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It hadn’t always been like this.
As fluid as the routine had become, as natural as it felt to see Andrey abrasive and on edge, to see Peter drooping like a wilted flower, drunk and nauseous and tired beyond words of a mind that dripped impossible ink like vodka from a leaky faucet, no, it hadn’t always been like this.
Andrey had been in a fight.
This, in itself, was hardly unusual; Andrey was quick to anger, a feral cat with his claws always out and at the ready. This time, though, was different, for, now that the fight was over, Andrey found himself overcome by a rather unfamiliar sensation: guilt.
“Is he dead?”
The voice was soft, slow, but somehow not at all reassuring. Andrey, a handkerchief pressed to his nose to quell the determined flow of blood from it, slowly met his brother’s eyes, finding them bloodshot, highlighted by a face as pale as his own. He took a breath and looked back at the shape lying suspiciously still on the ground.
“He-” Andrey licked his lips nervously. Another unusual feeling for him. He nudged the body roughly with his toe, and he - it? Was Farkhad an it, now he was dead? - flopped over, face-up.
“Yeah,” Andrey muttered at last.
There was a pregnant pause.
“Andrey,” Peter whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Is this our fault?”
Andrey made a sharp, disbelieving noise, dropping his bloody handkerchief. “No!” he exclaimed. “Why the hell-” he sniffed loudly as his nose began to drip. “Why the hell would it be?”
Peter stared at the corpse, his eyes glassy and vacant. A slash wound on his upper arm was bleeding sluggishly, and there were smears of red on his sleeves, his palms, his left cheek, his shoes. The color didn’t suit him.
“It’s my fault.”
Andrey snorted dismissively, ignoring the knot writhing like a python in his gut.
“How d’you figure?”
A strange look came over Peter’s face, his jaw tensing and brow furrowing, suddenly so expressive that it momentarily caught Andrey off-guard. In an uncharacteristically swift movement, Peter knelt by the body and, lifting the left arm, pressed his fingers against the wrist. He made a frustrated noise.
“I don’t even know how- Andrey, you do it, you took a class in medicine.”
Andrey looked up from picking up his handkerchief to meet Peter’s beseeching eyes.
“Do what?”
Peter’s lip curled in annoyance. “Find his pulse, Andrey.”
Andrey opened his mouth to repeat that it was no use, the man was dead, but (in a remarkable show of self-restraint) thought better of it and took Farkhad’s arm, digging two fingers into the wrist and counting to ten. Peter stared with anxious eyes, and Andrey heaved a sigh and dropped the arm.
“He’s dead, Petya.” Blood tickled at his upper lip, and he sniffed again before adding, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry.”
Peter went somehow even paler than he had been and rocked back on his heels.
“What are we going to do?” he said quietly.
Andrey grimaced. “Well, we should probably get the fuck out of here, for one thing.”
“We can’t just leave him.”
“Why not? He doesn’t care, at this point, and it’s better than being arrested.”
Peter’s head whipped around. “Arrested,” he repeated, as though he’d had a sudden revelation. “Should we do that?”
Andrey choked. “What?!”
Peter looked again at Farkhad. “Get arrested.” A beat. “No, you’re right, that’s stupid.” He thought for a moment. “They would, though, wouldn’t they? Arrest us?”
“Well, yeah. We k- that is, I-” Andrey swallowed his words awkwardly. “Well, it was technically murder, wasn’t it?”
At the word murder, Peter tensed, then put a hand over his eyes, his breathing beginning to grow harsh and panicked.
“Fuck, shit, fuck,” he hissed. “I killed him. I killed him, my- our friend, I-” Peter sank into himself, scrambling to find his breath, and Andrey hurriedly moved to put a firm hand on his shoulder.
“It wasn’t your fault, Petya,” he said, careful to keep his voice calm. “It was me who killed him, not you. My knife, my fight, my murder. Look, it’s- we’ll be fine, this is hardly the first time I’ve been in a fight that went too far-”
Peter shook his head. “No, no, Andrey, those were different, this was my fault-” He inhaled sharply and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “If I had just waited, if- I didn’t think he would die, I just wanted him to get away from you, I-I didn’t know about the knife, I didn’t think he’d- fuck, shit, Andrey, are you sure he’s dead?”
Andrey felt his heart stutter in his chest, and his hand trembled slightly as he rubbed Peter’s back.
“I was the one holding the knife,” he said. “If anyone’s in the wrong, it’s me. I stabbed him, even if-” he licked his lips nervously and tasted blood. “-even if I didn’t mean to, it was still me who did it. And I started the fight, in any event.” His gaze flickered to the slash wound on Peter’s arm. “And besides, you got hurt, because I did that.”
Peter let out a stifled noise, not quite a sob. “No, you didn’t. I pushed him into your knife, you didn’t stab him, and he started the fight, not you.”
“I- did he?”
Peter sniffed. “He said you were stealing my designs.”
“Yeah, but I hit first.”
“Lies like that are bound to start fights.” Peter looked at Andrey with a sudden terror. “We’ll have to leave,” he said, “we’ll have to leave before we can build it. The spiral. Right when it’s starting to take shape- we won't be able to build it.”
“We won’t have to leave town unless they catch us.” Andrey’s gaze slipped back over to the body. The blood had stopped oozing from Farkhad’s chest, now, and just pooled in a stagnant puddle all around him. For a moment, it seemed to him that blood was all he could see, all he could smell, all he could taste – but that probably had something to do with his own injuries. He wondered idly if his nose was broken.
Peter let out a shuddering breath. “What’s it worth, all this?” he said in a small voice, one he only dared use with Andrey, the harsh murmur that betrayed all of his fear. “I can’t save anyone, after all. Farkhad would be alive, if not for me. He- he’s dead. Farkhad is dead, Andrey, I l- he was our friend.” He looked down at his hands, slippery with blood. “I should let them take me. Please, I’ll just- I’ll let them take me. You should go.”
The words hit Andrey almost physically, and he shuddered.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said, and grabbed Peter’s uninjured arm to pull him to a standing position. “We’re going home. We both need bandaging. And a bath.”
Peter frowned, but, after a moment, let himself be towed along. He had always thought of himself as little as he could manage, and in not many more words than architect and twin and, sometimes, when he was feeling good about himself, artist. Useless words, all of them; it was what one did and said that made an identity, not how one described oneself. This was the closest thing to comfort Peter could think to try and offer himself as his mind chanted at him – murderer, murderer, murderer.
The staircases curved into the sky as though hinting at something beyond - an impossibility, like everything Peter dreamed of, like the spirals that the twyrine traced in his mind's eye. Monuments, of a sort. Of a sort. True atonement was a fantasy indulged in only by the vain and the naïve, naturally, as unattainable as revenge, or sobriety. Peter could build staircases as high as the heavens themselves, but all that would ever lie in wait atop them was a long fall and the satisfaction of an ending, the only permanence in all the world, the endless dark. Sometimes, in the long, late, nights of summer, he could gaze into that very dark and speak, as though he ever could find words to say, and Farkhad's voice would whisper back, bodiless and betrayed.
Some things simply cannot be undone.