Chapter Text
Where’s Anti?
Here.
With him, safe and sound. He has to be.
(Exhale. Inhale. Through the mouth.)
Where’s Anti?
(Sigh. This is all fine.)
Here. A coloured sketch of the scene.
They are together on the sofa, neither of them could sleep.
It’s dawn on the beach, golden and copper-red and surprisingly cold.
Days, weeks, months, seasons, time in general, anything other than the here and now, no longer exists.
It’s too good to be true, but it is.
Anti is fully stretched out, in his usual jeans and black T-shirt, barefoot, stamping on the armrest, his head in Henrik's lap, smiling up at his good doctor with sharp teeth, and prattles on about how he’s so sorry that he only managed to bring Goethe's Faust when Henrik asked him for something to read, and how unbearably boring that book seems, and how funny Henrik looks in his Hawaiian shirt, but he loves it, he loves it, he loves it.
Henrik just listens, absorbing every word, not what he says, but the way he shapes the words, the little glitches in his voice. Then the sight of him, the lights and the shades on his skin; surgically tracing the edges of his face under the beard, the way his eyes flutter, his lips, the way the static imperceptibly tear pieces out of him and then rearrange them back, and the way this happens again and again.
As he lovingly strokes Anti's velvety hair, the electric charge always leaves a few strands of hair clinging to his fingers.
“Henrik, you're not even listening,” Anti states kindly.
The doctor smiles back at him, and agrees that he’s really not. Then gently takes his demon's face in his hands. He wishes, aloud, almost begging, but only in his thoughts, that things had always been like this, that they would always stay like this.
He murmurs to the demon that he loves him, and he does it in German, because that's the most honest way he can say it.
Anti hums in satisfaction.
“Ich liebe dich.”
(Make yourself aware of facts. Things you’re one hundred percent sure about.)
“Ich liebe dich.”
And where is he?
Not here. There, somewhere, beyond everything.
Not with the doctor.
But he will come back for him.
(Calm the fuck down.)
“Ich liebe dich.”
But he can’t come back for him.
(Wait.)
The magical jar fell three stories from the window. It now lies in a thousand shiny pieces on the dark concrete, suffering the same fate as the mug by the bed. (Perhaps this is what’s called justice. Or an unkept promise.)
It looks like what the night sky should be. Still can't see the stars.
A dog starts barking somewhere, the sound bounces off the walls of houses.
Schneep bellows as he grips to the window frame, scanning the path for the shimmering crystals and shards of glass like a caged animal searching for the key to its prison.
The air feels heavy and thick and his lungs can't get enough of it.
It’s ridiculous. He has to get out of here.
He needs someone who doesn't judge, who understands, who is this force against everything, against his tormenting thoughts and anxiety and this bloody misery called his life.
Who’s there for him, who considers him... important.
He needs someone who makes him believe that he’s a good man and his mistakes are not his own. (Maybe Marvin was right. But that idea is soon washed away by a wave of other selfish-like sentiments.)
He needs half of the truth right now.
(He chants names in his head like the most desperate incantation.)
Die Ruhe.
Or simply he’ll go insane.
(Then, vaguely and illogicaly, he thinks about jumping off.)
After some hesitation, a soft and tingling kiss snaps on Henrik's forehead.
“I have a question. Got a name for me in German, doctor?”
“I like your name actually. Anti, Anti, Anti...” Henrik giggles, pronouncing the name with those beautiful open vowels of his accent, with the immature enthusiasm of a nursery rhyme. “But maybe…”
Just for a moment, he forgets his adoring, yet analytical eyes in the wound of the demon’s neck that will never heal.
That’s enough.
(“You’ve saved lives.” )
Schneep pushes himself violently away from the window, and then he rushes through the apartment to find what he has always kept in his wardrobe, in careful and strict order.
By the time he's got his slightly dusty white coat on, with all the ID he needs to get in, he's already running, not even locking the apartment, down the stairs, then through the sleepy streets of suburbia, faster than either a demon's teleportation or a magician's twisting magic could do.
His heart is thumping to the beat of his echoing footsteps, almost like his first day of work, once upon a time.
(Emotionless diagnosis: the anterior - larynx and trachea - and lateral regions of the neck are most exposed to trauma. Laceration.)
Anti's ferocious grasp on his wrist almost manages to startle him as the demon sits up and pulls the doctor away.
“What are you looking at?” he says edgily. “Don’t look at it.” That's an order.
