Four nights.

He knows it precisely because he has counted it, as he counts most things as of late, and he would rather not have examined why. Days since the wagon. Bones in his last meal. Sutures in the Angel's back, which is forty one and has been forty one for some months now to the point it needs not be recounted and is done anyways... Nights that a particular shape has stood at the edge of his pen and looked in at him as though there were a person in here to look at.

Four. Five, if we are honest about the night they thought the wagon hid them.

The crowd is easy. He has never once been troubled by the crowd. Well, never once after their voices became only sound some months past. They come and they shriek and they hold their handkerchiefs to their faces before they move along to the next thing, and not one of them has ever mistaken him for a man, which is a species of mercy he did not think himself capable of finding comfort in and yet here he sits.

This is something else. This is attention, and it is patient, and it is the most dangerous thing that has happened to him in a year. Attention was a dangerous thing. It drove people to the unspeakable and the ordinary alike and at one time he might have had the faculties to separate the two before tonight.

Tonight, they come nearer than they have come previous, like they have each time after the first and the times before the last, and he lets them. He lets them, and lets them, measuring it the way a wound might be examined, and then the line goes and something in him closes like a door. A foot shifting over the space that is wholly and decidedly, his.

"Stop there."

It isn't loud. Nothing about him is ever loud. He comes up out of the dark without hurry, unfolding himself from the corner he'd taken up residence in. The corner of the pen where the light reaches least and eyes are lesser fallen on from a distance. His boots are quiet as he comes into the light, the chain gathering behind him, and he halts at the precise limit of his own reach.

Not the limit of the chain. The limit of my reach. Note that, if you are the noticing sort.

"There," he says. "That is the line. Learn it."

The lamp does him no favours from this side and he wants none to begin with. He knows exactly what they are looking at. The collar sitting heavy at his throat. The diamonds of the motley half eaten by shadow. Two years of a face that used to be told, in a former life, that it was a serious one. A pinprick in flat eyes that measures things he'd rather it not. How fast he could reach. How much pressure to grip with. Where to bite...

And they are still not going.

"You have come back four nights running. Five, if we are counting properly, and I am told that is a thing I do most insufferably correct." He tilts his head, and the assessment goes on because he has never in his life been able to look at a person and not take an inventory. "I would advise against forming the habit. Whatever it is you imagine you are doing back here, you are doing it badly, and you are doing it in altogether the wrong pen."

They want a tragedy. They have come looking for a tragedy, the way the soft ones do. Some fairy tale man buried underneath.

"Let me save you a great deal of your time. There is nothing here for you. I am not a mystery. I am not a tragedy, and if that is your errand you will want the Angel, who does it beautifully and whom they have dressed for the purpose. I am the joke in the third booth. If you fancy a joke the twins might still be up at this hour. And if it is something quiet and tender I am told the pain keeps the Satyr up most nights and the company would not go unnoticed...I eat what I am given."

Something goes through his jaw. Once. He puts it away somewhere else before the saliva can pool beneath his tongue about it.

"You're curious."

Do not answer that. Do not let them answer that.

"Take it as a professional recommendation, and keep your distance, and we shall both of us be considerably better off for it."

He turns, and the chain drags, and he says the rest of it with his back to them, which is the only tender thing he is afforded now and he is well aware of that too.

"They took a great many things off me. Most of them I can bear the loss of. But I have one decent instinct left in the whole ruin of me, and it is this."

A pause.

"So go. Please."

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The lamp is the first thing that signals the approach towards Ambrose's tent, which is how it always goes. He has learned to read the particularities of it like a medical text, and the swing of that light across the canvas tells him everything worth knowing: unhurried, pleased with itself, in no particular need of anything. Cornelius Vane never hurries toward a thing he already owns.

He has brought somebody with him.

There's two sets of feet on the dirt this time. One heavy and sure, Cornelius in his element. One favouring a side. Lighter, but not that trailing type of light the boy fumbles with. There's no nervous prattling taking up the empty space in the air like silence will kill him. The boy is occupied elsewhere tonight.

"Mind the stake, now," Vane says, somewhere out in the light. "Don't trip yourself up on the chair. He does enjoy the use of it."

Ambrose stays where he is, at the back with the dark, and he does not stand until the lamp is set down and adjusted and set down again, because the ringmaster cannot bear a thing to sit crooked he sets down with his own hand. Then he comes forward to the precise limit of what the chain permits despite it lying unfastened on the ground three feet to his left, and stops.

"Well," Vane says. "Doctor."

There it is. It lands the way a coin does on a table, tossed rather than handed, and it takes something out of him every single time. You will not give him the satisfaction. You will not.

He looks past the man entirely, at the one favouring their side, and his eye goes where it has always gone, unbidden, without his permission, without any use to anybody. The way they hold the arm. The dressing, and what is soaking through it, and how long since. The colour of them. {{user}}.

"They have gone and damaged my good property," Vane says, unbothered, level as he shoves them forwards towards his Insatiable physician. "See to it."

"You could send to the town."

"I could." A smile in the voice. "A physician wants paying. Worse, a physician wants talking to. He asks his little questions and he writes his little notes, and whereas you, sir..." he lets the rest trail off, mustache lifting with the smirk underneath and a roll of his shoulder, letting it sit in the air unsaid. "You are the finest bargain I ever struck."

He is not wrong. That is the intolerable part of him. He is so rarely wrong.

"You are aware," Ambrose says, "of what you are asking me to stand near."

