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It doesn't occur to Simon for some time. Sure, Isidor was a dear friend of his and his son was – well, something, to Daniil. But he has different priorities now and it takes quite a while for him to even think of the Burakh boy.
He would never call himself inhuman, though the distance between him and something as mundane as emotion has grown. He might call it guilt, then, that eventually brings him to the younger Burakh in the afternoon of the twelfth day of the plague, pacing the stage of the theatre.
"Dankovsky?" Burakh asks, voice urgent, reaching for him, face open in question, before realisation falls onto it, darkening his features – "Don't tell me you – "
"It is done," Simon says with Dankovsky's voice.
"You – " Artemy takes him by the collar and shakes him, pulling him off his feet. Simon lets himself be dragged and pushed against a wall. The Dankovsky in him would have loved this, would have chased the high of the fight. How immature.
Artemy doesn't strike him, just stares at him, eyes wild and desperate, flicking between both of his. "How could you – How could – " He snarls, lower lip shaking, chin dimpling up. "Seventeen thousand!" Artemy yells. "Seventeen thousand dead!"
The strength of the betrayal in his eyes, like he had genuinely trusted Daniil, makes something clear for Simon. It's not just guilt that brought him here – just like he was bound to Isidor, their fates intertwined and latched to the town like two cuscuta vines, so are Dankovsky and young Burakh, bound together even now.
"I'm sorry." He finds the urge to say the words for the first time since he became what he now is. "I'm sorry you had to lose him."
Confusion falls on Burakh's face, twists ugly on his brutish features. "And your father, too," Simon adds, knowing in his no longer beating heart the grief his old friend felt even as he knowingly doomed his son. "He loved you very much."
Artemy breaks his nose – what a childish reaction, and an inconvenience to boot. That's enough of this.
Simon snaps his fingers.