Chapter Text
Round and Round His Pedestal
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There is a long list of Things You Are Not Supposed To Do in the Town-Upon-the-Gorkhon. It’s not written in stone, like the ones in the books Stakh’s father reads; you’re expected to just memorize it, to make it part of you, whenever you do something Wrong.
You’re not supposed to go out too far into the Steppe. That one Stakh doesn’t remember learning, he just knows it now, somehow. His mother says that once they almost lost him out there when he wandered off from something the adults were doing at the cemetery, and Stakh believes her, because she’s his mother. So he mostly doesn’t go out into the Steppe, not even when Gravel says it’s safer out there than it is in here and Grief calls him a chicken (which is a real insult coming from Grief, who already thinks he’s a bird, which is stupid), and not even when Cub says he needs him. Cub doesn’t need him, he’s only saying that because his brother or father or uncle can’t take him, or something like that. But the few times Stakh does break the rules and go, he gets in trouble when he comes back, even if it’s not the Steppe that hurts him.
You’re not supposed to dig holes. That one Stakh got in trouble for when Gravel’s mother disappeared and they tried to hold a funeral without asking anyone’s permission (and even though they were all pretty sure she wasn’t really dead). Cub’s big brother Ersher was the one to save them. He knew the right things to say and had some of the right tools even, and he said it was important for Gravel to say goodbye since she had the chance to do it. (And Stakh still got in trouble for it at home later.) But if Ersher hadn’t stood up to Sasha Saburov and his Owls it would have been a lot worse. For everybody. Especially for Gravel.
(It was beautiful, actually, like something out of a story. Ersher, half Sasha’s size and half his age back then too, holding the shovel in his hands like a hammer or an axe, like a huntsman in a fairy tale, telling a brute that was almost a man that the rules didn’t matter now, not if he was here. Stakh still thinks about that sometimes, when he needs to be strong. Of fair-haired heroes with bright, knowing eyes, fists curled tight around their world-changing tools.)
You’re not supposed to cut anybody or any body. That one, Stakh learned pretty early. There’s reasons his mother gave all the belts in the house away and locks up the cooking knives. As long as you keep your nails short and clean, it’s safer to use your own hands when you want to hurt people. Safer for the people you want to hurt, too. Cub and Ersher’s father can fix you if you’re only hurt by bare hands. They can only sometimes fix you if you get hurt by anything else. Doctor Burakh has rules to follow too, even if they’re different ones.
You’re not supposed to drink from the river. If you do, you’ll turn into a cow. That one literally becomes part of whoever breaks it, it’s said, but Stakh doesn’t believe it’s true, not really. He’s too grown up for that, at ten. Unless what happens if you drink is isn’t just getting sick, it’s that the cow transformation starts on the inside and doesn’t make it out because human people aren’t supposed to have extra stomachs so they get bloated because the new organs don’t fit and that’s why they die. That would make sense. But either way he won’t drink from the river anymore, because he did get sick, and it does feel like his belly is going to explode.
He was just thirsty, and didn’t want to go home. Well, he got his wish.
He’s sleeping in Cub’s house until he feels better. Well, not-sleeping, because he can’t sleep. But he’s in Cub’s house, and not his own, and that’s better already. Sort of.
The part that’s worse is he must be hearing things, because Ersher and his father are arguing. Ersher’s thirteen now, almost grown up, so Stakh guesses that fighting with his father means something different than Stakh fighting with (losing to) his. It definitely means his voice is louder. But they’re arguing in their other language, their Steppe language, so even if Stakh can hear absolutely everything he can understand almost none of it. It’s just as upsetting, just as uncomfortable as it is at home. For all Stakh knows they could be fighting about him, about whether to send him back. He hopes they aren’t. He’s too tired and too sick to stop himself from hoping though.
