2 and/or 50 for the angsty prompts, if you feel so inclined? :)
Artemy doesn’t quite turn, doesn’t quite look over his shoulder. Just enough to get a glimpse of blonde hair, of nervous shoes shuffling against the tile. Three A.M. - he’s listened to the clock chiming. He should be asleep, and Artemy should be scolding him for that. But who is he to judge, making himself stand upright for the twenty-eighth consecutive hour? He won’t sleep tonight. He never does. There’s antibiotics to be made, painkillers, plans and routes and plays to be performed.
But Sticky is not quite sixteen, and he should be asleep. “What?” It’s an inelegant question, come out from a rough voice that hasn’t gotten use in the past couple hours. In his own ears Artemy sounds somehow both demanding and nonchalant, like the question doesn’t bother him.
Sticky shuffles his feet again, hands in his back pocket. “Are you afraid to die?” It’s the first time he’s asked Artemy a question without meeting his eyes. He’s defiant, headstrong as all Burakhs are, and this sudden moment of frailty is startling. Artemy’s been taking his bravery for granted, forgetting that beneath that bold exterior, his ward is still a child.
At three in the morning, though, he’s not his most coherent. There’s a sort of humming all around them, and he tries not to sway on his feet as he does finally move his body to face Sticky. His lids are heavy. Artemy feels that he may fall. “What brought that up?” It’s a way to stall for time, to figure out what kind of answer Sticky needs to hear right now. He watches Sticky as he leans on his left foot, eyes flicking uneasily to the cupboard in the corner. He shrugs his shoulders, but this is not the end. Artemy blinks, hard enough to see spots before his vision and force himself awake. He’ll be better, he’ll be faster, be more alert than the last few times.
“Your serum isn’t working,” he finally says. “I know you tried it on some people at the hospital. You even asked that big city doctor for help. And he doesn’t know a damn thing, so we must be in trouble.” His eyes pull at Artemy’s, begging an answer. “Doesn’t that scare you?”
A lot of things scare me, but none as much as you asking me this. He runs his tongue over his lips and digs his teeth in. He should be comforted by the knowledge of his body being slowly reclaimed by the earth, by the feeling and the texture of the dirt surrounding him and making him whole. There is an echo in his head that tells him the Sand Pest is nothing to fear, but he’s seen the pain it brings and the destruction it causes, the way it’s ravaged the town he loves. That scares him, it does. “Yes.” He doesn’t know the look in Sticky’s eyes, if he’s comforted or disappointed by his admission. “But death doesn’t.”
He hears the sigh like it’s the wind moving through a broken fence. And he thinks, No child should have to deal with this. “How?” Lost his parents, lost my father. “How do you keep from being scared of something that just...” Spends his life crawling in and out of houses, in and out of shops. “Surrounds you?” He shouldn’t be thinking about death, too.
And Artemy wishes he had a better way to answer this, something mature, something useful. What he has simply isn’t enough. “I try not to think about it.”
