Chapter Text
Above all, Daniil Dankovsky seeks control.
Over himself, more than anything else. If he could he would wrestle the world into shape with his own hands, into the order that gleams in perfect lines in his mind that he has never quite been able to make anyone else see. Would arrange everything into the balance he seeks, would drag life and death themselves into submission. But he knows that is not possible, and knows further—with gritted-teeth admission—that such control would run counter to the very autonomy and independence he prizes. So he keeps his ambitions to his own world: his space organized just as he likes it (even if none of his colleagues can understand his organizational style); his experiments impeccable; his publications precise and logical.
There is too much outside his control, but he exerts what he can on his own body. He defies it even as it threatens to spill beyond the rigid borders he craves for it: his voice pitched low, his hair trimmed, his chest compressed. His shape tucked under layers of clothing that compose and present him exactly as he wishes to be seen.
And at night, he ignores the unruly flesh that spills free, red-marked and gasping, from the shape he has forced it into. Keeps his eyes from the mirror and his hands to the barest of hygiene basics until he’s safely armored in sleep clothing. Keeps his bed empty of any but himself.
There are surgeries he might try. It was one of his earliest ambitions, one of the first things that drove him to the field of medicine: the endless potential for what the human body might be molded into, if one only dared. He’s heard of the most promising, but of course none of the medical journals have him in mind in their reporting; no one speaks of their potential for men such as he. He hears whispers only, and dares not coax them into louder words. Dares not risk it all even to colleagues he suspects of open mind. He’s risked too much to get where he is; this last is something he does not dare. To sink into oblivion under someone else’s knife and wake up to an unknown reality—one that could strip it all away from him?
No. Daniil Dankovsky has given up much for the perfect order of his life. He has too much to do, too much to strive for. Coward he may be, but this risk is too much for him to take.
Artemy Burakh’s hands are gentle, but relentless.
Daniil’s stumbling into the Stillwater, clutching a cut in his side—shallow, but enough to need stitching—and the Haruspex is waiting for him, doubtless come to ask him a question or report on a new discovery. Doubtless not expecting Daniil to lurch inside, half-drunk on pain—but he reacts so quickly Daniil could almost suspect him of precognition if he hadn’t known of the man’s time in the army. Artemy’s hands catch him around the arms before he can so much as speak, guiding him to a seat in the desk chair, pulling at his shirt to expose the wound—
Daniil panics. His hands leave the cut to bat at Artemy’s own, fresh blood smearing from his gloves to Artemy’s bare skin. His fingers fumble for purchase; numb with pain and shock, he can’t find it. “Don’t—” he hisses, “damn it, Burakh, leave it!”
“Hardly,” scoffs Burakh.
“I can handle it on my own,” snaps Daniil. They’ve been friendly enough, even collegial—but this is different. This is too much. He doesn’t know what kind of man Artemy Burakh is, and he can’t afford to lose the closest thing to an ally he has in this town if he exposes Daniil and sees too much. Can’t imagine what the town itself would do to him if he were exposed to them.
“You can’t even keep hold of my wrists,” says Artemy calmly.
A sound tears from Daniil’s throat: half snarl, half hiss, like a defenseless animal trapped in a corner. His teeth bare with the sudden urge to bite, to lash out in whatever way he can, against the looming predator. Artemy is everywhere, caging him in, hands still unmoving, and the tension in Daniil’s body pulses blood faster to the gap in his skin, vitality leaking slowly from his body even as his chest tightens around his doom.
“Daniil,” says Artemy flatly. “You’re hurt; I’m a surgeon. That seems like a logical progression even you can appreciate. So I don’t understand why you won’t—”
He falls silent. The side of his hand has brushed the edge of Daniil’s bindings.
For a moment, they both say nothing.
Daniil would have hoped—has hoped, before—that the simple feeling of cloth bound over skin would not be enough, in casual graze, to give away the secret that lies beneath it. But his coat has fallen open, the fabric of his shirt as slashed as his skin, and Artemy is closer to him than he’s ever been. Perhaps at this distance, the shape of Daniil’s body does not allow for any further lies. Or perhaps Artemy has known men of his kind before. Whatever the cause, Daniil can feel from the silence between them that Artemy has found him out.
He closes his eyes.
Another long, long moment of quiet. Daniil inhales at last—to beg Artemy’s silence, to threaten him should he speak up, to deny what is obvious, he does not know—but then Artemy speaks, his voice an entirely different cast from before. “There are surgeries, you know.”
Daniil’s eyes snap open.
