Chapter Text
The train to the Capital rips through the Steppe, less like the precise incision from an experienced surgeon and more like a lawn cutter that's long blunted, worn from wear. But that is no trouble for her, truly. Bachelor Clara Dankovskaya has learned more patience the past twelve days than she has her entire life.
Beside her, the Haruspex— Daniil Dankovsky, her brother, she tells herself again and again—fidgets awkwardly, scratching his newly-shaved chin.
"I can't believe I let myself be dragged into this," Daniil grumbles. "I can't believe I let you dress me up like the doll I am. Cruel fate."
"I can be very persuasive, and you are a very handsome doll," she grins. Daniil may act all gruff, but she knows he preened in these new clothes when he thought she wasn't looking. There might be a dandy inside him yet. Like Pygmalion, all she needs to do is carve out the roughness he's accumulated out here... the shaving of his scruffy beard is a good start.
"Don't flatter yourself, Clara," he huffs, looking out the window - to seek what? She does not know. "Artemy has more of a hand in it than you do."
The Changeling, too, is on the train—not sitting of course, he would not settle with such boredom—walking around, excited to go to a strange, distant place he has only heard in sparse, dread conversations. Maybe he can bring some refreshing bite to that grim place. Artemy sure has given the grim Haruspex a refreshing sense of hope.
And Daniil Dankovsky is, indeed, her hope for salvation within their fractured family.
All she had to do was sculpt a better figure of him. Superficially, she did a pretty good job!
He is slippery, like a snake; rough, like its scales; his tongue, too, spits venom. But with a bit of a hair trim, a sprinkle of a borrowed tie and shirt, a bit of cleaning for his gloves, and a sewing a fitted used-coat, he looks human, almost the very picture she has seen countless times in the halls of her own home. Just older, wiser, sharper.
And yet...
"I still don't understand why you kept our family name," Clara wonders, staring intently at him.
"I couldn't have taken 'Burakh'," Daniil hisses, "Ersher would've skinned me alive."
"Ersher?” Clara's eyebrows raise. “I never saw an Ersher.”
"Ersher Burakh, Isidor's late son," Daniil replies, "Hated that he was taking more apprentices from outside the Kin. Hated me the most, since I came to the town by train like a bad omen. Among other things. He hated me almost as much as your parents did."
He pauses. Then looks at you with piercing, dark eyes. "Which is why I think you're lying to me about them 'missing their long-lost son'."
"Lying to you?" Clara asked. "Whatever for?"
"To protect me, maybe. But I don't need your protection, Bachelor. The Dankovskys don't miss me, because they don't have the capacity to feel that way," the Haruspex declares, "The Lines say so. Not the Kin's Lines, no. But the children's play's ."
Before Clara can criticize him, he rumbles on,
"And the truth is, I came with you half for Artemy's sake, and half to sate my own curiosity. I don't even think your parents or the Capital exist outside of what is planted by the Powers That Be as memories to make us seem more human.
"So, the Dankovskys not only don't have the capacity for kindness, they also don't have the capacity for abuse. None of it ever happened in the first place! I just want to see where the train stops and the sky ends, and how we die. Good thing that you've given me a coffin-ready look."
Daniil closes his speech with a wry smile.
It's always about the existential crisis of the sandbox with him, ever since the end of the plague. Clara thinks that it's wonderful that she gets to be in this role, to have a family that adopted her not for alleged miracles, a roof over her head, and an education—other Claras weren't so lucky. Artemy, on the other hand, doesn't care who puppeteers him, or if he's free at all, as long as he serves his purpose. She wishes that Daniil was more like either of them.
"Don't be such a pessimist," she says, pressing a finger onto his nose, "They do want you back. I am a lousy replacement, you know. They still speak of you like you're a tangible brother I had to live up to."
"Some parents," the Haruspex snarls. He moves his hand towards his hair, but Clara grabs his wrist, so he doesn't ruin the hairdo she's styled for him. "You deserve better, Clara."
"Do I?"
"Of course you do!" he snaps, "I'm not as heartless a ripper as you think I am. You shouldn't be chasing for love from people who-"
"People who, according to you, don't even exist," you slip into his sentence. "So you think my feelings towards them, my willingness to reconnect you to them, aren't real either."
"No- that's not what I meant!"
"What do you mean then?" you ask mock-innocently. "Do you mean the way they treated me doesn't matter? The way they always keep your pictures so conspicuous in our home, the way they say 'we shouldn't have let Daniil go, he would've made us proud', doesn't matter?"
"It does-"
"I became the youngest bachelor of medicine ever ," the words spill out of you, even though you didn't mean to, "I did everything to make them proud of me, to make them look at me, to get myself out of your shadow, and you just got yourself into this whole ripper business-"
The Haruspex's nostrils flare, and he almost rises from his seat but thinks against it. "This business saved this wretched town and you know it!"
Oh, not this again! She actually rises from her seat this time, pulls herself up and holds his armrests to keep her balance and loom over him. "This isn't about you!"
He glares at her with the flames of a quarantined district... before they're promptly extinguished.
She's won.
"I'm sorry," her brother says quietly. "I didn't mean to deny your struggles. It can be real to you. Even if it's all false to me."
"Thank you," Clara says. She sits back down across from him. "And I did lie to you, I suppose. They may not miss you at all."
"So why do you want me to come with you?"
"I'm bringing you back to them to gain their approval," she admits, "Just like most other things I do."
"You don't need their approval," he says. "You don't have to heal their wounds of losing their son. You don't have to fix that mess of a family—you're a child . An academically gifted, resilient child, sure, but you've done so much more than what a child should be expected to do, especially those twelve days."
"But-"
"But if we actually arrive at the Capital, and they actually exist," Daniil muses, "I can definitely try to fix it."
"How?!" Clara cries.
Then, she sees the glint in his eyes.