#reenactcreation

“It ain’t that bad.”

It’s bad. He got lashed to the pink muscle of him and he can feel the incision into his gut as both sides of skin are loosely held together by his work leathers. Lucky layers. Vokial always told him to wear layers- ‘stops knives, blunts, some shivs’. He abruptly wanted to interrupt and say nobody in town uses knifes to which Vokial laughed and said he’s too idealistic. He certainly isn’t now. Most of the knives made were made with Abbatoir iron, which had to be some kind of blasphemous.

People are people. People will do what people do, and that is anything.

“I’ve had plenty worse. Dog bites, knife kites. Glass cuts worse. Doesn’t hurt that much.”

It hurts more than he can manage, and the burns overshadow everything else. Artemy had the foresight to prep a spot for him, him and owl eyed Peter shellshocked and not looking well when they rolled in (but that’s normal for Peter, and he’s not surprised).

​Today was the first day it had not rained in two weeks. One of Peter’s paintings was melting linseed onto the floorboards with the damned moisture in the air- and it had finally decided to sob itself into smearing and dripping. The one of the man and the woman embracing looked now like the love child of Schiele’s erotic pieces and Bosch’s nightmares. The woman’s hand had turned into a smear with rope-length fingers. Like she was being pulled off the canvas.

Maybe that’s his guilty conscience talking on all fronts, but the painting started bleeding all over the wall and the floor last night. 

He took it down immediately and set it in the nearest trashcan he could find. It looks like a bloodstain dragged down the wall and across a part of the floor- he’ll have to clean it later.

At one in the morning the clock in the cathedral chimed and he sat at his desk and buried his eyes in his hands. The red was so strong it cast afterimages, and the Stillwater quietly muttered to him that 'it’s okay, just sleep’. 

“This place has to go too,” he mutters after losing himself in the violent image for too long. When he opens his eyes again it’s already 1:30, he’s exhausted, and he has to struggle to crawl into Eva’s shower. The water is pink-red.

Well. You did feed blood into the town’s reservoirs. Blood collects at his feet. It soothes his face and body though, and it doesn’t stick to him and make him feel worse. Burakh didn’t get here first- and it’s good that he doesn’t. Daniil brews coffee on a hotplate instead of crying about it.

Eva’s notes are still mixed with the rest of his letters on his desk. 

Saburov grimaced, and instinctively lifted a bloody arm to block his torso. His ribs throbbed from the kick still, and speaking in that authoritative voice put a strain on his lungs.

Not that it mattered to be authoritative right now. The only ones in the clinic were Burakh and his family and Saburov himself. So why did it matter?

Reflex, he supposed. Burakh had a nagging way of making him feel as if he needed to be authoritative. Saving face, or getting information through the thick-headedness Burakh demonstrated sometimes was a constant uphill battle.

Added on to the fact that Saburov was wounded, he was reacting akin to a cornered wolf. 

Lucky for Artemy that Alexander had grown fonder of him as of late and didn’t perceive him as much of a threat personally.

He brought Grace with him, and used the time to practice holding onto her hand without crushing her bones. His grip control is still poor- and it’s finally come back to him why with some small despair that one of his tendons was cut once upon a time. Worse, he never retrained that hand and couldn’t remember if it was his fault or not. One of many reasons why he stopped sculpting. He wonders if Andrey knows what happened- the scar blends in with the seam of his hand and it’s nearly impossible to see.

It occupies him too much and he forgets to knock on the door and ends up staring at the wood for too long.

He explained he wasn’t well today, not Sand Pest don’t worry, to his daughter. The girl was thrilled to go with him to the doctor- specifically to draw while Peter attempted to find some sort of medical grounding. Normally and effectively, he would have gone to Dankovsky. Daniil tended to ground either of them when they fluctuated up and down in terrible symptoms of near panicking manias and violent depressions.

He knocks eventually, ushering Grace inside slowly to get her out of the cold first and following behind her.

Snow crunches under foot as Grace steps out of the Loft and walks the few houses down toward Artemy’s. She has some art supplies tucked under her arm to share with Murky - more things Papa had given her from his massive supply collect that seemed to grow like ivy in various rooms in the house, recently unsealed. He called these pastels and they looked like chalk, but smoother and less dusty. And they had really bright colors. She thinks Murky will like them. 

It’s Sticky, not Murky, who she sees in the yard when she approaches. That’s just as well - she’s seen him around, but hasn’t really gotten to speak to him in a while. Not since she left the Graveyard - she remembers seeing him in the Steppe beyond the graves, looking for what he called ‘albinos.’ A Steppe creature. She thinks she’s heard Aspity mention the creature too, but a different word perhaps.. 

He hardly uses the door of the place, even after the debacle with Stakh. The second floor window is much more accessible to him anyways than waltzing into the yard and asking for a quiet spot in the back room to think.

The window he’s always used is now haunted by Sticky. He’s caught him almost every time the thing has been cracked open, and has never told a soul. 

“You’d be a good thief in law,” he tells him this time. He’s told him before, but the kid’s stubborn.

“I’d be a better doctor, obviously.”

He can’t argue with that. He trades Sticky some incredibly rare glass beads and a wooden toy soldier for a new lockpick and some rumors, and leaves him to his own devices. There’s no leather hide on his back this time for a guise, so this time, slipping off to the kitchen isn’t a matter of potential life and death.

Artemy moved things around for his kids, but he kept the kettle in the same accessible spot. Grief sets it on his stove, adds a few logs to the fire and takes the other half of offerings from his heavy coat to slip in the kitchen: buckwheat despite the rationing, salt, and a handful of seasoning herbs.

It’s an uninterrupted stint. He makes himself thieves’ porridge in one of Isador’s old and chipped bowls, nipping at it while Artemy’s girl toddles into the room to find what was cooking, and immediately leaves upon seeing him.

He’s almost offended until she comes back with a box of treasures. Shotgun shells, a riffle round, a whole scope.

“Okay... where the hell did you get this?”

The little sprite shrugs and pulls herself up to the counter while he’s perched on it too, a spoon in his mouth. It has him digging through his pockets again and pulling out a single item. It’s a comic, written in the King’s English, but the pictures are fair quality and survived the hellish trip here. It’s gold in these trading terms, and she’s not a fool. She knows that.

She’s also like five, Grigory. 

Which landed him with a box of munitions to peruse through, and absolutely flabbergasted by it, and Murky reading a comic upside-down. It’s a fair bit of company, because she says nothing to him this morning.