Archive of Our Own

It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world;
but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

— Frankenstein, Volume II, Chapter IX

In the new liturgy, before the blessing, the priests murmur at the end of their prayers: Grant us eyes. Slipped in like they hope no one will really notice. Djura’s not much for mass, but he privately grants the Church this much: in the end, all that matters is seeing, and not being seen.

Djura’s mother kept thread in an old biscuit tin. On the lid was an illustration of a kitchen, with a table set for tea and a rosy-cheeked grandmother pulling biscuits from the oven. The box said, in its own mute way, the same thing that advertisements and periodicals and sentimental children’s poems said: Home is plenty; home overflows.

For Djura home was never-enough. Never enough time for his mother to finish all the mending she took in; never enough meat to fill his father’s hungry belly after a week of exhausting work; never enough children. Djura was the last in a long line of little unspoken-of ghosts. Babies who caught fevers and toddlers who breathed too much smoke from the fire and newborns who screwed up their mouths in infant spite and refused to live. Blood wasn’t so plentiful in those days, not dropped off on doorsteps or passed out by every parish priest. By the time he was old enough to remember faces Djura had only one sibling, an older brother he scarcely saw, who ran errands for their father’s workyard and was beginning to learn the craft himself. One night, their father handed him a battered but well-made measure, a mark of his esteem. Djura still remembered how his brother’s knee had jittered up and down, his heel striking rapidly on the floor, in silent, awed delight.

Two months before he turned fourteen, his brother was standing beneath scaffolding loaded with masonry when it collapsed. Djura wasn’t yet five.

After that, Djura’s parents regarded him with vague surprise any time they caught a glimpse of him. Djura didn’t have any explanation to offer. He was small and pale and scrawny. He grew not-enough and ate not-enough and yet year after year he continued to exist. His parents, not without reluctance, gradually realized that they would have to begin to have expectations of him, the sort of expectations that came with phrases like only son. And then it was Djura’s turn to give back what he’d gotten, and to be, decidedly, never-enough.

The ash muffles everything in Old Yharnam. Every footstep says Shh, shh, shh. Djura would think he were going deaf if not for the pop and crackle from the fires that still burn in places where fuel is plentiful. At night, from the top of the tower, the quarter looks like a campfire, embers glowing gently among darkened husks.

The parish church opened a charity school and Djura’s parents sent him. Some thirty-odd children sat on hard benches in rigid rows, boys on the left, girls on the right. The schoolmaster had a shabby coat and hair that was too long to be tidy but too short to be daring. He wrote letters on the dust-smeared chalkboard and the children copied.

“Write with your right,” the schoolmaster said one day, on one of his rare strolls up and down the desks.

Djura blinked up at him, uncertain.

“We write with our right hands.” The schoolmaster lightly tapped Djura’s fingers with the stick he carried for pointing to maps or issuing corrections.

Djura looked back at his big, shaky letters and the chalk in his hand, still not understanding. “This is the right one,” he offered, timidly.

“No. That’s your left—” Another tap. “And that’s your right. We use the right hand.”

Djura looked up and around the classroom, noticing for the first time that all the other students held their chalk in the opposite hand as they wrote their own letters. Hesitantly, he switched his own chalk to match them. The schoolmaster moved on.

The chalk felt heavy and weird. Djura frowned, trying to figure out how to grasp it. He shifted it back to the left; studied his grip; moved it to the right and tried to imitate what he’d done. When he tried to write, his first mark veered in entirely the wrong direction. He soldiered on. His elbow felt too far out, the angle all wrong; whatever neatness he’d worked so hard for in his alphabet vanished entirely, the lopsided letters now parading down the side of the slate like a fishing line.

Djura glanced around, and shifted the chalk back to his left.

The next time the schoolmaster shifted from his desk during writing, he tapped Djura’s hand again.

“Wrong hand.”

“I can’t do it with the other one.”

“Because you haven’t tried. You must begin now or you’ll never learn to do it correctly.”

“But it’s easier the other way—”

“I beg your pardon?” His tone was a warning. The schoolmaster wasn’t especially strict with the pupils, but children did not contradict their elders.

Djura put the chalk in his right hand.

“Practice,” said the schoolmaster, and walked away.

Djura did practice.

It didn’t work.

He went back to his left.

The next time he was caught, there was no tap. Djura tensed when he heard the schoolmaster approaching, but made no effort to hide what he’d been doing. The schoolmaster swooped down, plucked the chalk from his hand, and said, “To my desk.”

All the other scratching and squeaking on the slates halted. Djura slowly put his own slate down and stood. Every face in the schoolroom was pointed towards him; more than one student’s mouth hung open. There was a queasy feeling not just in Djura’s stomach but all up and down his spine; he felt weirdly like he was floating towards the front of the room.

He had expected to be frightened of the schoolmaster. He hadn’t expected the way the gaze of all the other children would bore into his back, the way he felt their stares like a physical weight.

“Hold out your hand.”

He did.

“Your left hand.”

A couple hushed, nervous giggles behind him.

The schoolmaster raised the switch in a perfunctory manner; he wasn’t trying to put on a show. He brought it down three times on Djura’s palm.

“Write correctly, please.” The schoolmaster handed him back the chalk, and returned to his newspaper.

Walking back was worse. He didn’t want to stare shamefacedly at the floor but every time he met another student’s gaze he looked instinctively away. He realized he was holding his stinging hand cupped awkwardly in front of him, but didn’t know what else to do with it.

Everyone was still staring when he took his seat. Djura’s face was burning, hotter even than his hand, and he felt sweaty and feverish all over. He stared down at his slate. He could still feel all those eyes on him, probing at him, picking him apart.

He picked up the chalk with his right, and then slowly and deliberately transferred it to his left.

A little rush of air travelled around the room, a susurration like a bird’s wings.

He gripped his fingers around the chalk as best as he could and went back to his letters.

The schoolmaster didn’t notice right away. From then on, there was always a gap between when Djura was switched for writing incorrectly, and when the next transgression was noticed—a gap, sometimes, that strained credulity; the schoolmaster was not attentive but surely could see which hand his problem pupil was using if he merely craned his head. When the switchings did occur, Djura walked back to his seat with his head high. He met his schoolmates’ stares coolly and saw admiration and awe and perhaps even fear. If his eyes were occasionally watery, his cheeks a bit damp, that was all right; they had all been caned or paddled before and knew that tears in moderation weren’t really under your control. The important thing was not to bawl like a baby, and Djura didn’t. He’d probably been corrected in this way more often than the rest, not from any viciousness on his parents’ part but from his own chronically high spirits and chronically poor judgment.

The switchings, of course, increased steadily in severity. More strikes; greater force. There were limits to how far any teacher could go—holy blood was too precious to waste on schoolroom recriminations, and in any case past a point it was rather poor form—but as the months wore on Djura had more and more difficulty getting his fingers to close around the chalk, finding an angle to hold it that wouldn’t brush against his palm. When the schoolmaster was administering the blows, there was a hint of wildness in his eyes, some fury that had cracked through the veneer of his ennui.

Djura wondered, later, what demons of his own that man might have been exorcising as he rained blows on a seven-year-old’s palm. A man who seemed ancient at the time but in fact was probably no older than twenty; who wore his hair foppishly long in a vain attempt at aping the tastemakers and the poets; who might have dreamed of going to Byrgenwerth, but now was teaching paupers for pennies. Who might have dismissed his troublemaking student at any time but allowed him to return again and again, to transgress again and again, so that he could raise his switch and bring it crashing down again, and again, and again.

Djura grew accustomed to wiping droplets of blood off his slate. He held his rust-stained cuff up to his classmates’ approving eyes, whenever the schoolmaster’s back was turned.

