Chapter Text
At the arrest of insurmountable incuriosity, the Bureau of Inquiry had blundered out of the fictionalised columns to sophisticate yet another cold case to its lugubrious dossiers. Another nuisance going unsolved.
Viktor had arrived to the crime scene with practically the entire police department, noisy journalists fishing around the block, the mortician brawling to tuck the body into the open casket of his backseat.
"Squeakier than samovar, darlin'. I haven't seen you in a while, Yakov keeps you all to himself, is that it?" stiffened diction, shrivelling to billet its mediocracy, this was the main investigator, "Vitya, what are those eyes about? Have I deserved such maltreatment?"
"Dimitri."
The man's beady pupils went to Yakov, and having the company of another officer, Dimitri opened into clearly affected disfavour. He was another man loaded with reproaches aroused through status biases, whose advances flinched before Viktor's resistance. It has been years into this business and Viktor just never adapted to the frivolous prying.
"Yakov, officer, it's been great while past. This is no man of a prate gift. He simple or something?"
Nearest to the orb of agitated discomposure, the tilted axis reprimanded Viktor's quietude before Officer Dimitri, who rotated into a retrograde scoff. Yakov felt shame so strong that even looking past Viktor, that petulant man who never learnt manners, was harrowingly offensive.
"Would it be fair to say he is somewhat addled?" Dimitri's mockingly crossing his eyes had Viktor rest his chin on top of his mop and conceal rouged vehemence incredibly. "Egad! He frequent with the sick-hearted? Yakov, Yakov. . . never knew your boy is a madman."
"That is not so, friend!" Yakov's ministrations were punctual to no affect.
"Hmhn, ain't it a face I'd turn down eyeing me. . . " puckered mouth, prising pleats of wrinkles, treacly insidious. Purposes indeed agreeable with Viktor's sabered patience, for some waiting into silence could have been precious time to plan a hit on that bribed swine. The investigator's facial features, once looking at Viktor with interest, resorted to cruelty the moment Viktor did not let himself be taken advantage of.
Then, Yakov educated him those flinty ways; splashing a patter of teetering kicks on Viktor's calf and shooing him away dismissively, "Get on, get! Go clean the blood or something! Laughable scum, away with you!"
Only in honour of an animal could those stern hisses and booting between the other's ankles, as though balancing unstable stool, writ lange on the old coon's severity. These men would retract with little smiles, as if it is the order of all great things to have such animals like Viktor disciplined from time to time. Some render it a backward look, yet a beating devises a perpetual state of insensibility; and once the pitiful bites the hand of he whom feeds it its dark resources, then it be magnanimous put it down the light of flashing guilt trenches and suffering that even museums would turn down as unsightly. Viktor will always be a freak. He will never find his way to their approval.
Vice and virtue crucified the pendulum of extremities to an intimate point of mutilated possession.
Dimitri laughed at Viktor's pain.
"Teach him manners proper next time, Yakov. It's absolutely not your taste see what I could do of him."
"Officer, ah, hear me well. He is but a cleaner of the crime scene, nothing's out of ordinary with him but the motor mouth I'll get to grips with. He is just stupid, but he cleans well."
"All's right! Got myself a stubborn buck at home as well, chalking ambiguities in depraved white. Perfect miscreants. Want to know the outlook if we had not disciplined the weaker, Yakov? I say, the gunmen will know them by name and degenerates by nature. Why they rebel so much, friend? My son is going thirty and still has not come see me once because I would discipline him," seizing its gestalt rapidly, Viktor ordered off his scourges saintly. "Who's got the dirt on your case? Tell me what they found."
Yakov coughed, "Earliest intel had it the victim is a turncoat leper. He is possessing the wherewithal vouchsafe almost anyone an alibi. I am talking generational wealth here, Dimitri."
"Could not however buy his way out of death."
At this point, having already been packed with base layer gloves duck taped to his cuffs, and attention free from the shackles of donning his work gears, Viktor was filled so full of square alarm. He prepared to clean the scene, listening to the two men speaking with fleeting interest.
"True. True. Asphyxiation most likely did him in."
Dimitri rushed with the demand of stigma, "Looks like it was done out of vengeance."
"The evidence will hardly acquiesce with you, Dimitri. Come here, come! Look. . ." and Yakov had a pipe's remnant jut out his lips with resolve, stifling and caustic.
Viktor shod his nerves for a joust of uncertain fray. He knew trying to intervene and be part of the investigation will curtail fate's whimsies of another trounce. Haughtily, with his silver lashes coming to great grief upon an insensible, hot, piping curiosity, he peered before the two Investigators gently. Single-handedly, Yakov lifted the mattress where the victim had been discovered slain and condoned a very tight alloy of prospects.
