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Alexander is not a man predisposed to nurturing, but neither is he bereft, entirely, of empathy. So when, in the middle of the night, Dankovskiy is brought to his quarters an absolute mess, torn and bloodied from some skirmish in an alley, or from snooping in an infected district—the soldiers that bring him seem unable to agree to the cause—any ire for having his meager sleep disturbed is swiftly discarded, and Block dismisses his men promptly, taking a semi-conscious Dankovskiy from their brutish grip with his face stone-set and his orders for discretion even firmer.
He is, by every account, a hardened man—war and warring patronage often does that to a person—but the moment he is alone with Dankovskiy groaning in his embrace, he finds himself abruptly seized by a desperate worry.
With infinite care, he steadies Dankovskiy further into his room—a decent enough place in one of the abandoned residentials nearest the Town Hall—and lays the man immediately on his bed, hurriedly fetching a basin of water, a cloth, and small phial of laudanum. Though morphine seems to be the town darling, he is grateful this should prove an easier means of administering, and Dankovskiy takes his spoonful sans much complaint.
“Awful stuff,” he slurs. “But I’m sure I look about as well as it tastes.”
Block does not laugh, nor even give an assuring smile as Dankovskiy cracks open his eyes.
“Who did this,” the commander runs his fingers feather-light over a bruise dripping purple-red from Dankovskiy’s hairline to his collar. On his temple weeps an impressive gash, and though head wounds always bleed so much more than they’re worth, he’s taking no chances.
“If I knew their names,” answers Dankovskiy, “I doubt they’d have done this. Or maybe they would have done worse, hard to say. In any case, if memory serves, your boys shot them like dogs.”
In the midst of wringing out the cloth, Block pauses, assessing the doctor’s glibness. For his part, Dankovskiy is staring decidedly nowhere, eyes half-lidded and glazed over. The rest of him sprawls stiffly on the bed, as though his agony were some grand and terrible imposition. Even in suffering, the doctor can’t bring himself to enjoy any other state than annoyed frustration. Seeing Dankovskiy inflict it upon himself, and after such an ordeal, makes something stir in the commander, a nascent thing he has, for the most part, ignored. Or, been trying to, anyway.
“All the better,” he replies thickly, doing his best to swallow the weight in his chest. “Or I’d have hunted them, myself.”
“You flatter me,” Dankovskiy sighs, again closing his eyes, and seeming to let some tension seep from his face, the clench of his jaw, his shoulders.
Stupid that he did not think to relieve the man of his coat, as that surely cannot be comfortable to lay in, but no blood shows on the fabric, the worst of it seeming to have been kept above the neck.
“Your well-being is a continuing priority of mine,” says the commander, daubing the cloth over Dankovskiy’s brow, then his cheeks.
“Surely I am not so invaluable,” laughs Dankovskiy, a sound that grinds quickly to a groan.
“You are,” Block tells him.
“I suppose as one of the town’s few accredited doctors…”
“Among other merits,” Block finds himself adding, before he can stop himself.
Dankovskiy smirks, that private little slash of satisfaction across his lips that utterly bewitches the commander.
“I’ll have to ask you to list those,” says the doctor, “when I am better able to enjoy them.”
“In the morning, then,” Block agrees.
“Presumptuous,” jokes Dankvoskiy.
“You’re a stubborn man, Bachelor, but I refuse to let you back onto those streets until daylight.”
Dankovskiy lifts one hand, waving it as he lets his eyes fall again closed, “Fine, then. I’m all yours.”
Nodding, as if to confirm this for himself, Block returns to the task of cleaning the worst of Dankovskiy’s blood and bruises. He is diligent, perfunctory much in the way of his youth spent triaging his comrades in foxholes. Slowly, though, as seems to be the case of things whenever he is in Dankvoskiy’s presence, the weight of his station lifts bit by bit, his efforts guided no longer by practicality, alone, but by that of a man honest in his concern and the ill-advised pounding behind his ribs and at his wrists.
