Work Text:
It’s something Daniil had found charming, all those years ago: Andrey never missed an opportunity to discuss his latest project, even if he was busy drawing a cocktail of drugs into a syringe.
“Your new laboratory will be everything you’ve dreamed of, and more. Just you wait. Peter and I think the south side could open up to the sun, a sort of glass column of a greenhouse. Roll up your sleeve for me?”
Daniil does, taking a second to swab the area with alcohol, and then watches the needle go in. Its contents consist of a common paralytic, diluted to a fifth of that used in surgical settings, various thermoregulators, and a recently synthesized hallucinogen Andrey had been more than happy to source from the Capital. Not exactly the formulation Daniil had painstakingly developed at Thanatica, but, considering his circumstances, close enough.
“Thank you, Andrey,” Daniil says, once he’s begun to draw the needle out. “I’m sure it’ll be wonderful.”
“No need, old boy. The challenge is enough. Now let’s get these layers of yours off while you can still move.”
Andrey wastes no time, leaning in to kiss him with one hand against his jaw, the other coming up to join it a second later after it’s blindly set the empty syringe aside. Daniil tilts his head and deepens the kiss. Despite the knowledge that the paralytic must be setting in, he’s in no hurry — there isn’t really a ticking clock that can affect him now that he’s faced an outbreak and come out the other side. He focuses on the feeling of Andrey against him, the smooth plane of his stomach and the curved muscle of his back, the pressure and movement of Andrey’s fingers as they make quick work of the buttons on his waistcoat. Andrey pulls away once he’s gotten halfway through his shirt proper.
“What, going to make me do all the work?”
“You were doing so well,” Daniil replies. “I’d hate to interrupt.” He reaches forward to push Andrey’s coat off his shoulders even as Andrey snorts, and pulls it the rest of the way off. The buckles hit the floor first, bright metallic sounds, before they’re smothered by the heap of fabric on top.
“Where did you even get that, by the way? That coat of yours.”
“If I told you I made it myself?”
Daniil considers it. “I’d call you a liar.”
“Cold, Danko,” Andrey laughs. He shrugs off his suspenders, drags them off completely, and drops them to the floor too. “You’re not wrong. A seamstress, up by the Cape. Why do you ask?”
“Were you wearing it when you got these?”
He drags his fingertips across the twin scars on the left of Andrey’s abdomen. It’d been a light touch, but Andrey shivers — a reaction that catches Daniil off-guard until he remembers his core temperature must be starting to fall as well. He swallows around the saliva in his mouth. He liked seeing that, Andrey shiver. He’d like to see that again.
He helps Andrey with their clothes this time, and once they’re both undressed, rests a palm against the inside of Andrey’s thigh. It jumps beneath his touch; he hears Andrey bite back a hiss, sees the way his cock twitches in interest. He lets his hand linger there for another second before pulling it away. He’d repeat the experiment, but—
“Fuck, Danko…”
“Don’t worry,” Daniil says, flexing his steadily stiffening fingers. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do that again.”
“You mean you’re—?”
He nods, tamping down the instinctive apprehension that swoops through him at the very thought of giving up control. It’s a paranoia that’s quick to pass. The Andrey that he’d known is gone, subsumed over the years into the honed, dangerous version before him now, but there’s familiarity in the way he grips his sides, a rhythm to his movements that Daniil would recognize blind and deaf. This Andrey pushes him onto his back, and he goes willingly.
Andrey leans over him once he’s settled. Daniil looks up and imagines that this is how it must feel to be one of those he’d revived, back at Thanatica: the rigor mortis of their limbs, the icebox-chill of their flesh. His handiwork. His research. The thought sends a thrill straight to his gut. He shifts his hips upward, just slightly, all he’s able to, but Andrey doesn’t take him in hand — instead, he pushes Daniil’s legs further apart, probing at his entrance with oiled fingers.
He sighs as Andrey works one into him, and then another. The hand that isn’t stretching him open brushes down his face, closing his eyes the way one would a corpse, before moving to cradle his jaw. It’d be tender if not for the way Andrey digs his thumb into the joint. There’s some sort of significance to that, he thinks, but any emerging theories Daniil has on the subject fall apart the second Andrey crooks his fingers up and finds his prostate.
He tries to cry out and finds that he can’t. He scrambles to hold onto his thoughts as Andrey repeats the process, rubbing circles against his prostate at the same time that he presses harshly down the negative space of first his shoulder, then his hip. It’s only when Andrey takes one of his hands and tugs lightly at his knuckles that he understands — if he really were dead, his bones would be popping from their sockets with these ministrations. Andrey is dismantling him.