"What are we looking at?" Dimitri asked, staring at the bed.
"Two slats of the bed frame are snapped in half."
"Certainly," said Dimitri, drawing an inquisitive hand to the creaks. "Determination and a robust physique alike should do about this much damage. Terrible affair."
"The print in the kitchen is in compactness meet for a slender man's tennis shoe. It could be a woman too. The determination you spoke of was not of vengeance but despair. The pathologist already confirmed a rib fracture, so whoever was smothering the victim had then tried to restore his vital functions, digging into his chest harshly enough to break the slat underneath their weight."
"What a nutcase may ransack the place upon nothing but unstable sentiments and personal vendetta?"
"I would hope we learn soon enough. He did open the door, I should note, for the gendarmerie found the lock untouched. He knew the victim, it seems. Come, I will show you. . ."
Yakov and Dimitri took off, and Viktor, scraped and famished for more sober reason around this murder, remained in ideal invisibility. Should visibility of problems be a fact alongside the benefit of some rights? He need not have purchase on the delusion his place is anywhere but rooted within the flat-brimmed felt hat and bloodied work attire. Yet, even from behind the scenes, making himself small sufficed to peer into every case without becoming suspicious.
It is a reality most repugnant acknowledge without a swivel of agitated pardoning. Some days he would pawn off Yakov's abuse to drinking, some days he would take painstaking accountability for a sin he had been traduced into unwillingly. Yakov loves me, Viktor sincerely believed, scrubbing the cigarette's dust off the carpets, off the skin callouses punctured by a similar pipe that Yakov rested on his bare skin just days ago. He loves me, he would convince his little, weary heart, all while the rabid hum of violence fluttered in lukewarm confusion one should think comely hot if already shivering. Yakov . . .and he padded to the bed to have his curiousity satiated. . . he loved me so much! Minimally acquainted with evidence preservation, Viktor thought the bloodstain on the inside of the frame purely accidental, thus wiped away what would be a valuable swab. He continues, on and on, excited by the love he would receive once finished, oblivious yet strangely at peace. . . The strain blisters and lacerations assumed in softness of red silk, that conciliatory oversight, exempted him from hearing the truth that would cut him to blabbering, sobbing infancy. Yakov did not at all love him. But here is Viktor trying to prove himself otherwise, damaging evidence along the way.
Viktor, who had just finished tending to the blood-splattered wood of the bed frame, turned his head to the inside of the mattress, where more red stained the surface. Indeed, it was not a gush or the bludgeoning of anger, but rather a profuse lost of blood through a big wound, likely over a major artery.
The only place untainted by blood was the pillow, where he found a miniature embroidery stitched on a handkerchief, stuffed hastily in the case. It is clean, as Viktor observed with wide eyes, and it seems a token of considerable importance to the case. It is a wonder the officers missed it.
"Vitya! We need a hand in here!" he heard Yakov call out.
First, it was kind, then, it was menacing.
"Vitya, come here so I don't have to find you myself."
"I'm coming, Yakov!"
Quickly, Viktor folded the handkerchief and pocketed it securely, knowing that soon he could present it to Yakov, and that some finer, warmer day, death would be an insistence rather shy of inhibitions. One day, he will not only clean the crime scene, he will be part of the cases. He will be loved and important.
Viktor kept foiled Bird's Milk candies plastered inside a jewelry box, which was kept as a secret stash under his bed, mustering the extraordinary yet comfortingly human keepsakes of affliction. He has always loved to hide chocolates under his bed and eat them after having nightmares. Tonight, with a left hand dangling down the secret chocolate reservoir beneath the mattress and right snug between the crisp sheets and his neck, Viktor slept through the evening with soundness the like of naivety ushered in. Tentatively, very tentatively, utility posts cushioned a recline of crows, aureate-eyed winds slowly, very slowly, hibernated upon the thin windows in highest of frightful duties, sleep was a midas touch to each staggering fret the night could magnify, prob and disturb. He felt so safe in his bed.
The puffing, changeless and tender-facet, complied to a quicker billowing of his chest. . . Then he turn in bed, and suddenly, a mouthful farce erupted, delusion, release. Such idea wraiths indeed did exalt in the feather-soft of someone's snoring and the clinkering stars starched stiff in their own dim hearth, despite its enigma, could be at all seen tonight when the visions of fear had hid from something anew, bigger, colossal. Victor was suffocating, breathing laboured, fingers fighting against some invisible attacker.