Artemy is looking at him with a curious frown, a tug between the brows not so much of judgment but of curiosity: the look of a man with a puzzle he is trying to understand. Daniil knows that expression well from his time among scientists; is sure he would see it in the mirror if he ever bothered to look in one. “I know you know that,” continues Artemy slowly. “You’re at the cutting edge of medical research, aren’t you, oynon? Then why haven’t you—”
“Think, Haruspex,” says Daniil. His voice comes out hoarse, edged with a rasp he can’t even out. “There are surgeries, yes, but are there surgeons? Those of like mind, whom I could trust well enough with my reputation upon reveal—or with my body under the knife?”
He didn’t mean to say this much. It must be the pain, or the shock—or the shaky skin-peeled-off feeling that has nothing to do with the slice in his side still pulsing a sluggish flow of blood into his shirt. He clamps his mouth shut again, looks down.
Very quietly, Artemy says, “I’m a surgeon.”
Daniil swallows, a loud choking gulp, as if his tongue has swollen to entirely block the back of his throat. He can’t look up to meet Artemy’s eyes.
Is it an offer? A coincidental statement? A defense of the profession? He doesn’t dare read into any of it.
As if understanding, Artemy clears his throat, moves his hands to the buttons of Daniil’s gaping shirt. “Let me stitch you up,” he says, almost coaxing. “I promise your secret is safe with me.”
Slowly, Daniil nods.
“I want you to do it,” Daniil says to him weeks later.
Artemy looks up, startled, from where he’s seated on the end of the bed—his bed, their bed. The one he finally found the courage to reclaim from the ghosts of duty and disappointment that haunted him throughout the plague; the one he dared, eventually, to invite Daniil into.
Daniil is standing at the mirror in the bedroom, undressed in full. He’s staring at his own reflection, breasts cupped in his hands as if gauging weight and volume.
Artemy’s mouth dries out instantly, walls of his throat closing in around the words he would say. He swallows, hard, deliberately, and then says, “You mean—”
“The surgery.” Daniil releases his grip, crosses his arms over his chest, lets them fall to his sides again. His hands—ungloved, almost as strange a sight as his body undefended—open and close at his hips, as if channeling all the nervous motion of his body into their flexing. “I want you to do it to me.”
Artemy just stares.
Yes, he’d made the offer—thoughtlessly, yet passionately, unable to do anything else when faced with such a guarded secret. Yes, he’d meant it. But faced with the actual request now—
He’s a surgeon, yes; he’s the only one in this town with the right and the duty to do that work. But he never finished medical school, and Daniil’s worked with people at the top of the field. People who knew far more than Artemy ever will, even if all their knowledge has been erased or suppressed as thoroughly as the work Daniil still mourns. Does he know—
“It’s not a surgery I’ve ever performed before,” he warns. “I know the theoretical basics, but the practice—”
“Do you think I’m worried about your practice?” Daniil scoffs. It’s the tone Artemy’s heard him use countless times, usually when he can’t fathom the stupidity of the person before him. “You cured the Sand Pest. You’ve performed countless dissections under the most adverse circumstances—”
“This is different,” Artemy argues. “You’re alive. And you’re—”
You.
Daniil seems to hear what he doesn’t say, because his expression softens. He steps forward, so cautiously, into Artemy’s space—a kind of closeness that he rarely allows when fully naked.
“I know,” he says softly. “Don’t you think that’s why I’m asking you?”
“I—”
“I know the theory better than any other surgery,” Daniil says. “If I could do it for myself, I would. But I’ll show you, if you let me. I’ll show you exactly what I want, and I trust you to do it.” He smiles, a wavering thing that would be mocking if it weren’t so tentative. “Don’t you know the Lines?”
Artemy pauses with his mouth still open, tongue poised on the tip of a response. Lets himself really look.
Yes, he knows the Lines. He can see the way they draw Daniil’s body, can practically feel the discordant thrum of them where body and mind jar against one another. It was a dissonance he felt in Daniil from the very beginning, one he attributed to capital stubbornness and shortsightedness before learning its true source. Can see, even, where those conflicting Lines could be snipped and rewoven, brought into harmony. A body in alignment the way it ought to be.
“All right,” he says, and his entire body seems to exhale. “I’ll do it.”
The exam table is cold against Daniil’s skin, hard against the flesh of his buttocks and the bones of his shoulder blades. The needle is cold, poised just at the crook of his elbow, and he fights the urge to shiver.
Panic fights for a hold in him, thrashing under smothered layers somewhere deep in his gut. He breathes past the flutter, clutching the edge of the table with trembling fingers to steady himself.
The needle withdraws without piercing his skin, and Artemy’s hand closes over his. “Are you sure?” he asks.
He’s asked it before, again and again as they worked their way through the diagrams and notes in preparation for the surgery itself. Daniil would almost be offended if he didn’t know it comes from Artemy’s worry about his own skill rather than about Daniil’s commitment.