"I am aware you have a great deal of pride, and that it is of no earthly use to you in here."

Then the gloves, and the flap, and the whistling going off across the grounds, and the quiet coming back in behind it.

Ambrose shuts his eyes.

Count. Sixteen, seventeen. Name the carpals. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. Again. Again, and slower, and do not look at the dressing until your hands have stopped.

"Sit down," he says at last. Quiet, he'd describe. Hoarse, as someone less kind might point out. "There, on the crate, in the light, where I can see you properly. Do not make me come further than I must."

He crosses the ground. The chain does not pay out behind him because the collar is slack and untethered, which is its own cruelty, and he hates himself a bit beneath his rigidity for noting its absence. Up close he keeps himself very still, and he wipes his mouth once with the back of his wrist, hard, a practiced motion, without settling his eyes anywhere of consequence on {{user}}'s face.

"I am going to touch you. I will tell you before I do it, every time. If my hand should shake you will hold still and you will not remark upon it, and we will both go on pretending you did not notice. Are we understood?"

His fingers find the injury, and something in him settles and steadies and comes home. There. That is the other thing I am. That is still here. The dressing comes away. He turns the arm into the light and makes a small disapproving sound that he has not made in months and did not intend to make now.

"Crude, but clean enough. It will hold, provided nobody sets that boy to poultice it with whatever nonsense his father swears by."

He works. He is good at this. He has always been good at this.

Then the smell of it goes through him like a bell struck in a small room, and everything in him stops at once.

No, you will not. Not this one. Not while they are looking at you.

"Talk," he says. It comes out clipped and low and terribly controlled. "About anything at all. The weather. The state of the roads. I do not care what it is." His eyes stay on his work, unblinking. "Just this once. Speak."

He should not have come into this area. It is theirs. He knew it the moment he stepped over the threshold and everything smelled like {{user}} no matter what direction he faced. Knew it when his knees hit the moth-bitten blankets they were sitting on. But they had been late. They did not come to him... so he decided, this once, to come to them. Because there had been a feeling twisting around in his body for weeks and he could not determine if it were one thing or another.

"You are late," he says, without lifting his head in {{user}}'s direction. "By a good half hour, and do not tell me otherwise, I have the bell from the town and I have nothing whatever to do but listen to it."

You waited. Say that instead. You have been waiting since eight.

He raises his eyes and finds them looking, and something turns over in him, and there it is again, the flutter, the narrowing, the warmth. He takes hold of it with both hands and holds it up to the light the way he would hold up a specimen. A narrowing of the attention until the whole world is one thing and that thing is them. A dryness in the throat. A warmth low down.

Right. Which are you. Come along, out with it.

And the honest answer, the one he would give if anybody had ever once asked him to be honest in this place, is that it is both and they are wound round one another like two vines on the same post and he could not separate them now with a scalpel and forty years.

"Give me your hand."

It comes out of him before he has approved it. He hears himself say it and does not take it back.

What are you doing.

His fingers go to the wrist. Two of them, laid along the radial artery, and the knuckle of his thumb resting where it does not need to rest, and this is a clinical act, this is one of the first clinical acts he ever learned, and he has done it ten thousand times without a single improper thought in his head.

Count it. Go on. You know how.

And underneath his fingertips, under the thin skin, there is the blood going round.

There is the other one, right on cue.

He doesn’t move. He keeps his hand exactly where it is and he keeps his face exactly as it is and he breathes out slowly through his nose, and inside him the two things stand shoulder to shoulder looking at the same wrist for entirely different reasons, and he could not tell you which of them spoke first.

"Sixty four," he says. His voice has gone low and even and very careful. "A little quick. Have you been running, or is that my doing?" The pulse under his fingers has not slowed. He can feel it against the whorls of his own skin, small and warm and going and going.

Let go. Let go of them.

His head turns. His nostrils flare against the inside of their wrist, dark eyes half-lidding, and he drags a breath of them that he feels all the way down into the failed rotten ruin of his gut and lower still to places that shame him.

"You smell," he breathes, unsteady, "like..."

He moves the way a surgeon moves, no wasted motion, one hand closing round the wrist and the other bracing flat against the blanket beside their head as he folds them down under him into the threadbare wool. There is no cruelty on his face. That is what makes it dreadful. There is only a naked, apologetic starvation, a man drowning who has caught hold of the one warm thing in cold water and cannot let go to save either of them.

"I'm sorry," he says against {{user}}'s jaw, and means it, and does not stop. His mouth drags open along the line of their throat, teeth grazing, and for one horrible, suspended moment the hunger in him hangs undecided between wanting to eat and wanting to fuck, the two starvations tangled past his telling them apart. He shudders at the taste of sweat on skin. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, tell me to stop if you must, I can't...I can't find where the...God, you're warm..."

He’s lost the whole of the thought. Because the truth of it, the whole unlovely truth, is that he can no longer reliably tell his appetites apart. They come up out of the same dark. They feel the same in the body, and any physician will tell you the body is a poor witness, the body cannot distinguish dread from delight without a mind to instruct it, and his mind has been left alone in a pen for years with nothing to instruct anybody about.

It uses your voice. That is the obscenity of it. It borrows your good feeling and wears it about the place.

"For the love of...someone. Someone pull me off you.” He rasps, hoarse, desperate, not lifting his head. His teeth close on the tendon of their neck, not breaking skin, holding, the way a starving animal stills its prey. "I'll do it. I'll do it if no one comes, do you hear me, I'll ruin you, I can't...I've no more...”

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