Their voices are raised for at least an hour, an hour that Stakh could have been sleeping (if his body would let him sleep, he still feels too gross and he knows the only reason he’s not throwing up right now is that there’s nothing left in him to force out). Lucky Cub fell asleep already too, in the chair in the corner of the patient room instead of back in his and Ersher’s bedroom. Stakh knows that in the morning Cub will be cross with himself for not being a good doctor and staying up to make sure Stakh’s okay, but for now it’s better that Cub sleeps. Someone should. He’s so little in that big chair, curled up to barely the size of another cushion. How he can sleep through his father and brother fighting, Stakh will never know; Stakh always wakes up when someone is angry in the house. That might not be a Town-Upon-the-Gorkhon rule, but it’s carved into Stakh all the same.
But that means he’s awake when the volume goes down, when the Steppe language starts to sound more surprised than angry. He’s awake when Ersher laughs, a beautiful, musical sound that makes Stakh’s insides calm down a whole lot. And he’s awake when unrestrained steps pepper through the hallway, and when another door opens, then closes, and then when this door opens (Stakh lets out all the breath he’d trapped inside) and Ersher Burakh is framed in it, looking around for his little brother who should really be asleep in his own bed, not here with Stakh.
Ersher is always good-looking, but right now, with a distant argument over and Stakh admittedly a little sick and a lot tired, he looks like the hero he was four years ago, just starting to grow up. His hair is less blond now than it was then, more tawny, and it’s like his body can’t figure out growing vertical and horizontal at the same time so he’s plump in some places and rangy in others, but it all comes together into something Stakh could just look at for hours if he had the chance. His eyes are shaped differently than Cub’s and than their father’s, but still not big and bulgy like Stakh’s are, and his nose is a straight slope except for the notches at the top where his spectacles are already starting to dent it. He sighs and shakes his head, but there’s still a smile on him as he starts toward the chair in the corner.
Stakh must, well – he must have made some sound, though he can’t really hear it, but Ersher stops, and looks over at him, and his smile shifts, a little sheepish with his nose twitching in. “Did we keep you up?”
“A little,” Stakh says, because he won’t lie. “Sorry.”
“Nah, that’s on us. Are you feeling okay?” Even before Stakh answers, Ersher’s on his way over, sparing only a quick ruffle of Cub’s hair while he comes to Stakh’s bedside. “Need some water, no cow magic this time?”
Stakh can’t help the little wince, knowing he’s being teased, even if Ersher probably means well. “Couldn’t keep it down last time,” he says.
Ersher nods. His palm is cool and smooth as he pushes back Stakh’s fringe and takes his temperature. “You’re still warm. I’d say try again, as long as I’m here to clean up after you.”
Stakh nods. There’s no arguing with the apprentice doctor on matters like this. He’s right that that Stakh should try, he’s right that it’ll get messy if it doesn’t work, and he’s right that both of those things would be easier if he were here. So with one last pat to Stakh’s forehead Ersher sidles away from the bed to the sink in the other corner and fills up a fresh glass.
Maybe it’s the lingering coolness of someone else’s hand on Stakh’s skin, or the fact that he has to look past a peacefully sleeping Cub to follow Ersher to the sink with his eyes, but Stakh finds himself asking, “What were you fighting about?”
The water cuts off. “Fighting?”
“With your father. What were you fighting about just now?”
When Ersher turns back to the bed, his grin is even broader than it was before. “The future,” he says, like that explains everything, which it doesn’t.
“Did you win?”
“Basically.” He clears the distance to Stakh’s bed in three easy strides and hands the glass over. “Enough to make the future mine.”
He sounds like Master Kain when he says things like that, but Stakh sits up and drinks the water instead of saying so.
“Slow down,” Ersher warns him. Stakh listens. “Good. Just sips. Trick your body into deciding it’s fine.”
Again, Ersher is right, so Stakh tries his best to obey. He takes a whole minute to drink a gulp of water, letting every sip rest on his tongue. Eventually Ersher pronounces that good, and Stakh just sits in the bed with his hands folded around the glass. He knows the water is supposed to be cooler than Ersher’s skin, but in his palms the glass warms up quickly. He wishes Ersher would check his temperature again. Thinking about that keeps his stomach from churning, much.
“Good,” Ersher says a third time, his smile like the bottom curve of his spectacles. Concentric, Stakh knows that word.
“Thank you,” Stakh says, because he should, and if he just looks at Ersher’s glasses in silence he’ll, he doesn’t know what.
