, and what's more, I don't want to."
"Then I will. I'll kill every last one of the Kains' men that come near you. Or I'll make a deal with Grief, he’s protected you before and doesn't want attention in the Works any more than you do —”
"Don't," interrupted Rubin. "Don't we have enough blood on our hands?"
Rubin was a towering man, yet he looked small, sitting among the detritus of his prosectorium, among all the other discarded tools. There was blood on them, but there beside them was the vaccine in its slender blue ampoule, the closest thing to sky in these last, grey days. "I still need your hands, Rubin. I need the wisdom in them that only practice can teach. Don't you see, you're ... useful to me."
"I'm of no use to anyone like this."
Daniil clenched his fist until the hurt came back to it.
Then he let his fingers uncurl, and he took Rubin's face between gloved hands.
"Be quiet," he said. "Look at me."
Under his touch, Rubin's pulse hammered. He lowered it to linger on Rubin's throat, and made a study of his eyes. Brown, they began to dilate the longer Daniil looked into them, like black sky spilling over earth.
Good. That meant he could focus.
If you're of no use to anyone, then what use am I without you? Daniil didn't ask the question. He asked instead, cool and diagnostic, "Are you trembling?"
"Tired," Rubin said. Yet Daniil felt he was holding a breath. "I'm about to fall over."
"Then permit me to come down to you." Slowly he slithered himself down to Rubin's lap — it was easy, inevitable. Daniil paused perhaps only a moment too long, to check whether Rubin's eyes had followed him.
He kissed him. Kissed him tender, testing, tasting of coffee and meradorm, and when he heard the breath swell in Rubin's chest he dared to press the kiss harder. Rubin pressed back, clutched Daniil's coat as through to drag himself to life by it, and there was the passion Daniil wanted from him. When he parted their lips, Rubin pulled him back with teeth.
Easy, inevitable, Danill leaned into the other man, into the full, solid weight of him, and it was sturdy enough to keep them both from falling. However tired he was — however tired they both were, and Daniil could feel it, the exhaustion that burned whenever he closed his eyes. But he closed his eyes, and it didn't consume him. He let it grow into a kindling flame.
“Bachelor ….” The hands that held him close began to untangle themselves. Rubin shook himself, as if from a dream — who could tell what was a dream or wasn’t after days with only snatches of sleep?
“Let me take care of you,” Daniil murmured into the shell of his ear. Let me care about you, he might’ve said, selfish, inane. What could be saved by sentiment alone? He thought of his Thanatica, the strained faces of his colleagues, the rumors of investigation, the threats of the Powers That Be, but he could hold it all together —
He chased the thought away with another kiss.
”I hadn’t planned on this,” Rubin growled, and Daniil liked that, too, liked the low, rumbling reverberation of it rising in his throat. He tugged loose the laces of Rubin’s collar, the better to feel the rising of Rubin’s throat with his lips, the better to bite and stoke more sound from it.
Only then did Daniil look up, heavy-lidded, and ask, “You don’t want this? Don’t need it?”
He punctuated the point with a long, suckling bite, a bite that would bruise if he kept at it. But that was good, that meant there was still blood beneath the skin, and it got him what he was after — a groan of sheer, wordless hunger. He finished prising apart laces, pushed the heavy, leather coat from Rubin’s shoulders, where it pooled on the floor like ink.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
It was too cruel to expect Rubin to speak, but Daniil waited until he did. His voice came out strangled, gasping. “No. No, don’t stop. Damn it, Bachelor ...” He felt Rubin’s hands flex at his side, unconsciously, as if to pick up a knife, to start a fight.
“Touch me. When’s the last time you’ve touched or been touched by someone?” And if he couldn’t remember how to touch a body without taking it apart — well, Daniil wouldn’t mind being taken apart by him.
