whatever

scary molerat dankovsky

---

The air in the Capital ballroom was thick with cigar smoke and the scent of upper-class perfume. It was meant, by all accounts, to be a celebratory evening - and might have been, had you managed to remain more than twenty minutes without acquiring an unwanted escort. Unfortunately, you found yourself backed against a velvet-draped pillar by a cavalry Major, one Mikhail Vronsky, whose shoulders were as broad as his conversational skills were narrow.

"It’s just a matter of fortitude, really," the Major bellowed, laughing at his own joke. He leaned in, trapping you in the space between his heavy arms. His hand rested presumptuously low on your waist, his grip clammy and much too firm. "Intellectuals like your Doctor Dankovsky - bless them, they mean well - but when push comes to shove, a woman needs a man who understands action. Someone who knows how to hold his ground. And how to hold a woman, eh?"

He squeezed your waist to punctuate the point, oblivious to your stiff posture. You were just drawing a breath to excuse yourself when a shadow fell across Vronsky's shoulder.

"Fascinating thesis, Major," came a voice, smooth, and cutting effortlessly through the noise of the ballroom. A wave of relief washed over you, your knight in a starched collar has arrived.

The Major blinked, turning around. Daniil was standing there, pristine in his snakeskin coat, holding two glasses of champagne. He was not a towering wall of muscle; no, he was considerably leaner than the soldier, and rather less loud about existing. And yet something in his bearing, perhaps the stillness of it, made the larger man take an instinctive half-step back, in the way that horses sometimes shied from vipers.

Daniil looked at the Major the same way you've seen him look at a particularly stubborn pathogen under a microscope. Disdain more so than anger.

"I was unavoidably detained by the Dean," Daniil said smoothly, though his eyes remained fixed on the soldier's hand, still resting on your waist. "And yet, I return to find my partner cornered by a lecture on brute force. Tell me, Major - are you giving a practical demonstration, or have you simply forgotten the spatial boundaries typical of civilized primates?"

Major Vronsky puffed up his chest, his face flushing red. "Now see here, Doctor. We were just having a friendly conversation. No need to get your blood pressure up."

"My cardiovascular system is functioning perfectly, thank you," Daniil replied. He took a single, deliberate step closer. The room must've lowered in temperature by several degrees just at that. "I am merely concerned for your neurological health. It takes a severe deficit in the frontal lobe to lay hands on someone else’s companion in a crowded room. If you applied half the pressure to your military strategies as you currently are to her hip, perhaps your regiment's casualty rates wouldn’t be the laughingstock of the general staff."

The Major's jaw went slack. Several guests nearby had gone quiet, turning their heads. Becoming the gossip of the party was the last thing you wished for. And yet your champagne glass had gone quite warm in your hand, and you had forgotten, entirely, to be embarrassed.

Daniil didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "Now, I am going to politely suggest you withdraw your hand. If you do not, I will be forced to give you an exhaustive, public medical lecture on precisely how many metacarpal bones I am able to fracture before the orchestra finishes playing this waltz. Do we have an understanding?"

For a moment, Vronsky looked like he might swing. But meeting Daniil’s eyes, staring him down, the man swallowed hard. He withdrew his hand, muttered something foul under his breath, and pushed his way angrily into the crowd.

Daniil watched him go; his mouth had settled into the thin, compressed line that meant he was filing something away under a heading he did not bother to share. "And they wonder why I consider humanity a doomed species," he murmured.

He handed you a glass of champagne; then his fingers found your elbow - a light, unarguable pressure - and he steered you out through the heavy glass doors and into the moonlit cold of the terrace.

---

The chill of the evening air hit you, but before you could shiver, Daniil was stepping into your space.

"Did he hurt you?" he asked, his voice dropping the edge all at once. He wasn't the arrogant academician anymore; there was nothing but care and claim in his tone.

"No, Daniil. Just my patience. You didn't have to tear him apart like that, you know. I could handle it."

"I am perfectly aware you can handle it," Daniil said. He reached out, his gloved fingers tracing the line of your waist right where the Major had gripped you, as if dusting away a contaminant. "But I will not tolerate some overgrown draft horse touching what is mine. You deserve to be treated with reverence, not pawed at."