Viktor only discovered that fantastic intrusion when floored down in the wild throttle, more coarse fabrics stifling his airways. All the same headlong served were the flusters of being found blue, bulge-eyed and drained of poise. What if they find him looking all purple and hollow? Retaliation had succumbed to servile helplessness, at least the first few moments, but as soon the dizziness hit, Viktor became audaciously indifferent to appearances. He thrashed, convulsed, clawing at the threat, elbows grappling forth, feet kicking as if he had been suspended. Busted capillaries一pooling一the pressure on his sternum coaxing order, breath, clarity.
When the fear passed, he begged his own self adjust to the lack of oxygen, as if victimising himself in shame trained enough to comply just to self-preserve.
A well of jerky rages, cooing and billing, sharpened in former agilities, had contributed to the faster escape. Swayed and flustered now, Viktor sat in bed, aware he had been quiet throughout the entirety of these illusionary trials. His forehead was damp from cold sweat. His hands kept shivering. He succumbed to glittering generalities rendering death any uniting, peaceful, tickling the tissues of infirm rhythms. Experiencing the aftermath of heat filtering the equilibrium of breaths, the pounding headache and the hazy disposition, he just now slumped back against the mattress. He would not have questioned the insanity behind such occurrence, for Viktor always thought some things are beyond the human mind and some are our own fussing nervous system short circuiting. What reason is there in understanding it if one would not be able to tell reality and delusion apart? Something had tried to kill him but decided spare him was all he knew to be true.
He had only kindly stepped into the breach of deficient identity. It was right now the practiced distance from his laboured, throbbing, shuddery remains, withered its habits after dark eagerness. There was but three meters away from him, on the armchair, a thing, a figure, splotched in a manner human body does not bend. He only noticed it now. Did someone break i to his home?
Viktor's eyes tried the murkiness out of desire for eye contact, but where should be the eyes, there was transparency, and where should be some shudder of mortality, there were the ill remarks of something ghostly. And oh, Viktor knew, ghosts daren't show in such ways transferable in the connon of demise. This creature was something morbid.
Its fingers drummed. Faint wheeze faltering. Likely, it can experience the material world. It does feel omnipotent.
"What do you want from me?" sullen, scared, tiny question came from Viktor's end.
Squirming in the bed, he had his lips in the thinnest of line, chin wobbling to some fright, elbows tucked in a crouch, stiffer than a bristle. He frowned, shielding himself more.
"Who are you? Answer me!"
With the recent Civil War when potent riots, winged words fashioned impend over industrial masses, there had been manpower gained over capital. Those times when family affairs sobbed aloud were tutted over and men were all the worse for being rarely tended to warmly, were however the bricklayers of increasing faith. People needed to pray because of the uncertainty. Even Yakov went to the church. Every Sunday. And while Viktor never understood the appeal to worship in such dire social times, tonight he could at least confirm, it was out of fear. Something was indeed before him. The thing people beg not reach them. Something he could not see to be a human, but knew his kind so well it padded, lingered and heaved with the heaviness of a sick, sick man. God, this is horrifying.
"Who are you, for God's sake!" Viktor yelled, the comfort of his bed suddenly cold.
"I am Death."
"The real thing?"
"I can't think of myself a fake."
"You wanted to suffocate me just now!" he prevailed on Death whisk its reason, "Why stop? I was really falling in and. . . You stopped! Why? Why did you not just kill me?"
"What blazen height your arrogance parades over, thinking your delicate life deserves any of what I do?" his lips got thinner and thinner before scowling, "Vitenka, Vitenka, how does your idle humours fill with hope you may be chosen for anything at all in this lifetime? What say you, well, on being beside yourself along these excitable tidings?"
"Death, haven't I been a man of ease and grace? Why claim me so? I tried being a good person."
"Poor darling," the black splotch adroitly shuffled closer to the bed, "The case I put was to yours stealing from the deceased."
"I have not!"
"Did you perhaps take a little something with you home from work, Vitenka?" and Death pointed to the embroidery on the handkerchief, "The man who died was deserving of some fairness and resolve around his assassination, am I right, Vitya? Why don't you return this little evidence to the station yourself before I would need hatch circumstances bringing the police officers to your threshold."
But adamantly, Viktor clutched the handkerchief, "No, it's mine!"
Death grimaced, "What reason is there against, hm?"
