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“It’s the only way, or so you say…” Grief murmurs, huddled in the corner of a dead man’s house, trying and failing to block out the shouts that penetrate every wall.
Clara stands a few feet away, staring deeply into the mirror shattered by none other than Bachelor Dankovsky a few days prior. Her head is angled in such a way that he can’t see her face, but every once in a while he catches a glimpse of her eyes in one of many reflections. Those eyes bore into him, and he can’t help but feel like she’s still peering into his soul- whichever her it is that looks out of the glass.
“Well…” She finally turns to face him, leaning heavily on the flimsy sink with hands grasping its sides. A week ago, he might’ve told her to be careful, but he knows by now that she doesn’t do anything without reason. If it falls, it will be because she chose to let it fall.
(He envies her freedom. However good a thief he may be, he’ll never be able to steal his own fate as she has. All he can do is grovel at her feet in the hopes that her touch might imbue him with the slightest spark of life before it’s inevitably snuffed out.)
“The Bachelor could do something, I’m sure,” she says with more than a little reproach. He doesn’t think she hates him, per se, but she sees her counterparts more like enemies than they do one another. She is the odd one out among their trinity, sticking out like a sore thumb as she fails to find her proper place in the dance between those natural opposites. (No wonder Katerina pronounced her to be her heir, in the days before the Inquisitor cleaved that strange family apart.)
“But..?” he prompts her, clenching and unclenching fingers stiff with disuse- once nimble enough to pick a lock in ten seconds flat, now barely up to the task of unscrewing the caps of his few remaining morphine bottles. (He’s not an addict- or at least, he’s no more an addict than Dankovsky. The twyre-heavy air has done nothing to ease the pain of his body’s degeneration nor the fresh hole in his side. Some things are just necessary.)
“But, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as elegant as my solution. He’s self-obsessed; he sees himself in everyone. And because he hates himself, he won’t bother to consider everyone when making his choice.” Her hands slide from the sink as she approaches the cot he sits upon, her every move so deliberate they seem rehearsed. “He may achieve a miracle this time, but once he holds it in his hands, he’ll hoard it for himself.”
She stops half a foot away from the cot, tilting her head just slightly to look up at him. If he were standing, the difference would be less stark. He wonders if he should, out of respect, or… something like it. But his joints still ache from when the snake gave him the run-around, so he stays still and hopes she’ll understand.
(The worst part is that she always understands. And she doesn’t just understand- she pities him. Nobody’s looked at him like that- like a mother looks at her son, stumbling home sobbing over skinned knees- since he was younger than her. Guiltily, resentfully, he likes it. He shouldn’t- and wouldn’t, if he was the man he was meant to be- but the relief of being blameless in someone’s eyes for once is overwhelming.)
“Filin, oh Filin…” she singsongs, and his whole body tenses up. His mind races- is she going to touch him, to thrust him into the depths once more? Does she still not trust him, or does she simply want to tear his soul from his chest and watch it squirm, like a child pouring salt on slugs? Then she laughs, a quiet huff he might’ve missed were she not so close. “You’re wound tighter than a spring… why? Are you scared of me?”
She’s looking past him, at the wall where he knows the late Isidor’s medical diagrams are plastered. Since he came here, he’s spent hours every day just staring at them, thinking. Wondering why they can deceive themselves into believing they’re so much more intricate than they truly are. Wondering why a man far wiser than Grief could ever hope to be, as far as these diagrams tell, didn’t know the secret.
“You’re more lifelike than you think,” Clara says, eyes crinkling with her smile in a way that makes her look older than she should. “What did you say about that wretched woman? ‘She’s almost human’, that was it. Yes… you’re almost human.”
“‘Almost’ isn’t good enough,” he retorts. “A silkworm’s almost a moth, sure. But try askin’ it to fly, d’you think it’ll get very high?”
“Nobody’s asking you to fly, Grief.” She purses her lips in consideration, then shakes her head. “Except for yourself… that is.”
“And why shouldn’t I ask?” Grief says quietly. “Because the Law says I don’t have the right?” He feels childish asking her such things, but if not her- his patron saint, his guardian angel, his grim reaper, all wrapped up in one- who else?
“If you help the Bachelor leave this town, I will become the Law. It will say as I say… it will do as I do. And then you will be able to fly, because unlike him, I think of the sick.”
