(This is a belated bday present for @lararavel who wanted some Bachelor/Haruspex. No smut, but there’s some blood and plague rat death.)
After half a day of rain, the soil between the cobblestone walkways had turned to mud. Walking out on the steppe meant the risk of losing a boot, even if one didn’t go near the bogs. Daniel had taken to the outskirts of the town, just brimming the steppe, for the last few days to circumvent the worst areas of the Plague Districts. The choice was to either brave another district on the way back to the Slough or be caught in a mire.
He only had one good arm. He had to keep reminding himself of that, mentally. He’d gotten used to feeling pain all over his body, yet the cold fire burning in his gut kept him going. He would think he could still defend himself with two hands. The butchers who had ambushed him during his ill-fated trip to the Abattoir had seen to that. His left arm was immobilized in a sling a medic in Blok’s army had fitted him with shortly after saving and examining him. If he fell into a bog, he only had one hand to claw himself out of the quicksand.
Maybe this district wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, as he picked his way across the pathways. Not so bad if one ignored the green miasma and the scabs on the buildings around him which seemed to be breathing (a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and fever, he told himself. Dear Lord, he needed to take something to sleep tonight). There weren’t hordes of rats chewing on him or Plague victims lurching forward and clawing at his bag. Yet.
Which made it all the more jarring when he was suddenly standing over the body of a mugger who had tried to sneak up on him in an alley. He remembered seeing the reflection of a sneering face in a rain-streaked window. When he was next aware, he was watching rivulets of blood from the hole in the man’s head stain the rain water as it drained towards a gutter. The barrel of his revolver was smoking. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger. The explosion of the bullet may as well have been a clap of thunder.
He really needed to sleep.
He still had a mind to rummage through the mugger’s coat pockets. His spoils were a handful of coins and a worn knife he could try to repair and sell to pay the price of an egg.
A large shadow fell across him, spurring him to his feet, gun drawn. The motion made his vision waver, but he didn’t have a free hand to rub his eyes. His head throbbed.
At first he thought it was one of the nameless butchers come to loot through the district while the army was still setting up their boundaries. Well, he was half-right. The only butcher allowed past the Guards (and then, he knew, only with special permission from the Olgimsky’s) was…
“Haruspex. Do you have a death wish?”
Burakh had a sanitary cloth over his face and a scalpel at the ready. The rain made the bloodstains on his coat darken into crimson patches.
“Come to finish the job?” Daniel said wryly. Artemiy lowered his knife slowly.
“It’s better for the health if you avoid places of disease,” Artemis said.
“Speak for yourself,” Daniel said. With some hesitation, he lowered his revolver. “I can either get infected by the play the clouds or the swamp water. How well do you think I could swim like this?”
He saw Artemiy’s eyes swivel down to his sling. There was the flicker of something unidentifiable in his eyes. Daniel could tell it was there, even with the grime caked over the lamps.
“How did it happen?” Artemiy said.
“Your people happened,” Daniel said. “The little Mother-Keeper in the Apiary invited me to your temple for a tea party. I didn’t realize that the other guests would want to exchange bruises in the place of biscuits.”
There was a tense silence between them. That seemed to be all that ever existed between them. He was half- expecting Artemiy to say something like ‘you should have known better.’
What he got was a grunt and what sounded like a brief and muffled apology.
Daniel’s expression darkened further. “I don’t need your sympathy.”
A hard edge crept into Artemiy’s voice. “At least they left it attached.”
“Oh? Are they in the habit of tearing off limbs like rag dolls, then?”
They were getting nowhere like this. Every instinct of Daniel’s told him to just leave the alleyway before this got uglier.
Artemiy started towards him, crossing the distance between them with a couple of strides. His fingers closed around the elbow of Daniel’s good arm. For a hazy moment, Daniel thought he was going to give him a symmetrical break. He expected a searing pain and the sound of bone cracking.
A knife plunged into a fissure which formed in between the bricks of the wall next to Dankovsky’s head. There was an ungodly shriek from a small animal. It pulled out a diseased rat, skewered through the shoulder. Its bloated body was thrown into a puddle.Daniel recoiled in disgust.
Artemiy released Daniel and would have turned to leave were it not for Daniel’s hand grasping the collar of his coat. There must have been another feverish skip of his memory because suddenly he had pressed himself back against the wall of the house and pulled Burakh’s head down so that he could pressed his lips against the sanitary cloth cloth wrapped around the lower half of Artemiy’s face. The scratch of wet cloth must feel as rough is Artemiy’s lips would be.
When he pulled back, Artemiy was just staring at him.
“A token of my thanks,” Daniel said. “You weren’t the one who broke my arm. But you were the one who saved me from a rat.”
