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Sergey feels as if he hasn't slept in days. He probably hasn’t. The one person who would usually tell him to stop fucking around on computers and go to bed is…
His fingers twitch for the phone. Reflexively checking for new messages, even though the phone sits snugly against his thigh in his pocket, he would feel it buzzing. It doesn’t matter, he still checks. It’s not like he has anything better to do with his time.
Lera got fed up with him several hours into this and deleted the first message from his conversations. He downloaded it again from the cloud backup when she wasn't looking.
The base is compromised, neither he nor Lera can go anywhere near it. He spreads his contacts across the city, releases bots into the dark web, combs through every string of communication he can catch. Nothing comes up. Whoever works for this - this someone who kidnapped Oleg - is either extremely well paid to keep their mouth shut, or more likely, already dead.
Sergey stares at the picture until it blurs before his eyes. Lera is there again - when did she leave? She’s handing him a cup of black coffee. Her face is hard but her eyes are worried.
Sergey can’t shake off the feeling that he’s missing something. Something obvious, something right before his eyes. But he can’t find it, no matter how many hours he stares into the screens, no matter how little he tries to even blink for fear of missing something. His eyes burn. He’s so tired.
Waiting for something, anything to grab and run with, even the tiniest clue, is bad enough.
Knowing that Oleg is waiting too is worse.
But then the worst happens. More pictures start coming.
#ICouldDoThisAllDayPlagueDoctor
Oleg’s face is hardly recognisable under all that blood and swelling. Sergey deletes this picture before Lera can see it.
#TheClockIsTickingPlagueDoctor
Sergey’s going to find that man and brand a hashtag on his fucking face before he kills him.
Something is telling him not to check the phone after the last buzz. A self-preservation instinct, maybe. But even as his heart is trying to hammer out of his chest with terror, his hand moves on autopilot: thumbprint, tap, swipe.
#OopsTooLatePlagueDoctor
Sergey stares at the picture but his mind refuses to register it. As if the shock cut off the neural paths between his eyes and his brain. The part of it that translates visual stimuli and assigns them meaning is completely numb.
*
Too late.
He’d been too slow. Too scared. Too stupid.
Lera is talking to him but he doesn’t hear her. He sees her mouth move but the voice coming out of it is not hers. It almost sounds like his own. Almost.
Too weak .
Something is fluttering at the edge of his vision. A flurry of black. Dark, smooth, glossy feathers. Sergey squeezes his eyes shut. It doesn’t help. The voice is inside his own head.
It could be the voice of his guilty conscience. But... there’s an edge to it, a jarring resonance he recognises, and it fills him with dread.
Idiot. An utter idiot. Who’s going to be on your side now? How stupid you are, always putting your faith in people who leave you.
“Oleg didn’t leave me!” Sergey shouts to drown out the hissing, crackling mockery in his head. “He… was taken from me.”
Oleg didn’t leave him. Not this time. This time he stayed… till the end.
And what’s the difference? The result is the same. You’re alone. Pathetic weakling.
He must be imagining it. He used to hear that voice for so many years that it’s ingrained in his memory, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. So it has to be his imagination. The Bird is gone. Devoured.
On his face, Sergey can still feel the splatter of blood when the Raven god had bitten off the Bird’s head.
But who knows what is possible at the edge of oblivion?
You know I would have never left you.
“Oleg. Didn’t. LEAVE ME!” Sergey screams it this time but strangely, he can’t hear anything. Nothing but the crooning, mocking, cruel voice.
He already left you once - and you begged me to fill the gap. He’s gone now - and suddenly you think you can do it all on your own? Find his murderers and kill them, alone?
A smell of stale blood and rotting flesh fills his nostrils, so intense he nearly gags. He coughs and sputters and tries not to think about the truth in those words. Because he is alone now. Lera won’t help him, she would never kill a man, no matter how foul. The mercs they sometimes hired? They were Oleg’s friends, not Sergey’s. There’s no one looking out for him now, no one to tell him to go to bed, no one to keep him from going off the rails-
-and he could. Go off the rails. That’s something he remembers all too well. Fire and destruction all over the city just to get back at one man.
But even that requires planning, and determination, and focus, and above all, courage-
That was me, silly. Because I am what you’re lacking. You’re nothing without me.
Sergey doesn’t want to listen. He wants to prick his ears to never hear it again. But deep inside he knows he can’t escape it. Because it’s the truth.
It was always like this, wasn’t it? People hurt Seryozha - and the Bird made them pay.
But why should I help you again?
“Because I…. I need you.”
