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He was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of stew with no thought for anything but the colours that rose and sank in it, when he heard quick, barefoot steps and felt the weight of a running child smack into him from the side.
Small arms wrapped tight around his leg. Trembling with the strength of their grip, and he stood frozen.
All at once, in his mind, he was in the theatre again. In the dark place he almost remembered existing between a knife’s thrust through his ribs and the next gasp. The smirking face of the impresario.
Everything that had been taken from him there. He had thought it would be easier to give up, sometimes. It would be kinder to die mostly whole.
But he had kept giving up more for the chance to come back. To make his world whole. He still didn’t know whether any of it was more than a dream. He only knew that, if he thought of wrapping his arms around someone in that way, a cold hand seemed to close around his heart and pin it to his spine.
Pain and freeze, until he gave up on the idea. He had given up. But Murky’s small arms trembled around him, ten seconds, perhaps, of silent shock and love before she stepped away.
Even clean, she looked like something that had been lurking around the train cars. Like a stray cat; she looked up at him with the same wariness in her eyes, as if she trusted neither her ability to give affection nor his to receive it.
He tried to think of something to say to her. But his mind was still in the theatre, and she turned to run before he could coax it back. Her bare feet pattered away through the house, bringing welcome noise to its emptiness. Her brother – her brother because of him, both of them saved and brought together through him – shouted something to her from upstairs, and she ran to join him.
He stood. Frozen still, not by a hand around his heart and spine, but by the warmth of her grip lingering ghost-like around his leg. The warmth of a sigh she had left there, the warmth of being held, which he had bargained away.
For them. For days like that, the dream of them, peace, a place they could all live together happily. He stood wondering if that was a bargain he could still break, had broken, and if so, what would happen next.
The stew simmered. A sweet red smell and steam rising to his face. The front door opened and closed, and the tread of boots tracked through the house. So much noise where there had once been emptiness; he didn’t turn, couldn’t bring himself to, even when the tread stopped behind him.
He was still trying to sense the integrity or crumbling of his world, waiting for the theatre, when a new set of arms slid around him. Around his waist, and the pressure of a cheek turned sideways settled against his back.
His heart quivered free. The smell of the stew was taking on acrid undertones, and he reminded himself to stir it. Rote circles while his mind ran wider.
“I can’t say I ever expected to come home to someone who could cook,” Daniil murmured into his back. Hands still gloved, linked around his waist.
Artemy stared down at them. The tight, affirming link of fingers. His chest ached for how much he wanted it to be that easy. A curse shed.
A bad dream forgotten. But he could sense, around his heart, that he still wouldn’t be able to reach out. He had made a trade for what he had.
And it had been worthwhile, even if it meant those silences between them. When he would have known how to touch but didn’t know how to speak, and so did nothing. He stirred the pot, and tried to swallow the awful size of the thing in his throat, his chest, that wished and wished...
“You know,” Daniil spoke, still into the rhythmic movement of his back, “This would be much easier if you’d stop pretending you have something to apologize for.”
His grip tightened on the spoon. He could still hold things that way, the way he would grip a knife. Cruel.
He could still hold a scalpel. Still fulfill his purpose. It felt, sometimes, like he had carved away everything else for that.
But the other man’s arms were still around him. He was warm, there and where Murky had gripped him in her quick, nervous way. Her testing way, as if she, like him, still couldn’t quite believe their happy life was solid all the way through.
He would have held her back. He hoped she knew that, at least.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Touching would have been easier. Words seemed to come out brusque and clumsy when they were in touch’s place.
Daniil scoffed. Somewhere between touch and word, communicated through the place where their bodies met.
“You can’t play the ignoramus with me,” he said, “Remember? You skulk around like this isn’t your home. Whenever one of us gets near you, you go practically myotonic. I know you’ve said you have...limitations. I won’t pretend to understand, and you’ve made it clear you don’t want me to. But-”
“It isn’t that.” Brusque again. Clumsy. The language of warmth had been native to him. Was that why the smirking man in the theatre had taken it? If he had valued the language of lungs more, would a cold hand clench them now whenever he tried to speak?