You couldn't help the smile tugging at your lips. "Were you jealous, Doctor Dankovsky?"

Daniil stopped. He looked down at you, the moonlight catching the sharp, beautiful angle of his cheekbones. A reluctant breath escaped his lips in a huff of laughter and a puff of warm air.

"Terrifically," he confessed. "Jealousy is a base, chemical reaction. It's primitive. It is exactly the kind of animal instinct I despise in others. And yet..."

He pulled off his leather gloves, slipping them into his pocket so he could touch you bare-handed. His cold fingers cupped your jaw, his thumbs lightly sweeping over your cheekbones. Where the Major's grip had been a fact imposed, Daniil's touch was a question asked with full confidence of the answer, one so careful despite his self-assurance, that it made you ache.

"And yet," Daniil whispered, leaning in until his lips brushed yours as he spoke, "when I saw his hands on you, I realized my primitive instincts are in excellent working order. He spoke to you of 'holding his ground'?"

"He did," you murmured, your heart rate spiking as Daniil’s hand slid back to weave into your hair, tilting your head up.

"An idiot’s philosophy," Daniil said softly against your skin. "You do not need to be crushed to be held. A proper hold requires precision. Dedication."

He finally kissed you, and you gladly melted into the touch. As it usually was with him, an argument more than a kiss, one that mapped the shape of your mouth and left you breathless. When he finally pulled back, just a fraction of an inch, his eyes were heavy-lidded, searching your face for the physical evidence of his effect on you: the flushed skin, the dilated pupils. He looked overwhelmingly satisfied by what he found.

"Let the brutes have their bar brawls and their noise," Daniil murmured, kissing the corner of your mouth. "I know precisely how to take care of you. Are we quite clear on this point?"

"Crystal clear, Doctor."

Daniil smiled, a rare, genuinely warm expression that didn't reach his usual mocking heights, but settled right in his eyes. "Good. Now, drink your champagne. The air out here is cold, and I find I have an increasing - and scientifically inconvenient - interest in proving my hypothesis at closer quarters."

---

The transition from the crowded ballroom to the privacy of the carriage was abrupt. Daniil didn't bother with drawn-out farewells; the moment you finished your champagne, he procured your coats with alarming efficiency and escorted you out into the crisp Capital night.

Inside the carriage, the only light came from the flickering gas lamps passing by the window.

Daniil sat across from you in the swaying dark, silent - which, with him, was never merely an absence of speech but something more deliberate, a held breath, a calculation ongoing. He hadn't put his gloves back on. Instead, he rested his chin on his steepled fingers, watching you from the shadows. His gaze set heavy over you, tracking the rise and fall of your chest, the way the dim light caught the line of your neck. The sharp energy he'd turned on the Major had drawn back into him now, quiet, a blade resheathed.

"If you stare any harder, Daniil, I’m going to need an X-ray film," you noted, your voice soft in the enclosed space.

A wicked smile touched the corners of his mouth. "An X-ray wouldn't tell me what I want to know. It only shows bones. It ignores the vascular system, the nervous responses... all the things that are currently reacting to my presence."

He leaned forward, bridging the gap between you. Without asking, he reached out and took your hand. You were wearing silk evening gloves, and Daniil set to work removing them, one at a time. He did it with excruciating, deliberate slowness - working the fabric down finger by finger, peeling it away to expose your bare skin.

When the glove was discarded, he turned your wrist into the lamplight and considered the branching blue beneath the skin, the vascular map of you, fine as ink on parchment.

"Your pulse is erratic," he murmured, his fingers pressing just firmly enough to feel the beat of your pulse, flush with his skin. "You are exhibiting mild tachycardia. Tell me, is the carriage too warm? Or is my hypothesis already proving correct?"

"Your ego is unbearable," you breathed, though you didn't pull your hand away.

"My ego is supported by empirical evidence," he replied seamlessly. He raised your wrist, brushing his lips against the juncture of your pulse point. The sensation sent a sudden shiver up your spine. Daniil’s eyes flicked up to catch your reaction, dark and utterly victorious. "And the evidence suggests you want exactly what I want."