The realization, and the ache it causes, hits him like a physical force. He wants him, so badly. He wants Andrey’s cock where his fingers are. He wants, end of sentence. A muscle in his trapezius twitches as Andrey begins to speak; his overworked brain interprets it as a strange sliding sensation.
“You know, I’d wondered about you, over the years. How you were getting on. How your research was going — interesting application by the way, I couldn’t have guessed this was what you were doing — but mostly I wondered, whose bed were you crawling into? Did they know how to fuck you as well as I do?”
“Was I there?” His hand falls back to the bed when Andrey lets go of it. There’s a slight hitch to his voice, and then the slick, wet sounds of Andrey working himself to hardness. “The first time you played cadaver. When your colleagues touched you, did you imagine their hands were mine?”
In truth, he hadn’t. The first time he’d done this, it was the pressure of an upcoming investor meeting, and the fear of pulled funding, that had been at the forefront of his mind; Daniil and his colleagues had simply been looking for a way to clear their heads. But now, with Andrey maneuvering a leg over his shoulder and beginning to push into him, it’s all too easy to revisit that memory and write over it, to lean over his younger self and whisper into his ear a different train of thought.
The Daniil in Thanatica shudders on the table the way Daniil in the Town-on-Gorkhon would like to, unprepared and overwhelmed as he imagines Andrey driving into him, deeper and more forcefully than his current partner is able to accomplish. A twist in perception, a crack in reality, and he goes from neutral observer to active participant. He tries to remember who it’d been. An algochemist they’d poached from Lisbon, he thinks — quiet but ambitious, and more than a little infatuated with Daniil. He wouldn’t notice if Daniil pictured someone else in his place. He doesn’t know him well enough to.
It’s cold, in Thanatica — those early days, they saved money on heating under the guise of ‘improved specimen preservation’. He drips sweat onto the table regardless. The chill that the drugs lend his body isn’t something Daniil can feel himself; it’s a variable, only given meaning when held against a control. He sweats because his partner is hot and vital and alive. Andrey is hot and vital and alive, and he has a growl trapped between his teeth.
“Stay with me, Bachelor,” he hisses, punctuating the statement with a sharp thrust. A clear warning. “Don’t go wandering off on me now.”
He wonders how it is that Andrey can tell. Undaunted, he remains at Thanatica, even as the cracks in his concentration begin to show, beneath his brilliant Portuguese colleague who will leave anyways within two years for the promise of tenure at some university in Leipzig he’s never heard of. He rearranges his features so that it’s Andrey with him, but he’s artless in his need to come, prone to mistakes — the eyes he gives Andrey in the Capital are brown, not green. It doesn’t matter. He’s shaking, wracked with tremors as the real Andrey slams into him, brutal and unforgiving, before abruptly pulling out.
His eyes snap open at the affront. He was so close. Before he can protest, Andrey jerks him off to completion, and the mangled groan he’s able to force through his vocal cords sounds like a death rattle in reverse.
“Christ,” Andrey says, and the strain in his breathing reminds Daniil that he still hasn’t come. “That good, was it?”
Daniil makes sure Andrey’s looking before rolling his eyes. He glances at his flushed and leaking cock in silent question, but Andrey waves him off, so Daniil leaves him to it. Most likely, Andrey’s thinking of finishing on his chest.
He thinks again of Thanatica. Now that he’s come down from his high, the memories of his beloved laboratory hurt more than they soothe. Guilt creeps in too, towards Andrey — Daniil can see the station from his room in the Stillwater, and the truth is that he watches the coming and goings of the trains the way one presses at a bruise. He knows that a train will arrive tomorrow, just as it has every month for the past four, and because he has always strived to prepare for every eventuality, he’s tidied up his room and packed away his things. It would be so easy.
Daniil doesn’t doubt that the Stamatins could create a fantastic lab for him, or even another miracle. But how quickly could they do it? A year, two? With each passing day, any sway he might’ve held over the Capital’s academic establishment wanes. He’s restless, caged. If the ordeal of the Sand Pest had defanged some of the pressures associated with time, it was at the cost of empowering others.
His thoughts are interrupted when Andrey grinds down on him, the underside of his cock sliding against Daniil’s, shamelessly hard. It’s too much, too soon. The sparks of sensation it sends through him border on painful.
“Andrey,” he gasps, strangled. “That’s enough.”
“I think you’ve got one more in you. Should corpses talk this much?”
He wants to bite back, yes, they do, because at Thanatica we raised them back from the dead, but a sentence that complex is currently so far beyond his capabilities it’s almost laughable. Maybe he’ll save that for another day. Daniil concentrates instead on trying to breathe as Andrey forces his oversensitive cock to stir once more.