Strange, thinks the commander, that it is only Dankovskiy who has ever seemed able to place this stupor upon him, flaying him sweetly raw and fumbling.
“Where will you go,” asks the doctor, some languid minutes into Block’s ministrations, and the commander starts, taken suddenly from his spell.
Dankovskiy does not open his eyes, but he needn’t have, anyway, to feel the way the commander’s hands come to an abrupt pause.
“When this is all over,” he continues, “when we have seen this plague dead, where will you go from here?”
“I wouldn’t have put you for an optimist, Bachelor,” Block answers.
“Then you do not expect to emerge from this?” Now, Dankovskiy looks at him, with piercing incredulity and just the barest glimpse of sadness.
“I…” Block chooses his words carefully, feeling much too perused.
“I do not expect anything,” he settles on. “I strategize.”
“A better effort than most who would call themselves doctors,” rebuts Dankovskiy, leveraging painfully onto his elbows.
Block instinctively leans closer, mumbling something like, “All the worse for them. I am no doctor.”
“You have the heart of one,” says Dankovskiy, and he is so near that Block can smell the blood on him. “And the hands. Practical and yet gentle. I wouldn’t have been so careful with myself, even.”
Block shivers, but says steadily enough, “Then we are both lucky you were brought here.”
Sighing, Dankovskiy falls back upon the bed, placing a full stop on wherever that moment was veering inadvisably towards.
“In many ways, General, yes.”
Block would like to say something in return, anything that might goad the doctor close again, and perhaps even closer, but he is still hurt and in need, and they are tired, and tomorrow will not wait for them to waste time, now.
So they say no more, Block taking great pains not to rush anything, and the only sounds that fill the room are that of the cloth, going to and from the basin, turning its contents pink and Dankovskiy’s brow less scarlet.
It’s meditative, almost, brushing back his hair, daubing the cloth, watching its fibers soak away the red. Rinsing it. Smoothing the skin just cleaned as fresh blood wells to the surface.
At length, Dankovskiy seems almost near calm, though still remaining slightly too stiff and giving only short, sharp breaths when he is touched. But that he never makes the effort to fend for himself, to brandish that standoffish independence the commander has seen so swiftly wielded for defense, that does equally terrible things to Block’s thoughts, and he wishes he could suspend this fragile night exactly here, reliving again and again this man brought to him, put onto the bed, lain back for his careful attention. Unafraid and vulnerable and hurting only as much as Block lets him.
He could lose himself in a man like Dankovskiy. Truly, he could.
But then the doctor is opening his eyes, because Block has let linger too long his fingers on the man’s temple, at first assessing the gash, and now mesmerized by how warm Dankovskiy is there, so soft and open. It’s a violent, perverse thought to have, but he’s helpless to it. It, and the stark blackness of scarlet on the man’s ivory skin.
“This might need stitching,” he says, out of pure obligation when he catches himself being observed.
“It’s only small,” counters Dankovskiy, with a tone set to remind the commander who is, in fact, the doctor here. “I should be fine till morning.”
But the ache won’t dislodge itself from Block’s throat, and his hand stays of its own accord, a flagrant breach of the conduct he’s already strayed from far too many times tonight. Only he can’t seem to help himself. By Dankovskiy’s very presence, he is a man undone of decorum, no longer the stalwart general everyone seeks solution and strategy from, but simply a man as lost as any other, cold and afraid and wanting in this empty, illimitable tragedy.
And so, when he brings the cloth to Dankovskiy’s temple, when he presses it there, barely firm enough to dislodge the last clot of dried blood, and when Dankovskiy winces, unabashed of the vulnerability and exhaustion and utter defeat in his bruised complexion, it is not General Block who holds his breath, who brings away the cloth and instead takes Dankovskiy by the jaw, thumbs and fingers making a cradle for his heavy head.