“It isn’t that,” he repeated, if only to be sure that it wouldn’t. His lungs were free, and his heart, so long as he didn’t think of turning to put his arms around the other man in turn. “I want you to understand. But I can’t explain it. I’m not...”
The word clambered inside of him. The cold hand. He clenched his teeth and forced it out.
“...allowed.”
Silence. He lifted the pot off the heat, the smell gone thick-savoury and finished. The children would be down once they noticed it. Like stray cats, both of them, in how they ate as well. Someday, somehow, he would convince them both that the food and shelter of that place would always be there.
He would do his best for them. The best that was left. He couldn’t use all the words he wanted to promise that.
Daniil sighed. Another touch by way of word, whispered through both of them.
“Is this about your rites?” he asked. “No – don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”
Artemy tilted his head to his shoulder. That much movement, without any intent in his arms, was allowed. A questioning look.
“Really, oynon? You don’t need to know something?”
Daniil stared up at him. A moment’s surprise in brown eyes, his chin indenting the stiff weave of Artemy’s shirt. Perhaps he had not realized himself what the words meant before he spoke them.
“No,” he seemed to decide only as he spoke, “I suppose I don’t.” A smirk lifted the thin line of his lips. “The world’s mysteries may, by and large, be fair game, but lovers are allowed their secrets.”
Buried in that sentence was a word that still filled Artemy’s chest with an expansive, dreamish feeling. Another thing he had been waiting for life, or death, to take from him, yet there it was.
There it was. He turned back to the stove, turned the spoon in lazy circles, surfacing colours. Not because the stew needed stirring, but because standing there in the warmth of good work, in someone else’s arms, was something he still wanted to make himself believe.
Something he wanted to believe would last. In every way he could, he would make it last.
“I’ll find a way to tell you someday,” he promised. “I won’t keep anything from you that I can share.”
Daniil laughed. Perhaps Artemy wouldn’t share this, but he believed, sincerely, that that was the best feeling to share between two bodies.
“A bold promise.” He turned his head to rest again, against Artemy’s back. “Well, then. I’ll await that day with bated breath. And until then...it seems that whatever rules apply to you have no power over me.”
“No,” Artemy acknowledged. Slowly, still waiting for the world or the theatre to prove him wrong. “They don’t seem to.”
“Not that that would stop me anyways. You should know, I don’t have the most cordial history with rules.”
A smile tugged at Artemy's lips. Despite the waiting, the ever-present threat of the theatre. It seemed impossible that the world could ever crumble or fall like curtains when Daniil spoke of it with such breezy confidence. “Really? I thought I had invited a docile man into my home. You still plan to continue your war with fate, then?”
It seemed impossible that it could do anything but change for the better.
“Of course. Really, the only thing that might convince me to surrender on this front-” And one of his gloved hands opened, a lover’s tease and a doctor’s deliberate pressure, across Artemy’s stomach- “Is if you asked me to. So? Will you ask me to?”
He sighed. Steam curled away from the waiting pot; no other hand would have felt safe where Daniil’s rested. No other hand had ever said, so gently, ‘I know you’.
"No," he said. "No. This is all I could have asked for."
A smile curved, still closer to a smirk and satisfied, in Daniil's voice.
"Well. I might ask for more later, if it's all the same to you, but- ah. And here comes the ravening horde."
Footsteps thundered down the stairs. Murky called after the boy who was now her brother, and Daniil slid to a chaster grip, one arm slung around Artemy from the side. An easy confidence in how he held, always, and a new liberation in his eyes. Yes – perhaps he hadn’t realized before that there were things, important things, he could live without knowing.
“Someday,” Artemy murmured, as much to himself as the man at his side. It was another good word. A warm and sun-soaked word, one the theatre had promised in its whispering, sacrificial way. One his home, now filled with children’s laughter, promised every day, warmth in a language he was still allowed to feel.
A word of gambles, and a prayer. There was no time for Daniil to respond. The children arrived as they always did for dinner, in a clamour of voices. Artemy turned to them, still in Daniil’s grip, which tightened against his movement. Against the rules, perhaps. But it seemed the man in the dark theatre hadn’t accounted for the fact that some people made it their life’s work to fight the rules and win.