He whispers it instead of screaming but it’s enough. The flapping of wings is now everywhere, slithering across his face in a strange caress that leaves goosebumps in its wake, and then there are talons, sharp pinpricks of pain digging into his skin like a familiar embrace-
Oh, darling. I thought you’d never ask.
*
“No!”
Sergey’s eyes snap open. But instead of the dreaded fiery golden gaze he meets Lera’s light brown as she stares down on him, eyebrows raised.
“You were screaming.”
A dream. The Bird was only a dream. Sergey curls forward in the computer chair he fell asleep in, ignoring the pangs in his back, rests his head in his hands, and just breathes.
A roasty, bittersweet smell hits his nose. There’s a cup of coffee on the desk in front of him. It’s still warm.
Wait. Didn’t Lera bring him coffee just before they got the second picture...
Sergey nearly knocks the cup over in his scramble for his phone. He holds his breath and checks his messages.
There are no other pictures than just the one. The date and time blink gleefully at him. It’s early morning, the day after Oleg was taken. Sergey must have dozed off with exhaustion. It was just a nightmare.
Except… it felt far too real.
“Lera? If we don’t find him in time… promise me you’ll be able to stop me.”
Those deeply unimpressed looks are another thing she picked up from Oleg, besides hand-to-hand combat. “Sure,” she says. There’s just the right amount of dismissive coddling in her tone that makes his hackles rise instantly.
“You think you know me?” he hisses. “You have watched the news! You know what I did. Do you believe it was just a psychosis? That it wasn’t really me?”
She’s waiting out his outburst with the same silent patience Oleg always has, and Sergey needs to drive the point home.
“It wasn’t an illness, Lera! It was a choice. A fucking choice I made.”
She tilts her head at him. “And what makes you so sure you’d make that same choice again?”
Sergey slumps back in his chair. His hair, crusted with sweat, is sticking to the back of his neck. He rubs at it with his sleeve.
“I just...” he sighs. “The nightmare-”
“-was just that,” Lera interrupts him. “A nightmare. It’s not real.”
She says it with the same benevolent conviction of an older sister assuring her younger brother that there are no monsters under his bed. Too bad Sergey likes to argue, even on a good day.
“I’d say that our dreams represent a pretty solid image of our subconscious, Lera.”
“I performed a vivisection on my anatomy professor the night before my exam,” she answers without missing a beat.
For a second, Sergey chokes on a swallow, before he remembers her tendency for making medical jokes. Damn her, she got him again.
“And it wasn’t any representation of my subconscious desire to eviscerate that bastard,” Lera continues with just the tiniest smirk, “it was simply my brain’s way of revisiting the chapter on the abdominal cavity. Because earlier, I heard it’s his favourite question. I got an A for that, by the way.”
“Congratulations,” Sergey huffs. “Now if grades were all that I could get for having to face my greatest fear almost every night-”
“And what was it?” she asks. “What did you dream about just now?” She sounds too serious for it to be just an idle chit chat but…
“I can’t possibly explain,” he sighs again. Oleg would understand. Lera wasn’t even alive when this started.
“Don’t explain,” she shrugs. “Forget about what it means . What was it that you saw ?”
Where did this curiosity come from? First, she says it’s just a nightmare, and then she wants to know everything about it-
“Dreams are not metaphors,” she repeats. “They’re trying to show us something. Earlier, you were going on and on about how you’re missing something, that there’s something just out of reach. And then you fell asleep and had this dream. What did you see? ”
Sergey presses the heels of his palms against his temples and tries to remember - to separate what he saw from what he interpreted .
Black feathers. Crow feathers. Smooth and flapping, smelling with the blood of a fresh kill and with the must and decay of rotting carcasses - crow wings, beating against his face, crow claws scratching his skin as they flew around him in panic-
They had startled a whole colony of crows when they crawled through that one empty frame in a large industrial window into an abandoned warehouse.
He and Oleg. They were just kids, sneaking away on a school trip. Later, they would get in trouble - but at that moment, the silent and dark warehouse, with just a hint of rusty scaffolding visible through the dirty windows, was too alluring to pass.
Sergey blinks back to the present. Strange how he almost forgot about the crows that they pissed off that day. He must have suppressed that memory by association. But even stranger is that he remembers them so clearly now - the smell, their sheer number, the way their mad flapping almost blocked the light coming through those tall windows…
Those same windows that are in the background of that damn photograph.
Lera is right. The dream was just showing him what he already knew. The rest was just his insecurity and feeling of guilt. And if he’s lucky, he won’t have to deal with those for much longer.
“Lera? I know where they keep him.”