It is Alexander who does this, no longer a man possessed only of practicality and strategy, but one broken in turn by the image of another so cruelly lashed by the world and its evils.
It is Alexander who holds Dankovskiy’s face, who looks into those bleary eyes, still so full of life, bloodshot as they are.
And it is Alexander who moves their bodies close, who leaps the faithless distance between their mouths to put his lips softly upon Dankovskiy’s, like he might breathe some prayer of hope and healing in that tight set grimace.
It is Alexander who kisses this man so like himself, and who he continues to be as Dankovskiy subsides to him. No reticence, no recoiling into those put on airs of aloof distaste, though the doctor has never once regarded the commander as such.
But he is still no longer the commander. And Dankovskiy still welcomes him, letting Alexander lift his chin, amending the angle of their closeness. It is not chaste, the kiss, though neither is it the indulgence Alexander has wanted for. Simply, it is warm, and soft, and as gentle as they have never known a single moment to be in this wretched town.
And of course, it ends, and nothing grand emerges from the act. Alexander pulls away, and Dankovskiy lets him go, and once more the cloth is brought between them. This time Dankovskiy does not wince, although watching his face carefully, Alexander can see he’s actively suppressing it.
“Don’t let me hurt you,” he says, implying nothing. He knows the doctor’s ego well.
“Then I would have to keep you quite far away, General,” replies Dankovskiy.
Now Alexander flinches, but because Dankovskiy’s eyes are again closed, he does not see, so no hands reach for him, and no lips search out his sighs.
“I would ask,” he says instead, “that you do no such thing.”
“Why is that,” Dankovskiy’s brows draw close, the only evidence of his pain.
An impossible silence alights on the general’s tongue, but not nearly as impossible as the man he tends to, and with eyes still closed and face still drawn in contemplative agony, Dankovskiy wets his lips with a flimsy smile, and murmurs, “Has it not to do with why you’ve kissed me?”
Alexander balks, not outwardly, though his stomach, his chest, roil as one great ache . Something must be said for this, for Dankovskiy is not a man prone to leaving things unanswered.
So Alexander gathers himself, and tries at some platitude or other, as though he has not just kissed the man at all.
“Affection is not so black and white, Bachelor.”
“Daniil.”
Alexander swallows, nods, can’t quite look straight at Dankovskiy.
“Daniil,” he says, tasting this foreign ardor on his tongue.
There is more silence, just for a spell, and when Dankovskiy opens his eyes, it is to watch Alexander’s face, who does not, cannot watch him back. The man is terribly thin all over, to be sure, but some parts of him bear too starkly his emaciations, and with each breath rising short and shallow, his breast beneath his waistcoat barely stirs, inspiring the irrevocable need for Alexander to touch him there, to spread his palm and find the pale heart of this man.
It’s on one such shaky exhale that Dankovskiy speaks again.
“Do you want me,” he says, and the general shivers, eyes darting to Daniil’s, snared there, drowned.
Damn him, damn all his little tricks, because he never asks anything outright, but Alexander feels compelled as if under duress of the most dire interrogation. And he can’t lie. He never has, not to Daniil.
“Yes,” he breathes, because what else is there for the air so thick in his lungs? Who else should deserve his asphyxiant awe, his complete unraveling by a man he has known for astoundingly less time than any of his previous lovers, sparse though they have been. For he is not a stranger to intimacy, but what weaves its lariat between him and Daniil portends something devastating, something truly ruinous.
Or perhaps that’s just circumstance, the stresses of this damned sickness, of the power and manipulation that stalks his every choice made in some dashed effort to do any scrap of goodness.
Perhaps he should kiss Daniil again, and forget the whole affair, if only for as long as Daniil will have him.
He decides upon the latter, and Daniil welcomes him like blood to a rend. For he is, all of him, a wound, an open raw thing, and Alexander flows into him, fits his heavy, scarred palms around Daniil’s face, his throat, his shoulders, takes Daniil’s lower lip between his, surges carefully against the man, delicately crowding over him—steadfast and protective.