“We’re going to die here,” Djura says.

“I know,” comes the amiable reply.

You’re going to die here, you idiot, he wants to say. What the hell are you doing? Don’t let me do this to you.

Djura was too small and clever for heavy work, too restless and distractible and half-schooled for clerking. He tried all manner of things, and never stayed for long. He looked longingly in the windows of watchmakers and bookbinders, people who used their hands to craft things beautiful and useful both, but he was too old to be apprenticed.

He didn’t like the Church hunters. Didn’t like their crisp uniforms or old-fashioned weapons or daily mass. But he liked the idea of hunting. Every boy in Yharnam knew how to shoot a pistol. He liked the power of it, the sound and the smoke, the balance between cleanliness and chaos in a fine gun and a fine shot. And hunting was grand, important; even if polite society turned up their noses at the rough men and women who cleansed the streets, they also had to grit their teeth and show their gratitude, and a hunter might parade down the street with a certain swagger, and people would look at him with a certain admiration.

There were other workshops than the Church’s, and what these establishments lacked in glamor they made up for in independence. There was only one hunters’ guild, really, that courted disrepute, that verged on freethinking in its attitudes and vulgarity in its methods.

Djura knocked on the Powder Kegs’ door on a muddy, fresh-scented spring morning. The man who opened it sized him up in an instant, hardly seemed to listen to Djura’s hesitant request, and gestured him inside. The cramped workshop smelled of oil and metal. Two people were arguing over a workbench; a gray-haired woman was hammering on something as if she were trying to punish it; a young man was surreptitiously lighting a cigarette by the window, only to be rapped on the back of the head by Djura’s host and have his matches snatched from his hand. The younger man protested, but the older turned to Djura instead.

“Do you have enough sense not to light a flame in a room filled with powder?”

“Yes?”

“Then you’ll never cut it here,” the man grunted, pocketing the matchbook and ushering him on.

The Kegs took apprentices the way a river takes swimmers: in a mad rush of unabated activity, sweeping them along in whatever direction they were already going. Djura cleaned weapons and measured powder and proved that he could hit a moving target at least a few times out of ten. Instructions came in haphazard and contradictory bursts. Well before he was ready, cleaning became repairs, small and simple ones that demanded he understand the rhyme and the reason of the machines instead of learning by rote. Then, with no fanfare, he was asked to find new solutions instead of old ones: fit more powder here, a few more bullets there—can this move more smoothly, do you think, can it hit harder, reload faster? What happens if we add this to that, or subtract those entirely … ?

He saw weaponry when he closed his eyes at night, fell asleep fiddling with imaginary gears. He couldn’t walk down the street without picking apart every machine he saw, water pumps and bar taps and carriage wheels opening up like diagrams in his mind. 

The young Kegs were eccentric and wild, some with foreign accents and some missing fingers. The young man with the cigarette was named Seán; he had two missing teeth and wide-set eyes that made him look permanently astonished. He took it on himself to make introductions for Djura to the rest of the recruits, some newly initiated and others still waiting to prove themselves. Djura hadn’t known that the Kegs’ badge was filled with real gunpowder. He hungered for it like he’d never hungered for anything in his life.

On the night he earned that badge, his newfound companions took him out for celebratory drinks. They insisted on taking him to a pub he’d never been to before, with a humming excitement that made it clear he was in for some kind of a treat, and when they arrived Djura understood why: this dingy barroom was a melting pot, filled with ordinary Yharnamites as well as hunters, and many of those Yharnamites were young and female. There were hunters from other workshops, too, of similarly mixed gender, and a few of the younger female Kegs had met them as well. With a beer in his hand, perched at the bar, Djura could pretty easily understand that there was a different sort of hunt playing out here.

Lukas was talking with Fenechka, a Saw Hunter, if “talking” was the word for staring at her pretty mouth with desperate, stupid hope while she made all the conversation. Seán was showing off some bit of Keg machinery to a redhaired girl who seemed more interested in smoothing the hair out of his eyes while he bent over it. Other women circulated through the crowd with rouge on their cheeks that advertised that they were here for business, not pleasure.

Djura had never had a sweetheart. It had never bothered him much. He was young and there was so much to do. The girls he liked best were the type of girls who joined the Kegs, the ones with loud laughs and more expertise than he could ever dream of acquiring, who would demonstrate some fine point of craftsmanship and then cuff him on the shoulder affectionately when he showed improvement. But he didn’t fancy them. He’d never really noticed before. He ordered another beer—Lukas was paying and Djura was determined to make him regret it—and he watched. The women all looked very nice. The female hunters glowed with strength and pride; the ordinary servants and shopgirls were sweetly earnest in their ribbons. The working women had a clever, canny look that fascinated him. But as he watched the way the men gawked at them, stumbled after them, revolved in their orbit, he had the same sort of feeling that he’d had fifteen years ago when he’d looked up from his slate and seen every other child writing with the opposite hand.

Djura finished his beer and slunk out the side door. No one noticed him go.

The dead flit around him. A woman climbs a blackened staircase, undeterred by the fact that it crumbles to nothing halfway up the ascent, placing her feet on phantom treads. A stumbling drunk pisses against a wall and then vanishes to mist. A horse nickers, a baby laughs. A friend is leaning in the doorway, smile ironic, eyes hard. Djura blinks and she is gone, leaving only the smell of singed flesh.

Djura’s first death was unexceptional. It was the sort of death he should have died: they were out on the hunt, and he was young and inexperienced. Although he had his wits about him as well as one could hope for a new recruit, the beast surprised him and he lost his head and didn’t clear out in time and got caught in the blast he knew was coming. It was loud, and then it was painful, and then it was done.

And then he woke up.

Flowers and gravestones and a little chapel on a hill. Beyond, fog and sunset-mist and pillar-trees. He wandered baffled and wide-eyed until he found the old man, and the doll, and learned that yes, he had died, and also, no, he could not die.

He could not die.

It took him a while to believe it. For someone who had always known he shouldn’t have survived past the age of three, life nonetheless became suddenly rather dear; it wasn’t until he’d died twice more by accident that he worked up the courage to fling himself off the bridge to Cathedral Ward. When he woke up the doll applauded politely.

He wasn’t the only one chosen for this privilege. He sometimes glimpsed other figures, ghostlike, that he recognized: a Saw Hunter he’d shared a drink with; the Hunters of Hunters’ new acolyte, whom he’d met a few weeks before.

“Good luck getting rid of me if I ever go barmy,” he said a few nights later, in the waking world. The acolyte, whose name was Eileen, rolled her eyes.

“I’ll manage.”

Djura’s contract wouldn’t burn. He’d had to return once more to the dream, renounce his vows, feel the bite of the scythe on his neck. When he awakened for the final time in Yharnam, he felt lighter than he had in months, free from all the deaths he might still have had to die. All but one.

There were signs of carnage in the lumberyard, streaks of blood and one beast shot dead. Seán and Anja were here already, but when they saw Djura catching up they waited for him at the entrance. The three moved in together, guns drawn, towards the open warehouse door.

They were halfway across when a figure lurched into view, hooded, firearm of his own at the ready.

“Stay back! There’s nothing for you here.”

“Easy, friend.” Djura raised one hand. “We’re hunters, not looters.” Next to him, Seán raised his badge from where it hung around his neck. “What happened here?”

The man lowered his gun, but his voice was still strained. “Someone didn’t close the back door when he snuck out for a smoke.” The disdain in his tone made it clear what the thought of this dereliction of duty. “Other guards all scattered when the beasts got in. The ones that could.” He jerked his head toward a corpse half-hidden in the shadows, and took a step forward, but staggered with a hiss of pain. He wavered for a moment, recovered, but then collapsed to the ground.

