• Old Black Train by mothi (Pathologic, Burakhovsky)

╰┈• Artemy Burakh is not a man who cries. He has no specific opposition to doing so, but it does not come naturally to him as it does to some. He did not have the chance to weep when his father died. He did not have the chance to weep for the Town; for those who were lost.

He weeps now. The force of it tears his body apart, a pain so exquisite he forgets to breathe, cracking his ribs and making his breath come in gulps that shake his lungs. He weeps for Dankovsky: for a man never mourned nor missed who died alone and afraid with his own blood pooling around him; for a doctor who could not save himself; for a lonely, lost man. For a friend he never had the chance to love.

• It Hurts to Become by inkpot_demigod (Pathologic, Burakhovsky)

╰┈• The inquisitor’s voice seemed to cut through layers too easily, like a surgeon who recognized nothing between the skin and heart.

╰┈• Perhaps that was what hope for the future looked like on her face, like a whisper, like what seeped down into the earth and waited for spring to grow.

╰┈• He couldn’t say that speaking to the other man had started to feel, at some point, like solid ground. No traps rigged in his path. He couldn’t say that looking at Daniil, condemned by fate and yet alive, made him feel somehow saved as well.

╰┈• “Then tell me,” she urged him. “What will you be instead?”

For all the thought he had put into it, the answer still didn’t come easy. Perhaps because it was so large, and the window for it seemed to be closing. Those of them who were in between one state and another would have to choose soon. Their lives wouldn’t be over, the metamorphosis wouldn’t end that cleanly, but it would have a direction. An end goal.

“Do you think my answer has changed since last time?”

Her lips tugged tighter. “The last four days would have changed some minds,” she said. “Or rotted them away. Only a very brave or very foolish man could emerge from all of this the same as when he went in.”

“Then I’m neither,” he informed her. “I’ve changed. But my answer is the same.”

“A healer, then.” She left the smile behind with a slow turn of her head. A look towards home, or the closest she had – that dividing line.

╰┈• How young she still was, and how she was trying to rush it along. To grow into the wounds of the town and become its connective tissue.

╰┈• “I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.'” - Andrea Gibson

• i will get up now and go about the city by spargelseason (Pathologic, Burakhovsky)

╰┈• Listlessly, he says, “I don’t believe you. And I don’t like you. Actually, that’s too mild a statement. I feel an innate resentment toward you.” Her face twists into something like a smug, mocking smile.

From the edge of the stage, a sigh. “I don’t like you, either, girl of faith.” A pause. “But not just you. I’m not sure I know how to love.

Dankovsky laughs, sharp and jarring, and too loud, either for the theatre or the empty night. An ugly, desperate sound.

“You don’t know how to love,” he chokes out, leaning heavily on the proskenion.

“You—”

He crosses the stage, or room, and crouches near the edge of it. Hesitant, puts a hand on Burakh’s shoulder.

“Artemy,” he says, and the name, the well-worn fondness of it, makes Burakh startle, wary, and look him in the face. In the flimsy candlelight, shadow draws long deep lines in his face, like incisions. 

“You don’t know,” Dankovsky says, squeezing his arm, “how to do anything but.”

It floods out of you, like blood, till you bleed dry.

╰┈• When he looks up, she’s gone.

So, down again: he’d worried the glove's clasp undone. Something red bursts through. He tugs it off, left, then right, to reveal the smudges: along the line of from ulna to metacarpus and the phalanges, there’s blood on his hands.

The vital organs, Daniil knows, including the heart, have no colour. Cleaned and cleared, the tissue of human organism is grey, colourless. Blood makes an exception, a warning sign.

With shaking hands, he stuffs the gloves in the inner pocket of his coat. Left side, over the heart.

He stands at the edge.

The wind pulls at him, inviting. An old friend welcoming home.

Vale, thinks Dankovsky, and takes a step.

-

Hypnic jerk. The sensation, muscle spasm, as you cross the threshold of consciousness as though missing a step in a staircase. Heart tugs, something wild and frantic, before everything realigns.

He inhales sharply, stunned, surrounded with sudden studious darkness. Dimly, a source of light looms, somewhere undefinably above. Mostly he can hear his own breathing—and heart. It races, dull and scared in the ribcage.

Soft laughter, then, footsteps. And then, someone’s hands reaching for him, pulling him upright.

“Careful,” a voice, “You fell off the stage.”

• permit me the present tense by mrcogito (Pathologic, Burakhovsky)

╰┈• The absence of memory is wedged inside his chest, displaced from the mind, and he tries to carve it out with the force of his will and the equal and opposite absence of a question.

╰┈• The second you were gone, Dankovsky thinks, incongruously, all that remained was entropy.