“How do you want me,” sighs Daniil between his lips.
“Any way you will let me,” answers Alexander. “Even if only for an hour, for less, I want you to forget this world with me. I… I want to make love to you, to know what you look like when none of this touches you because I won’t let it.”
“Quite eloquent, General.”
“Alexander,” it slips out before he can help it, but he’s too far gone to care, because Daniil is here, bleeding in his bed and still giving over to life—to ardor, even, and to every way Alexander needs to feel that he is real and hurting and fighting despite every fucking thing that seeks their destruction, their failure.
In this, there can be done no wrong, and so there can be no pretenses, either, no formalities or regalia.
“Alexander,” repeats Daniil, the name unto something coveted within his mouth, and Alexander kisses him again for it, searching out the taste of himself held so lavishly and so secretly by a smile he prays no one else may ever see.
This time, at last, Daniil lets him deepen it, coaxing with his teeth, keeping his mouth slack for Alexander to fill hungrily.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t,” he says, exhaling his trepidation over Daniil’s tongue. “Your injuries –”
“If you think,” interjects Daniil, “that I intend to let you rile me without satisfaction, then you’re far denser than I took you for.”
“I want you,” replies Alexander, half-laughing, half-pleading. “God, I want you.”
“Then have me.”
It would seem, in these fevered moments, he has brought himself almost completely onto the bed, arms bracing either side of Daniil’s head. A touch to his forearm by Daniil’s gloved hand sends a shock to his core, and the bed groans pleasantly as he shifts, bringing his left knee between Daniil’s thighs, bracketing his leg and looming fully over the doctor’s supine form.
He feels that he should make some grand speech about this all, he’s given so many, besides, but none that could prepare him for this, for Bachelor Dankovskiy spread beneath him and still so handsome through the mangled state of his face.
So he lets action dictate their confluence, leaning down to brush his lips from one corner of Daniil’s mouth to the other, meanwhile bringing his hand to the doctor’s sternum, skating it down, and down, and down.
More than anything, he wishes to savor the man, to enjoy for an eternity in his memory every second of their coming together. But even in the act, things are faulty and unforgiving, and Alexander finds himself stuttering through haphazard increment.
His lips are upon Daniil’s. And then his stomach. And then between his thighs. The ordeal of discarding trousers, apparently unimportant, is given little fanfare. Later, Alexander tells himself, later when this is over, he will enjoy Daniil as he was meant to be. He will spend hours undressing the man, adoring every inch of skin and bone and blood, and Daniil will say his name like turning over a talisman in his palm.
For now, that palm is comfortable gripping Alexander by the roots of his hair, and he relishes it, groaning softly his acquiescence as he laves his tongue to the silky heat of Daniil’s cunt, a slow and torturous ordeal that leaves the doctor’s thighs quivering.
“I – have wanted that mouth of yours – for so long,” pants Daniil.
Alexander feels compelled to point out they’ve known each other barely a week, but that would require taking his tongue from its task, and he can think of no greater sin.
So he hums his concession, and relishes Daniil’s responding groan, lapping eagerly at the man till he’s shaking.
Until – “Stop,” – and he pulls immediately away, though Daniil’s hands are there to catch his chin, to soothe two thumbs over his flushed cheeks and assure him there was nothing untoward of the request.
“I need you,” says Daniil, staring down at Alexander with cheeks warmed like spilled port. The cut on his temple has not ceased its weeping, and a thin stream draws faintly its iron dark rivulets down Daniil’s cheek.
“You have me,” says Alexander, awed.
“I need more of you,” replies Daniil. “You said you wanted me, so take me. Fuck me.”
“I said,” breathes Alexander, climbing the length of Daniil’s body, “that I wanted to make love to you.”
“A charming sentiment,” Daniil mumbles against his mouth as Alexander fits himself there again. “Perhaps when we’re less of two ragged bodies seeking fleeting pleasure.”