Djura and Seán darted forward; Anja held back, gun still drawn, scanning for beasts. The man was clutching his leg, and no wonder: there was an enormous gash across his thigh, bleeding profusely through a hastily improvised bandage—almost certainly a wound to the artery. 

“You might’ve mentioned that first!” said Seán, reaching for a blood vial. 

“No!” The man’s hand shot out and locked around Seán’s wrist. “No blood.” His hood had fallen back, revealing a dark face that nonetheless looked ashen in the moonlight. His features were fierce, heavy brows furrowed over an aquiline nose. 

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No blood,” the man insisted. “It’s fine.”

“Mate,” said Djura, “if there was a moment to ask for no blood, you’ve missed it by about a mile.” He nodded pointedly toward the sticky, dark pool that was spreading rapidly on the cobbles.

“There’s an apothecary down the street. I’ll go there.”

“Vicar’s shriveled tits,” said Anja. “If this lunatic wants to bleed out on the floor here I say leave him.”

“The apothecary,” the man repeated, panting now. “The chemist’s. Just at the end of the street—”

“Will be barred and locked and you'll be dead before you reach it,” Anja snapped. “Let's go, then, leave him—there's other folks in Yharnam who want to live.”

Djura looked at the man, whose face was screwed up in pain, thick dark hair plastered to his head with sweat as he tried to stanch the wound’s bleeding. He didn't look like he didn't want to live. He just looked too stubborn for his own good.

“You go,” he said. “Nikola’s up by the entrance to the Ward with the others, you can regroup there. I'll meet you.”

Anja rolled her eyes but didn't argue. She and Seán both stood, leaving the man on the floor, and readied their guns to cover each other as they strode towards the exit.

But Seán brushed Djura’s shoulder as he went, and muttered, “Don't let him hold you back, hey? Do what you can for him but meet us at the Ward.” Djura nodded agreement, and extended his arm to the stranger.

“Come on now,” he said, “we'll try your chemist.” The man gripped him around the shoulders and heaved himself to his feet. He was tall and powerfully built, and Djura nearly groaned under his weight. Fortunately, Djura had no intention of trying the chemist’s whatsoever; he was already reaching for a blood vial, which he fully intended to sink into the man's thigh the moment he had the opportunity, and then leave the stranger to work through his wound and his delirium.

“You a guard here, then?” he asked, by way of distracting conversation, as they tried a step forward; the man nodded in reply, lips thin with pain.

“They pay you well?”

“Better than nothing.”

“But not by much, I’ll bet.” Djura could feel the smooth shape of the syringe in his pouch. “Why didn't you take off with the others?”

“Our job was to defend the warehouse,” the man grunted, “not run away.”

“Against a horde of beasts? You didn’t have a chance.”

“He offered me coin to do a job. I took the coin, I’ll do the job.”

The childlike simplicity of it almost stopped Djura in his tracks. “So you'd rather have that coin dumped on your corpse, then, than live another day?”

“I keep my word,” the stranger snapped, “and I’m not a coward—” 

The man's grip tightened on Djura's shoulder. Something snarled. And then Djura was hurled halfway to the floor, and gunshots rang out over his head, close enough to half-deafen. He had his own blunderbuss out and ready by the time he was back on his feet, but there was no need of it: the guard had, in one smooth motion, shot a lunging beast clean through the skull, at a distance of a good twenty yards, in a dark warehouse, before Djura had even noticed anything amiss.

Djura was still staring admiringly as the man collapsed to the ground again.

“All right,” he said. “Time for blood.” No more pretending. This man was keen-eyed and a crack shot and clearly half-mad; that changed things.

“No,” the fellow started to insist.

“Blood or you die.”

The man met his eyes, lying there on the ground, and for all his bravado of a moment before Djura would swear he saw fear there now.

“I don’t think you want to die,” Djura said, more gently. Something shifted in the man’s face, subtly, almost a pleading expression; Djura knelt on the ground. “Must be something to live for, hey? Bigger warehouses. Fame and glory among all the hired muscle of Yharnam.” Djura reached inside his shirt, lifted his own hunter’s badge, and held it up for the man to see. “Something better, even? Guard something more precious than lumber?” The man’s gaze caught on the badge, sharpened.

Djura recognized the hunger that was stirring there.

He raised the vial in his other hand. 

The man looked at it for a moment, then gritted his teeth and lowered his head. His shoulders tensed as the needle bit in.

“What's your name, friend?”

“Aleksander.” A moment after he spoke, every tenseness in the man’s body loosened. He sagged backward, resting on his elbows as the gash in his leg began to knit itself closed. His eyes were wide and lips parted, and Djura realized that he was seeing a man in the euphoria of first blood, a milestone most Yharnamites passed before they were sixteen. It made him look very young indeed.

“Do you like guarding warehouses, Aleksander?” Djura asked, after a moment.

“No,” he breathed, dazed. “No, not especially.” The way he spoke was odd, suddenly, a clipped sort of accent that would have sounded more at home in an elegant parlor than on a bloodstained warehouse floor.

“Would you prefer to hunt beasts, do you think?”

Aleksander turned his gaze to Djura, still looking young and childlike, as one hand probed the smooth flesh where the wound had closed.

“A beast killed my mother,” he murmured.

“Well. Give it some thought.” Djura clapped him on the shoulder. “The Kegs are recruiting, my friend. It’s not pretty work but your colleagues won’t be cowards, I can promise you that.” He left Aleksander to mull it over, and kept a wary eye out for any more lurking beasts as he made his way out of the work yard and back to the Ward.

The celebration that dawn was raucous, spilling out of taverns and into the street and then back into alehouses all through the roughest parts of Yharnam. It had been a triumphant hunt, dozens of beasts slaughtered, the hunters draped in glory. Djura drank and danced into the pleasant sort of fog that crowded out gutted corpses and screaming women and jaws snapping around tender flesh. He drifted with the Kegs and then drifted away, as he often did now, to back rooms and discreet barrooms where he knew he might find what he was seeking.

It wasn't a bad sort of life.

Djura used to watch his mother mend. She always held a few spare pins in her mouth and he would hover uncertainly, afraid that she would swallow one. Why was he always scolded and switched for being reckless, when his mother could thoughtlessly hold such sharp and nasty things between her lips? When he was older needlework lost its veneer of danger and instead became the object of scorn amongst all the boys—Why don’t you go work on your sampler with Agnes, then, if you’re so scared—and it occupied a similar rhetorical position for the Kegs, above all for Anja, who always felt she had something to prove—If you’re going to be so delicate about it then take up embroidery instead and let the rest of us work, I hear the haberdasher’s is hiring—and now Djura spends hours of precious daylight trying desperately to keep what few clothes he has in decent repair, patching holes and mending seams with clumsy stitches that tear out again within days. Everything he owns is tending towards tatters and soaked in grime. His hands are calloused and burnt and even so he manages to stab himself with the needle so often he nearly weeps with frustration.

Aleksander did join. He knocked on the workshop door a few days later, and stood looming in the doorway, tall and imposing, looking somehow grimmer than he had as he was bleeding nearly to death. He said little, his eyes roaming over Djura and the doorway and the chaotic scene beyond, his skeptical glower only deepening with every new detail; his expression was that of a priest debating whether to walk into a brothel. But walk in he did, following silently in Djura’s footsteps. He introduced himself curtly, answered questions as briefly as possible, but still, in the end, said that he was willing to be taught, and then to take his vows if they would have him. From behind his back Seán raised his eyebrows meaningfully: Oh, fine catch, Djura, what a pleasant chap.