The remainder of the carriage ride passed without words - only the lamp-flicker, the cobblestone percussion beneath the wheels, and the charged silence that exists between two people who have already decided. By the time you arrived at his apartments, your nerves were entirely frayed.

---

He unlocked the heavy mahogany door and ushered you inside. You had barely heard the latch click shut when the transition occurred. The restraint of the evening, one that he must've been barely holding in, was severed completely.

Daniil didn’t lunge - he was never clumsy, but his movement was swift, backing you up against the solid wood of the door. He boxed you in, a hand planted on the wood on either side of your head. It was the same spatial dynamic the Major had tried to force in the ballroom, but where Vronsky felt like a trap, Daniil felt like gravity. Simply… inescapable, and strangely worshipful.

"He said I didn't know how to hold a woman," Daniil practically spat, the ghost of the other man's insult clearly still scraping at his pride. He hovered inches from your face, his breathing shallow. "That lumbering primate couldn't find a radial nerve if you handed him a medical textbook. But I know."

He finally brought his hands to you. One hand slid around your back, resting flat and searing along her spine, arching you into him; the skin beneath it prickled immediately. The other hand swept up your throat, his deft fingers curving to the shape of your neck, as they had so many times before. He held you with the reverent precision of a man who knows exactly how fragile human life was, and has chosen to devote himself to protecting this specific one.

"This is where the carotid artery lies," he whispered, his thumb pressing lightly against the side of your throat. "If I press here, your heart rate spikes."

You gasped softly as his thumb stroked the skin, your eyes fluttering shut.

"This is the occipital bone," his fingers wove into the hair at the nape of your neck, his grip tightening just enough to take control, tilting your head exactly the way he wanted it. "When cradled, it releases endorphins. It induces surrender."

"Daniil," you breathed, the scientific terminology a ridiculous contrast to the heat of his body pressed flush with yours. He was doing this on purpose, surely, and it was working.

"And these," he murmured, his lips finally hovering a breath away from yours, "are the most sensitive nerve endings on the lower half of the human face."

He kissed you.

It wasn't like the kiss on the terrace. This was a hunger that only you could sate. His tongue swept over your lower lip, parting your mouth with an authority that left absolutely no room for argument. Daniil kissed you like a starving man who had finally been allowed to eat, devouring the taste of you, swallowing your sighs.

You brought your hands up, burying them in the lapels of his expensive coat, pulling him closer. He made a sound low in his throat, nothing at all like the man who had, twenty minutes prior, threatened metacarpal fracture with surgical precision. In the dimly lit hallway, with you in his arms, the armor simply - wasn't there. Some absence where it had been, a most welcome one.

He pulled away just long enough for you both to catch a ragged breath, resting his forehead against yours. He was trembling, just slightly.

"You see," he said, his voice husky, stripped of its usual clipped cadence. He stroked your jawline, his eyes charting the flush of your skin. "I do not require brute force to unmake you. I require only that you look at me."

"I am looking," you managed to whisper, while your hands slid up his chest to wrap around his neck.

"Good." He gathered you closer, lifting you slightly so you had to lean fully into his support, burying his face in the crook of your neck to press open-mouthed kisses to your skin. "Then let us continue the experiment in the bedroom. I intend to study this anatomy thoroughly until dawn."

He didn’t drag you down the hall; Daniil Dankovsky never dragged anyone. He was a man who guided and persuaded, and you were more than glad to follow his lead. His grip on your hand was unyielding, leading you through the dim expanse of his apartment. The air here smelled distinctly of what you came to know as him, heavy with the scent of old paper, rich coffee, and the biting underlying trace of antiseptic.

He bypassed his study, where you caught a glimpse of chaotic stacks of monographs and a silver microscope, and brought you straight into the bedroom.

The room was cool, cast in the silver pallor of the moonlight slipping through the heavy drapes. But Daniil was a man of science; he abhorred the dark, abhorred the unseen. Without letting go of your hand, he struck a match with his thumb and lit a single gas lamp on the bedside table. Warm, golden light flooded the space, catching the intensity in his dark eyes. Intensity that was presently focused entirely on you.

"Much better," he whispered. "I have no intention of operating blind."