He shifts uncomfortably, looking anywhere but her face. Across the room, perched atop a wardrobe, he spies a skull looking down on him. He stares deep into its sockets and wonders if he’s any more ‘alive’ than it. With a gun to his head, he couldn’t say. “I’m not sick.”
“Oh, but you are, aren’t you?” Clara reaches out and he resists the urge to flinch. She places her hand upon his knee- carefully arranged as to put the least pressure on it- and slowly, deliberately, twists.
He can’t help the way his face scrunches up in pain as his kneecap slides out of place, jaw clenching and eyes squeezing shut. He’s sure he could stop her if he tried- he may not be strong, but she’s a malnourished teenager, holy healer or not- but he can’t bring himself to reject her. He simply tries not to move or make a sound, but after about ten seconds a sharp pain shoots up through his leg and he’s helpless to prevent either his pained gasp or his full-body spasm.
“Yes… see?” Clara says, finally releasing her surprisingly strong grip. His face flushes shamefully- it’s humiliating how easily she calls his bluffs. “All of mine are sick… in mind, body, and soul.”
“Great… here you had me thinkin’ I might be unique,” he manages after a long moment spent catching his breath. Every inhale pulls on the stitches holding his side together, making him shudder- both from pain and the thought of how many more stitches his body hides in the felt he sees as skin. “Thanks for clearin’ that up.”
(He refused Dankovsky’s help only to do a shoddy job patching himself up. He knew it was unwise, but he couldn’t stand the thought of another healer’s hands on him after Clara’s ripped him open. And now here he is, letting her play with him like the doll he is.
What a disgrace.)
“You’re missing the point,” Clara insists. She presses her hand to his knee once more, and this time she merely smooths her palm against it. Maybe it’s a placebo, or maybe she’s ironing out his creases, or maybe she’s laying on hands just like she says she can- whatever the case, the pain she inflicted vanishes as quickly as it appeared. There it is again, that pity. “This is why it’s better, doing it my way.”
“What, cause I’m already past my prime goin’ on twenty-nine?” His smile verges on a smirk that verges on a grimace.
“If I perform the miracle, you’ll become free and truly human… just like you wanted, Grief. Just like Simon.” Equally as careful as she was when she slid his kneecap halfway out of its socket, she reaches out with both arms and wraps them around his neck. Her skin is as cold as ice- like a corpse, he thinks. The chill penetrates his thick jacket, then his skin, then his bones- it’s like they aren’t even there, like she’s peeled every layer away and holds his very soul in her arms.
Grief doesn’t want to die. But if he’s being given a choice for the first time since his creation, to live as a puppet or die as a human…
In the back of his mind, he knows: it’s not a real choice, not if he could only ever choose one way. But it’s the closest a thing like him is ever going to get, so he’ll accept it, and he’ll be as grateful as he can bear to be.
“You’ll help him leave, won’t you?” Clara whispers in his ear, breath warm despite her frigid skin.
“‘Course I will…” Not like a man who’d make that choice deserves the right to make it, but that’s besides the point. The string of fate is still tied to him… and it will be until he passes it on.
Some traitorous part of Grief hopes Daniil will choose to stay, will use his freedom to keep him alive yet again, unaware as he may be of that particular consequence. But then, what good is his life if he doesn’t belong to himself? Why shouldn’t he want her to set him free?
“I am,” he says the second he realizes, answering her question far too late, “scared of you.”
“Oh… I see.” She pulls back just far enough to look him in the eye, lifting one of her hands to run thin fingers through the short part of his hair. He shivers whenever one of her broken nails scrapes against his scalp. “That’s okay. I-” Her voice catches in her throat, and he stares in disbelief as she struggles with her words for the first time since they met. It’s as if he’s deviated from a script he isn’t privy to, leaving her struggling to find phrases that sound right coming from her character’s mouth.
“You alright ?” he asks with a pang of uncharacteristic concern, and for the first time she looks every bit the teenage girl she’s never been allowed to be.
“I’m scared, too,” she admits under her breath, eyes glassy and unfocused. “Everyone hates me or loves me… and I think one of me is going to die before this all ends. Do you understand? I’ll be alone! Everyone who loved me will be gone… I’ll have used up all your love.”
“One of you is going to die..? Your sister?”
“Or me…” She speaks with all the hesitance necessary when entrusting a closely-guarded secret. “I don’t know which I am. A harbinger… or a saint.”