The moments stretched dream-like. (Because who could tell?) Rubin grasping for his hip, his thigh, while Daniil rocked into his lap, lulled him with the promise in the path of teeth and tongue, with hands — always hands, stroking the nape of his neck, stroking up his side and underneath his shirt, coaxing and clever and unrelenting, mapping until nothing could remain undiscovered — until the world was crowded out with contact, and that was the idea. “Stay, stay right there,” he demanded between one endless kiss that flowed into the next and the next, because it felt good to have Rubin coming undone and desperate underneath him. And because if he stayed just like that, he wouldn’t leave .
It would follow Rubin into sleep, the memory of hands.
Daniil couldn’t congratulate himself for tiring the man out — the world had done that — but at least his forehead was unlined now, his mouth slack and something resembling relaxed. He didn’t have the strength to drag to Rubin into a bed, but he would sit on his chest like a mara to keep him from waking.
And he was still so tired. Tired enough to hurt, and the hurt wasn’t enough to keep him going. No use . He curled himself up on Rubin’s chest instead, and joined him in his sleep.
...
They woke to the chiming of the bells. Daniil only half-woke, but he felt everything that had loosened in Rubin tighten again, felt the man beneath him tense into wakefulness. Pushing Daniil from him, he sat straight and rigid — he leapt at once into pacing, muttering. Something about his noble visage and who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him ...
“Rubin …” Daniil blinked, still bleary. He watched Rubin snatch his coat from the floor, not even bothering to shake the dust from it. “Rubin, where are you going? You can’t still be planning on going to the Kains.”
“I am, and I will. Don’t you hear the bells from the Cathedral?” He spoke like a figure in a stage-show, like it had all been written for him to recite. “The Kains’ Cathedral. How all occasions do inform against me …”
“ Stop .”
Everything between them tensed, coiled like a watch-spring past the point of breaking. But Daniil still moved to touch him, touch that spot between his shoulders where all his tension spiraled.
“You can’t go. Haven’t I proven to you that I still need you?”
Rubin went silent, jaw clenched. “I see. So that was a … proof.”
“There’s a quarantine on. No one should be scurrying about.” Beseeching, reasonable, Daniil reached to press Rubin’s hand in his. “You know that as well as I, don’t you? As you and I discovered, the plague dies out when its victims do. The safest place is behind walls — safer now with your vaccine.”
“Do you think,” Rubin asked, and let the words linger, “that I want to be kept here at your pleasure, guarded by your thugs, like a twyrine whore?”
Daniil dropped Rubin’s hand as if it were molten. “You misunderstand me.” He felt — he never thought he could but — he felt like that girl Clara. Don’t you see, I wanted to be, to do good.
“I didn’t believe it, when the town said that you must have an agenda, that everything you did here you did for your own ends,” Rubin said. “But you can’t do anything without an ulterior motive, can you? Of course even a show of intimacy is meant to be a proof . It could have been a farewell. A final kindness. But no, you believed you could seduce me from my conscience, make me compliant to you, and you had to prove it …”
“‘Seduce you from your conscience?’” Daniil laughed, bitter and joyless. “Dear Rubin, aren’t you overstating your case? Or do you think I’m some sort of Faustian tempter, a stage mask representing city corruption and decadence? I didn’t think you were so parochial and backwards …”
Rubin looked like he might hit him. Daniil hoped he would. “If everyone in the Capital is like you, then this country is as doomed as I am.”
“Oh, they’re worse. I’m trying to help you, as a colleague …”
“Boddho rid me from such help!”
Distantly, Daniil thought the rest had done Rubin some good. He couldn’t have yelled like this last night, couldn’t have raised his voice beyond a defeated undertone. There’s fight in him yet .
“Don’t be a fool, Rubin.”
“You’ve made fools of us both.” And just like that, the fight was gone from him.
Rubin turned for the door, and Daniil did nothing to stop him. He’d done everything, and nothing, except add another loss to the list.
“Take the vaccine, Bachelor. I’m leaving it for you.”
I’d rather have you, Daniil thought, didn’t say. He needed the vaccine. The vaccine was their victory.
What he wanted was immaterial.