Aleksander was, indeed, willing to learn. From the first day, he carried a small notebook with him everywhere in which he scribbled furiously anytime someone gave him instruction. Djura wouldn’t have been surprised to flip it open and find the directions to the outhouse fastidiously copied down. Aleksander volunteered for all the worst duties, which won him a few friends, and then began trying to organize all the workshop’s tools and supplies when everyone’s back was turned, which lost them again. 

“It’s dangerous to leave the powder out and unlabeled,” he said firmly, to Anja.

“It’s dangerous to move my shit without asking,” said Anja, and brandished an unattached rifle-barrel inches from his face, to underline her point. Aleksander merely blinked at her, unmoved. 

It was a shame that Yharnam kept no standing army; Aleksander seemed like he might have rather enjoyed doing marching drills and having his bed examined for neatness every morning. Once Lukas, exasperated, asked why he hadn’t joined up with the Church hunters, then, if he liked everything lined up in neat rows. 

“My grandmother loved the Church,” Aleksander replied, deadpan, and it took them a moment to realize that that was his answer, and that it might even be a funny one.

And he did have his moments. Such as, for example, the moment when he kicked over a vegetable stall to distract an enormous slobbering beast that had Anja and Djura pinned in a dead-end courtyard, bearing the full brunt of its attentions until the other two had time to close their wounds and gather their wits. Or the moment when he ended a frantic debate about how best to light a too-short fuse by snatching the matches out of Nikola’s hand and charging in to do it himself, before the beasts could make it past and render all their planning useless. 

Or the moment when they’d given up a tenement building for lost. None of them liked to do it; none of them had joined the Kegs to be told can’t or too dangerous or listen to orders, fall in line. But the infestation seemed to have begun inside the building, spreading from the bottom floors upward, and at this point only a small handful of human lives remained, trapped on the upper stories, and to try to fight their way through would have left them vulnerable to being pinned on both sides: that was a bad night, more beasts on the streets than they were equipped to handle. There were others who needed help and their lives were on the same side of the scale as the Kegs’, tipping the balance.

And yet—

Djura had never had a mind for scales or arithmetic; his brain, deficient, never succeeded in weighing distant abstract consequences against the tangible reality in front of him. The prospect of a switching for skipping chores had always seemed insubstantial compared to the immediate joy of tearing down the street with the other neighborhood children. And death, he remembered, as he let the other Kegs get ahead of him and then turned to run in the opposite direction—death, now, was a painful but temporary inconvenience. All the more reason to try, at least, to see if he could save even one. 

And then, as he was mounting the narrow rickety stairs, sizing up the beast careening out into the landing and straight towards him, a gunshot blasted out from behind him, and the beast slumped dead. 

“Wait for me, next time,” said Aleksander irritably, as he mounted the stairs and brushed past Djura to take the lead.

Yes, it was difficult to be entirely exasperated with someone who had moments like that.

Little by little, Aleksander did loosen. Over the months, as he trained and hunted and took his vows, the rest of the Kegs had to grudgingly admit that he really wasn’t such a bad sort of fellow. Even if he could glower like a disapproving father when they were doing something foolish, and was still damnably stubborn about taking blood, and sometimes in moments of stress slipped into that drawing-room accent that made him sound like a rich tosser. This last, he confessed shyly one night over an ale, was because he had been a rich tosser, when he was born, but beasts did in both his parents before he was ten, and the family fortune proved to be more memory than reality, and he had to make his own way in the world. They all felt a bit badly after that, and bought him another drink, and only sometimes afterward called him “milord” or “guv’nor” when he slipped up—which was rather kind, by their standards.

It was good to be a hunter, then. There was blood and there was gore and there were friends who didn't make it back to the pub at the end of the hunt, and there were nights when Djura couldn't drift off to sleep without the fuzzy warmth of a drink dulling his mind. But the Kegs were clever and bold and they knew it was only a matter of time before the Church realized that, before all Yharnam realized that, and honored them as the best of the hunters.

All hunters earned a stipend and for the first time in his life Djura had just enough money to waste it on fine things sometimes, on waistcoats in vibrant plaids and on colognes that didn't smell cheap. He bore his own fair share of teasing for being a dandy and didn't mind it a bit. Let them laugh; he could laugh too; and when they looked at him, they saw only what he chose to show them. It was armor of a different sort. If they thought him vain, there were worse sins than vanity, worse sins too than spending his days with freethinking men and women who mocked the Church and its gods. There were sins he indulged in private rooms and disreputable bars, where he now helped different sorts of men exorcise different sorts of demons. And those indiscretions, too, were under his control, worn as lightly as the fashionable cap all his friends mocked him for until months later they all sported the same type. There was an art to it, a needle to delicately thread, when one kept company with miscreants who were hardly puritanical in their views and yet could not be expected to throw aside every notion of decency; it took skill to deftly reveal just enough, make sly jokes at his own expense, to hint and raise eyebrows impishly, without pushing too far, without revealing too much, without stating anything so plainly that it might make Lukas or Seán shy from his touch or read too deeply into his attention. Make it a joke, invite everyone to join in, and it became one of any number of eccentricities. They could all see the him he had crafted, and believe they saw it all. 

Cogs and gears turning, an illusionist's device: look here, and here, see the smoke and the mirrors, never think to glance away, to spot the sleight of hand hidden beneath the extravagant cloak.

The trap goes wrong. He was trying to seal off one of the last remaining entrances into Old Yharnam, one that might be attractive to looters. A tripwire and a hidden cache of powder. But he doesn’t secure it thoroughly enough and instead of scavengers it’s a couple of beasts that stumble upon it, only a few days later, and he arrives to hear their screams of bewildered anguish. He tries to run in, multiple times, but his traitorous body will not allow it. The deep-seated and craven instinct that despite everything still wants to avoid pain and self-destruction recoils from the heat of the flames. He loses time and when he comes to himself Aleksander has found him and is dragging him away, and once he might even have been ashamed of the way he’s carrying on, ashamed of being so weak in front of a man so steady he seems carved from stone, but now all that matters is the fact that despite everything, all his sacrifices and good intentions, more people have suffered because of him. They have to wait in an abandoned shop for Djura to stop shaking and retching. Aleksander’s eyes are so shadowed he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks but he, at least, knew what he was getting into.

The Kegs didn't get their renown. The years drew on and their inventions became bolder and more bombastic, and the more they achieved the more the Church turned its back on them.

“What do you expect,” Lukas said wearily, “we've thumbed our noses at them for years on end, you can hardly blame them for not wanting to walk arm in arm ...”

“We help,” said Aleksander, stolidly. “We save more people on our own than half their hunters manage in a night. They're the Church, they shouldn't be petty, they should want to do the most good—” 

“We did take out nearly an entire block the other night,” said Lukas.

“Stupid block,” said Anja, through a mouthful of meat pie. “Looked better on fire. No one died, we got everyone out—Don't purse your lips like that, Aleksander. You look like my maiden aunt.”

“Aleksander was born to be a maiden aunt,” said Djura. “The gods got mixed up at the last minute.”

“Must’ve put the hunter into my auntie instead,” said Seán. "Reckon she could take a beast one-handed ...”

Aleksander was pensive as they walked back from the meeting, more so than usual. Djura had learned to read his moods, to know when he was truly brooding and when he was merely thoughtful, or content, or shy. The route from the workshop to their respective rooms was the same until the final blocks and they often walked back together. Djura sometimes filled the time with jokes and chatter but sometimes too lapsed into silence, a condition he usually found excruciating but didn't mind on these occasions. He never felt he was letting Aleksander down by failing to entertain him.