Ersher sits down in the smaller bedside chair and scoots closer, legs scraping along the floor. “No problem. So what happened, did the Filin kid put you up to it?”
Again, Stakh won’t lie. “No, it was hot and the barrel was empty and I...just didn’t want to go home.”
He’s sorry the instant he says it, because the smile leaves Ersher’s face, like fog condensing into water on a windowpane. His eyes shrink back a little behind the lenses. “You know you can always come here, right? Without making yourself sick? We may be a clinic but we’re also just a house with people who love you in it.”
“I know,” Stakh breathes. He does know. He just doesn’t believe. And he doesn’t want to talk about it, so he asks Ersher instead, “What did you mean, you made the future yours?”
If it was sad to watch the smile leave Ersher’s face a moment ago, watching it transform again, slowly, from that grown-up guise to something almost mischievous, testing, like there’s a game afoot, is so much better. He spends precious seconds just looking at Stakh, and Stakh could shrink under the covers if it were someone else looking at him like that, but he chooses not to because it’s Ersher.
“Why not,” Ersher says, the smile returning to his chin but not his eyes, not quite. Those, those are still searching. “After all, you might just get it. And the parts you don’t get you can still lead me to the other side.”
“I’ll try.”
“I know you will. So, okay. You know I’m going to be a menkhu like my father, right?”
Stakh nods, because everyone knows that, and this is just meant to set things up.
“There aren’t that many, now that people are settling here. And Uncle Oyun’s sons both cut themselves off in the spring, so people have been saying that when I’m menkhu I need to have lots of children to replace them. And there are other people saying I shouldn’t, because mama wasn’t khatangher, but even if they weren’t lunkheads, and wrong, it’s supposed to be my choice, right?”
“Right,” Stakh agrees.
“But I mean, everyone’s talking about it. About my life, my future. And they don’t even think about what I want. I know I have a responsibility, but children...even if I want them, I don’t want to have them, you know? To do the thing that makes them. And no one thinks about that when they say what I should and shouldn’t do.”
Stakh runs that over in his head a few times, once for every nod. Ersher doesn’t want people to choose for him, that Stakh understands. Ersher doesn’t want people to talk about him like they talk about breeding bulls, that Stakh definitely understands, even if Ersher’s people don’t mean it like an insult. Ersher wants children, but…
“You don’t want to get married?” Stakh guesses.
Ersher winces. “Not to a woman,” he says. “Not to one who wants to have children like that, anyway. I just...don’t.”
“I get it,” Stakh says, because he does. Whenever people tell him he and Gravel should get married or stuff like that, he feels that same kind of wince, inside. Like the churning in his gut he’s been fighting down since he drank from the river, though not as hard. He thought it was because she’s Gravel, but it’s the same when he thinks about other girls too. He knows they wouldn’t be happy with him, like his mother and father aren’t happy with each other, and he doesn’t want to make anyone unhappy like that.
He must have stayed silent for too long, or lost focus or something, because the little tsk that clicks out of Ersher startles him and he has to lift his eyes again. “You too, huh?”
“I what too?”
“You don’t want to marry a girl.”
“No,” Stakh says, confused because he thought he said that pretty clear, but no, maybe he just thought it loudly.
“And not just because you think girls are gross?”
“They’re not gross,” Stakh says. “Gravel’ll kick you where you sit if you call her gross.”
Ersher laughs, though there’s still some tenseness on his face, prickling up just under the rim of his glasses, and Stakh wishes he could just wipe that away. “She can try. But you don’t want to marry one?”
“Yes. I mean no, I don’t. I don’t want to marry a girl.”
This time, Ersher’s head tilts back a little, the laugh louder, eyes crinkling. “Okay, maybe you really will get it. So I just told Aba. I told him I don’t want the khatangher telling me I have to go breed children, or who I should and shouldn’t marry. And I told him yes, I’d tried kissing girls and didn’t like it, and then I thought if I tried kissing someone who wasn’t a girl I’d like it more. So I did. And I did, I did like it more, so I told him I probably wasn’t going to like having children with a woman anyway and that the elders should shut up.”
Stakh’s stomach wrenches. He grips the water glass tighter. “And you fought about it?”