Grief remembers when his petty thievery started to transform into something bigger than him, a web he never intended to weave. A web he didn’t weave, he reminds himself- but one he was led to believe he had. The way lifelong friends looked at him then… like they didn’t recognize the creature before them. He’d started to wonder whether he really had become a different person, if his insistence to the contrary was nothing more than denial.
Then things got worse, and men he used to call brothers took to the knife, and while they painted the streets red he couldn’t stop wondering whether deep down, he truly wanted this.
“You don’t really have a choice either, do you?” It’s almost a relief to know she’s just as helpless as he is. But ‘almost’ isn’t good enough, is it? The yawning pit in his stomach widens in light of the knowledge.
She pulls away from him, face scrunching up like she’s fighting the urge to cry.
“I will!” she protests. “You have to believe me, I will… if he leaves… or even if he doesn’t, I will eventually. And I’ll make better and wiser choices than either of them could have, you’ll see!” She’s close to shouting, desperation showing in her frantic gesticulation.
“Hey, I didn’t mean…” He almost reaches out to hold her wrists before she knocks something over, but it feels wrong for him to touch her rather than the other way around, so he merely holds his hands up in a placating gesture. “I’m not blamin’ you. How could I? Glass houses, or somethin’… and we’re all trapped under glass, right? Even that awful Bachelor, to some extent.”
It takes a bit, but she stills, chest still heaving from her upset. Her face is flushed and her brows drawn together in frustration.
“I’ll break free. Please, stop seeing yourself in me. I’m nothing like you… nothing at all.” Maybe he should be offended, but all he can feel is guilt. He should have just believed in her from afar. He always digs too deep, looking for answers whose knowledge will only make things worse. The hole in his side might’ve closed by now if he hadn’t pried it open searching for cotton. What was the point of it all? “I don’t want to be trapped. I want to save you. If only you’d just let me…”
Grief knows when she says ‘you’ she means the town as a whole, but he can’t help but wish she meant him. “It’s going to be okay,” he lies. “You’ll have your day. And I’ll… help you make it real. Your miracle.”
Will Stakh feel anything as he transmutes Grief into that which he destroyed his life trying to create, or will he go about it clinically before succumbing to his final end? Will Lara mourn him, or will she treat his death with the same cold indifference which makes him doubt whether they were ever truly friends in the first place? Will Artemy..?
He’s pretty sure he knows what Artemy will do, actually. Artemy will call him an idiot for agreeing to this. And then, maybe… cry for him, if he’s lucky. Not in public, of course. Maybe not even out of sadness, but because he feels like someone should. Whatever the reason, it’ll be good enough for him.
“Thank you,” Clara is saying, wiping away tears he didn’t notice gathering in her eyes. “Oh, thank you. I’m going to fix everything, I promise. It’s going to be wonderful… and it will all be thanks to your sacrifice, my beautiful, terrible disciples…”
And yours, he thinks, but doesn’t say.
Grief wonders if his hesitance is the reason Clara visits Gravel the next day. Maybe she wanted to make it easier for him to die. Maybe she wanted to make it harder for him to live.
Still, he doesn’t hate Clara. He doesn’t know why- he should, but he can’t. He hates Dankovsky for abandoning them. He hates himself for giving himself over to her so completely. But he doesn’t hate Clara.
Grief sends the Bachelor away in a coffin of his own just before the funeral. It doesn’t make him feel any better, but maybe it’ll make Dankovsky feel worse.
Clara is standing behind the door when Grief steps outside. Waiting for him.
“I’m going to tell myself it was your sister,” he says before she can get a word in, staring straight ahead. She blinks, slow and ponderous- and there it is again. He finds he’s finally grown sick of her pity.
“It was,” she says, so earnestly that he has no choice but to believe her. Her word has become Law, after all, so it must be true.
He should have known better than to put his faith in her the second she mentioned such a thing- wasn’t he trying to fight the Law which bends and breaks them without discretion? He’s trying and failing to calm himself down when she wraps her arms around his neck and he has to fight the urge to shove her so hard she cracks her skull on the pavement. “Don’t be sad. It’s the only way…”
He can’t stop thinking: he should have known. He should have known.
(Did he want this as well? Now at least two of his friends will follow him to the grave. Did her touch make Lara free and truly human? Was it worth it?)
“Two more days,” she whispers into his ear, and he can’t help the sigh of relief he lets out. Just two more days. A choice made for him, a choice made by him- what does it matter?
Just two more days.