Is he sure? This is the moment that he’s feared for years: lying vulnerable as a sacrifice on Artemy’s table, at the mercy of a surgeon’s knife. The precipice of possibility or destruction—of his body or his reputation—the chance of waking up to his body mutilated and his deviance exposed, his work destroyed and his name along with it… or of not waking up at all.
That chance that has forever outweighed the breathless possibility of waking up a new man, lighter and freer than he has been in all his life.
But he has already lost his work and his name and his hope. Lost them all and come out on the other side to a life still worth living—a life where he might at last be able to claw his way into everything he’s ever wanted. A life where Artemy stands over him now, the only person to whose reshaping touch he could ever bare himself. A man he trusts utterly with his body and soul.
So he blinks up at him and says, “Are you?”
A change passes over Artemy at the words. He blinks and straightens, a ripple passing through his body, his eyes sharpening. His hand on Daniil’s clasps tighter, then relaxes.
“Yes,” he says, and there is a new confidence in his voice, in the surety of his grip. “I am.”
Daniil smiles. “Then I am, too.”
When the needle returns to his arm, he closes his eyes.
Artemy finishes the surgery with the smooth motions of years of practice. Dressings and bandages applied; tools washed, sanitized, and laid aside; a clean sheet drawn over the naked form of his patient. All as he has learned to do, everything in its place.
And then he slumps into a chair and lets his head drop into his hands.
The shaking starts from his center, the fist-sized space at the base of his ribcage, and then spirals out through chest and gut and limbs until his whole body trembles like the last leaves still stubbornly clinging despite the dawn of winter. He clings, too: fingers in his own short tufts of hair, legs clamped tight against the chair as if to hold it to himself. Himself to it.
He hasn’t been shaky after a surgery since the first days of medical school, and never during. In that, at least, his record remains clean: his work on Daniil’s body was smooth and focused, not a twitch or a tremble to be found in his hands or his gaze. He drew his scalpel neatly along the Lines, following the path laid out by Daniil’s body—revealed in greater eagerness with each new stroke, thrilling with the satisfaction of being aligned right at last.
In fact, this may be the most perfect surgery he has ever performed.
He lifts his head out of his hands at last, glances over at Daniil: still unconscious from the anesthetic, still unmoving upon the table. Even in deep unconsciousness, his face retains its stubborn little frown, the lines etched between the brow and at the corners of his eyes.
Artemy wonders how much of that frown comes from living with an extra weight for all these years.
Not so much weight, not really. Just a bit of tissue and fat, easily disposed of. Not so much at all, compared to its weight in the world, in the mind.
There was a moment when he was working over Daniil’s body that Artemy felt his consciousness expand, could see doubled in his mind the Lines of Daniil’s body and the lines Daniil had drawn for him, the steps of the surgery that he had studied for years and still remembered by heart. It was as if Daniil’s own hands were guiding his, his body singing beneath him as he shaped it into the form it has always been meant to take.
And now…
He’s known it all along, of course, but perhaps it’s only now taking shape for him that it was Daniil beneath his scalpel, Daniil lying unconscious and bare before him on the table. Daniil’s body opening for him, showing him the secrets of its insides in a way he has never seen them before. Speaking to him, crying out its plea for his menkhu’s touch—following his blade as he coaxed it into a new form.
He lets out a shaky breath and stands, bracing himself on the back of the chair until he can trust his unsteady legs to support him. Comes around the exam table to stand at Daniil’s head, to brush a lock of hair back from his forehead.
Beneath his touch, Daniil’s eyes flutter open.
Artemy stills, hand still resting lightly on Daniil’s brow, and searches for his gaze. Daniil’s dark eyes are sleepy and unfocused, but they sharpen even as Artemy watches, his insatiable need to be aware wrestling stubbornly with the haze of the drugs. He lifts one hand, bending it only at the elbow, and brings it up to rest on his belly. “’s it done?” he slurs.
Artemy catches the hand before he can raise it higher, squeezing it between his own. “It’s done,” he says. “How do you feel?”
Daniil considers, his eyes flicking from Artemy and down to the sheet that still covers his body. Down, perhaps, to the flat planes of his chest, the unobscured view across the top of the sheet—for when his gaze rests there, he begins to smile.
“Good,” he says, and there is a trace of awe in his voice at the word that brings a lump to Artemy’s throat. His hand struggles to return the grasp of Artemy’s own: a faint, fluttering pressure against his fingers. “I feel—I feel good.”
“Good,” Artemy echoes, and as their fingers interlock, the Lines of both their bodies resonate with rightness.