Tonight Aleksander said, “I have the schematics I borrowed in my room. I can give them to you if you'll come up with me.”

Djura had never seen Aleksander’s living quarters. The room was as tidy as Djura might have expected, though not rigidly so; a rather cozy afghan was draped over the bed, with a pretty rose pattern. There was a stack of worn, well-thumbed books on the bedside table. While Aleksander dug through his trunk for the papers, Djura flipped one open and read:

Two agonies of the greatest kind warred within my breast. Failure to act would leave my sister destitute and without recourse; and yet to act would mean losing the good opinion of a lady who had shown me the most extraordinary kindness ...

Djura shifted eagerly through the rest of the stack; most of the books had women’s names as the titles, and at least one had a frontispiece that showed a pen-and-ink lady sprawled despairingly across a sickbed.

“There,” Aleksander said, “I've found them—what are you doing?”

“You read novels ,” exclaimed Djura, delighted.

Aleksander fumbled with the cylindrical case in a way that betrayed his embarrassment. His shoulders hunched defensively, nearly to his ears.

“They're very—diverting,” he said.

“Go on, then, which one's the best? Lend it to me.”

And Aleksander shyly reached for a book with a worn red cover and handed it to him, and until Djura was out the door his eyes kept flicking to it nervously, like a new mother reluctant to let her child out of her grip.

Djura's own reading didn't extend much beyond the occasional periodical, and that more for the diagrams and illustrations. His foray into Aleksander's novel didn't convince him to change his habits. It was a very long story about all the sad things that happened to an imaginary woman, with a lot of characters he couldn't keep track of and long boring bits that he skimmed through. His real interest, by the end, laid not in the contents of the book but the pages themselves: the places where they were worn smooth by long use, the mysterious smear that hinted Aleksander may have enjoyed his supper along with the book, one or two wrinkly circular spots that looked suspiciously like teardrops. Djura read those pages with the closest attention, sifting through the narrator's tormented moral quandaries, imagining Aleksander curled over the pages, sniffling into his warm afghan.

Someone’s tiny back garden survived the flames. Most of the vegetables choked on ash but there are potatoes and carrots nestled safely in the earth, which will roast in their campfire, and they will even spare some of a precious tin of salt to celebrate their discovery. It will be the closest they’ve had to a proper meal in months. Even with their bags full of everything they can harvest, neither of them wants to leave. Aleksander keeps poking determinedly through the wild overgrowth, and Djura is content to wait and to watch. Aleksander finally emerges with a small flower, autumnal purple and already beginning to wilt. They both look at it for several moments.

“Do you know what it’s called?” Aleskander asks.

Djura shakes his head.

“I think this is the kind that they used to have in the square outside the butcher’s, at harvest-time. Big pots of them.”

Aleksander tucks it neatly into his breast pocket, for all the world like a gentleman on a country stroll,  and Djura smiles and nearly laughs. Aleksander smiles, too, and reaches out to put a hand on Djura’s shoulder. Djura turns away, and slings his bag over his back.

The Kegs began to lose their allies. It was increasingly clear which way the wind was blowing, and fewer and fewer hunters wanted to risk their own reputations by joining them. Some stayed. The Hunters of Hunters, for one, prided themselves on their neutrality, and Eileen in particular never hesitated to join the Kegs in their planning or on the hunt. But their world was growing smaller, avenues closing off to them.

Within what society they had, Djura was gaining some measure of respect for his skill as a fighter and an engineer. It was a strange thing, to find himself suddenly called on to instruct a new apprentice, or consult with the senior Kegs. Djura wasn't sure he liked it. The weight of the Kegs' gaze on him felt heavy. Who was he to shape the direction of their band, to weigh in on matters that could make the difference between life and death? He was a nobody, a fool, a south-pawed sodomite who couldn't be trusted to keep his own affairs in order, much less anyone else's. The only reason he was still alive was because some strange old codger in a dream had taken an interest in him.

He drank more and talked louder and transgressed more frequently and less carefully. One night he thought he'd slipped away discreetly with a handsome foreigner to an upstairs room, and emerged half an hour later adjusting his necktie with the taste of the man hot on his lips and the man's own mouth pressed teasingly to Djura’s neck, hands on Djura's waist, drawing him back for one last embrace—

When Djura looked up and saw Aleksander framed in the stairwell, his eyes wide.

“I—” Aleksander started, and Djura's paramour darted instinctively back, hiding his face behind the door, and Djura didn't have the wit to move, not that it would have mattered—

“Sorry,” said Aleksander, his shoulders hunched in that familiar mortified posture, “I wanted to ask if you knew where—I'll wait, sorry—” and he turned and fled down the stairs.

Djura felt hot all over, his stomach roiling. He had never wanted Aleksander to see this. Less than the others. He never joked about it to Aleksander the way he did with Seán and Lukas. Aleksander must know, must have heard something, over all these years. But he was so solemn, so serious, so trusting and upright and noble, that whatever Aleksander heard and thought elsewhere Djura had never wanted to see him looking like this, gawking and appalled.

He avoided Aleksander's eyes after that, avoided being paired with him in the shop or on the hunt.

They didn't walk home together any more.

After a time the hunters become bold. There’s what might almost be called a stream of them. Some might not even know what happened here; Djura finds foreign money on some of the bodies. New blood, unaware of Yharnam and its history.

The message on the gates is exceedingly clear. Djura is even kind enough to issue a second warning, when the first is ignored. After that, it is briefly glorious to set the Gatling into motion, to give his fury full vent on a target that is not himself. He mourns them less and less as the months pass on.

Aleksander finally sought him out. It was late, and midsummer, and the rest of the Kegs were out celebrating and scandalizing. Djura was engrossed in a project, and also avoiding Aleksander, who very annoyingly stepped through the workshop door.

“Too tired to get into trouble,” he said, unconvincingly, gesturing towards the revelry outside.

“Yes,” said Djura.

“How's your work? Have you solved the torque problem?”

“Very nearly, I think.”

“That's good.” Aleksander picked up a rag someone had left on a table, put it back down, smoothed it out, picked it up again. “What did you think of Anja's idea?”

“The trap? It seems promising.” Djura's shoulders were stiff from being clenched so tightly.

“Yes.” The rag dropped back to the table, crumpled once more. Aleksander crossed the room to the window and gazed out of it. His arms were crossed, shoulders tense. The sun had just slipped beneath the Yharnam skyline, and from this angle the last hazy twilight purple illuminated the sharp angles of his face, the strong nose, the heavy brows, but also the soft curl of thick dark hair at his temple, the generous curve of his lips.

“It wasn't a beast that killed my parents.”

Aleksander stayed stock-still as he said it, gaze trained resolutely out the window. Djura paused in his work.

“No?”

Aleksander took a deep breath.

“My father was an embarrassed aristocrat,” he said. “Robbed of his rightful due. As far as he was concerned.” The sentences came out stiffly, as if recited by rote. Then Aleksander swallowed, exhaled. Something seemed to loosen. “I know for some men,” he went on, more softly, “the blood is just—relief. Rescue from pain. For him, it was … something more. It made him the lord and master again, in his own mind. Proud as the lion on our dusty old coat of arms. And about as gentle.”

He pressed his lips to the inside of his mouth, biting down, tense with memory. The last vestiges of the light outside were dimming, casting deeper shadows on his face.

“He was always sorry, afterward. Tried to be sweet to us. And after—my mother—”

His hands clenched.

“That last night, he was very sorry indeed.”

Djura lowered the wrench he was holding, as slowly and silently as he could.