He proceeded respond while bobbed downwards, his tears were then inflammable arson wavelets, willing the ripples of sobbing applause in small clatter before dribbling down in pathos of a seething Armageddon. Sweet human, thrashing the little of heart good manner should repose on. No sooner had another whine sullenly snuffed out the lump in Viktor's throat, Death's svelte grip addressed the drawn, bawled, ruined sight before him. The affection thence sealed in reapproach peaked in the hot wax and rough stamp of a sharp slap, which had the whole tenor of any aforethought mercy altered.
Quietened. Viktor slapped Death with great anger. He really retorted to violence, just like Yakov taught him.
"Rather. . . quaint."
Viktor's eyes still superscribed in so red the signs, mad-blinded. He could not trust his eyes. The man before him was, in fact, completely transparent and unmoved by such exemption in the straits of reservation. The length of Viktor's fingers travelled around the scattered, pale, see-through front of Death's calm face, his eyes wide as if spectacled, hair dark as if dyed in esoteric obscurity. This was really no human, but whatever it was, it looked beautiful even in its wrath and more compassionate than any human.
"Oh. . ." Viktor sobbed and apologetically thrust up his hand away from the perfectly put-together, unimpressed field, "I am so sorry! I do not know what is happening to me! Sorry, I'm so. . ." and the straightest aisles to redemption began with hyperbolic, charged excuses. "Death, don't punish me now. . . I will return the embroidered handkerchief! I will even . . . Anything at all, God. . . Please don't take my soul yet."
With more authoritative spite, Death lowered himself closer to Viktor's lips and asked, "What soul?"
Starring blankly into him, Viktor stopped crying and responded softly, "My soul. . . I really don't wish to die."
"I do fancy these men, whose seeing me has brought anything but stilted bargaining," and his hand, cold and mocking, ran over Viktor's cheek, "Mhm, mhm, you've got no soul I could be tempted bringing home, only a hollow, sad, trained bargaining. Do you often try to physically hurt people, Vitenka? Are you that low?"
Viktor's chin quivered, "No. . . "
"Right. Had you assaulted Yakov you would have had your head splintered and brain matter smeared around. . . You think yourself so strong steal from a victim and then cry when I should ravish the nothin' of a thing you've become?"
At that point, Viktor preferred death, "It hurts my heart when you say these things. . . Yakov is not a bad man at all."
"O life, my Vitya, do you hear yourself?"
"Yes!" Viktor cried, "It is for me only know this man. I can reassure you he has been through worse, much worse than I, his abuse is reciprocal to suffering that. . . sat through unthinkable ordeal. I'm sad, Death. I'm sad for him. I'm not at all angry."
"Then why hope showing him the evidence will get you anything?"
Viktor startled with dread, "It won't. . . ? It won't make me an investigator?"
"Quite the understatement. Have you seen poodles, Vitya?"
Viktor nodded with a faint, disoriented ambition. "Very much!"
"You are one circus dog, psychologically intimidated, floored to fragments, sorry pup. Put through glittery tutus, barking when your master glances to the whip, indulgent and corrupted. Do you know what is self-control, Vitya? Did you know you can live without making light of yourself? Jumping through hooks, balancing balls, ganging with the police so as to prove your worth. You have not lived for yourself in years, sweet thing. What worth or heart is there even for me to take away?" then Death recoiled, but Viktor clasped his waist, "And you cling to me, indeed, even if I am trying to instill in you the instinct to be your own independent mind. I speak foul and you like that, is that so? You are really broken."
God, this poor used man is really that alone.
Then Death murmured, "You could be dressed up for the circus, the awful freak officers giggle at, but make no mistake, nobody would dare look you in the eyes when you perform."
Death had a palm caressing Viktor's hair and another, more careful one, feeling the newly orbed row of tears and taunt brows. It surprised him that Viktor had almost fallen to sleep around his slenderer frame, ear claiming the small spot where Death's pulse should have been shuffling and some reliable flesh and muscle could be embraced. Forcing his eyes through the veil of darkness, Death could see the plates and mugs had been untouched in the sink, even dusted, and muttered to the figure crumpled in his arms.
"Hey, Vitya, you did say you were hungry? If you clearly name me the word, the thing you wish to eat, I can make it come true."
"Oh, I'm indeed. . . " Viktor clawed at him and pouted, "Can I please have some attention and love?"
Death laughed and said, "I thought you were hungry?"
"Starved."
"Fine. You would need to name me the exact object you associate with such dear affection and I will have it for you. How do you call the thing fluttering beneath your excited heart, hm? Tell me Vitenka, tell Death and I will fix it for you, sweet one."
Oddly enough, Viktor looked all over Death's face, then his body, and after brief consideration he concluded softly.
"Yuuri."