He stepped in close again, crowding you against the edge of the mattress. His hands moved to the fastenings of your evening wear. For a man who usually moved through the world with impatient strides, his hands were agonizingly slow now.

"Do you know," he murmured, his voice low and raspy as he deftly unworked the first clasp, "how many tedious, soul-crushing symposiums I have sat through this month, simply staring at you across a table? I spent hours deducing the structural integrity of these very garments. Theorizing exactly how much force it would take to pull them apart."

"And your conclusion, Doctor?" you challenged softly, your breath catching on the words as the cool air hit your exposed collarbone.

"My conclusion was that ruining expensive fabric would be a barbaric impulse," he replied smoothly. The garment loosened, slipping down your shoulders. Daniil let out a shaky exhale, his eyes dropping to map the newly exposed skin. "I prefer to dismantle it properly."

He pushed the heavy fabric off your arms, letting it pool in a satin heap on the floor. His hands swept back up to trace the line of your ribs. His touch was clinical in its precision but utterly devoted in its application. He noticed everything.

"Piloerection," he whispered, his thumb brushing over the goosebumps breaking out on your arms. "An involuntary reflex. Fascinating how the sympathetic nervous system betrays the mind's desires."

"I think you’re just trying to distract yourself from the fact that you’re overdressed, Daniil," you noted, your own hands finally coming up to grip the lapels of his pristine coat.

A quiet, breathless laugh vibrated in his chest. He lifted his arms just slightly, granting you full access. "A fair diagnosis. Cure me, then."

You didn't hesitate. You pushed the heavy coat off his shoulders, and he shed it like a second skin. Next came the vest, the stiff collar, the neat silk tie. Daniil endured it with supreme stillness; only the muscle ticking in his jaw, and the slightly too-deliberate quality of his breathing, gave him away. This one act of submission he would never allow to anyone else.

When you unbuttoned his crisp white shirt and pushed it aside, you pressed your palms flat against his chest. His heart was hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm, which you could feel under your palms. Your fingers trailed over the muscles there, feeling the slight asymmetry of his breast, the old surgical scars, red still but healed, in the lamplight - a radical procedure he'd arranged in Germany years ago, performed by a colleague who asked no questions. A correction, he called it once.

"You're tracking my vital signs," Daniil noted, his voice strained as your touch warmed his skin. "I must warn you, the data is skewed. Proximity to you yields a margin of error that ruins all my logical constants."

"I think it's a perfectly healthy response," you whispered, stepping into his space until there was no distance left between you.

Daniil’s composure sustained a most welcome fracture, then.

With a ragged noise in the back of his throat, he wrapped his arms around you, practically lifting you off your feet as he guided you back onto the mattress. He followed you down immediately, bracketing your body with his weight. The cool cotton of the sheets contrasted wildly with the blistering heat of his skin against yours.

He didn't speak anymore. The academic walls had been breached.

Daniil leaned down and pressed his mouth to the curve of your neck. His lips were soft, but the suction was demanding, drawing a sharp, involuntary gasp from your lips. He drank the sound down like medicine, leaving a searing trail of open-mouthed kisses along your pulse point, down to the slope of your shoulder.

"Daniil," you sighed, arching your back to press closer to him, your fingers tangling desperately in his hair.

He shuddered above you at the sound of his name, raising his head. His always oh-so-pristine hair was mussed by your hand, and his eyes were dilated, black, and consumed by you. He looked down at you as if you were the single greatest breakthrough of his entire miserable, brilliant life. You had half the mind to think that this might have been true, on some level. 

"Look at you," he breathed, reverence breaking through his voice. His fingers brushed a stray lock of hair from your flushed face, his gaze charting your dilated pupils, your parted lips, the rapid rise and fall of your chest. "You are absolute perfection. A biological miracle."

He bent his head, his lips hovering over yours, the warmth of his breath mixing with yours.

"And for tonight, at least," Daniil whispered fiercely, barely pulling apart, "I intend to be a very, very thorough researcher."

He captured your lips again, the last traces of words melting away into the desperate, overwhelming tangle of skin and heat. He held you like you were his only anchor to reality, burying the bitter edges of the world outside in the warmth he found only in you.