“Afterward I went to live with my grandmother and she explained to me that I was confused. Upset. Imagining things. She told me that it was a great tragedy how the beasts had gotten in and killed my parents but a wonderful miracle that I was still alive to carry on the family name. That of course my father wasn't a—”

And Aleksander paused, and seemed to wrestle with something very powerful indeed before he could spit out:

“—suicide.” The word came out strangled, hushed. Aleksander swallowed again, more frantically. “She explained to me that my father was a good man and like all good men he was buried in the churchyard in hallowed ground, next to my good mother gods rest her soul whom he adored—” 

The light was nearly gone but Djura could feel as much as see the way Aleksander's fingernails were clawing into his forearms.

“And it would be a very shameful thing if I told other people what I had imagined because they might believe me and they would think our family was full of bad people. And so I didn't tell a soul ever again. Until—” 

Aleksander looked at Djura, finally, in exactly the moment when the day's last light became a memory, and Djura saw his eyes, wide and pleading for Djura to understand what he was doing and why. And then they were in darkness, and Aleksander continued to speak in a low desperate whisper.

“Even now I don't believe myself and I think I'm being horribly wicked. And I know I'm telling you a terrible lie, because the more my grandmother explained to me about the beasts the more I could remember them. I could see them, and the way their eyes had glowed, and the way they had moved with the shadows and eaten my parents all up. How can I see them?”

There was panic in his plea, childlike. Djura had already begun to move through the darkness, brushing his hands along the tables, towards the window, towards Aleksander's voice.

“Am I mad or am I a liar—was I such a hideous horrid child I invented the whole story, did I hate my father so much, did I want to ruin him even after he was cold in the ground?”

Djura reached out to touch Aleksander's forearm. Aleksander took a breath to speak again and instead a sob came out, a noise that seemed to shock him as much as Djura. He froze, one hand to his mouth, Djura's fingers light on his shirtsleeve. The darkness was not so absolute as to blind him; he could see the shadow of Aleksander, detect him by his movement; but it was close enough. After a moment, Djura squeezed gently. 

“I know I didn't imagine it,” Aleksander whispered. “I know I didn’t. Except for all the times I don’t know at all—”

He returned Djura’s grip, then, clinging tightly. He seemed to be trying desperately to maintain control.

“Sit,” Djura said. He pressed down gently and guided them both down to sit with their backs to the wall and heads resting uncomfortably on the sill. Djura put his hand on Aleksander’s shoulder. And Aleksander finally curled in on himself, rested his head on his knees, and made pained little noises, shameless in the dark.

After a little while, he seemed to gather his strength and his breath, and tried to speak—only to break off again, struggle again. Finally, he whispered, “My mother made me little animals out of yarn. She was very clever with her hands.”

“Which did you like best?”

“The elephant. I loved him so much she cut silk from her old evening gown and made him a blanket for his back so he’d look like a raja’s mount, and she made a little yarn prince with skin as dark as ours to ride on his back …”

He choked on the last word, and then continued to cry softly, sporadically, for long, liquid, unmarked moments, as revelers passed beneath the window loud and laughing, and Djura rubbed circles on his shoulder.

When the shaking had subsided and the room was nearly quiet, Djura said, “You would never be like him. Not if you took all the blood in Yharnam.”

Aleksander shook his head and sighed, not so much an agreement or denial as a weary laying-down of a burden.  

After another endless moment Aleksander shifted and began to straighten. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he wiped at his face. “I didn’t come here to make a scene, truly.”

“Stop, don’t apologize.”

“Only I wanted you to know …” He trailed off. “To know,” he finished. “And to know how very highly I esteem you.”

And it was so charmingly formal, so like a line from one of his novels, that Djura laughed, and Aleksander, bless him, laughed too.

Aleksander has always had nightmares. He confessed that to Djura once, after the night he told him the truth about his parents. Since he was a child the terrors would sometimes come at night, both remembered and imagined. It embarrassed him; he knew he sometimes disturbed his neighbors. Still, Djura had never given full thought to what those terrors entailed, until now, when he is the one woken from restless sleep by the thrashing, the strangled cry. Djura tries to lie motionless, to give Aleksander his dignity. The tower room where they sleep is black as pitch by night, without a single star or distant lantern-glow. It is easy enough to stay still, to keep his breathing even. But one night in the darkness he hears—not weeping—but the motion that comes with it; Aleksander is muffling the noise but in the deep blackness Djura can hear the slight rustling shifts of his body. Knowing that he should not, Djura rolls over, slides closer, slips his own singed quilt over Aleksander’s shoulders. Aleksander rolls over then, too, and seizes Djura’s hand. Djura waits in darkness for those breaths to even out once more.

Pain like this was supposed to end in dreaming.

Djura kept waiting, waiting, for this to end, for the brief moment of blackness that would dissolve into the dream’s milky moonlight. It did not end. It went on and on and on, and he flexed his fingers to reach for a weapon—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d put a bullet in his own head to get a miserable death over with—but his body would not respond. There was something wrong. Something was very wrong.

“Give me your blood—”

“They’re all shattered!”

There were voices and gunshots, maybe not in that order, dim shapes moving and hands lifting him and Aleksander’s voice in his ear saying Djura, Djura, other words too, but those were the only ones he could understand.

Put it out, Djura tried to say; he tried to grab for Aleksander’s hand, wrist, shirt, but could not.

My face is on fire. It’s burning. Put it out.

Please, gods, Aleksander, put it out.

It was its own kind of dreaming, the time that followed. Snatches of movement and image and meaning with a logic all their own, that in the aftermath he struggled to piece together. There was the moment that they lifted him and jostling was so terrible he screamed his throat raw; the moment that the stink of beast and the acrid smoke and the loamy forest-smell became overpowering; the moment that he saw Eileen’s reliable face and had the coherence to think to himself Oh, Eileen, good to have in a crisis, until he noticed the way her lips were tightened and her nostrils flared as she stared at him.

In the aftermath, the Kegs’ expedition to Hemwick was considered something of a success. The Church, certainly, was pleased; they had charitably given the Kegs a rare chance to prove themselves, to show that their heretical methods might still be worth something in the endless fight against the beasts, and the Kegs had managed that much, at least. The rotting, abandoned outpost, home to an infestation of the creatures, was wiped from the map, first laced with gunpowder and then ignited, cleansed and purified in a controlled burn.

Of course, the Kegs might—and did—grumble that they’d managed this feat despite no backup, no material support, scraping together only a few independent allies and what little remained from the stores of weapons and blood that the Church had become so very stingy with. They might grumble about the way that the blood had run low, left them without recourse for their wounded, about the fact that injuries that would have knitted together in seconds with immediate attention now lingered, scarred.

They might especially grumble about what had happened to Djura.

Djura woke in one of the small spare rooms at the workshop. He thought, No, not here. If I’m waking up here, then—

He reached up to his face. The right half was swathed in bandages.

Aleksander was there, looking at once wretched and unbearably tender. There was a great deal of I’m so sorry and I should have been there sooner and It will be all right—You’re alive—Everything else will be fine … It was excruciating; Djura cringed away from Aleksander’s anguished attention. Lukas and Seán and Anja were there too, often, all being too kind or not kind enough and staring, always staring. And so he waited to ask until he was alone with Eileen, who would not lie to him.

“How bad is it?”

She kept her gaze on the chipped old teacup in her hands.

“The eye is lost.”

They both knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

On the day the bandages came off, Eileen was there. Djura held his hand out for the little shaving mirror on the bureau. She handed it to him, careful to reach over farther, to center it in his vision, so there was no risk of his fumbling. He looked into it for a few moments, and then handed it back.