He thinks of all the times Andrey had palmed him, in coatrooms and the backs of carriages, when they were younger men and possibilities seemed to stretch endlessly before them. He’s never had a problem with Andrey pushing him past his boundaries before, but now something about it chafes. He grits his teeth. His heart is starting to pick up pace, and he’s irritated with it, like he’s irritated with Andrey and most everyone he’s had to deal with in this awful town, for dismissing his express desires in favor of their own agendas. He’s irritated with himself, for being such a coward, sentimental and weak — why should he care whether his departure leaves in his wake a half-formed tangle of steel and glass, a miracle stillborn in the grass? It’d only be the same as what they did to him. The Stamatins are no strangers to leaving unannounced.
Tension comes and builds in record time. Andrey touches him like he knows his sensitivity’s faded, his grip firm and sure, twisting so that his calloused palm drags over the head of his cock again and again, relentless. Daniil moans. He’s already half hard, leaking pre-come, though his anger hasn’t left him — it surges underneath his skin, intoxicating in its own right. It gives him the motivation to test against his bounds. He shifts when Andrey enters him, or thinks he does; either way, he falters immediately.
The skin shucks off his back in patches, leaving stinging rawness beneath. Blood seeps out of his wounds. The connective tissues holding his layers of skin, fat, and muscle together feel as though they’re disintegrating, nerve endings sending up flares of pain before fading into something less distinct; Daniil tries to move so that he meets Andrey’s next thrust. He’d almost forgotten about the hallucinogen in the mix. Compared to the one he usually prefers, this new one has a significantly delayed onset.
But what does he expect? Hospital-grade drugs are beyond his reach — he’s a fugitive, on the run in a nameless town on a polluted river. Reduced to taking compounds of dubious quality and provenance. His jaw is tight even as Andrey angles himself so that he finds Daniil’s prostate, even as he’s pushed closer still to orgasm; the noises he makes come out with an edge to them, harsh and uncontrolled.
Arousal is its own heat, and it feeds into his steadily growing fury. The rough linen of Andrey’s sheets scrape at his flayed back and his blood turns molten in his veins. Andrey’s skin is so hot still, near to burning, and he fucks him faster, rhythm stuttering and becoming fervent, erratic. He’s hurtling towards the edge. Andrey was right. That first orgasm was nothing.
All the indignities he’s had to suffer— they demand his attention, begging to be relived. The thrashing he’d received in the Abattoir. The hunting dog his father had him shoot when it’d developed arthritis. How his colleagues must have died, jerking marionettes and liquified flesh as the current passed through them, a final mockery of their work. He’s so furious he forgets all his terror, all his humiliation. Andrey finishes before he does, ramming into him with one final thrust but the sensation barely registers, his focus has narrowed, he’s incandescent with and consumed by rage, he’s sick with longing, livid with it, he’ll burn away this husk of a body leave his worthlessness behind—
He comes with a snarl on his lips, knocking his shoulder into Andrey, who instinctively shoves him back, hard. He hits the mattress before he can understand what's happened.
He lays there, winded. Above him, Andrey is pale and bloodless, like he hadn’t expected it of himself to respond to Daniil with an outburst of violence. Like he’s done something he hadn’t believed himself capable of. The moment lasts for only another second before Andrey clears his throat and moves to get up, saying something to Daniil that gets lost beneath the pounding of his ears.
He doesn’t move after Andrey gets off of him, free of his chemical restraints but boneless from orgasm. He looks at the ceiling but doesn’t really see it. He’s more focused on the fading patchwork illusion of his uninjured back— and, in his peripheral vision, the indistinct form of Andrey as he makes his way towards the kitchen. The shadows shroud him more and more until all Daniil can make out is the pale movement of his body, suggestions in the dark. He watches the way his muscles flex as he braces himself against the sink, head bowed, and then the way he pulls himself together before reaching for the tap.
For one long, jagged moment, Daniil considers reaching for him and saying— what? You didn’t mean anything by it? He can’t convince himself to say the words because he doesn’t know if they’re true. In the end, he holds his tongue.
He comes face to face with the bedside table clock when he rolls over. It reads twenty past three — six hours until the next train arrives. The sound of running water coming to a stop, the dip of the bed beneath Andrey’s weight. He thinks of that indeterminate future, of textbooks and academic journals that will never know his name in fine ink and finer praise. That slow slide into obscurity, never to stand beside the greats. Daniil closes his eyes and wills himself to sleep.