“I would like to try,” pleads Alexander, dragging two fingers between Daniil’s folds.
“Ah,” Daniil arches off the bed, head tossing back.
Alexander repeats the action, circling his thumb to the man’s cock.
“May I,” he murmurs, giving over his words to the dip of Daniil’s throat.
“Yes, God yes.”
Two fingers is all it takes to unravel the doctor, and Alexander applies them mercilessly, stroking Daniil from the inside out, marveling at how thoroughly he falls apart. How his face draws pinched and helpless, how he goes rigid everywhere save his hands, which claw and grab at Alexander’s shoulders.
“Please,” breathes the commander when the last twitches of climax have left Daniil boneless. “May I have you, now?”
Another cruel bout of shutter-snatches of action. There is Daniil before him, dazed on pleasure and the pain of his still open wounds. There is the “yes,” exhaled so reverently from his tongue. There is the fumbling of bodies fitting themselves to each other, of clothing roughly shoved out of the way, the trembling and relief and the scorching warmth as Alexander slides into Daniil.
“God, Daniil…”
“Move.”
How fitting he should give orders, and how helpless is Alexander to obey them.
So he moves, an aching drag of the hips, and Daniil takes him beautifully, and of pain and pleasure, he is wholly more than both combined, indistinguishable from each, so the blood on his face becomes the gash of his mouth falling open in gasps and moans, and his bruises are the belly deep bloom of warmth and climax fast approaching.
Alexander still sees him through to the end, first, his thumb slipping down to where Daniil’s body yields to him, stroking and squeezing, coaxing the man to orgasm again, and crying out at the exquisite tightness that draws his own climax from him.
When they resurface, they are still blood and body and whole, together, and Alexander lets his arms carefully buckle, laying his head beside Daniil’s, putting a palm to his chest.
It might be hours later that Daniil breaks the silence. It may very well be seconds, too. Or maybe time cannot touch them, and the light beyond the window will forever never quite be, and they can lay here, for always.
But Daniil persists.
“How would you do it.”
He still does not quite ask anything.
“Do what,” says Alexander anyway.
“How would you hurt me,” explains Daniil plainly, so bereft of intonation or even conviction, like he’s reciting some objective truth of the universe.
“I’ve wondered this ever since I came to want you,” he continues, “and now I cannot hope to understand unless you tell me, yourself.”
“Then that’s very easy,” replies Alexander, spanning his wide, uncruel palm over Daniil’s cheek. “I wouldn’t.”
Daniil inhales, staring at the ceiling.
“We will always hurt each other,” he says eventually. “If not intentionally, then by association, by whatever machinations warp us in this wicked game.”
Propping himself on his forearms so as to take the doctor’s visage again, Alexander asks, sincerely, “Have I hurt you?” searching every inch of Daniil’s face for apprehension.
The blood has dried, now, and Alexander knows that he will need to clean it again, and again. He knows that this will reopen the wound. He knows that there will always only ever be more and more blood.
“I don’t know,” comes Daniil’s answer from a thousand miles elsewhere.
Alexander strokes his face, tracing his bruises. His fingers come away stained.
“I will,” he says, feeling sick for it, feeling the most honest he has in days, months, years. “I will hurt you, if you need me to.”
“I know,” this whispered against his lips as Daniil pulls him down, as they kiss drowsily into the dregs of an anemic sunrise, and Alexander realizes there is no more time. The blood is too dry, the wounds too menial. There is work to be done everywhere else but here; dissents to be rectified, orders to instate.
He is so tired. And yet, he is still here, with Daniil beneath him, and their bodies still met. And they are not hurt, yet, so he can suppose, if only for another second longer, that the world cannot touch him, either of them, and that there will always be hands to suture the torn things, the bloody things, and that when the time comes, when he must in some way hurt Daniil, it can be understood and maybe even cherished.
"I know," says Dankovskiy, and Alexander swallows him down. Like blood, like laudanum.
I know.