He found himself a very nice eyepatch. It was made of fine material and large enough to conceal most of the scarring. In the Kegs’ meetings, he laughed about it. It rather suited him, didn’t they think? Gave him a roguish air.

In the privacy of the courtyard, late at night, he shot at targets again and again, forcing one eye to do the work of two. A sepia-toned schoolmaster hovered in his nonexistent peripheral, sneering, We aim with our right eyes.

In the pubs, he joked, I’ll set a fashion soon enough, you’ll see. Everyone will be wearing them.

In the privacy of his room, he turned his mirror to face the wall.

Canals run beneath and through Old Yharnam, and there are places where ages ago they cut the street away to give access to the running water, so the women could bring their washing. The water was never good for drinking and is worse now, but not so filthy that a bit of desperate laundry can’t be done, and Djura is kneeling down to wash dirt and grit from his eyepatch when booted feet appear before him. He seizes for his gun, but when he looks up it’s just another ghost. One of the last apprentices to join the Kegs, who could hardly have been older than twenty; Djura actually found his body a while back, managed to scavenge some bullets and blood. The boy looks down at him with a sullen expression.

It’s only after he’s faded away that Djura realizes he lost his grip on the patch, that it’s already been swept under by the current and lost.

It was incredible what the body could learn to bear. One eye lost, vision halved, and yet with relentless work Djura made himself a hunter again, keen as ever. Able to do with one eye what many couldn’t manage with two, able to correct for his vision so ably that he sometimes forgot he was impaired at all.

Here are some of the things he saw, in those final months:

A letter from the Church, signed and sealed by the vicar herself.

Maps of the city sprawled across the workshop tables, Old Yharnam outlined in red.

Stockpiles of powder and blood and silver bullets, fresh-delivered.

Pride and hope gleaming in his friends’ faces.

They made their plans and laid their powder and oiled their weapons. You control the blaze, said the Church’s people; we’ll control everything else.

The Church’s people did not say, We’ll manage the evacuation.

No one noticed.

How can you hear what isn’t said?

(How can you see what isn’t there?)

The night came and the matches lit. The fires took the quarter so rapidly and completely that midnight became noon, all heat and searing light.

Here is what Djura saw:

Blood.

Bones.

People fleeing their houses with clothes alight, pillars of fire like the avenging angels in stained-glass windows.

Flesh bubbling, warping.

Seán’s face the moment before the burning doorway crumbled and collapsed on top of him.

Anja with her pistol to a sobbing woman’s head.

Here is what he did not see:

Any trace of the scourge.

 “Fuck off, you lunatic, what’s the matter with you?” Anja snarled. “Look at her, what do you want us to do, keep her as a pet?”

She pulled the trigger.

Here is what Djura had not told a soul:

Back in Hemwick, he’d been clearing a building before the final retreat, when he’d found a beast lurking. Too tall, limbs warped, fur sprouting from the tattered remnants of its clothes. He had startled it, entering the room, and it had turned. And seeing him there, with his weapons drawn, it had reached for the grimy white bonnet it still wore on its head, and jerked the frills in front of its face. Ashamed. And Djura had been so startled by that one simple gesture that he had stood there frozen, until a gunshot rang out close by and the creature started and roared and lunged across the room to rake its claws down his face.

(How can you see what isn’t there?)

All around him, Old Yharnam burned, and all around him men and women exorcised their demons. Anja and Lukas realized the blaze was out of control and retreated to the exit point they’d coordinated with the Church. Two black-robed hunters shot them dead as they approached, and returned to sealing off the barricade. It was Aleksander who dragged Djura to a dirty canal and guided them both through subterranean tunnels and back up into cold, dark night, the blaze a sunset glow in the distance.

In the days that followed, Djura did what he’d always done, and continued to exist.

It was incredible what the body could learn to bear.

Old Yharnam’s dead never speak. Sometimes Djura wishes they would. Sometimes Djura dreams that they do, and wakes from the nightmare soaked in sweat.

Djura had grown up surrounded by ghosts. Living in Old Yharnam came naturally enough. He packed little, scarcely prepared. It was less a conscious decision than obeying the dictates of a dream’s logic—or the laws of physics—an internal gravity that drew him. Everything, since that night, had been a nightmarish haze, a constant, keening panic. That feeling did not diminish in the charred corpse of Old Yharnam, but rather found its natural habitat, a place where the inside of Djura’s head and the landscape around him were in harmony.

He scarcely ate. A day he caught a rat was a feast day. He yanked up weeds from between paving-stones and spat on them to rinse the ash and gnawed them into paste in his mouth before he could swallow. A few were good. Most were not. Once in desperation he drank brackish ash-laced fountain water and for the next two days he was so sick and feverish he nearly died.

Some beasts avoided him. Some didn’t. He found perches, places he could observe them like some batty naturalist in the jungle. They had their own rhythms, rituals, packs. A few looters broke into the quarter, and a few men whose effects showed them to be Church agents. Djura shot them, from a distance, cleanly. He lingered by the bodies, staring dully until the beasts picked up the scent of a fresh kill.

One day Djura spotted a man concealed in a cloak who was carrying an oddly heavy pack down through the streets. He watched him idly for a few minutes, hand tapping on his blunderbuss, before he suddenly realized that he knew that bottle-green cloak, knew it very well indeed.

When Aleksander saw him approaching he lowered his pack to the street and straightened and scowled. The scowl deepened as he took in Djura’s appearance, his sallow skin, the filthy clothes already too large for his frame. Djura was too exhausted to do anything but stand there baldly in the daylight and let himself be judged.

Finally, Aleksander said, “You left.”

Djura spread his hands slightly, shrugged.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry.” He was.

“You left me up there,” Aleksander continued, furious, “all alone—no warning, no explanation—”

“I’m sorry,” Djura said again. Aleksander glared. “There isn’t one. I didn’t want you to be—” He shook his head—“burdened, bound, I don’t know.”

“You didn’t want me to be bound,” Aleksander repeated.

Djura shook his head again, weary. Aleksander deserved better than abandonment but a great many people deserved better than what Djura had given them, including many who roamed these very streets now or who lay rotting under the rubble. Aleksander had always deserved better, as had his parents, teachers, mentors, friends—better than a reckless unnatural idiot who couldn’t tell left from right or man from woman and who papered over his inadequacies with cheap humor and confidence tricks.

Aleksander kissed him.

He closed the distance and took Djura’s face in his gloved hands and kissed him clumsily, insistently, and then after a moment he broke free and glowered as if to say There, I believe I’ve made my point, and then his hands dropped from Djura’s face and he turned and went back to his pack and opened it.

“You take some of the weight,” he said, “I’ve carried it all this way already.” He began to pack some of the contents into a smaller sack. Djura, lips still burning, watched as Aleksander unloaded tins of food and canteens of clean water, and realized, once again, that he would not die just yet.

“Why won’t you let me touch you?”

The question comes at the end of a long and grueling day. Djura is cleaning his blunderbuss by the light of their lantern; Aleksander is supposed to be doing the same. The air outside is heavy and humid, thick with mist that obscures everything more than a few feet away. The Gatling gun would be worse than useless, and in any case it is not a night of the hunt. It should be safe enough, to be together in their tower room; or it was, before Aleksander spoke in that too-measured tone.

Aleksander has stopped working. He is looking directly at Djura, jaw set. Djura shrugs in response, gives him a baffled look.

Aleksander continues, “You draw back if I so much as put a hand on your shoulder.”

“I didn’t realize it meant so much to you,” Djura replies, acidly. They’re sitting on the floorboards, facing each other; he jostles his leg. “Grab a handful, then, it’s no trouble for me.”