(The pencil lines are blurred. They may not be accurate.)
Henrik immediately lowers his eyes, but Anti's grip stays on his hand, his nails digging into his skin. The doctor doesn't dare take it away, even when he feels his bones crack and, on the verge of pain, would cry out. (There are ten bones in the wrist. Ulna, radius, lunate…)
He stammers in confusion, he won't do it again, he didn’t mean to.
Can't feel his fingers moving.
When searches Anti’s gaze again, he can see his pupils dilating, the subtle movement of his muscles as he realises what he’s doing, and the shadows of panic. (Anger? Can’t be.)
Now only his thumb and index finger are wrapped around his wrist, loose and gentle, as Anti guides the doctor's hand in front of him.
Henrik groans at the throbbing pain. On his pale and thin skin, right next to his sick-bluish veins, are the red fingernail marks.
“Didn’t mean to,” the demon whispers in a flat tone, tracing the line of the veins with his fingertip. His expression reminds Henrik of medical students who are going through an autopsy for the first time in their lives. They want to see everything, and yet... they don't.
As if the demon feared that something had suddenly broken the spell.
The doctor quickly replies that nothing happened. He tries not to sniffle.
“Of course,” Anti nods. Maybe smiling. Then presses a kiss into Henrik's palm, and for a second the doctor feels the static, with alarm-reds and poison-greens and with a burning sensation, creeping under his skin. And just like that, nothing happened, indeed.
Like a patient with a fever, he shivers and boils at the same time.
He has no memory of how he got here. He blames it on the adrenalin rush circulating in his veins, which makes him unable to decide whether his walk has taken too long or too little. Irrelevant.
(Doesn’t have time for this. His demon may already be looking for him, certainly. Must be sure of that. Nothing else matters.)
Only the technical information that was once part of his daily routine: turn right, turn left, turn right again.
The place is most vulnerable between the night and morning shift. Still sleeping, not yet awake.
Here’s the back door with the least access hassle if called in an emergency.
Security cameras cover this corner.
Medical instruments are kept in that storage room. It's not locked.
Any idiot could easily get in, and he remembers how much it used to bother him, this kind of defenselessness, in one of the best hospitals in the country. How ironic.
The doctor mildly massages his perfectly uninjured wrist, feeling only phantom-numbness under his skin. Anti curls up next to him, lazily resting his head on his shoulder, and mumbles something about his doctor should wear colourful clothes like this more often.
Henrik, with a half-smile and a slightly numb brain, looks down at his Hawaiian shirt, and agrees whole-heartedly.
(But honestly, he would do so much more for him.)
Schneep scurries through the sterile-white wards and corridors, trying to force himself to slow down and breathe normally in the deserted silence.
His eyes burn and sting terribly, but the familiar scent of disinfectants almost succeeds in soothing him. Almost.
Nothing seems real.
“Excuse me, sir. Where are you going?”
Schneep pauses at the question from the night nurse behind him. Her voice is somewhere on the verge of sleep. She probably thinks she's dreaming. (He sympathises with her on this.)
Panicked screams chase through his skull: kill her, kill her, kill her. (That’s not a scary thought.)
He puts his arm around Anti, who is more snuggled up to him, and talks about how his daughter used to say similar things, and how he was sure she would like him very much, especially as she was interested in such strange things anyway.
Anti laughs and shakes his head. Blood streams down his neck from that damned wound, and Henrik tries to ignore this. He can’t ignore his concern, however. In his opinion, it’s understandable.
“I also have a question,” the doctor says, Anti's hair is still impossibly soft between his fingers, and Anti with closed eyes nearly purrs.
“You’ve always got some.”
“Does it hurt?”
Stop. Anti snaps open his eyes, his figure tenses.
“No,” he replies, relatively calm. “It doesn't hurt. It’s just there. That’s all.”
That’s all.
“Do you have a problem with it, Henrik?”
“No! No, of course not, I just want to make sure you're not suffering.”
A dry snort into his shoulder.
“And perhaps,” the doctor continues, his caress is soothing, “I can try to stitch it up.”
He feels only a tiny pang of guilt. (He just wants to help, that’s his job.)
“If you bring the tools. As I see, the wound is not life-threatening for you, so it's just a completely clean and a little deeper cut. A routine job for me. And you know… Once I treated the exact same wound. I did a good job with that.” He hasn't sounded so confident in a long time. So proud of those precise, steady, skilled, broken hands, his knowledge, his profession. So happy.
