Rubin is sleeping. For once.
He has chosen his bed in the stairwell leading to the second floor — the balcony with no seats. Daniil watched him carry a bedroll and his folded up coat with him, while Rubin asked for the city doctor to wake him in at least two hours. Diligent, if stubborn. Daniil is familiar with his attitude. It is six in the evening.
It is not as if they were chatty men, beyond exchanging notes and observations on the sick and dying. But without Stanislav present, Daniil notes the silence of the hall is overwhelmingly present. Silence in hospitals is dangerous. It means the dead outnumber the living.
Daniil rolls up his sleeves to his elbows and flexes his fingers. He has since removed his coat, and has already accepted that he will never be able to wear these gloves in decent, healthy company again. Maybe he can use whatever remains of his savings to get new ones back home, if home remains an option.
An older man lays before him on one of the prop tables turned autopsy slab. These tables are thick with infected blood, running into buckets below. He has reminded Burakh twice now to replace each bucket with different ones so they may be disinfected before using them again. He sees that there are thick black red stains inside.
With a deep sigh, Daniil folds up his sleeves to his elbows. He turns at his hip to retrieve a scalpel, waiting patiently for him in a spread leather toolkit he's been trying to clean for days. There are infected kidneys to be cutting out, after all.
As he takes the blade and brings it to the bare, pallid skin of the dead man, Daniil's shoulders tense at the unexpected hollow sound of a cane on wood behind him. Daniil looks over his shoulder, blade eager to slice, and finds himself frowning in the face of a curious theatre owner.
Mark looks at one of the curtains across the stage. His stage, Daniil supposes. Beyond the divider, another body waits to be cut into. "You've not much of a mind for decoration, do you?"
"Hospitals in the Capital can barely afford plants that won't irritate the sick," Daniil remarks, looking back to the waiting carcass. "It'd be one of many miracles we're waiting on if this place could fit a daisy."
"I can have that arranged," Mark replies, dragging his hand against the surface of one of the many books scattered across the nearest table. "Where would you like them sent?"
"To the memorials they have by the graveyard. Why are you here?"
"Did you forget you are using my theatre? Even if you lack theatrical foresight, you certainly must understand that I have the right to walk where I please on my property."
"A right of yours that you should be wary of practicing." Daniil looks over his shoulder for only a moment. "It is unwise for you to be here, Immortell."
"Always back and forth with deciding if you and I are on a first name basis, aren't we, Dankovsky?" Mark asks. He rolls his head along his shoulder. "Back and forth, back and forth..."
"Conversation is one thing, Immortell. But if you're going to distract me..." Daniil looks back at him once more, and frowns at how Mark has set himself against the table of books and notes. "Don't sit on those. I don't care how lame your legs are."
"How rude," Mark sways his cane against the floor, in a wide circle. "I can be of incredible help, you know. Stimulate the mind and keep you on your toes."
Daniil sighs, quietly. "Put on gloves, or a mask. And don't sit on anything."
The moment of silence while Mark dresses himself in protective gear is a kind one. It allows Daniil to prepare his incisions — he marks the dead flesh with the cut of his scalpel, listening for the easy sound of flesh splitting. Blood swells from the severed veins, only just managing to fit into the incision that Dankovsky begins and not spill down the man's belly. He cuts him from sternum to gut, a straight line of grief.
"Steady hands carry terrible burdens," Mark exclaims, the gloves that Rubin favours warm over his spindle-fingers. "Did you ever practise surgery?"
"No." Daniil exhales to avoid the rotten stench. "But duty calls."
"That it does. What do you look for in blood?"
"Nothing like the town does. You're not going to scorn me for 'walking Lines I do not know', are you?"
"Not certain they'd tell you it like that. But, no." Mark stretches his hand and ghosts it over the body bare before them — Daniil tenses, as if he'll have to bat his hand away, but relieves his reaction when Mark doesn't touch it directly. "I'm not one of this town, either. Their traditions are interesting, past certain stories and methods. Cut as you please."
"Hmm." Daniil slips the edge of the scalpel under the skin's layer, seeking the first give of flesh into organ. He slips over meat and fat, and believes he's begun cutting the stomach away from the gore. "Bring me the brace. Hook it under the skin I'm holding."
"I thought I wasn't to touch anything."
"Do you want to be useful? Grab the brace, or replace my hands with yours. I need to reach for his liver."
With a narrow smirk, Mark sips his gloves hands beside Daniil's, as the both of them move quickly to replace the pressure of Daniil's hands with Mark's. Then, in the slick maw of gore and blood, Daniil wields his scalpel once more, and presses on the stomach, to cut the fat free.
"Not much of a liver," Mark notes. Daniil can feel the sharp odour of infected blood sting his nose. Mark is, interestingly, not affected. "Neither a heart, or bone..."
"You don't seem that familiar with the human body," Daniil retorts, dry. The shifting sound of organs being sliced from fat and muscle is repulsive, but nothing to bat your eye over. "We'll be taking the stomach out. Hold him."
"I wouldn't mind staying here," Mark laments, as Daniil cups a hand under the sac of bile and acid, easing it out while he cuts what remains. "You seem the type to favour bloodstained affairs."
"Is that what you came to talk about? Relationships! At this time!"
Daniil pulls the stomach free and brings it to the steel tray without the finesse of his cuts. He returns to the scalpel and digs inside, all while Mark smirks.
"You don't hold hands with your surgeons inside your carcasses?" Mark asks, his inquiring pout not much of a pout at all. Maybe more a soft lower lip. "I'll have to reconsider your position, then."
"I'm not going to ask what you mean by that," Daniil says, putting pressure on the blade to cut into a particularly thick piece of flesh. This must be the infection. When he cuts into the chitinous surface, the inside bleeds oil. "Fuck. Hold this."
"Ugh. Allow me." Mark is quick to reach for a blade discarded by the corpse's skull, and plunges it inside the corpse. Daniil hasn't any time to stop him, or accuse him of lacking practise, before he can hear the give of meat. Mark lifts free a blackened, maroon liver, thick with infection. He lays it on a separate tray from the stomach. "There. Don't question my skill."
"Tremendous," Daniil admits, lifting his hands from inside the body. The part that they had pried open hangs loose over the cavernous maw of the torso. "We'll need to study these... I don't like the colour of the stomach, it might have affected the lining..."
"Always an eye ahead, hmm?"
"What do you mean?" Daniil asks, as he leans himself towards the infected liver with his sleeve folded over his mouth and nose. Breathing infected, dead organs stings your throat the way the pest does — it's best not to tempt fate. "There's no other choice but to look ahead. Plan each moment."
"No reason." Mark returns his hands inside the body, moving around the emptying torso for loose meat and flesh. "I understand; sometimes, we all dream."
"Sometimes," Daniil agrees, yet still frowns when he sees Mark's hands once more staining themselves with gutmeat. "I will repeat myself, Immortell: you shouldn't be here, not at this time."
"Don't grow tender-hearted, now, Dankovsky," Mark tuts, turning his wrist and lifting his hand up, catching Daniil's in his own. The blood that stains them both mingles together once again, a fetid smell of rotten plague. "You aren't a worrier — only a thinker."
"Depends on what there is to think about," Daniil replies, hand now heavy in Mark's. "If you're so certain."
"I always am," Mark says, with a thin smile that Dankovsky thinks he doesn't trust.