Aleksander scowls. “If it’s no trouble for you, why do you flinch away from me? Why do you avoid me? Why do you cover yourself up like that, as if it makes any difference to me—?” He gestures to the bandage Djura now wears over the right half of his face, the bandage he’d found and carefully secured the very day he lost the patch, before he would even consider returning to the tower.

“If I wanted to be scolded like this, I’d have gotten married,” Djura snaps.

“I was under the impression there was another reason you hadn’t married,” says Aleksander, heated, and even after everything Djura cannot continue meeting his gaze, looks instead at the cold metal in his hands. After a moment Aleksander continues: “It’s been more than a year since—I came for you—and sometimes I think you can barely stand to look at me.”

“I didn’t ask you to come. I didn’t ask you to throw your damn life away—”

“You didn’t have to ask—”

“I never meant for you to, then. You came here of your own free will and you can leave whenever you like.”

There is a silence. Djura is still looking at his hands. They are too close, for this; the lantern’s dim glow forces them close together, to share the light, and now Djura wishes he could slide backwards, into the shadows, not sit with his folded knees barely a foot from Aleksander’s.

“I thought,” says Aleksander, lowly, and then pauses. After a moment he starts again. “Tell me—please tell me if I was mistaken. In what I believed we meant to each other. I will not leave; even if you asked me to, I would leave the tower, but I would not leave Old Yharnam. But if I have been—deluded—it would be kinder to tell me.”

“What did you believe we meant to each other?” says Djura, hearing the coldness in his tone, hating it, hating himself.

“Stop it,” Aleksander hisses. “Stop pretending. I’ll bear anything but that. What did you think it meant, when I kissed you?”

Djura’s shoulders tighten. His gaze is fixed now on a worn knothole in the wood. “That you were distressed.”

“Distressed.”

“Desperate,” says Djura. “Con—”

“If you say confused—”

“Confused.”

Very carefully and neatly, Aleksander begins to fold up the parts in his lap in his oilcloth and lays them aside.

“I’m not like you,” he says. “I don’t make friends easily. You are the only person who has ever truly known me. And so I thought, for a long time, that what I felt for you was what any man feels for his dearest friend. I had no point of comparison. I loved you before I knew I loved you, and when I knew, it was a long time before I understood that I loved you—” Aleksander tries to complete his sentence, struggling against a vocabulary that has no words for this sort of confession.

Djura shakes his head.

“Completely,” Aleksander concludes. “That I loved you completely. In every way one person can love another.”

“You don’t,” Djura says. “You’re not like me. You’re not a—” A half-dozen ugly words spring to his lips, words that describe what Aleksander is not and Djura is. He bites them back and shakes his head again.

“I’m not like you,” Aleksander agrees. “I’m not as kind, or as clever, or as good.”

“What? No,” Djura says, startled enough to meet Aleksander’s eyes. Startled, and then incensed. “You’re a better man than any other in this whole city, and I’m—”

“You’re what, precisely?” Aleksander leans forward. “You saved my life the first time we ever met. You gave me the only real family I’ve ever had and the first kindness I’d known since I was eight years old. I’ve seen you drop half your wages in a beggar’s hands the day before your rent was due. When Nikola died you were at his widow’s house every day for a month and I know it was you that beat down the bishop’s door until she got her stipend. You saw what we did here and you were the only one brave enough and good enough to try to make it right. You weep when you see a beast in pain and you build burial-mounds from the ash in every house we visit. And so I know I am not asking you idly, when I ask you to be kind to me. Tell me if I was mistaken.”

Djura cannot.

He cannot. He is mute, staring helplessly at Aleksander’s face so close to his own. He’s overwhelmed by this litany, these episodes of his life which he knows to be true and yet which strung together build a narrative of himself so entirely foreign. It’s too much, to realize how Aleksander sees him—Aleksander, who speaks in florid phrases that belong in a novel and yet who is so upright and noble and good that they seem utterly right coming from his beautiful mouth.

Djura has always thought him beautiful. Of course he has. He’d have gladly gone to bed with Aleksander the first night they met, scowl and all, and that was when he only thought him handsome, when he didn’t know how brave or good he really was. Djura has always in idle moments imagined the touch of those hands on his skin, dreamed of pressing a kiss to the corner of that mouth, running his fingers through those thick curls. And then has tucked those thoughts away, ashamed to take advantage of Aleksander’s friendship, terrified that Aleksander will read something in his gaze if he lingers too long.

Aleksander must read something there now, because he sits up on his knees, reaches over the lantern, and brings his hands to Djura’s face. Bare, this time. Skin to skin. His dark eyes are pleading the way they pleaded with him on that midsummer night, the way they pleaded when he was bleeding into dirty cobbles and needed to be told whether he deserved to live. 

“Tell me,” he says.

“I can’t.”

Can’t, because it’s wrong. Can’t, because it’s unnatural. Can’t, because he is wrong, because even if Aleksander shares his inclinations there are other men a thousand times more worthy. Can’t, because they are surrounded by death and decay and it is ghoulish to even imagine such a thing in the middle of a mass grave he helped to create.

Can’t, because of another reason, more shameful than the rest, buried deep within, selfish and stingy and mean.

“You’ll regret it,” he says. “You’ll leave.”

Other men have. Other men do. Other men have a night or two of fun and then go home to parents, wives, children. Some of them look disgusted as they go, with themselves, with what they’ve done.

Aleksander’s expression shifts, sorrowful. And disappointed.

“Do you think so little of me?”

“No!” Djura says. “No.” And he wants Aleksander to stop looking so sad, so tired, and his reckless idiot brain has been pushed past its limit of self-control and then a bit farther still. And that’s all. That’s all. 

Djura’s kiss is as clumsy as Aleksander’s was, that day he came to Old Yharnam. Aleksander doesn’t seem to mind. He kisses back, first eagerly, with almost bruising enthusiasm. And then he slows, lingering, pausing between to rest his forehead against Djura’s and rub his calloused thumbs over Djura’s cheeks before kissing him again, and again, as careful and unhurried as if he has all the time in the world. As if there is no reason to fear. As if no one is ever going to discover them and nothing will ever part them and as if here in this room they can kiss each other as much as they like and for as long as they like, for the rest of their lives, if they want to, as if the two of them have their own separate universe where the only thing that might ever disturb them is the occasional howl of a beast on the streets below. 

Djura is clinging to Aleksander’s wrists as they cradle his face. Aleksander responds to the pressure, reaching down to shift the lantern from between them, inching closer so their knees touch. He kisses the corner of Djura’s mouth, now. His cheek. His temple. The inner arch of his brow, the tip of his nose. Precise and deliberate as he always is. He moves to lift the bandage from the other half of Djura’s face, and Djura recoils.

“Don’t,” he begs. But when he opens his eyes he sees the expression on Aleksander’s face. 

He reaches for the lantern, kills the flame, and envelops them in a darkness so absolute it’s almost tangible. But not as tangible as Aleksander’s hand on his jaw, the other removing the bandage, exposing the mangled flesh beneath to the warm, close air. Aleksander gently traces upwards from Djura’s lips to the very bottom of the scarring. His fingers move along the jagged edges of the flesh, and then at last his lips follow, learning the shape of the scars more intimately by touch than he ever could by sight. And Djura finally wraps both arms around him and presses his face into Aleksander's neck and exhales.

He hopes, for once, that dawn takes its time in coming.

In the new liturgy, before the blessing, the priests murmur at the end of their prayers, Grant us eyes. 

Djura’s not much for mass. He and the Church differ on some key doctrinal issues. A few finer points of theology.  

The priests pray for eyes.

And Djura knows that, in the end, the best things happen in blindness.