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The longer he stays in this accursed place, the better Daniil is getting at realizing that he's dreaming, which is not a skill he thought he'd ever acquire on the job, so to speak. This particular dreamscape, though, lingers for a long time in the twilight haze of maybe-reality, despite how they're standing at the heart of the Abattoir (a location Daniil recognizes even though he has never been there), and how Burakh has horns.
They are splendid indeed, great black things tipped with silver ornamentation. They look heavy, especially to be supported by a mere human skull (to say nothing of the vertebrae), but Burakh moves his head as though they weigh nothing. It is a testament to the starkness of their improbability that Daniil only notices secondarily that Burakh is almost completely naked. A brown leather loincloth not unlike a butcher's apron provides the barest hint of modesty, leaving the rest of his frame bare and golden in the torchlight. Everything about him is so solid, the immovable object of physics hypotheticals. Instead of feet, his lower legs end in mighty hooves. That it is a dream should be obvious on that fact alone, except that part of Daniil's consciousness seems to accept that if any man in the world might be hiding hooves under his boots, that man would be Artemy Burakh. Oddly enough, he even means it as a compliment.
Burakh draws closer to him, his steps almost musical against the stone. His walk is strange, and it takes Daniil a moment to realize that's because his knees now bend back. "The little scientist," Burakh says with a smile. Now Daniil knows it's a dream, because Burakh is speaking the Steppe language, and somehow Daniil understands every word. "Bold of you to step into my parlor. Not many can."
Daniil lifts his eyes and looks around. The inside of the Abattoir does not look like what Daniil would have assumed of a place designed to kill cows. He supposes that despite its strange architecture, he's been picturing its guts as mechanical, efficient, deliberate like the Termitary's cramped right angles and claustrophobic corridors. The room he's inside is so vast, he cannot judge how far away the ceiling is, nor can he swear that there's anything above him but the starless night sky itself. Strange of his subconscious to have gone in such an organic direction. "Yes, well, being menaced at the door by the only people in town with permission to stab me does put a man off a place," Daniil says, trying to slip his hands casually in his pockets.
He has no pockets. He has no coat. He barely has any clothes at all, and what few remain about his frame are tattered like the herb brides'. His bare legs are muddy up to the knees. He touches his fingertips to his face and feels a smear of some sort of paint there, then lifts his hand higher and encounters a snarl of grass and small twigs threaded artfully through his short hair. In the waking world, October was full upon them, and he'd been told more than once during his extended stay in the town that the twyre bloom was all but done. He must have gotten some stray puff of pollen before bed, to have it twist his dreams like this.
Chuckling, Burakh shakes his head. He takes a step closer. He's tall, taller even than he is in real life, his digitigrade limbs giving him a bit of extra loom. "Not a place," he says, gesturing with a hand toward the expansive chamber around them. On his wrists, he wears leather cuffs embossed with some runic design Daniil still can't understand, even if his dreaming mind allows him to believe he understands the speech. "A state. You're starting to understand, little scientist."
"I'm really not," Daniil says with a sigh. Really, he's never had much use for dreams in general, all the stray thoughts and idle nonsense vomited up by his mind for his sleeping amusement every night. Lately all the talk from Europe was abuzz with the idea of dreams meaning things. One could know things about one's self, they said, if one studied one's dreams. Daniil doesn't care to suppose what they'd make of this: Ah, you wish to bed the exotic blond man! Of course Daniil bloody well does; he'd be shocked if anyone Burakh had ever met hadn't. "A state, you say? A dream state. A particularly vivid one, judging by the detail. Tell me, what do you say about my neuroses? Anything of use?"
Burakh tips his head back and laughs. "You are the funny one. Sharp without and sharp within. No wonder my menkhu has grown so fond of you."
That, at least, gives Daniil pause. Mixing his image of Burakh with the images of the powerful Steppe herds seems, he must admit, well enough in line with Daniil's way of thinking. But the idea that it might not be Burakh before him in the first place? That's something he hadn't begun to consider. "You are the menkhu, though. Aren't you?" Oh no, that was one of the few Steppe words he's thought he understood; he'll be crushed to learn he's been mistaken.
"I've put on his face," says Burakh, or says the thing meant to apparently look like Burakh. Well, that explained the horns and other features. (Did it really, though?) He takes another step closer, until he is well within arm's reach. Without moving any closer himself, Daniil could stretch out his hand between them and place it square in the center of Burakh's bare chest. "It's mine to take. So that you'd know me."
Daniil does not move to the obvious next question. Something stops him, tells him he does not yet want to know. Instead, he looks up into what he wants to be Burakh's brilliant green eyes, so striking and lovely in his handsome face. Instead, there is no green, nor white; his eyes are only their black center. Like a bull's eyes, Daniil thinks, for what he assumes are obvious reasons.