“About telling the elders to shut up? Yeah. I...may have said it stronger than that. Stronger, than telling them to shut up.”
That’s not surprising. In Stakh’s experience, shut up usually comes right before a whole host of horrible words, and worse things than words.
“And I threatened to leave like Uncle Oyun’s sons if they made me do it,” he says, like it would be that easy. “And Aba didn’t like that. But he did say that I wouldn’t have to.”
Stakh blinks. “Really?”
“Really,” Ersher repeats, and that smile of his is back, and broad, and Stakh has to blink again and again to keep looking at it. “He said I can’t be alone, I do have to be with someone, but that the elders can’t pick for me, and that he doesn’t mind if I partner up with someone who can’t have children by blood, as long as we pass things on like a family. He really surprised me! Said that the elders will have to deal with it, the way they dealt with him and Mama. He also said that it would be easier if I picked a man who’s khatangher already, and children too, but that I shouldn’t do anything just because it’s easy.” He chuckles, like a joke was told somewhere not here. “He said no Burakh ever does things the easy way unless they’ve got Lines to cut along. Or color inside, I guess.”
Stakh can’t help laughing at little at that too; it’s contagious the way yawns are, or noticing the shape of clouds. “That’s great,” he says, and it’s true. He wishes he had a father more like Doctor Burakh, especially now.
Ersher puts his hand on top of Stakh’s, still folded around the glass, and leans down
a little. His hand still shouldn’t be cooler than the glass but it is, it’s like water should be. “Hey. Is your stomach acting up again?”
“No,” Stakh says, shaking his head maybe a little too hard and pressing his knuckles into Ersher’s palm. It’s not his stomach that’s getting fluttery right now, more like his throat getting lumpy and the place behind his eyes spinning a bit. But even if he won’t lie, saying he’s jealous of Ersher isn’t the right thing to do, and he knows it. There’s other things to say that are just as true. “So you said, um. Kissing boys isn’t gross.”
“Not to me and not to the ones I kissed.” Ersher pats Stakh’s hands a couple times before pulling it away. “And maybe not to you, when you’re older. Right now, just worry about not turning into a calf, okay?”
“I’m not gonna turn into a calf.”
“That’s the spirit,” Ersher proclaims, “now sleep it off and prove it,” plucking the water glass out of Stakh’s hands and setting it within reach on the bedside worktable. As he pushes his chair back and it scrapes the floor again, from the other, bigger one by the door, a rustle and a sneeze well up.
Cub.
Stakh balks, but Ersher just snickers to himself and bends to gather his brother up in his arms. “Come on, akhar. Shift’s over.”
Stakh can’t understand what Cub says – he doesn’t usually remember his Russian when he’s half-awake – but what Ersher says back is familiar and soft. More goods and you did wells, Stakh thinks, and when Cub clings to him with all four limbs like, well, a sleepy cub, he murmurs words that are just as soft and flowing, except for Stakh’s name.
Ersher stops and turns him around, and says, in Russian, “See? He’s gonna be okay.”
“’wanna stay,” Cub slurs.
“Not your turn,” Ersher says, patting his hair, and then switches back to the Steppe tongue, teasing and lilting, and Stakh catches the word oynon, another one he knows. It’s what the Kin call people like Master Kain and Professor Yan.
Cub rolls his eyes and nods almost twice; on the second nod he just slumps back against Ersher’s shoulder, already mostly asleep again. For a moment that stretches out into the dark, Ersher just stands there, holding Cub in his arms, with an expression that Stakh’s never seen anywhere before. Sad, somehow, even though he’s smiling, and trembling at the edges. Wistful, Stakh thinks the word is, but it doesn’t seem to fit.
They leave him alone after that, for long enough and quiet enough that Stakh lays back and closes his eyes, fever and all. He gets most of the way asleep before the door creaks open again, and the starlight glints off a pair of thin spectacles like hopeful smiles, and Stakh dreams about the Steppe, vast and endless but not lonely, somehow.
There is a long, long list of Things You Are Not Supposed To Do in the Town-Upon-the-Gorkhon. It gets longer every day.
Ersher Burakh is going to be an exception to every one of them.
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