(This may be the only time when his thoughts are not replaying over and over again how he ruined everything afterwards.)
The demon doesn’t react.
“Of course, only if you trust me not to hurt you,” Henrik adds, cackling, as if it were a bad and light-hearted joke.
(Details and answers are lacking in the picture.)
The doctor must have fallen asleep on that sofa, because the next time he looks up, Anti is nowhere to be seen, and although the sun is high in the sky, he’s cold.
Schneep addresses the nurse over his shoulder, not turning to face her. She is awfully young, he can see that now, and reminds him of someone.
“You're new here, right? We haven't met yet. I was on leave for a while. Work was piling up, so I came in early,” he utters all these things so naturally, he almost forgets that none of them are lies. He wants to appear calm. Composed, as someone who belongs in these corridors even more than this girl here. He works here as a surgeon, for fuck’s sake.
(Kill her. He’d tell the demon to kill her, and he would do exactly that instantly.)
He nervously rummages in his lab coat pocket.
On the periphery, he sees the nurse standing there, blinking in confusion, and sees the moment when she finally nods with conviction. (Too easy, but why shouldn’t it be?)
“Right, I... I didn't mean to bother you, uhm... Can I get a name though? For administration. I need to check things out.“
“Henrik von Schneeplestein, MD. Attending Physician.” (This is the surest thing.)
He doesn’t regret the arrogant edge of his voice. He's not even there anymore.
The doctor moves forward with measured steps, following the map in his mind, the hospital departments following one after another as he passes them: Cardiology, Neurology, familiar places from the past.
It's as if the whole place is a labyrinth in pieces, a fragmenting illusion reflected in a window pane. The place doesn't look real at all.
Then he finds himself in the Intensive Care Unit.
His blood is pounding in his ears.
It’s pure instinct when he opens one of the rooms. It's a wonder he doesn't collapse right there on the doorstep.
All the energy he's used to get to this point suddenly abandons him, leaving him nothing but what he really feels he was from the start: a weak man with a weak mind. And for a moment it occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't be here. However, at this point it no longer matters.
He has everything at his disposal, a full arsenal of medical equipment.
Scissors, scalpels, staples, absorbable sutures soldered to the end of hook-shaped needles, medium-strength anaesthetics, anti-inflammatory drugs, antiseptics, and much more.
Half of which he doesn't need, and he's almost certain Anti robbed a hospital for them. (Patients may have died from this, and oh, how he doesn't care.)
Careful, deliberate stitch after slow, steady stitch.
“Don't strain your neck, please...”
The first time is a nervous routine-recall.
Stitch after stitch tears open soon after and gushes fresh, deep-red blood.
The second time feels more like defiance in the face of inevitable reality.
Henrik's hand twitches. He concentrates so hard that sweat sits on his forehead.
Third time’s a charm, they say, and they are lying. Fourth time, and it’s all the same.
And the demon is so calm, so patient, so bored, keeping his neck perfectly straight as the doctor tries again and again. A smirk plays at the corner of his mouth.
Tiresome stitch after stitch.
“Hopeless.”
“Just not easy. It’s part of a deal, after all. Part of me and Jack, apparently.”
“Jack's wound was one of the most beautifully healing scars I've ever seen, but here… I'm afraid I'm going to make it worse with new attempts. Please, forgive me, I don't know what I'm doing wrong...”
“No, come on, just calm down and keep trying for me.” Henrik can't recall the demon’s features when he says that, just his lips on his lips. “I don't like it when you're so disappointed.”
Countless tries, but all they achieve is that the doctor gets more and more intoxicating kisses, and his hands dirty with more and more blood.
(Familiar, more or less pleasant things.)
The room is so terribly spacious and empty, its windows are so unnecessarily large, and Jack looks so tiny and fragile on the hospital bed, in the mass of tubes and wires. Only the rhythmic beeping of the machine next to him indicates that he is, incredibly, alive.
(In theory, it's all thanks to Schneep.)
(He gets confused as he lists the names of the instruments. He mixes them up.)
The doctor steps closer. Black tears are streaming helplessly down his face.
Here lies before him all his good deeds and all his terrible sins. But he can't help smiling, even bittersweetly, at the thought of seeing him again.
“My friend,” he weeps as he carefully lowers himself to the edge of the bed. Through his tear-stained glasses, he watches Jack's chest rise and fall. His sunken face behind the oxygen mask. The even whiter scar on the pale skin of his neck. One of the doctor’s best works. (It's going to be okay.) “What have we got ourselves into? I'll never let you hold a knife in your hand ever again.”