Burakh -- or the thing that is supposed to represent something that isn't Burakh, but honestly, Daniil's never been the keenest student of metaphor even outside his own brain -- reaches up and strokes Daniil's cheek with a very human hand. His fingers are soft and warm and surprisingly delicate. Daniil finds himself turning to brush his lips against Burakh's palm. Burakh presses his thumb against those lips, where Daniil can tell that it smells of blood. He rarely chose to perform much with his mouth, not because he did not enjoy the act, but because he knew how others thought of a man prone to such submission, even when it benefitted them. Yet now he parts his lips eagerly, taking in Burakh's thumb almost to his palm in a single motion. He looks up at Burakh, searching his face for ... approval? Is that what he wants?
If it is, it's what he finds. Burakh's borrowed face opens with a smile Daniil's has never seen the real man wear: the doting grin of a lover pleased indeed. In feverish stray moments during the plague, then in the more-than-frequent idle stretches since its defeat, Daniil had indulged himself with secret thoughts of what Burakh might look like in such situations. Of course, he'd always felt the appropriate associated shame for such fantasies, the guilt of a man who knew exactly how unwelcome most other men considered those thoughts.
Here they are not unwelcome; here they are encouraged. Burakh pushes his thumb even further into Daniil's mouth, letting the broad, callused palm press against the back of Daniil's tongue. "You look beautiful like this," he says, and hearing those words in Burakh's voice -- even if it's not actually supposed to be Burakh, even if what it's supposed to be doesn't matter because it's a dream anyway -- makes Daniil's knees weak. "Eager and hungry. It's how he wants you."
Daniil shouldn't be surprised or even particularly moved to have his own mind float back to him the same fantasies he's been permitting himself for weeks now. Instead he moans shamelessly. Of course it's shameless. There's no reason to be ashamed here. This is a place that accepts all realities of bodies and hides none. Hunger, weakness, arousal, excretion, death: What does concealing them bring? They must be opened too, because they are part of the lines. Like the lines, to a menkhu, they are already known.
Why is he thinking this?
Burakh draws his thumb from Daniil's lips, trailing a thin line of saliva after it. "Will you do this for him?" Burakh asks, his tone oddly gentle for the beast he appears to be.
"Yes," Daniil promises. It's true, he would, and with not even an instant's hesitation. This is of course a thought as ridiculous and self-indulgent as any other, but why should he not pamper himself in his dreams? Why not allow himself a moment to revel in the impossibility that Burakh -- the real one, not the one conjured up from Daniil's own deeply unhelpful desires -- could want his mouth? It hurts no one and binds Daniil to nothing but his own worst instincts.
"Then show me," Burakh says, taking a half step back. He is naked now, having shed the loincloth at some dream-appropriate point. The most Daniil had ever seen of Artemy's real, waking bare body was what of his torso he needed to uncover to clean a festering knife wound, and even that moment of appreciation had been tempered by diagnostic instincts and the obvious need for stitches. Now, though, he feels no shame at taking in the sight of ... well, obviously of what his brain assumes must be beneath Artemy's clothes. He has to admit, his fantasies have good taste. Before him, Artemy's body is broad and thick, not ridged with too-obvious muscle like a carnival strongman, but soft in a way that blankets real power beneath. Light blond hair dusts his arms and legs, though it shades darker at his chest, where it tends downward in a line that leads across his belly and down to--
The cock stiffening between his legs is inhumanly large, far beyond the range of human anatomical possibility. Daniil had never been known to turn down a man's tool before based on its size in any direction, but really, this is just ridiculous. And that's even before he gets to the testicles behind it, hanging impossibly full and heavy beneath. Daniil isn't laughing, though. Instead, he's licking his lips.
Daniil had wondered -- though absolutely never inquired -- about how Steppe proscriptions against violating bodily integrity might apply to penetrations of a more intimate nature. Based on (what he must admit now were somewhat uncharitable) assessments of the culture, he had assumed that it would be grudgingly permitted in the act of procreation, and absolutely forbidden in all other cases. For all he knows, that might actually be the case. But here, as he sinks to his knees on what his subconscious tells him is the well-worn stone floor of the Abattoir, he can pretend it is otherwise. He can dream that this is something sacred, something more than just a carnal indulgence between bodies that think less of one another after the deed is done. He can imagine that there is no shame about it, that it is even a noble demonstration of not only affection but outright devotion. He can think about doing this for Burakh -- the real Burakh, menkhu, emshen, Artemy -- and having the gesture received not with horror, but with joy and thankfulness, and even maybe something approaching love.
He would like that very much indeed, he thinks as he opens his mouth.