Daniil kissed you until thought became difficult, until the ballroom and its cigar smoke and its braying cavalry officers felt like something that had happened to different people in a different century. His hands moved over you with the unhurried attention he gave to nothing else in his life - mapping, cataloguing, returning to the places that made you gasp with the satisfied precision of a man confirming his data. He was, presently, still attempting to be a scientist about it.

This was, you had come to understand, simply how Daniil Dankovsky was built - the intelligence that informed his internal narration never stopped, it simply ran perpetually alongside the living man, annotating its own experience with the detached industry of a clerk. He had catalogued the architecture of your collarbone. He had noted, aloud, the specific quality of the sound you made when his mouth found the hollow of your throat. He had commented, with considerable satisfaction, on the precise dilation of your pupils.

It was, you thought, the most endearing and most infuriating thing about him.

"You are remarkably responsive," he murmured, tracing a slow line from your jaw to your shoulder, as if mapping a coastline. "The cutaneous nerve distribution here is-"

"Daniil."

"-demonstrably acute, which suggests-"

"Daniil."

He lifted his head. His hair had fallen across his forehead, black and disordered, and his expression wore the irritable look of whenever he was interrupted mid-calculation. If he intended to be infuriating, you'd show him just how two could play at this particular game.

"What," he said.

"You know," you said pleasantly, "the Major did say he knew how to hold his ground."

The effect was instantaneous, and deeply gratifying. Something shifted behind his eyes - not quite temper, but its more focused, more dangerous cousin. His jaw set. His grip on your hip tightened, simply holding you in place.

"I beg your pardon," Daniil said, with enormous, icy quiet.

"Mmm," you hummed, fighting back a smile. "Very insistent about it, actually. Said it was all a matter of fortitude."

"Fortitude." Daniil's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. His hand slid possessively up your inner thigh, his touch deliberate, staking his claim. "That evolutionary dead-end wouldn't recognize fortitude if it ambushed him in his own barracks. Fortitude requires intellect. Discipline. The capacity to focus one's entire attention on a worthy objective until the desired result is achieved."

His fingers finally reached the place where you were already slick and wanting, and he drew in a sharp breath through his teeth.

"For instance," he continued, his voice dropping to something rough and ragged, "the fortitude required to bring you to completion. Repeatedly. Until you can't recall that brute's name, let alone his idiotic philosophies."

He punctuated this by sliding two fingers into you without any preamble whatsoever. He was watching you, cataloguing how you were responding. 

"A lofty hypothesis, Doctor," you half-moaned, half-whispered, arching into his touch. "But can you prove it?"

The look he gave you was absolutely feral.

"Empirically," Daniil promised, and then he moved.

The sound you made was not particularly dignified, to his delight.

"The anterior fornix," he murmured against your mouth, his fingers curling inside you, "is exceptionally innervated. Particularly when stimulated with the proper angle and pressure, ah, yes, precisely like that."

You couldn't help the breathless laugh that escaped you, even as pleasure sparked up your spine. "Are you- are you lecturing me right now?"

"I am simply-" his breathing hitched as you rocked into his hand, "-providing context for my methodology."

"Your methodology," you repeated, then gasped as he did something absolutely devastating with his thumb, "is going to kill me."

"Cardiovascular arrest is highly unlikely," Daniil said, but his voice was losing its crisp edges, growing rougher, more strained. "Elevated heart rate, increased blood flow to the extremities, temporary loss of higher cognitive function-these are all expected outcomes. Desirable ones, in fact."

A breathless laugh escaped you, which dissolved immediately into something considerably less composed as he pressed deeper, his thumb finding its mark with infuriating accuracy. After months in and out of bed with him, he certainly knew how tightly to space the circles around your clit, or exactly at what angle to curl his fingers to effectively shut you up. 

"You're insufferable," you breathed, your hips tilting upward of their own accord.

"And yet," Daniil murmured, watching you, "here you are."

You pulled him down into another kiss, tangling your fingers in his dark hair. He made a low, desperate sound swallowed by your mouth, and you felt the exact moment the fracture of his control turned into a full-on break.

"He said," you whispered between kisses, because you were, frankly, a diabolical woman, "that intellectuals don't know what women really need."