He reaches for his patient’s hand in which the infusion was tied, rubs the back of it with his thumb. The doctor’s other hand’s still in the pocket of his white coat.
Jack remains motionless, his chest goes up and down. The instruments show no change, just steady sledging rates and another beep.
A deep sigh.
What was he thinking? Nine months don't magically disappear without a trace. It’s even possible that he will never wake up…
Schneep's eyes widen with terror.
Perhaps it’s only the hum of the machines that keeps him alive. Then it was Schneep who condemned him to this lifeless existence and others to continue their own lives with this in mind.
(It’s his fault. That’s the truth.)
It's too much to bear.
“I'm so sorry, I never wanted this... And neither did Anti, he didn't mean to hurt you! Forgive me for not being able to save you, but he tried to help me…”
Dawn is breaking outside, the sky is red underneath.
Henrik cannot see clearly.
Beep.
“He helped me so much… And after my previous marriage, when you were so worried about me, I dared to fall in love again. I’m in love with him! Still sounds so unbelievable...”
Beep.
(He thinks about those so-called intentions Marvin talked about. Magic needs them to work.)
(“Ich liebe dich.”)
“He loves me as well! You'd be so happy for me!” Henrik is choking with laughter. “And I don't want to lose him. Not him, not anymore. You understand that, right?”
Why he expects an answer, he doesn’t know. He takes the oxygen mask off Jack as carefully as possible. Nothing changes for a while.
At least he can get another good look at his face. How peaceful. How dead-like.
(There’s a doctor who ruins everything he loves.)
Beep.
(Anti, Anti, Anti.)
“Help me, Jack. I know you would. I can't do it any other way.”
He wishes his friend could hear what he is saying. He wishes he could actually agree to this. Justify it.
(The heart slowly tears out of the chest.)
(Anti, Anti… Then he calls him in German, because that's an even more honest way he can say it.)
“Bring him back to me, bitte," he breathes in his final despair. Then it happens.
He pulls his hand out of his pocket with that brand new silver scalpel.
Just one swift movement. A quick cut.
It runs along the same place, the same way and the same size as the previous scar.
Surgical precision. A deadly straight line.
It's almost elegant the way Jack's blood starts to bead. Slowly, drop by drop. How different from anything the doctor had ever experienced.
Mesmerised, he picks up a tiny red drop with his finger.
He holds his breath, and swears Jack’s eyelids flickered, an it doesn't matter anymore.
A flatline. A prolonged beep. That's it.
Jack's dead-like face changes nothing.
Henrik then backs away from him, and waits. Closes his eyes to see only his Operencia, far away, so far away, where anything can happen, even the impossibility that he’s a good man, not this childish and selfish mess. Where only the windswept scent of the sea is in the air, not the iron smell of blood, there’s no blood in the ocean...
(The machines go completely silent.)
He clings into this picture of his mind tooth and nail, like a child into his blanket and into the whispered bedtime stories, when he’s frightened by the dark and the monsters of the night.
(“You are mine, and I am yours, and no one in the world can alter that,” the Brothers Grimms said once.)
He embraces himself.
(Anti, Anti… The chant continues.)
And he waits.
He waits.
He waits.
He cries.
(A tiny spark on one of the screens. Reds and greens and scattered fragments.)
“Henrik.”
He freezes just for a moment.
“Mein Herzblatt...” It's little more than a strongly accented whisper.
Then the doctor rises up all the more vehemently, holding the demon as tightly as he can, burying his head in the side of his neck, and he cries, he cries, he cries all his tears.
“Let’s go home, take me home…”
Everything is covered by the light of dawn.
His tears mix with the blood of the cut, and he cannot see Anti's face as the demon asks:
“What have you done, doctor?”
This is the part in the fairy tale when Schneep would have realised that his daughter had fallen asleep, sweetly snoring, hugging her knitted, Hawaiian-shirted cat plushie.
Schneep would smile at this. Of course, it was always the most questionable, the most graphic, the most bizarre details that reassured her in the middle of the night.
What else could the good storyteller do?
Schneep, for example, would adjust her blanket, kiss her goodnight and finish by saying: and then they lived happily ever after.
It could be half-true, a half-lie, or neither.
Maybe after some points, after some things have been broken, the end of the story doesn't even matter anymore.
And with that, Schneep would walk out of the room.