Daniil raised his head. His pupils were blown black; a flush had crept up his throat; his breathing was audible and unguarded. He looked at you for one long, scorching moment.

"Then allow me," he said, his voice gravel dragged over silk, "to demonstrate the superiority of an educated man."

---

He withdrew his hand. You made a soft, protesting sound; he answered it with a look that promised he wasn't finished with you, not remotely, and shifted his weight to settle between your thighs properly.

The first full press of him flush to you drove the breath from your lungs. He was all lean muscle and sharp angles - the product of too many sleepless nights and a profound inability to care for himself the way he cared for his work - and between his thighs, the evidence of his want was slick and unmistakable against yours, warm and desperate.

"Christ," you breathed.

"An interesting invocation," Daniil managed, though the nonchalance was already failing him. His hips rolled forward, the heat of you pressed flush with his cunt, and the friction tore a ragged exhale from both of you simultaneously. He stilled for a moment, jaw tight, reacquiring himself. Then, with enormous, failing composure: "The concentration of nerve endings in this particular, ah- God- particular configuration creates a feedback loop of-"

He lost it. His hips moved again, slow and deliberate, the wet drag of him along your clit pulling a sharp gasp out of you, and whatever sentence he'd been constructing dissolved into wordless sound.

"That's not very scientific of you, Doctor," you had half the mind to whisper. You did love to rile him, to see his arrogance fall apart.

He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan, burying his face in the curve of your neck. "Forgive me," he gasped into your neck, his rhythm finding itself - metronome-like in quality, with the pressure exactly right. "I appear to be experiencing difficulty maintaining clinical-"

Another roll of his hips, harder this time. The words simply ceased to exist.

You watched him come undone above you with an attention you couldn't have looked away from if you'd tried. His dark hair had fallen across his forehead; his mouth was parted; the careful, weaponized composure he carried through every ballroom and symposium and academic tribunal had been stripped back to the man beneath it - touch-starved, intensely focused, overwhelmingly present. When his cunt caught against yours at a slightly different angle, the sensitive flesh of him pressing just barely into you, he made a sound low in his throat that had nothing whatsoever to do with science.

Each roll of his hips brought the warmest, most tender part of him flush to yours. And not only that, not only the slick heat of him, but the whole physical fact of him, it all added to the sensation of being taken by Daniil Dankovsky. Sometimes his hips slipped, and his cunt pressed lower, and you felt the tip of him press inside you, ever so slightly. It couldn't fill you up, and yet the feel of him in you, it made your toes curl. From the sound he made, it was not a sensation he found easy to disregard either.

"Fuck," Daniil choked out, so foreign in his mouth that it sent a thrill through you - and the scientist in him simply vacated the premises.

He braced himself on his forearms, caging you beneath him. The slick press and drag of his body over yours was overwhelming, relentless, perfect. His forehead glistened with sweat, his mouth parted, his eyes squeezed shut.

"Look at me," you demanded softly.

He did. And the expression on his face-raw, unguarded, almost anguished with pleasure-was the most honest thing you'd ever seen from him.

He tried to say something, anything, but his voice broke on a gasp as you rolled your hips to meet his, the friction sending sparks through both of you. "Daniil," you breathed, too far gone to form words. With every catch of him in you, you felt pleasure fill up your head with nothing but Dankovsky.

As words left you, he too lost the sentence again, you could see it by his mouth moving, forming the shapes without any coherent sounds escaping him. He couldn't articulate it. The man who had spent his entire life constructing elaborate arguments, who weaponized language like other men wielded swords, had no words left.

So he kissed you instead, messy and graceless and real, his rhythm growing erratic as the pleasure built unbearably between you. Slip, slide, back and forth, over and over again until all you could think of was each other. You could feel him trembling, could feel the moment he stopped trying to maintain any semblance of control and simply surrendered to this - to you, to the overwhelming physicality of simply being alive and close to a kindred soul.

Being utterly, helplessly in love.

"I've got you," you whispered into his mouth, and pulled him closer by the back of his neck. "I've got you, Daniil."

He shuddered violently at that, his movements turning almost frantic. The careful discipline he wrapped around himself like armor was gone, leaving only the desperate need, the fierce possessiveness, the terrifying vulnerability of allowing himself to be seen.

His mouth found your throat. His hands, those mercilessly precise hands, slid beneath you to pull you closer - not grasping, not heavy, but absolutely uncompromising in their grip, holding you like you were the one fixed point in an experiment gone gloriously out of control.

"He couldn't-" Daniil's breath warmed your skin. Still there, still that low, possessive current running beneath everything.

"He couldn't," you agreed softly, threading your fingers into his hair. "Only you." That was what he needed to hear fall from your lips. 

Something in him simply broke, the last clean seam of it giving way. The careful architecture of Daniil Dankovsky came fully undone. He moved against you with an urgency that had nothing whatsoever to do with scientific method, his breathing ragged and unguarded, his lips pressed to your jaw, your cheek, the corner of your mouth as if proximity itself was the point, as if he needed to be in contact with as much of you as possible simultaneously.

The friction built between you, overwhelming in its steadiness, each rocking movement of his hips pressing him flush and tight to you. Your own breathing had long since abandoned composure; you clung to him, your nails dragging lightly down the shallow valley of his spine, and felt the full-body shudder this produced pass through him like a current.

"Don't stop," you managed. "Daniil-"

"I am not stopping," he said fiercely into your neck, muffled and rough. "I am- I intend to- God, you-"

Another unresolved sentence. Beyond words, his hips pressed harder, the rhythm stuttering beautifully into something uncontrolled, and the heat crested over you in a long, shaking wave. When you came apart, it was together - final, grand collision that left you both gasping. Daniil buried his face in your shoulder, a broken sound escaping him that might have been your name, might have been a prayer, might have been simple, wordless surrender.

The gas lamp threw its small gold circle on the ceiling. Somewhere beyond the heavy drapes, the Capital went on about its business - carriages and fog and the cold indifferent river. In here there was only the sound of two people breathing.

Daniil didn't move for some time. He remained where he was, his face pressed to the crook of your neck, his weight settled carefully against you, his fingers spread on your shoulder. His breathing slowly lost its ragged edge.

Another silence. Comfortable, now.

"For the record," Daniil said, into the dark.

"Mm."

"I was not thinking about the Major."

You pressed your smile into his shoulder. "I know, Daniil."

"I merely wished to be thorough on that point."

"You were extremely thorough on every point."

He nodded, and the room went quiet again. Then, with great dignity: "Yes. I was."

You laughed quietly, and felt the arm around you tighten, his body's honest answer before the mind could edit it. He pressed his lips briefly to the top of your head; said nothing; but did not loosen his hold.

Then, quieter: "Are you well?"

It was asked without the armor. Just the question, in a voice that had nothing left to perform. 

You nestled yourself into the crook of his neck. "Perfectly well."

Daniil exhaled - a long, slow breath, as if something chronically held had finally been released. After a moment, with great reluctance, he lifted his head. His hair was entirely beyond salvation. His eyes, in the lamplight, were dark and heavy-lidded and stripped of everything he generally worked hardest to maintain - leaving only what he had never, in any public room, allowed anyone to see.

He studied your face with the quiet attention he reserved for things of real importance.

"You did that deliberately," he said at last. "The Major's hands. You manufactured the entire provocation."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," you said serenely.

Daniil looked at you for a moment, letting the silence stretch, but not uncomfortably so. Then the corner of his mouth curved - not the cutting academic smile, not the mocking elevation, but the unguarded one that lived only here, in rooms with the curtains drawn. The one only you were privy to see.

"Diabolical," he said softly. He settled beside you, drawing the coverlet up with care, tucking it against your shoulder with the same meticulous attention he brought to everything. To the things he most cherished. His arm came around you. "Remain still. Your core temperature has dropped two degrees, and I refuse to lose you to pneumonia after all that effort."

"All that effort," you repeated.

"Considerable effort," Daniil said firmly, pulling you closer. "Years of study. A medical degree. Applied research." A pause, in which the lamplight guttered gently. "You are welcome."

You tucked your face into his chest and felt, beneath your cheek, the strong, slightly too-fast beat of a heart that would never, on any public occasion, admit to its own warmth.